On Influencers, Beauty Culture, & “Corporate Confidence”, with Kate Kennedy

Listen & follow The Money with Katie Show: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

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About This Episode

I previously joined Kate Kennedy on her show, Be There in Five, to discuss Rich Girl Nation, and we ended up talking about everything from beauty culture to women as breadwinners—enjoy.

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Kate Kennedy’s One in a Millennial
• Kate Kennedy’s Be There in Five Podcast
• Our previous Money with Katie Show episode with Kate Kennedy

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Transcript

Kate Kennedy:

Your arc from being a subscriber of American Cheerleader Magazine to hosting Diabolical Lies. I mean, truly nothing like it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

As gross as possible. Everyone I know, I always joke in college I was going through a Bama rush and a Reagan Bush t-shirt, so anything is possible guys.

Kate Kennedy:

Ronald Reagan for president, let’s make America great again.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show. This is Katie Gatti Tassin Tossin as always, and this week’s episode of The Money with Katie Show is a little bit different, because it’s actually the interview that I did with my friend Kate Kennedy on her podcast Be There in Five over the summer for Rich Girl Nation.

Part of the reason that I wanted to reshare this interview today is because I recently found out that Barnes and Noble named Rich Girl Nation one of their top 10 business books of 2025, so I’m really excited about that and if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, we’ll put a link in the show notes for you to order Rich Girl Nation or you can check it out from your local library.

That’s always awesome, but it was fun to revisit this conversation with that context. Now, over the summer when the book was coming out, I probably did a dozen give or take interviews on other people’s shows about the subject matter in the book, and it’s always really interesting to hear how different people receive the material and what they find to be worth talking about. But this interview in particular was one of my favorites that I did because I felt like we got into some meandering topics that don’t come up as much on personal finance shows. This is a pop culture podcast, which is probably why, and so I wanted to share it here because I think you guys are going to enjoy it. It should be a fun, easy light. Listen, we get into the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. We get into influencer culture a little bit, which I really enjoyed Kate’s take on this and just kind of the flip of consumerism where well, you’ll see please enjoy this conversation from the Be There in Five podcast on The Money with Katie Show.

Kate Kennedy:

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Be There in Five podcast. Our guest today is host of the Money with Katie podcast and author of the newsletter of the same name with the Morning Brew. She’s also the co-host of a podcast I know so many of you’re obsessed with called Diabolical Lies, which is on Substack and has absolutely taken off this year and I think is amazingly named after the thing Harrison Butker if I’m not mistaken.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

It is my muse Harrison Bucker.

Kate Kennedy:

Today I want to talk about Rich Girl Nation, her brilliant book. It’s a guide to thriving under capitalism that points out the nuances of how women experience money differently. It approaches. I think what can be a very intimidating or as we talked about when Katie was last on the podcast, like a shame spirally subject, but to me this book approaches it with as much wit and compassion as it does helpful and tangible how tos and not to mention a lot of thought provoking cultural analysis and I’m a fan of her brain. I know a lot of the best are a fan of her work and I’m so excited you’re back with us today. Welcome back to the Be There in Five podcast, Katie Gatti Tassin.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I’m so happy to be here back in the land of the Beths. I’m a Beth myself. I love the Beths, so thank you for having me back. I’m so excited to talk today.

Kate Kennedy:

I was reflecting on when you were on last year. Last year, you found my book I think asked me to come on your show as we’re talking on your show, I’m like, do you want to just come on mine? I just want to keep talking. And then we just kept in touch and we voice note each other and we still never met.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That was the long game though, before I found you. I had obsessively listened to your back catalog and read your book and then basically decided that I was going to make you be friends with me. So I think my master plan really paid off.

Kate Kennedy:

It really is cool too because it’s like for you to pursue me from my work and then for me to become obsessed with yours and to learn so much from you I think is really, really like not only with your financial work, which we talked about last time you were on the pod, but do you mind if we really quick touch on Diabolical Lies, which you started when last?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Caro Claire Burke, my cohost and I started Diabolical Lies back in, I think it was last summer around this time, like July. And that was also a friendship that started with voice notes and then became a we should have a podcast. And we basically started doing it kind of as these are things that we are interested in and want to talk about but feel like there is something in the mainstream popular conversation that’s not being said or there’s an angle that isn’t being touched on that we want to talk about.

I remember our very first episode we did after the Sunday Times piece on Ballerina Farm went really viral and that episode, we sat down to do it and I thought we were just going to have this fun conversation about trad wives and it’s evolved into this grander discussion of “Is free will real? Does anyone have free will? Does Hannah Neeleman have free will?”

And that was really when I realized, oh, we are off to the races. This is not going to be a normal podcast. We’ve done a lot of interesting work on it and I’ve learned so much doing it. We switch off every week of who’s going to lead the episode and teach the other person about the material. So we really took a note from the Michael Hobbes cinematic universe. He has podcasts like You’re Wrong About, Maintenance Phase, If Books Could Kill.

And that’s the format that they do where one co-host teaches the other co-host about something and then the co-host who’s learning is kind of going in without any background and just live reacting to what they’re hearing and responding to it. And so some of the episodes that I’ve done, we did one about Luigi Mangione and who becomes a terrorist in America. That one was very heavy. I read the Patriot Act for it. I did one about the Men Are Not All Right crisis and modern masculinity; we’ve done one about kind of shifting gender dynamics in the Republican party and the Kristi Noem of it all. I did a really deep dive on capitalism and what about dermal fillers I thought was really interesting.

Yeah. So really nothing is off the table. Anything that interests us we’ll talk about, but it all does typically just because of our interest areas come back to economics, gender or politics in some way, which is basically everything. And that’s a way of saying we’ll talk about whatever we want.

Kate Kennedy:

I have the same problem where by the time I’m at the end of the episode, my existential questions are so great that the research I’ve just done or the dissertation I’ve just performed, I’m like, what the fuck was the point of that? But that’s almost the sign of a good deep dive I think is going so in the weeds that it almost expands your thinking to a point that almost feels overwhelming.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, no, I love that and I love your deep dives by the way. I think that you’re right. I think when you’re doing a good deep dive, the sign is that you should be less sure of how you feel about it.

Kate Kennedy:

A thousand percent.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

You should walk away understanding a level of nuance that you’re like, oh, that actually was not as black and white as I thought it was. I love walking away from those conversations being like, oh, oh damn, that actually completely changed my perspective on this. I think that’s really powerful.

Kate Kennedy:

Since we uniquely have a similar job and I can’t ask that many people this question. I’m struggling a bit with becoming a miniature expert on things for two week periods that my brain is very one in one out information wise, and I feel like my short-term memory has suffered since the deep diving on the podcast. I have to retain and process a ton of information in really short periods of time.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I haven’t noticed short-term memory loss yet. That’s probably coming, but what I have noticed is that because of the sheer intake where I will be reading four books at a time constantly, there are so many different sources that I like to read from where I think they’re covering things in unique ways. So I love reading socialist feminist sources. I think they’re really good at connecting the dots in ways that you’re not going to get in a mainstream newspaper or in a newspaper that has a lot of corporate interests backing it. I will sometimes forget where I’m learning things and then be like, I know this is not an original idea. I know I didn’t think of this, but I could not even begin to tell you where I learned this. So the chances that I’m going to be able to cite this properly, it was just one line and one of the books that I’m reading right now, but it’s fun.

