Curtain Call: All Stars Return to Talk Financial Independence, Fear, and Growth

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

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About This Episode

Well, here we are—for the last time, for now. A couple weeks ago, I wrote an end-of-year letter that functioned like a little “status update” on how I’m feeling moving into 2026. In this episode, I invite back five of my favorite guests for their own check-ins. We talk about:

• What it feels like to finally pull the “F.I.” rip cord (and whether it “works”)
• How money changes relationships, and vice versa
• Marriage between entrepreneurs
• An economic diagnosis of our present moment 
• Things we’ve changed our minds about in 2025
• Why the AI bubble is different from previous bubbles
• and much, much more.

This felt like the most fitting possible capstone for the year and this chapter of the show. Thank you for tuning in week after week; thank you for being along for the ride as this show has evolved over the years and as I have evolved over the years; thank you for arguing with me in good faith and expanding my worldview; thank you for engaging with this show so earnestly and consistently. Until next time!

This episode was produced by Katie Gatti Tassin. Audio engineering by Nick Torres. Devin Emery is the President of Morning Brew.

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Get your copy of Rich Girl Nation, one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Business Books of 2025 and one of Bookshop’s Top 100 Books of 2025.

Mentioned in this Episode

• “The Katie Episode” of Diabolical Lies
• An End-of-Year Letter from Katie
• “A Masterclass on Status, Power, & the Economy with Tressie McMillan Cottom” (The Money with Katie Show, June 25)

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Transcript

2021 Katie: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of The Money with Katie podcast. Show? I don’t know, what are we calling this? I wanted to call it Rich Girl Summer, but I didn’t know if that was gonna have some limited seasonality. So anyway, happy end of 2021. The close of what feels like another fake year to now I’m getting to the point where I’m pretty sick of the fact that I don’t have a catchy jingle.

There’s maybe some, um, impending news that you should keep an ear out for.

I have news. No, I’m not pregnant [00:01:00] with Money with Katie is pregnant with a lot of new content because we are joining the Morning Brew Family. The podcast is going to get leveled up and all the content that you know in love is gonna get leveled up. Welcome back to the Money with Katie. Show Rich Girls and Boys.

I’m your host Katie Yadi Taan. And this week I’m asking the question, where the hell is the millennial middle class? Today we are talking about what marriage means for your money. Today we’re talking about some of the small lifestyle level ups. Money can buy. Wait, what is, maybe I shouldn’t use a teleprompter.

This is like actually way harder. Wait, wait, wait. Sam, he’s whacking the table with his tail. So one second. Okay, I’m gonna wait ’cause he’s attacking me. George is barking. Beans! Georgia, stop. Side note to Nick, my audio engineer. Um, do we need a Nixon drop like our Reagan drop? Nixon? Nixon? It’s like saying you think there should be a safety net under this tightrope?

Well then why don’t you unclip your harness and jump off of it because that doesn’t magically [00:02:00] make a safety net appear. Today we are breaking down the foundation of my investor philosophy, the economics of weight loss drugs, common 401k mistakes money dysmorphia. The most romantic thing that I can imagine, the prenup, what it means to be poor in the United States, and why it remains such a common experience despite our overwhelming abundance abundance.

Well, here we are for the last time. For now, I’m Katie Gatti Tassin, and this is The Money with Katie Show. What a journey. I have to say I feel so proud of and grateful for everything that we have learned together over the last four [00:03:00] years, and as a peek behind the curtain. My original game plan for this episode was to share more about my decision and what’s coming next for me and what it means to buy back intellectual property.

And then I decided, you know what? I would rather write about this and write about it in the venue where I intend to continue regularly publishing. Which is my newsletter that will relaunch as an independently owned publication next Wednesday, January 7th. So you can subscribe if you aren’t already at the link in the show notes.

And then I have some fun plans for January as like relaunch month. I also did an interview with Caro on Diabolical Lies as like a, “How I Built This”-style riff on, really, the entirety of the last five years and just how things have changed. So if you wanna hear that interview, it’s about 90 minutes. I will link that in the show notes as well.

And I think those of you who enjoy entrepreneurship content will find [00:04:00] it entertaining. But what I want to be sure to say right now. Is, thank you. Thank you for tuning in week after week. Thank you for being along for the ride as this show has evolved over the years and as I have evolved over the years.