My favorite thing in the world is just getting super cracked out on coffee and spending six hours just going down rabbit holes and then coming up for air later and feeling like the always sunny murder board where you have all the things connecting and you’re like, I can see the matrix, I can see it. And when that happens and it all connects, it’s such a high, there’s no better feeling.

Kate Kennedy:

It really is a high, and I’m glad you said that because I feel the same way about deep diving and researching things and sometimes I think to myself, is this how other people fill at music festivals? I feel very lost at those. Yes, I relate to that. Something about information gatherings really exciting to me and my short-term memory loss. I think what disappoints me about myself is that I’ll know everything about something for a brief time, but then I can’t go back and remember all the stuff I talked about in a deep dive.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Do you ever go back and listen to your own?

Kate Kennedy:

No. I have such a strict rule now because I used to do that, but then I would delete episodes and now people are like, where are episodes 1, 6, 44 and I’m like, oh, I just thought it was annoying on a bad day. So obviously there’s so much good content in this book and each chapter focuses on a different relationship. We have to move on. I can only focus on a few. And I was going to dive into the hot girl hamster wheel, which you brought up last year that I was like, and I think about this and I reference this all the time because I’ll let you in your own words, explain to people the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel and what chapter one is all about before I get into my thoughts.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And I’m excited to hear your thoughts. So the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel is how I describe the expenses that are required to maintain what I will jokingly call the acceptable feminine appearance. So the thing about the hamster wheel and why I call it the hamster wheel is because as all of us know, none of this is one and done. This is not something you can purchase one time and be done with. All of it has to be constantly maintained and re-upped because your body will slowly over time reject the modifications and enhancements that you’re making.

And the particularly insidious thing about it and what really kind of brought my attention to it from a financial angle is that these are bodily investments that you are making, aesthetic interventions that you are making that actually leave you worse off. There’s actually something kind of coercive about them.

So think about the way that when you get a gel manicure, how nice it looks at first, it will make you better at first, but then as time goes on and it grows out and it starts looking bad, not only does the product itself look worse, but your natural nail underneath now looks worse too. It’s probably yellowing, it’s probably brittle. You can’t just snap your fingers and go back to the way that you were before.

Same goes for all my ladies out there that are on the highlight grind like me. When the highlights grow out, it looks worse or any hair color, really anything that grows out is going to look worse than it did naturally before you changed it because that line of demarcation kind of unsightly. So now you’re kind of trapped. You can’t just stop doing it or you could, but again, you are in some ways worse off than before.

I think this takes on a whole ‘nother level of intensity when we’re talking about Botox and filler, particularly things like preventative Botox for young people and this idea that you need to start early and they’re now finding that with all these people who start getting Botox in their early twenties, that your muscle isn’t decaying. But when you’re not using those muscles for that long, the skin actually thins and gets crepe or on top of it.

So I think that in a lot of ways we participate in these ecstatic interventions because we sense that the way that we look matters, we know that the way that we look impacts how other people treat us. Pretty privilege is real both socially and in the workplace financially. All of these things are true.

And yet I don’t think that many of us really think about what we’re getting ourselves into when we step onto that hamster wheel and the way in which every dollar that we spend really functions like a commitment to spend more in the future.

And so in the book I talk about, let’s quantify this, how much money are we really talking about? And on average as of 2017, so this has certainly gone up both because of inflation and because of the increasing prevalence of Botox and filler and other cosmeceuticals, the average woman was spending something like $300 a month on aesthetic upkeep. And so I just looked at that through the lens of opportunity cost and said, alright, well if she’s investing that money instead, what would she have? And over a 40 year career, we’re talking about a million dollars. So that was a really revelatory moment for me of I know that most of us understand what we’re spending right now. I don’t think many of us understand what we’re really giving up in the long-term to pursue these norms.

Kate Kennedy:

Sometimes I have trouble really grasping things in a quantifiable means, but something you said that clicked with me of, holy shit was when you were talking about your expenses, I think it was when you were maybe first out of college or the early years in the corporate world with a paycheck that you spending on beauty maintenance was a month’s worth of income. So you had to work a month. I forgot you wrote it, something about that I was like, that’s insane that yes, a month of your income is going to just maintaining your appearance for this arbitrary return we’ve convinced ourselves is there that materially is not there. That as you argue socially is kind of there unfortunately in some ways, but not in a way that benefits your wealth building. It’s actually quite wealth depleting. But yeah, I thought that was a really interesting exercise.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So basically at the time I was taking home around $1,500 every two weeks. So I knew that my net income every month was around $3,000 after taxes and I was contributing to a 401(k), but that didn’t feel like my savings at the time because I couldn’t touch it. And so when I saw that I was spending about in line with the average, and by the way, this is why I always encourage women when they do this to do the kind of hot girl detox and figure this out for themselves is to annualize all your costs. So the tricky thing about beauty spending is that because it’s all happening on different timelines and on different cadences, it’s death by a thousand cuts when you go to get your hair done and it costs $200 or whatever that you’re spending a lot of money. But if you’re also doing the eyebrows and the eyelashes and the nails and the pedicures and the tans and the waxes and whatever, it can be really powerful to be like, okay, how often am I doing this and what does it cost every time after tip?

Figure out what that represents for an entire year and then add all that up. And then once you annualize it, you can see it contextually against your salary and that will really put it into context for you because when I saw that, okay, I’m spending what, $3,500, $3,600 a year on this stuff and I make $3,000 a month, I was like, oh my God, is that really worth it? Am I really getting six weeks worth of labor value out of this and the bottom line?

And I think the tricky thing is that the closer you already are to the beauty standard, the less risk you have for basically straying from it. So if you are a thin able-bodied white cis woman who already kind of conforms to Eurocentric beauty standards, you basically face no risk from getting off the hamster wheel, realistically speaking. And so the more your natural state diverges from that Eurocentric beauty standard, the more you might feel like that risk is real.

And in some cases it really is. I mean particularly the data around the wage penalty for fat women is extreme. The last I checked it was something like 12% wage penalty if your BMI is over 30, so this stuff is real, so I don’t want to downplay it or suggest that feeling of vulnerability or risk that you might have from divesting from these systems is all in your head. But I do think it’s really important to talk about what that ROI actually is. What are you actually getting? Because yes, there is an ROIA little one, it is incremental, but it pales in comparison to the ROI that you could be getting by investing that money instead. I mean, it’s just not even close.

So you’re probably investing a lot of money in your appearance if you are because you think it’s going to bring you confidence, safety, security, stability, all these very natural human needs and desires, but having financial strength in an extractive system that you control that nobody can take away from you and Unilever can’t change when they decide fluffy are out and thin brows are in again, that is pretty invaluable to me.

So I think we just have to be honest about what those ROIs are and not get caught up in the industrialized beauty industry’s messaging that the only power that a woman should be pursuing is beauty. Because as my favorite thinker, and now hopefully I can consider her a friend, Tressie McMillan Cottom says, beauty is the only power that women are allowed to use but never own. It is rented. And it costs a lot of money to keep renting it.

Kate Kennedy:

Yeah. Dang. If I had a pen near me, I’d write that down because, and I wrote down so many quotes in this chapter because regarding empowerment and social capital, because I think something too that this chapter tied together really nicely is how crazy it is to the way marketing has co-opted financial terminology to essentially trick you into thinking you’re meaningfully investing in yourself, beauty and wellness, hijacking financial language to convince people that consumption is a fiscally responsible thing. To your point, so smart, that lack of return is crazy.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And I think empowering too is such a funny word. We talked about this in our recent SkinnyTok episode of Diabolical Lies, how you’re now seeing this shift happen in overt thin inspiration content where they’re talking about how it’s empowering to do XYZ. Typically, we’re talking about restrictive tendencies and we were really trying to get inside that word empowering and what does that really mean, because it feels so fuzzy and feminist, but really it just means give power. And so yeah, in a system where being white, blonde thin and hot gives you power, then yeah, I guess it’s empowering to conform to that.

But is that really the goal? Should we be asking bigger and better questions about what it’s all for? And the work of a woman named Jessica Defino has been so impactful for me. I highly recommend everybody check out her Substack, the Review of Beauty, if you’re into this conversation and want to get bigger and deeper into the beauty part of it specifically.

But she always kind of reframes these conversations in the marketing co-option of feminist language as we have to remember what feminism is. Feminism is not about empowering individual women to have more power under capitalism or under patriarchy. It’s about the collective liberation from gender oppression. And so when you take that broader view, it makes way more sense why this isn’t good for anybody. When you think about it through that lens of gendered oppression, I think we can start to have more productive and substantive conversations about it. But yeah, I mean it’s crazy the way in which the marketing has really almost replaced the more philosophical underpinnings in our mainstream conversations about these things and really fooled a lot of us into thinking that we’re making really good choices for ourselves.

I mean, I don’t know. I still get my hair done. I got a manicure for my book launch. So it’s not that you can’t participate, I mean, it’s about understanding what that participation actually costs and making sure that you’re participating in a way that you actually feel really good about. And I don’t know, not everything you do has to be an explicitly feminist choice. That’s something Jessica says, but it’s important that we don’t recast those decisions as feminist in retrospect to kind of retroactively justify the consumption. It’s okay to consume things, it’s okay to make choices that are not feminist, but we should call it what it is and kind of go into it eyes wide open.

We will be right back to my conversation with Kate right after this quick break.

Kate Kennedy:

Something that struck me when you were talking about how wealth depleting the big picture of the hamster wheel can be is what’s kind of a bit insidious is the people responsible for influencing us a lot of times for this hyper consumption with beauty products and procedures and whatnot are influencers, and they are uniquely the only people for whom their consumption actually does produce a return. So interesting, which incentivizes them to get to buy shit for. We don’t produce a return.

That’s an interesting thing for me to think about too, because I kind of laugh when bloggers talk about investment pieces in capsule wardrobes, unless you have a Birkin or something. I don’t really know that an equipment blouse from 2012 really did much for me in the resale market, but that is kind of how influencers adopt it from marketers and it trickles down and there’s just a lot of different motivations there.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That’s really interesting. I think I’ve heard you talk about that in the context of home renovations before too. An influencer renovating their home is doing it just as much for the content and the brand partnerships as they are resale value and how—

Kate Kennedy:

Yeah, I think they need something to talk about.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, I agree. You know how hard, honestly, it would be so hard to be a lifestyle influencer. I could never, oh, because I’m so boring. It’s kind of like reality television. You have to manufacture storylines for yourself.

Kate Kennedy:

A thousand percent. I think that their recommendation, kind of being rooted in something that they actually are seeing a return on because of your engagement is an important distinction in their mindset when recommending something because every product they buy is an opportunity to make affiliate money. What was funny is you did the math in the chapter of calculating your opportunity cost of beauty spending. Not that I was proud of myself, but I do think that balayage ombre acceptance of darker roots has been transformational for my budget. Thank you. Hailey Bieber.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

What the fuck is the name of the hair color now? I agree. I completely agree.

Kate Kennedy:

Oh, is it like old money blonde or something? I have no fucking clue. I hate those terms too. It’s almost really interesting to see patterns in yourself. For example, I didn’t get rouge status last year for support, and I was like, hell yeah, I’m a savings queen, low maintenance queen. But looking at the pattern of spending, there was two transactions, one of them was $719, and guess when that was? It was November 6th, 2024. So it’s like consumption as emotional regulation in front of my face, even though I intellectually know this is something you shouldn’t do, I still very much do it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That is so I’ve never actually seen such a perfect black and white example of that. That’s a hysterical.

Kate Kennedy:

Why did I run to Sephora that is almost the most offensive place I could have run?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Well, oh my God. I guess what’s been really interesting to me on the beauty note is the Mar-a-Lago face phenomenon and the way that beauty work, aesthetic intervention and just gender dynamics more broadly are playing out in our politics right now. I find it so fascinating and something that I wrote about for Salon Magazine recently. It was kind of connecting that gender norm orthodoxy resurgence and this idea that you have to be performing your femininity more aggressively now or that that’s just culturally where we’re moving because the culture have experiencing this conservative backlash that is so connected to our economic situation.

So I think that a very popular, maybe the most popular example of this, and something that I’ve noticed is this obsession culturally with 1950s nostalgia and how that was the time that is memorialized by these television programs because that was when television became very popular in the United States. You have Leave It to Beaver and shows like that demonstrate these very traditional nuclear family dynamics, and that even at the time was kind of propagandized, but now it’s really heavily propagandized and is associated with this period of American prosperity and a strong middle class in a time when things were stable and America was powerful, and I mean it’s in the slogan Make America Great Again. It’s this callback to that earlier period, which by the way is a rip off of Ronald Reagan’s. That was Ronald Reagan’s slogan too, Make America Great Again. So that’s a loaded rich text that we could spend some time with.

But that the thing about the 1950s that I don’t think enough people realize is that the corporate tax rate was very high. The top marginal tax rate for high income people was 91% labor power and union density was at an all time high. So basically workers had power and corporations had much less power. It was a different time economically, and it was a time when our government actually intervened to create a middle class. But because we don’t have a strong economic analysis or a material analysis on the left, all we’re left with is all these cultural explanations for why things are shitty now. And when we look back to the 1950s, we look at the gender roles and we go, oh, it must’ve been good because of the gender roles, when in reality it was a completely different economic paradigm that with policy shifts we could get back to, gender roles be damned.

But I think that that economic upheaval and the general sense of instability that people feel and that precariousness that just seeps into everyday life now for increasingly more and more people, I think that that is really a big, big driver of this recommitment to and turning back toward these gender norms that people think and associate with that level of stability.

And so obviously aesthetic upkeep and performing your femininity, I mean, all of that is connected. But yeah, I mean it runs really, really deep. And I do think that that’s why more popular understanding of economically what is happening in our country and why it’s happening is so important for people because I think it makes it easier to see through a lot of the bullshit.