Thank you for arguing with me in good faith and expanding my worldview. Thank you for engaging with this show so earnestly and so consistently. To be frank, I’m not really sure what will come next for me in this format. All I really know is that at some point this year, I felt with peace and certainty that it was time to move on and create some space for something else.

So that is what I intend to do. Something that I wrote in my end of year letter a couple weeks ago was that I never wanna produce something just for the sake of producing it. I only wanna make things that I feel like I need to [00:05:00] make. And I guess at some point I started to feel like, okay, I’ve said what I wanna say in this format for now.

So that left me with a big, looming empty spot on the editorial calendar and a little bit of a sense of pressure that like, I better fill it with something kick ass. Because this is the last episode of the year and of the show in its current iteration. And so I was like, how do I produce a fitting finale for something that has been such a long-term creative outlet?

And you’ve heard a lot from me already about how I’m feeling about next year. So I wanted you to hear from some other people too. And the only thing that felt right was welcoming back the guests who have studied the episode lineup with [00:06:00] their brilliance over the years. Today I’m talking to the group who I consider the Money with Katie all stars.

The people who, in one way or in another, were really pivotal checkpoints on this journey. Now without giving too much away, I know there is one person who is not in this episode that you’re gonna be upset about. That is Tressie McMillan Cottom, who was not available to record for this conversation because she is off on another fellowship leave in the rarefied air of folks who have literally been dubbed geniuses by the powers that be, though she does send her regrets and she thanks all of you for the gangbusters reception to her interview, which is to date the most popular episode ever of The Money with Katie Show.

So if you’ve somehow managed to avoid that, I’ll link it in the show notes. The good news is that I have five brilliant former guests joining me today to check in on what they are thinking about going into 2026, the [00:07:00] best things they’ve read recently, their economic diagnoses of our present moment, surprising money lessons they’ve learned, and more.

So without further ado up, first, you know, I had to talk to Brad Barrett. The host of ChooseFI because his show was my gateway drug to the financial independence community. I can’t tell you how many hours of my life I spent listening to him talk to his co-host, Jonathan, about personal finance. When I think about my years commuting through Dallas, Texas every morning and night, it’s like Brad and Jonathan were in the car with me.

I like think of them in those memories since we became friends. I have been interviewed on ChooseFI. I have guest co-hosted their show, and I have hosted Brad on this show, so I wanted to call him up and see what he is thinking about right now as we go into 2026.[00:08:00]

Brad Barrett: I don’t know exactly what we’re talking about, but I said the same thing that I’ve said to you before, which is like, if I could literally handpick. One person on earth to be my co-host of ChooseFI, it would be you.

Katie: Oh my God. Stop it.

Brad Barrett: I’ve told you that repeatedly.

Katie: I’m going to leave this in, by the way.

Brad Barrett: I mean, you absolutely should.

I’ve definitely told you that before. I’ve told you that in private, and, uh, and it’s true. I’m gonna, if I say it enough times, maybe I can, will it into the universe.

Katie: Tucks hair behind ear. Okay, Brad, well, I’m glad to be catching up with you and I, I wanna know what is an interesting money lesson that you have learned recently?

Brad Barrett: An interesting money lesson. Yeah, Katie. That’s a good one. So I have a couple things, and this all weaves into, into where I am in my life now. And I actually, uh, I’m now renting, actually, I’ve been a homeowner for 20 plus years.

Katie: Stop.

Brad Barrett: it’s the greatest thing ever. Katie. Oh my God. I am a dyed-in-the-wool renting lover at this point now.[00:09:00]

Katie: No kidding. What, what prompted that? Just like you just, why not? Why not own,

Brad Barrett: I think at this point in my life. I don’t really plan on being where I am for more. So my, my younger daughter is in eighth grade and she’s got four and a half years left, basically. And then the world is my oyster. And this kind of ties into, uh, like my flexing my thigh muscles, which is what I, I mentioned to you.

It’s, I am living into my phi life in a way that I’ve never done before. It was all theoretical. And now I can like confidently say, even though I, I could have confidently said this, but I can say with the experience PHI works, it just simply works. And it’s better than I could have even imagined. Katie.

That is the greatest part about it. It’s about, it is glorious and the nice thing is my life doesn’t cost that much. I’ve cut all the stress. So much stress in your life, whether you know it or not, comes from owning your [00:10:00] home. It’s incredible. And when that is gone. It’s like this huge weight is off your shoulders.

Katie: Really?

Brad Barrett: Yeah. I mean, Katie, I kid you not, and, and I know, I, I suspect you’ve gone back and forth between renting and, and owning.

Katie: Mm-hmm.

Brad Barrett: So I, I’d be curious to hear your perspective, obviously, but. All of the things. Think about how much time in a normal person’s life is taken up with, oh, I have to mow the lawn.

Oh, it’s the fall. I have to get rid of leaves. Or down to this little thing is broken. I have my little to-do list or whatever. I don’t have to do any of that damn stuff anymore. Anymore. It’s amazing. And it’s just gone, kitty. It’s gone. The total mental weight is gone.

Katie: So wait, so, okay. Are you, are you renting an apartment or a home?

Brad Barrett: I’m renting a home, so yeah, somebody owns it. It is a town home. I’m in this amazing, walkable community now where this town home that I’m living in was like five to $600,000. I’m renting it for under [00:11:00] $3,000 a month.

Katie: Oh my gosh,

Brad Barrett: my, and frankly, like you think about all the equity, I think this, a lot of people don’t realize the equity in their home, in their, like the home that they own.

It’s just sitting there inert.

Katie: Mm-hmm. Right?

Brad Barrett: And when you sell your home. Even just putting it into a high yield savings account, getting 4%. I mean, at, at this point, the two of us are basically paying for our home, for our rent with just the equity that we used to have in our houses.

Katie: Oh, interesting.

Brad Barrett: And I know I’m supposed to be a personal finance expert, and I know that like, you know, yada, yada, yada.

Like, this is not the option.

Katie: This is a safe space.

Brad Barrett: Yeah. Just, just me and you and a couple hundred thousand of my friends. Right? Yeah. But, but, uh, but realistically, like, it feels wonderful to have that money just essentially covered. And the beautiful part is there’s no. Property tax. Yeah. There’s no HOA if the HVAC goes cap putt, which it actually did the first [00:12:00] month that we moved here, we didn’t have to cover the $6,000 bill.

Katie: That happened in our condo shortly after we moved into it and they had to put a new HVAC in and I was like, man, I’m so happy I’m not paying for that. Right.

Brad Barrett: How great is that? But yeah, I mean, just the mental load. Mm-hmm. And I mean, realistically it feels like we are on vacation every day.

Katie: When did you make the change?

When did you move in?

Brad Barrett: So it was, uh, like three and a half months ago.

Katie: Okay. Got it. Okay. So I actually have a follow up then. Looking back though, on the last however many years of your life and like raising your children, are you happy that you owned a home during that period

Brad Barrett: given the construct of American life?

Yes.

Katie: Okay.

Brad Barrett: And I, I give that weird caveat, which is if I had the option to rent and I knew there was stability. I think I would go back and rent, but that’s just not reality. So I’m, I’m, I’m making up a fabrication, right? Like, yes. I, we, we wanted to live in this particular school district and in order to [00:13:00] guarantee that we needed to quote unquote own a home.

So that was, it was a lifestyle play more than it was a financial decision.

Katie: Oh, I, I agree. I’m kind of in the opposite side of the spectrum than you are right now. Where I have always rented, really enjoyed renting. Think that I have actually, it has enabled me to grow my wealth in a way that I think being an owner wouldn’t have.

Even from the, the sense of all the time stuff you’re talking about. I didn’t really have to worry about any of that. And I think now that I’m looking into this next chapter of life of like, okay, what would starting a family look like? What does it look like to kind of. Be open to spending that sort of time and money as a homeowner.

But again, it is a lifestyle play. It’s more of like, and I’d want a space to be outfitted in this particular way and we wanna make sure we can stay in a place without it being someone else’s decision that we have to leave. Things of that nature. So it’s really fun to talk to somebody that had, that is now on the other side of it and is now like renting rocks.

Brad Barrett: Oh, it’s so [00:14:00] rocks. But yeah, I think realistically for me, the, the biggest factor was the not getting kicked out. Just that stability. Yeah. I think you just, you can’t beat that.

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

You said you’re flexing your thigh muscle. But to my knowledge, like, like what does that mean to you? Because I, I feel like you’re still doing the same, like you’re still working, right? You’re still doing the podcast.