Kate Kennedy:

Oh, for sure. In researching the 1950s propaganda era of the United States, like a hobbyist venture of mine. I’m obsessed with actual accounts of people from that time, women from that time. And when you even, I just thought this was an interesting tidbit, like the trope of vacuuming and heels, June cleaver vibes that’s actually rooted in women unceremoniously pushed out of the workforce when people returned from war and they wanted to be in their homes and feel dignified and dressed for work, and it actually wasn’t necessarily for their husbands when they got home. And I think that thinking kind of humanizing women in that era too, and how they were expressing themselves in the face of being under such a strict patriarchal structure is super fascinating to give them more credit than just being these cartoonish housewives.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The popular understanding of that time now is so far from the reality. I mean, I think there’s also the fact that that period led to the greatest women’s in civil rights movements that this country has ever seen. There was a strong backlash to essentially stripping of women’s economic freedom and rights and the women’s rights movement of the 1970s. It’s still so responsible for a lot of the, we’re still enjoying the benefits of that, their work for anti-discrimination and the fact that you can get a bank account now. I mean all of these things came out of the 1970s women’s movement. All of that was a response to the culture of the 1950s and people being like, we don’t want this.

I think too, I mean I talk shit about Ronald Reagan all the time. It’s like one of my pastimes. But Reagan is when he was governor of California, was the first one to institute no fault divorce, and then eventually it rippled through the rest of the country and the suicide rate for women went down by 20%. So this idea that the fact that no fault divorce is even in the conversation right now, taking that away is terrifying.

Kate Kennedy:

Genuinely terrifying. And this is why I gets so mad when Maddie Prewett’s out here on her podcast being like Feminisms to blame for XYZ. The conservative people with mics love, love, love to blame feminism for everything. And I’m like, hey, do you know how you’re getting paid? You have a credit card, you have autonomy. You are so indebted to the work of so many women before you and shitting on the very thing that puts you in a position to be in front of this mic. And it drives me absolutely insane.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Same. It’s so infuriating. I’m like, Gloria Steinem, don’t look, Gloria, stay off the internet. I hope you never see this shit. It’s also so frustrating for me because I think so much of what they critique feminism for is actually capitalism. And in a weird way, in some of these circles, you’ll notice that they actually will start to use anti-capitalist language, but then it’s a movement called reactionary feminism. I think that’s kind of how you could classify it, which is feminism has gone too far, feminism is bad for women. It’s very hetero pessimistic. So basically men are trash. They’ll never improve A lot of biological essentialism. If you listen to the complaints that a lot of the Maddie Prewett types have about modern culture, modern work, the way that society is structured, almost all of it is actually a critique and a complaint about capitalism, but they don’t have the language to express that.

Kate Kennedy:

I would love to listen to a Diabolical Lies about Maddie Prewett capitalism.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I’m going to write that down while we’re on the subject. Anyone listening who’s not in the Patreon, you need the Be There in Five Patreon episode about Maddie Prewett in your life yesterday.

Kate Kennedy:

God, she kills me. And you’re talking about just, is it Defino or Delfino?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Defino.

Kate Kennedy:

I love her newsletter and I love her work about beauty. And I think sometimes people struggle to have this conversation about how girl hamster wheel and about beauty standards because they can be things that we acknowledge are big picture oppressive or made in the male gaze that we’ve adopted and been conditioned by, et cetera, et cetera, and we can also like them and they bring us comfort. And for what you were saying about your highlights in the book, picking and choosing what you maintain, and I have to say the thing that forced me off the wheel, not by choice weirdly, but by default was motherhood and physically running out of time to perform a lot of beauty rituals.

This is probably not the correct use of word per our convo. The thing that was empowering to me is choosing to reengage. It’s not realistic for me to ever break free of beauty standards entirely. That would be a type of empowerment I wouldn’t experience, but I genuinely did experience a positive change in my life about choosing to reengage with them from a position of having survived without them.

And I think there’s another layer of how beauty standards affect moms, not only because of the tropes of bouncing back and stuff, but there is something about bodily autonomy and identity that almost going back to some of your beauty rituals feels like a reclamation even though they represent something that inherently it’s like a mess. If I think about it too hard, I really think that when you line item these expenses, you advise people to do, it creates that situation where by choosing to remove or reallocate some of these things, approaching beauty from a place of choice and not obligation actually feels very different to me. And when you step off the wheel of it, you don’t really need a lot of the things and if you step off, you’re like, oh, I’m fine.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, I think sometimes I recommend taking them off one by one and just seeing how each one feels and kind of treating it like an experiment. Because what I experienced was just that I got a lot of time and mental energy back and that it was really valuable. There was a period last year where I did stop coloring my hair entirely and I let it grow out and I finally decided, okay, I could live with this. This would be fine, but I would like some highlights around my face or I’m going to do a balayage. I’m going to basically compromise with myself and do mostly my real hair color, but with little pops of color just to brighten me up a little bit. I prefer me that way after spending 15 years having full highlights and being very blonde. And what’s interesting is I basically didn’t wear makeup for a year, and it was really nice.

And what actually got me wearing it again and wanting to wear makeup again and enjoying it was I went through this hard period earlier this spring where I had the flu for a period. I was in kind of a funk. I had this foster dog from LA after the fires who was just so sweet, but so much work, and I just felt constantly spread thin by this puppy. And after a month of just feeling like this dark cloud, I was like, I need to put a little bit of effort and time and spend the effort and time on myself again. I think that will make me feel better. And it really did get me out of the funk, so it felt like this lever I could pull to improve my mood after a hard time that I can now engage with freely or not, and I don’t really feel super strongly one way or the other.

I feel comfortable as myself both ways as opposed to what it felt like back then, which was my baseline state where if I deviated away from it, I would feel very insecure. And that has been kind of an interesting coming back around to it now and being like, okay, how can I engage with fashion or makeup or self-expression in a way that feels really fun and embodied and additive and not, oh, I have to present this way to be acceptable.

There was a really interesting quote in an interview that Jessica did with another writer who I thinks name is Camille Soji. I don’t want to butcher that. She writes a substack about the concept of pleasure and something that they had both, I think kind of expressed in this interview was ever since I divested from a lot of these routines, and I think Jessica never wears makeup. I mean, she’s completely bare faced, completely natural all the time, and I think she said something to the effect of like, oh, do you feel naturally beautiful now? And she was like, well, no, I don’t, but I feel really good about myself in ways that don’t presently include the way that I look. I think that there’s actually a lot of power in that neutrality too, giving your appearance less power over your day to day.

Kate Kennedy:

Oh, a thousand percent. I don’t know if you keep up with Addison Rae, but have you noticed she doesn’t wear makeup in any of her?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I have not.

Kate Kennedy:

She’s completely doing press for this album without wearing makeup, and I’m like, that is awesome.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That’s so cool. Honestly, I know that sounds dumb to be like, that’s important, but I really think that that’s partially why the decisions we make about beauty and self-presentation are more than just personal choices. They do impact other people. That’s how beauty standards work. That’s how norms work.