Brad Barrett: Yeah. And, and I’m glad you pushed back on that. I think it’s a mentality. I think life is a mentality.

Katie: Agreed.  

Brad Barrett: it’s just like, how do you approach something, right? So like, I think for a very long time, and I’ve been doing ChooseFI now, it’s almost nine years to the day that we recorded the first episode. Basically I have had this mentality of I need to work all the time on ChooseFI. Like it’s something that, because, and I know how [00:15:00] fortunate I am, obviously that it, that it blew up to the degree that it did.

And I get all these emails and I wanna respond to them. And I, I just have this pressing need to give back more. I, it sounds ridiculous to say it out loud, but like, but it, it just, it was this mental burden for so long and interestingly, and I think you hit on it beautifully, is at the end of the day, nobody really.

Notices if I’m working 50 hours a week or four hours a week. So as far as anyone in the world is concerned, ChosoeFI is operating at full capacity. All those years I was working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. I can’t say it was wasted, but as far as anyone was concerned, it was wasted. And I was crushing myself, crushing myself.

I just look back and I’m like, man, I wish I could have done it differently. And the nice thing is, okay, well you can’t go and re-litigate the past, but I can change now. And I just have a much healthier mindset with it all. And, and I mean, frankly, [00:16:00] and you know this, I love doing the podcast. I could do it forever.

I hope to do it for decades because I genuinely lo love it. And you know, the newsletter and that, that might go someday, but, but the podcast, I’ll do that forever. So yeah, I think again, it’s a mentality then of, okay, well. I’m gonna go to the gym for 2, 3, 4 hours a day. I’m gonna go in the sauna and do recovery with the compression sleeves and do some zone two training and lift weights three or four times a week.

Like Erin and I go there just about every day. We’ll go and play ping pong or do something like we’re in this amazing walkable community and we’re cooking. Mm-hmm. 21 meals a week in our house where Oh

Katie: my God,

Brad Barrett: Katie. It’s amazing. And it’s not like, it’s not sacrifice.

Katie: 21 meals a week!

Brad Barrett: We eat like kings.

Katie: No, that’s incredible. Thank you for that. I love the enthusiasm is just emanating off of you and I, I couldn’t agree more about it being a mindset. I think, um, so many of the cages we put ourselves in are completely self-imposed and so it’s [00:17:00] so fun to hear that that’s the energy that you’re going into 2026 with.

It sounds like you made some big changes and they’re really paying off for you.

Brad Barrett: Yeah. It’s, uh, short term changes and also really this entire FI journey. I think that’s, that’s the cool thing is it works. It just works. It really simply works. Wouldn’t

Katie: it have been so funny if like, it didn’t, like you are like, Mr. ChooseFI and you had to come on here and be like, so bad news guys. Yeah.

Brad Barrett: So remember the millions of you that have listened to the podcast, it was all a fraud. Sorry guys.

Katie: You’re like, “Trying it! Hate it!”

Brad Barrett: Yeah. Going back to full-time accountants work.

Katie: Oh my gosh. I can’t even imagine. Well, thank you.

Thank you for, for checking in with us and sharing some of that enthusiasm and inspiration. Any, uh, any petty gripes? That you wanna share while you’re here?

Brad Barrett: Oh, petty gripes. Well, I could always rail on, uh, Elon Musk and [00:18:00] Tesla, Tesla investors.

Katie: Please lemme lend you the soapbox. What, what’s your gripe?

Brad Barrett: Well, do you, do you have any, uh, any thoughts on, on Tesla?

Katie: Oh, beyond it just being like egregiously overvalued?

Brad Barrett: Yes.

Katie: I think for me, I am more on the, all the AI companies are egregiously overvalued. That it almost gets easy to forget that Tesla’s valued at like over a trillion dollars.

Brad Barrett: Yes. It’s crazy. It could probably drop a 90, 95%, and it might be fairly valued, might be it’s this core company that is going like losing sales year over year, month over month.

And the hilarious thing is this Clown Musk talks about like this optimist robot as if this is gonna save his company. Right. And then the team lead leaves for meta. At a, a pay cut, which is like alarm bells to any investor, any sane investor, of which there are none in Tesla. And then the, the hilarious thing was, I actually had this moment, like 10 days ago, where I read about, oh, the Optimus Robot [00:19:00] had this really successful demo, and I, I actually had the thought, I’m like, I wonder if my dislike for Elon Musk is clouding my judgment.