So yeah, I think sometimes I’ll talk to women who have let their hair go gray and they’re like, yeah, I mean, do I love having gray hair? Not always, but I do feel powerful in the sense that I feel like I’m doing something liberatory for other women who see me and might feel incrementally more comfortable going gray themselves and allowing themselves to age. So I think that’s a fun part of it too.

Kate Kennedy:

Did you watch the Alex Cooper documentary?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, I did.

Kate Kennedy:

There was a lot of important stuff in that documentary that, this is not the main takeaway, but walking away from it, I was like, I didn’t get enough detail on the glow up between everybody bullied me, boys wouldn’t talk to me, to dating professional athletes in college and being this blonde bombshell.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yes,

Kate Kennedy:

She went on Armchair Expert and actually, which is a podcast I don’t normally listen to, but she kind of explained that entire part of it.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Really. What’d she say? I didn’t hear this.

Kate Kennedy:

She had talked about how transformative the experience was when she was like 14. Her mom let her get highlights and people responded to her differently. And I had the same experience where I went from invisible to getting a disproportionate amount of attention when I went from mousy natural to blonde in ways that I think you internalize so deeply in terms of people just even seeing you, acknowledging you, and that sounds so insane. I love the kind of mousy in-between dark blonde. It’s not about the hair color, it’s about your experience and how people react to you when you participate in certain beauty trends or rituals.

And you guys talked about this on the SkinnyTok episode too, where the weirdness of people kind of abstract tell you how great you look and you lost weight. I think sometimes those can be the hardest things to separate yourself from maybe the almost inner child response of how one, you went from awkward to having these tools at your disposal to fix everything you didn’t like about yourself at an age where you didn’t have the wisdom or experience to accept yourself. And that in its own way, felt weirdly empowering at the time. It makes so much sense.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We are social animals, it’s so normal to want other people to love and accept you and like, oh my God, talk about a fundamental human need. And I had a similar experience like going from the brace faced, unibrow, having mousey brown hair, kind of scrawny middle school girl to being in high school. I’ve got boobs now. That was a huge development, both literally and metaphorically getting highlights, braces come off, unibrow’s gone. Having that glow up and then recognizing, oh, people treat me so much better. Like you said, you go from being invisible to getting a lot of positive attention. And I remember internalizing that a lot too and kind of being like, oh my God, I never want this to end. I didn’t know life could feel this way. I mean, that’s pretty privilege. Pretty privilege feels really fucking good. And so it can feel, like I said, kind of vulnerable to voluntarily dial back on that.

It’s like there’s a little bit of game theory at play where it’s like if everybody’s dialing back, then that’s better for everybody, but if you’re the only one who’s abstaining, then it’s just worse for you. So yeah, I mean there’s certainly no easy answers, but I empathize deeply with that feeling because I totally remember and it sticks with you. It really sticks with you when you sense that there are certain things that you can do to manipulate the way that you look or you feel like, okay, this isn’t there some novel. It’s like the summer I got hot or something. Summer I turned pretty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Summer I got hot. That would’ve been a better name. Summer I became a smokeshow. Where I remember having, I mean, this was a deeply personal chapter for me because I was a sorority girl at Alabama as well, where talk about all this on steroids.

Kate Kennedy:

I forget that sometimes and I just am like, oh, this is your arc from being a subscriber of American Cheerleader Magazine to hosting Diabolical Lies. I mean truly nothing like it

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Gross as possible. Everyone I know, I always joke in college I was going through a Bama rush in a Reagan Bush tee, so anything is possible, guys. But I remember having an almost obsessive and addictive relationship to beauty because I saw what it could unlock for you. And it until I feel like I started gaining financial power and seeing myself in another way, I really think that my self-concept shifted from valuing being hot and valuing, being well-liked to valuing intellectual curiosity and integrity. And I think when I made that shift and saw that I could be rewarded for that too and accepted for that too, and actually build stronger connections on the basis of my mind and my ideas, that was when I was like, oh, all that was noise. All of that was really holding me back from becoming the person that I really wanted to be. And so I don’t judge my younger self at all. I think she was doing the best that she could and responding to the environments that she was in because holy toxic as fuck, bam, a rush. But if other women are experiencing that and feeling that, I want them to know that there are other options available to them.

We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

Kate Kennedy:

You just said the most beautiful series of sentences about self-development I’ve ever heard, and the worst part is I just am dying to ask you if you were old or new row.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I was old row bitch. Not that it matters, not that it matters because everyone is old row in God’s eyes. But yeah, I was old row. I wanted to be old row so bad because I was from the north, and as a northern girl, you want all that clout. You want to be in the top dog. I actually talked with Tressie that I was in that system, but not of it. So even though I was able to manipulate my way via good grades and looking the part and speaking the part and tapping into that theater kid energy and really letting the charisma shine through during rush, I was able to get into an old row house.

But once I was on the inside, it was very obvious from day one that, oh, there’s actually a hierarchy even within this house and there’s an ingroup within this house and I am not in it. And that was a hard realization to have, and I think that it just goes to show that those power dynamics run deep and it’s a losing game even when you’re in one of the best sororities in the school that’s most known for Rush. There’s still further hierarchy and jockeying and weird fucking power dynamics. The sad thing is you just spend so much of your time preoccupied with that shit that—I’m still friendly with people that I was in a sorority with, but my closest friends from college now were actually not in my sorority.

Kate Kennedy:

One thing I wanted to get to also in your second chapter, because there’s a lot of girl bosses here, I made my book club sit down. It was like a fictional book club. I made them sit down and read Lean In and do a whole discussion in like 2012 or whatever. Because to your point about finding value in stimulating intellectual pursuits, I think that since I couldn’t be super validated by grades, couldn’t be super validated like socially by men or didn’t always feel good in the looks department, when I started working, people were obsessed with me. It was the first time I actually felt like I had something to contribute as a person. When I say obsessed, I mean I could do really good PowerPoints and they acted like it was revelatory, and it was such an important period of confidence building for me just to have it be expressed to me that I have value outside of those vanity metrics.

I think I got really into Lean In girl-bossy because I was genuinely empowered by and interested in the corporate pursuit that I now realize is individualistic in that context. But I will never forget reading the negotiation part of that and really taking it to heart and just being like, oh shit, I’m just a bad negotiator and that’s why I’m in that position. Didn’t take into account any systemic factors whatsoever. And beyond that suggested that the best way to combat the system was to hold the same posture as a man and act like them in the workplace, which you point out in the book actually works against women. And this chapters just so interesting on so many levels, but what were you trying to get across with it?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

What’s funny too about the Lean In thing is that I was watching the celebrity memoir book club girls talk to Chelsea Fagan about Lean In recently on a Financial Diet video. And they had pointed out that, and I didn’t remember this at the time, and I think Lean In has become kind of like a meme from the girlboss era now, but it is interesting. She does acknowledge some systemic factors in the beginning of the book, not throughout the advice, but she kind of calls out shortcomings at the beginning and then is like, okay, so yeah, these are a thing and we do need to focus on these. However, I am going to focus on all of these individual solutions. So fine. What’s been so crazy? Did you read Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams, the Facebook whistleblower?