I actually had this thought and then, and then I read yesterday. It

Katie: is not,

Brad Barrett: did you see this?

Katie: Is it that the demo was a woman dressed in a robot suit?

Brad Barrett: It was amazing. They took the VR goggles off and the robot fell backwards.

Katie: I’m so happy you brought this up. I have to share with you my, one of my favorite podcasts is called If Books Could Kill.

They basically like rail on these dumb airport books that go like mega, mega viral. And it’s such a fun snarky little, I just love it. But they, they are doing a two part series on the Walter Isaacson Elon Musk book. Nice. And the first part dropped yesterday. I, you would, I don’t think it’s a bonus episode, but if it is, I’m gonna buy you a subscription for Christmas just so you can listen to it, because it is gonna, you are just gonna be giggling to yourself on your next walk to Trader Joe’s.

Brad Barrett: [00:20:00] Oh, I can’t wait. That’s wonderful Katie. And yeah, just a kind of final word on that is. It’s so interesting, like people don’t think rationally, so Tesla and this optimist robot might win in terms of world domination on autonomous robots. Right? And this goes back to like my old watching, uh. ESPN and the show.

Pardon the interruption. They always talked about would you take this team or the field? So it’s, would you take Tesla or the entire rest of the world who is also making robots? So like this company is fully valued as if they are going to win. Mm-hmm.

Katie: Yeah.

Brad Barrett: But every other company in the world is building these things. It’s insane.

Katie: Aren’t the Chinese companies that are building these things, they already have like very functioning prototypes.

Brad Barrett: They seem way ahead. Way ahead. Yeah. And then you get to autonomous vehicles. Waymo is crushing, crushing Tesla.

Like this is Elon saying like, oh, full self-driving is around the corner circa 2016.

Katie: He’s been saying that for [00:21:00] 10 years.

Brad Barrett: Yeah, literally 10 years.

Katie: He basically just trades on hype and making these like crazy claims that then get news coverage and then people start discussing these things of if, as if they’ve already happened.

And yet there is never a, an inventory taken of like, what are all the promises that this guy has made that has like, that have not panned out? And that list is much longer than the things that have

Brad Barrett: Oh yeah. It’s crazy. I mean, to his credit, if he’s allowed to do this and become the world’s richest person.

Why wouldn’t you do it if everybody else, the other 8 billion people are that freaking stupid to let him win, then why wouldn’t you do it? Right?

Katie: Alright. So that’s the main takeaway guys, is, um, delusion works, lying works, and uh, ghost. Start a ghost, start an electric car company, I guess. Go start your humanoid robot company.

Yeah. Oh my God. Have them take

Brad Barrett: Take the VR goggles off first.

Katie: Dude. Wild. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining me for [00:22:00] this check-in.

Brad Barrett: I didn’t expect to, uh, to be that snarky, but, oh man, that was fun.

Katie: I don’t think I’ve ever heard you yell on a podcast before. Yeah, so that was exciting. Okay, next up, I have a guest who joined me for the first time in 2025 for one of the most popular episodes ever.

Optimist Economist Kathryn Edwards. You know her, you love her. One thing you need to know about Keds is that she is an over preparer. So like when I pitched her to join me in this episode, she sent back a term paper of notes detailing what was on her mind right now. So basically she’s like an interviewer’s dream.

So for that reason, I made her interview slot about 10 minutes longer than everyone else’s because I knew I would wanna spend a little bit of extra time chatting with her. And you know what, the stuff that she was thinking about kind of surprised me.

Okay, so you, you have your little one, your postpartum. Is this your third child? [00:23:00]

Keds: It is my third kid. I’ve got kids for days around here, kids for days. How is postpartum? Honestly, a lot better than the first time around. Hmm. The way that I would describe it is it doesn’t create anything new. Right. It’s not like it’s something that wasn’t there before, but when you are postpartum, uh, all of your defenses are down.

Hmm. I mean, it’s just like the castle. You’ve got this like castle wall, which like insecurities, anxieties, fears, things that upset you, things that bother you, and you’ve got like this little castle and it’s across the moat and you’re like, I am good. And then you have the kid and it’s just like all the defenses go down and it doesn’t create things, but it taps into things.

And so it’s, um, that’s hard. But the first time it happened, I was like totally off guard. I was like, what the fuck is this? But then by the third kid, you know, I could just look at my husband and be like, Hey, I need like an hour to go [00:24:00] to our room and turn off the lights and go under the covers and watch Pride and Prejudice.

And he’s like, sure. He’s like, sure, you go ahead and do that. That sounds great. And I’m like, thank you so much. I was like, this shouldn’t take more than an hour. And he is like, do I get to know which scene? I’m like, it doesn’t matter. I just need to hear a British accent speak politely and it’ll unlock some kind of defense mechanism in my brain, and then I’ll be able to make, do laundry.

And he’s like, great.

Katie: Sounds good. Well then I’m glad that, I’m glad that this is the version of kids that we get today. This is a new version of kids.

Keds: It’s a little unfiltered. I’m kind of like, let’s let it go.

Katie: Incredible. That’s exactly, you know what, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. So I guess, let me start with the question that I asked Brad Barrett first, which is, what is one surprising money lesson you’ve learned recently?

Keds: It’s been a year with me and me and Money have had a year. We have been on, I’m in like a 15 [00:25:00] part series with money this year, so, all right. We’re coming up at the end of 2025 and January, 2025 to now I have. Bought a house, moved my family across the country while pregnant and had to deal with the moving finances.

Uh, sold a house in D.C., uh, and then remortgaged the Houston house that we had purchased, in addition to starting a podcast, setting up payment streams for that podcast, then incorporating as a nonprofit and getting nonprofit status. Oh. Um, all while doing my own taxes. So I think the lesson, and this is like the most financial year I’ve had ever, I think the lesson I’ve learned is some tests you just pass.

I, I find personal finance to be so bro-y of like, get that rate, sell it this time. You gotta win that percent. And like, there’s so, I mean, it’s just set up as this like hyper [00:26:00] competitive game and it’s just really nice to be like, you know what? My family and I live in a house that we own, and we got here and like, was there a half point rate somewhere that I lost because I didn’t act on the right day?

Yeah, there is, but you know what? I didn’t make an a on this test. I passed it. So I, I think that that was, there’s so much competitive culture around finance that’s like, there’s a best way to do it. So if you don’t do it that way, you’ve lost, and I, I think I have this like philosophy that’s like Uhuh, living’s the best win.

And I live!

Katie: oh my gosh, some tests you just pass, you’re in your house with your family. Your new baby. I mean, hell yeah. I love that. Hell yeah. You did it. You freaking did it.

Keds: You know, so many financial decisions afterwards. I’m like, well, yeah. I mean, I could have what I coulda, shoulda have maybe could have looked that up, but it, it’s not, I think it’s just should have looked that up, like just some things we could have [00:27:00] done.

There were some easy wins I might have left behind, but at the same time, like what do I need? Like I have a house, I have a family, I have kids. We’re occupying it. The mortgage is like meh, but like so does the economy. We’re doing okay. I think that the, the competitive edge on personal finance can make people feel like losers and then you have to remember of like, I’m fine.

Katie: Yeah. So, okay, you said the mortgage is met and it matches the economy. So let’s do an economic vibe check. How are you feeling right now? Can you give us like your operating diagnosis of our present moment?

Keds: Yes. The economy is slowly slowing. That’s hard to parse, especially for millennials like you and me who have lived through just unprecedented time after unprecedented time in our economy.

Katie: So unprecedented. It’s basically unprecedented.

Keds: Yeah. It’s basically precedented. You know what’s funny is that we’re, we’re so used to unprecedented, especially in terms of economic contractions, that we don’t realize that the precedent [00:28:00] is for recessions to be mild. Mild as they come up. Mild as they’re in effect and mild as they leave.

I mean, most recessions, I mean, we can have bad ones, but we also have a lot of mild ones. And, but we, we have not experienced to mild recession, uh, in our lifetime, in our adulthood. We’ve had one in the nineties that was, it was just kind of bad. Right now the economy is slowly slowing. Mm-hmm. And the way I express it, I was just on Sirens, which is another great podcast.