Kate Kennedy:

I have it in my stack for the summer. I hear it’s awesome.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Dude. Cheryl Sandberg is a freaking nut job. Assuming that all that is alleged in this book about her leadership style and the way that she treated the women that she worked with is true. I will say this, generally speaking, I am very much be hard on systems, not people. That is a principle of mine that I try to come back to is that again, do we have free will anyone, anyone, but no, really be hard on systems, not people. But I say that about Sandberg and the information in that memoir because I think that it makes me feel more comfortable critiquing Lean In for what it was, which I think is a very narrowly set of advice that, I mean, one thing that I noticed about it in retrospect, flipping it again, is like she doesn’t mention unions in the book. She doesn’t mention labor power or collective bargaining or any of these dynamics where, I mean, we know that women in unions have a gender wage gap that’s like 10 percentage points smaller.

So you actually do have some individual control over whether or not you unionize your workplace completely gets glossed over. So my goal with that chapter, and I guess with Rich Girl Nation more broadly, is I do want to talk about the systemic factors because the systemic factors matter so much and the systemic elements of the gender wealth gap, which I think is really what I’m concerned with in the book, is just where we see that differential coming up and what are the drivers of it. And so in chapter two in particular, I wanted to talk about the wage gap and the myths about the wage gap, why it happens, how tied the gender wage gap is to the gender care gap and how women’s roles as caretakers and there in the cultural imagination, how much that impacts women’s ability to succeed at work and stay in the workforce.

And it kind of culminates in, let’s just make sure that our causality here is correct in that it’s not backwards, which is women don’t earn less because they’re bad negotiators, but negotiating in a way that navigates gender bias can help offset some of the challenges and obstacles that you’re likely to face as a woman in the workplace. One of the most interesting findings was the fact that when women negotiate assertively or aggressively, this is probably going to be a surprise to nobody. They’re more likely to be punished because we punish women who behave like men, women who subvert gender norms and femininity norms are more likely to be punished for it.

One of the interesting takeaways that I talk about is the way that socialization impacts how women negotiate and women are socialized to make people feel comfortable. So when they’re in a tense conversation and they’re deal making, they’re essentially asking somebody for more money, more power, more prestige, whatever these masculine coded goods, in order to make that situation more comfortable, and again, to make that other person feel more comfortable, we are more likely to negotiate against ourselves.

So we’ll make our case, but then we’ll be like, oh, but I totally understand if that’s not doable right now, and you kind of downplay and you negotiate against yourself, you do their job for them. And so one of the simplest tips that I encountered in the research that I reviewed and the experts that I spoke with was simply just to stop talking, know what your case is, make the case structured it in this particular way that is asking relationally and thinking bigger about all the things that you can get. I lay it out in the chapter, but then stop talking and allow the uncomfortable silence. Allow that other person to respond and just kind of have that key phrase in your mind of you say your piece and then you go, what do you think? Boop, silence. And that alone can really help. It can help you get more in those situations.

Kate Kennedy:

I thought that was such good advice and to the point where the thought of me stating my case saying, what do you think? And pausing and sitting in the tense silence, the thought of that makes me wince with nervousness. And because I know that that’s almost what I mean is that’s how good of advice it was, I was like, oh yeah, I would go far to fill that space and fill that discomfort with something that would probably make me kind of backtrack or negotiate against myself. And I thought that was such good tangible advice.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh, thank you.

Kate Kennedy:

You also talked about something that I strongly believe in, which is it’s not about how much work you do, it’s about how much work people perceive that you do and the importance of self-advocacy. Can you touch on that a little bit?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So annoying, right, so annoying. The analogy that I make in the book is that workplaces like humans are imperfect. They’re a little bit like glorified high school lunchrooms. And so unfortunately, perception is reality. And as much as this sucks because I really hated this element of working in an environment with other people, which is wonderful in many ways, but one of the things I did not like about it was the politicking and the peacocking and having to represent yourself in that way. I felt like, well, hey, if I’m doing a really good job, shouldn’t that be enough? Why do I have to perform doing a good job? But in many ways, that performance is more important than the work itself. And I think that the earlier that we accept that and find a way to accommodate that reality with integrity, the better.

And so I kind of talk about it with respect to this idea of socializing your wins, which I think is a really cringey phrase, but it’s unfortunately the best way to describe what you’re doing, very popular negotiation advice that I see all the time is, okay, catalog your wins at work, keep track of all the things that you’re doing and all the ways that you’re succeeding.

And then when you go into negotiate for more pay, you go into a performance review, you’re going to unfurl the scroll in front of the person and be like, see all the stuff I did. Let’s talk about all the great stuff I did. But what’s better and more important is that as those good things are happening, other people know about them. It’s not just important that your direct manager knows, but that you are building an engaged network of advocates around you, other people on other teams who you want to build that broad perception. And so my thing is I want to work smarter, not harder. I’m not saying you need to be on Slack every Saturday morning. I’m not saying that you need to be working 70 hours a week, but there are little tweaks that you can make in the way that you engage in the workplace with other people that will leave that disproportionately robust impression of your work ethic.

And a lot of them are simple. I just call it going the extra yard. So if you have to turn something around by Friday, do it by Thursday. If you’re asked to come up with three factors that are impacting conversion, throw in a fourth. It’s like little stuff like that. And the socializing your wins component is really about finding the way to communicate those wins broadly. I write about this one gal that I used to work with who was amazing at this. She has since left Corporate America and become a lawyer, which I just think is so funny. But what she would do is she was always the one who was kind of communicating for her team. So we would get emails from her periodically that would be like, hey, we just wanted to share out these findings from such and such that we did in case it’s helpful. Or like, hey, I took on this other project and I wanted to let everybody know that these were the results and let me know if you’d like to hear more. Happy to share. She felt like she was everywhere. She was kind of constantly on your mind.

And I don’t think that that was because she was actually working harder than everybody else, but she was really, really good at making her presence and making the work that she was doing well known throughout the department. And I think she actually did put quite a bit of time into thinking about how she was being perceived and working on those both presentation interpersonally, but also putting herself in that position to be the one that was presenting findings to leadership and stuff. It sounds so dumb, but that’s how workplaces work and that’s how people get into higher visibility positions and get the opportunities that enable you to earn more and be top of mind for people that have decision-making power.

Kate Kennedy:

And I think it’s almost like it was the Lean In era. And then the pendulum swung so far in terms of like, okay, the empowering message got us a seat at the table. But then I think a lot of us millennials became kind of disillusioned by the ways neoliberalism beyond failed us. And the 2016 election, the drastic response to that and the anger that caused me to nitpick at people posturing as feminists and writing books like Lean In or Sophia Amoroso or whatever, just the intensity of me nitpicking about how their feminism wasn’t perfect was in some ways valid in some ways a coping mechanism. And now I’ve kind of almost landed somewhere, not entirely in the middle, but it’s a combination of focusing on broader systemic factors that benefit the collective, but also playing the game. There’s kind of no way around playing the game to a degree. Because a broader theme of this book, I feel like is each chapter is kind of getting at a way to improve financial outcomes for women without doing more work than you already are, right?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yes. Right. My thing is I want you to earn more and get more out of the things that you were already doing. And I think there are a lot of arenas in finance where there are very small tweaks that actually do have outsize impacts. Another example of this is what I talk about in chapter six, which is tax advantaged investing and how simply saving and investing in this bucket versus that one, because of the way that compounding returns work and how taxes work, you will literally retire 15% faster. So those are the shortcuts that I’m talking about because ultimately when I look at my own journey and what enabled me to start thinking bigger and to start becoming politically engaged and outspoken and to start trying to understand, okay, how could we actually build a better economy? How could we build better businesses, better families? What does that look like?

It was only because I had financial stability. It was only because I finally had money so I could make decisions without money being the number one factor. And so I hope that people when they read Rich Girl Nation and that the things that they take away from it is doing good work, being paid well for it, investing for my future. You’re not a sellout. You’re just doing the things that you need to do to give yourself as much capacity as possible so you actually can have a positive impact on your sphere of influence, whatever that may be, big or small. But I really believe that when I think about the future and what is going to save us, I mean it is the collective, it is all of us coming together. And I think that there are so many people right now for whom they feel so spread thin and they’re so concerned about just the end of the month that they can’t think about next year, they can’t think about 10 years from now.

They don’t have that luxury, they don’t have that privilege. And so it’s not that investing advice and negotiation advice is going to solve that problem for everybody. It won’t. And I want to be very honest about the limited utility of this advice that in many ways it is still for people who have decent incomes and are not exploited low wage workers. Those things do require systemic solutions. There’s no way around it. But I do think that we can continue to build power together by essentially enhancing our own financial stability. And then again, I see it as a responsibility that we have to bring other people along with us. It’s not enough to get it for yourself and then be like, cool, I’m good. You do need to share this with other people. You do need to help other people, whether that’s with the knowledge or with your own money or however it looks like for you. But I do believe that we have a responsibility to other humans.

Kate Kennedy:

So much of it was very enlightening. I think, and I hope younger women read this too, because even just you spelling out that just factually women outlive men, but often with a third of the assets or the likelihood of finding oneself in poverty after divorce relative to male counterparts in protecting yourself, you have a chapter on prenups, you have a chapter on all moms or working moms. I mean, you really cover so many unique aspects of women’s experiences with money and to money that are so important to in that it’s not just about women be shopping, I want to buy more shit. It’s like securing yourself to a place where you have freedom, where you have options where you’re not stuck and where you’re safe.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. So I’ve obviously, I’ve read a lot of personal finance books. I’ve been in the space for half a decade now, so I am extremely familiar with what was out there and how we talk about these things. And obviously I’ve spent a lot of time in the data and trying to understand how women end up in these not so great positions and financial situations. And something that really jumped out at me was just how striking it was that so few finance books talked about marriage or caregiving because it truly is the most impactful by a long shot and it’s not close, the most impactful thing on a woman’s ability to earn, save and invest. So the fact that there was rarely if ever conversations about how marriage is going to change your finances or what should be in a prenuptial agreement or if you’re going to work inside your home instead of outside it, what kind of legal protections do you need to have?

I mean, it just struck me as very common sense given what we know about women’s outcomes, women are 65% more likely to leave paid work to care for a family member. There are no social security credits for caregivers. So if you aren’t working for a paycheck and you’re working inside your home for decades, not only are you not getting an opportunity to save for your own retirement, but you don’t get your own social security either. You’ll probably get some of your partners. But even that, there’s weirdness around how that is meted out later. So I really wanted to get into the caregiving gap and the domestic labor gap and just how money functions in marriage, how to manage money together because those things felt like to me just as if not more important than here’s how you buy an index fund

Kate Kennedy:

And so much marital money advice is about so much focus on what’s shared, which is fair, but I think there’s an element of self-protection that’s not discussed enough and it’s just more people being reprimanded for not sharing joint accounts for everything or whatever. I just thought you had a really refreshing and interesting take. Wait, I forget. Do you have a prenup?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I don’t. No. That was kind of the joke. I have this very extensive section about prenups where I’m like, you need this. Everyone’s marriage is a contract. Do you want the opportunity to influence it or not? Yada, yada, yada. And then I have this big reveal of you are probably thinking like, man, I’ve never encountered a woman so excited about contract law. I bet her prenup is amazing. And then I’m like, but I don’t have one. And the reason I don’t have one is because even though my husband who is an attorney and I had had discussions while we were dating and engaged of like, yeah, prenups makes sense, we’re definitely going to do it. We just never got around to it. We got married when we were 26 and I didn’t fully grasp at the time how important it was beyond just a superficial understanding.

And so I want other women to have a deeper understanding of this is exactly what it can do for you. It can outline terms about spousal support if you become a stay at home parent, because that’s going to be tough to get if you go in front of a judge in a state that’s not super friendly to stay at home parents, you can make it whatever you want it to be, but I didn’t realize this when I got married and I don’t think many people do because there’s no natural stopping point when you are getting married where anyone sits you down and explains to you how this is going to change you legal and financial rights, which is crazy if you think about the fact that you’re literally signing a lifelong, legally enforceable contract. There’s nothing to read. That’s nuts. So I don’t think many people realize it.

Kate Kennedy:

But you’re so right at the ceremony, you signed something, you literally haven’t read a lifelong legally binding contract.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Binding contract with nothing to read. It’s nuts. I’m sure this is pretty standard. I shouldn’t say people don’t know that from the date of marriage, anything that either of you earn, borrow or buy is looked at by the state as belonging to both of you. So my only kind of point to people is if you want to keep your finances separate, that is okay. But just remember that that separation, absent a prenup is probably a little bit of an illusion because if you split up and you’re in a community property state, or I mean honestly equitable distribution state, you’re going to see this but less in a less extreme sense. The court is going to look at all of that shit as both of yours.

So if you’re saving and investing diligently and you’re on top of it and you have no idea what the fuck your spouse is doing and they’re just going along to get along forwarding all their paychecks to Draft Kings, they’re probably going to be legally entitled to half your 401(k).

It pays to get on the same page that even if you are managing money separately, you are protected. And I just don’t think that there’s a better or more romantic time to have that conversation than at the outset of a relationship and the outset of a marriage when you both can do something very selfless for one another and say, I want you to have this in life even if it’s not with me someday. That is so beautiful, so much more beautiful than, okay, well you signed on the dotted line, so fuck it. We ball. Hope for the best. Swallow the key.

Kate Kennedy:

That is such a good point and in such a way to get around what I think is the hardest part about this conversation, which is that it’s deemed unromantic to talk about splitting up when your life is just starting together. But what a profound respect for someone you love to say, I want you to be okay whether it’s with me or not.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And I know you’ll want me to be okay too. Yeah, I mean you just never know. I think obviously nobody gets married with the intention to get divorced, but things happen. I’ve heard stories from women whose husbands had essentially severe psychotic breakdowns. And I mean that in the medical sense, not in the colloquial sense where mental health issues arise. I mean people can really change, not because they even mean to, but some of this just truly is outside of your control. And I look at it as common sense. And for someone like me who didn’t have the prenup and didn’t understand enough when she got married, what she was really agreeing to, you can do a post-nup and they do tend to have more issues with enforceability. It does depend on your state. So both of you need to be working with your own legal representation.