What I told Sirens is, okay, imagine that you’re on a road, you know, it’s got some. Say three lanes and there’s a bunch of different cars driving, and you’re all headed towards a red light. The red light is coming, you will all stop, but you’re not all moving at the exact same speed. You’re not slowing down at the exact same rate.

And you can think of that as indicators and their underlying economic conditions that things aren’t slowing down at the same time and nobody’s slamming on the brakes, but we are all slowing down. So one month unemployment doesn’t look good, but job numbers are fine. Another month, job numbers are [00:29:00] fine, but the GDP was really weak.

You know, hiring is bad. We’re getting a bad unemployment insurance claim. They’re all just like the brake lights that you see in front of you as you’re heading towards a red lights. And what matters is we’re all slowing down.

Katie: So what I’m hearing then is that for a long time now, I think the prevailing story has been that people feel like the economy is bad, but actually the data says it’s good.

And it feels like what you’re telling me is like the data is starting to say that things aren’t so good. Like we’re starting to see some of that sentiment appearing in the numbers. Is that fair to say?

Keds: I think the data has been in a varying state of weakness for two and a half years.

Katie: Oh, really? Okay.

Keds: Yeah. I mean, we we’re not thriving, but we’re not in recession, and I think the struggle that people have, the disconnect is. On a couple levels. You know, one is, there’s not a ton of language to describe, you [00:30:00] know, the difference between booming economy and recession, but that’s where our economy is a lot of the time.

And it’s where we’ve been for the past two and a half years of, it’s just a weak economy. And a weak economy can tip into recession, and so we’re worried about it. But I think in some ways people have adopted the language of recession and downturn to describe when they’re not doing well, because that’s what economists used to describe the economy writ large when it’s not doing well.

But there’s a lot in between. The data hasn’t been, it’s not like we’ve been knocking it outta the park.

Fora couple years now, we if, if it wasn’t on the inflation side, it was on the labor market side or the growth side. Yeah. Or the sentiment side. It’s not normal for an economy to be this, I guess, mixed bag.

Now, the second part of that, I think of the disconnect is that we live in a capitalist economy. Part of that is that people will struggle even when times are good. And I don’t think that people have the ability or the necessity to say the economy’s doing really well. I just happen to be of that [00:31:00] unfortunate 5% who can’t find a job.

Right? If you can’t find a job, you don’t need to detach yourself from your current situation and say, but actually the economy is great. No, if the economy’s not great for you, the economy is not great.

Katie: Hmm.

Keds: And because we have this kind of slow down on a lot of levels, people have their own source of not great that has not combined to enter a recession, but doesn’t mean that their struggle isn’t happening again.

I think a lot of it comes down to less of describing the economy and more the language we use to relate the economy into people’s everyday lives.

Katie: Mm-hmm. Are you familiar with this job hugger concept? No, it’s a job hugger. A job hugger. So this was new to me this year. Someone used it in an email they sent in that I was like, I like that.

It basically gets at a sense of broader precarity where like, because the labor market is slowing down and hiring is slowing, and people basically feel like if they have a job rate now they need to hold on tight. It’s like the, the polar opposite of when we were in [00:32:00] that great resignation period where everyone was changing jobs and things were going really well and you felt like you could go out and negotiate and get a better offer somewhere else.

And now it’s like, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to get an offer at all.

Keds: Oh, we call that job hoarding. Yeah, because, uh, typically like if a firm is doing badly, but they’re not laying people off, we would think of that as one version of labor hoarding, where like they’re holding onto labor, not because they necessarily need all the labor they have, but they don’t wanna get rid of it.

That kind of translates to us as the idea of hoarding of like, we’re just, we’re holding onto jobs, we could leave. And so it’s the flip side of employers not firing people is workers not quitting. We call that hoarding ever since the, I call that hot labor summer. Um, but since, since the end of hot labor summer, the economy has been slowing down.

I mean, the, the unemployment rate is up a percentage point since then. So it’s, I think it’s, there’s something really dissatisfying when you’re having a hard time and [00:33:00] you have someone like me being like, but the unemployment rate went up one 10th of the percentage point over the past two months, and you’re like, oh my God, are you kidding me?

I mean, everything is in line on a big macro data over the past couple of years, but, and any given month, they’re not gonna all flash red.

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

You had said something when we were talking about this conversation. That stuck with me. You said, we don’t need to fix this year’s economy. We need to fix this centuries economy. What do you mean by that?