You need to work with real attorneys who really understand the family law in your state. But I just think it’s vitally important that women kind of understand men too, understand legally what’s happening to them so they can make the best choices for themselves. And I talk to people too who choose not to get married because they don’t want to introduce this level of legal and state, not interference, but they don’t want a contract. And that’s okay too. And maybe once you know what that contract entails, you’re going to opt not to sign it and that’s fine. But knowledge is power.

Kate Kennedy:

There was something you cited, maybe it was in the intro that the statistics are worse now than in 1992 in terms of financial literacy. Why do you think that is?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, it’s from the UBS Know Your Worth Study. I think this one came from 2021, heterosexual—this is a mixed sex couple study, how many couples report the husband taking charge of all the financial decisions and the financial long-term planning? And I think it’s something like 56% in 2021 reported that compared to 53% in 1992.

Kate Kennedy:

Fascinating.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I don’t know why that is. I couldn’t even begin to tell you why or how that’s getting worse. But what’s was really interesting to me about that study was that 30% of women reported that they were the main financial decision makers in their homes, and only 11% of men reported that their wives were the main decision maker. So I was like, there is this weird two-way mirror thing happening where even in situations where women were reporting that they were the primary, fewer men were comfortable admitting that. So I’m sure there’s something weird and gender dynamic going on there. It’s probably even worse now in 2025 than it was in 2021, but it was something like one in five couples reported making these decisions equally. And that’s scary because like we said, women live longer, six and a half percent longer on average, they are more likely to bear the brunt of poor long-term financial planning than their spouses.

Just again, if we’re looking at the actuarial tables and the cold hard data. So you got to be involved. I get why women aren’t though I want to say that because it’s not about intelligence, it’s not about competence. It’s not about one gender being naturally more math friendly than the other. But I think that this too is connected to the caregiving gap because if you think about the fact that women do an hour more of unpaid labor in their homes every day, and you have a partner who maybe does actually at this point in time know more about it than you do, who’s saying, hey, that thing that you don’t know anything about yet that you’re not really into or interested in, I can take that off your hands and manage it end to end and you don’t have to think about it. Most women are going to be like fucking great thanks.

Can we apply that attitude to more things that actually it makes perfect sense to me that you would take somebody up on that offer and that offer is probably being made in good faith. I don’t think that men are malevolent creatures out here trying to dupe you out of your wealth, but it’s just the reality that when marriages end and men are the ones that have been in charge of the finances the whole time, you’re going to find yourself in a not so good situation. And we know that that’s true. I think it’s something like 75% of women who either get divorced or are widowed report finding a negative financial surprise. And so I don’t know, I can personally think of no worst time to find out that by finances are not what I thought they were than when I am going through and grieving a traumatic life event.

Kate Kennedy:

And to your point, if people need to go easy on themselves, because if you’ve never financial literacy, it’s not something that should come naturally to you. It’s something you have to put a concerted amount of effort into learning and self-teaching if you didn’t have a formal education surrounding it. And I think per me talking about my money, noise and issues last time you were on the pod, I think a lot of my avoidance is grounded in, I like to feel competent and I know so much about so many things, but it’s just an area that I’ve never had a formal education in or spend a lot of time with and who I honest to God think about all the time is Theresa Ucci. Not that I’m a diehard fan of her. Say more, Kate. I think that there’s a lot of situations where you don’t even know what you’re signing or signing up for and you’re defaulting to somebody who claims to know more than you.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, it’s a good point. I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but there is a book called Pound Foolish by a woman named Helene Olin, and she does sort of myth bust this idea that it’s tricky because it is true that men, these sorts of decisions are abdicated to men more often. It’s more common for a woman to abdicate to a man than vice versa within household finances. We know that that’s true, but when you actually compare rates of financial literacy, the actual knowledge, there’s not a very big gender gap actually. I mean there’s slightly a gender gap, but it’s pretty small, like a couple percentage points at most. And so her point in this book was basically like, it’s actually a myth that men know more about money than women do, which I think is really interesting. Again, we kind of culturally assume that this is the man’s, at least that’s the message that I received as a, not from my parents really, but just like the provider narrative that money is a man’s thing. And you see these dynamics even in relationships where the women are the financial breadwinners. This is true even for high earning millennial women who are the primary or sole earners in their homes. So it’s interesting for sure.

Kate Kennedy:

I mean, truly guys, this book is fascinating. It’s funny beyond like we talked about with prenup or saving for childcare, she is retiring independently in a tax optimized way. She’s talking through tax loopholes in one breath and making a pop culture reference in another. And it is not an easy feat to get me to read cover, to cover a book about a topic that I claim to have so little interest in. And you belong in this position to make this topic approachable and empowering for women. And I just want the Dave Ramseys of Arnold to get off my nuts about my cups of coffee and to be practical, helpful advice. And this book is full of it. And the thing I like to ask authors is a person who promoted a book, is there any part of it or a tidbit or something that you don’t get asked about enough that you wish you got asked about or something that you love talking about in this book? Because interviewers always ask you about the same stuff or hot topics, right?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That’s a good question. Something that I wish we would’ve talked about that honestly, there’s nothing that’s coming to mind immediately. But I do think that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what’s next and what I want to write next. And I feel good now that I have this kind of how to book out in the world where I’m kind of explaining if you want to know how to manage your money and not just manage it from the basics, but you want to go advanced, you want to know the 505 of money, this is what you should read and you’re going to learn it all and you’re going to have everything you need. I’m happy that I’ve done that now because now I feel like I can kind of move on from being the how to girl. And I have this artifact now that someone can buy it.

Kate Kennedy:

Andy Anderson, How To Girl.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Now I have this artifact that everybody can buy and read and benefit from, but I really want to write a book of essays next because I really enjoy writing essays. I really enjoy the type of writing that isn’t necessarily offering solutions or answers, but is just trying to get you to think about the world differently and imparting insights maybe that are going to stick with you. And so I really enjoy writing about culture and capitalism and the interplay between these two things. I guess you could say I’m the dreaded cultural Marxist that all the right wing Twitter accounts love to hate. But I just think that there are such interesting dynamics between culture, the economy, and politics. And I am excited now that I think I can kind of move more fully into that space.

Kate Kennedy:

Absolutely. It’s kind of like this is what got you into the public square and more how to prescriptive information. It’s like kind of your financial advice magnum opus you’ve put out there. And now what that information and self-teaching over the years and expertise has allowed you to do is make really astute connections when you’re doing cultural analysis that I think different people can bring different things to the table by the field that they understand. And I think having that financial overlay, financial and political overlay, especially that you and Caro are able to bring to the table and talking about feminism and talking about cultural phenomenons, it’s invaluable and it forces me to grow and learn. And I just think you’re brilliant.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh, thanks Kate.

Kate Kennedy:

And I will devour your next book of essays and hopefully you’ll come back to Be There in Five.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That is all for this week. We will see you next week for a Rich Girl Roundup. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.