Keds: Yeah. It all comes back to language of a recession is what we describe as struggling in the economy, and how could we not be in a recession if we’re struggling on so many levels?

A recession is when the economy slows down, but that’s not why it’s hard to afford housing. That’s not why it’s hard to afford your electric [00:34:00] bill. That’s not why it’s hard to find daycare. That’s not why you don’t have paid family leave or paid sick days, or you can’t find a place to put your aging mother.

That’s not why your health insurance premium is insane and your out-of-pocket cost even higher. None of that has to do with the strength of the economy this month or this year. That has to do with accumulating policy failure this century to address the needs of Americans. Not Americans who own a lot of stock, not Americans who benefit from one of five tax cuts.

We’ve seen this century. I mean Americans who are just trying to make it work and are having a hard time. None of that has to do with the current unemployment rate. It has everything to do with Congress failing to meet people where they are in the economy.

Katie: Can I get an amen? You know what that reminds me?

Did you read that viral piece from Michael Green?

Keds: Yeah. The poverty rate’s $140,000. Mm-hmm. With that, it were so simple. No. Okay. This is gonna sound bad. I didn’t [00:35:00] finish it. Okay.

Katie: Fair. No. Doesn’t sound bad at all.

Keds: I, which is not characteristic of me. I am like, I am, like I, it doesn’t matter what it is. Like I complete the assignment.

You pass the test. Now, maybe it’s because I’m like a little bit on maternity leave. I got halfway through and I was like, okay,

Katie: I’ve seen a really wide range of opinions on this, and my initial read of it was like. This is great. I was like, I want more people who work in asset management and have high profile, high intellect reputations talking about this stuff openly and seriously.

And I think that a lot of the criticism that I saw really flattened the argument that he was making to say like, it’s ridiculous to say that the poverty line is $140,000, but that wasn’t really the point that he was making. I think that he may have done himself a disservice by even allowing that headline to basically be how the piece was marketed or branded.

I mean, it was certainly click-y, so it did its job. But to me, the big thing that he was [00:36:00] getting at was, what is a sufficiency income? Like if you actually look at the median cost of housing, the median cost of childcare, et cetera, and you were to just build sort of like your average household budget based on these things, $140,000 is what that costs for a family of four on an annual basis. And his point, and I think where the poverty line came into it was that it was the measure of the poverty line that he says, got him thinking about this. Because it was the, I guess the 1963, like it’s based on like food spending was how they were calculating it.

Because food is something that has really gone down in cost. Everything else has exploded in cost. We can’t just look at like food spending to tell us what a sufficiency income is and. He basically talked about the benefits cliff, I feel like the main nut of the piece was about the benefits cliff and how if you are an American who is really struggling, there is a little bit of a social safety net that will kick in where like you will qualify for [00:37:00] the credits for your health insurance premiums or you will get an earned income tax credit or there are these other things that can help fill in the gaps.

But there is a bit of a no man’s land. I think he was arguing between 60 and a hundred where like you actually might be net-net worse off than someone who’s pulling in 30 or 40. It was an interesting piece and I think that it, it, it really though got at, and the reason that I wanted to talk to you about it and why I personally found it valuable was because I think it was, it was a satisfactory explanation for why so many people whom the numbers dub middle class feel like they are barely scraping by

Keds: A few things. And let’s see if I remember, I’m gonna, I was gonna say three things. I’m like, but I might not remember all three. Okay. Three things. Okay, one, so we in social policy circles refer to this as columbusing, where someone discovers that there’s poverty and hardship in America. [00:38:00]

Katie: Wait, okay. I

Keds: definitely, Columbus a few years ago, it’s like a really well documented phenomenon that every so often will have, like not just America, but lots of countries, but part, particularly in America, we have this like cultural moment where someone’s like, oh my God, there are poor people here having a hard time.

And so we refer to this as Columbusing into poverty. I guess the reason why I stopped reading, and this makes me sound so arrogant, is that there was not original thought in it. It was him. Columbusing into things that we have known and talked about, at least, you know, in people who have like studied poverty and studied hardship and lower wage workers and all this stuff is decades old, but Columbus does get a lot of credit.

There’s a day, I guess the, it’s one of these like, listen, I don’t care what time you showed up to dinner, as long as you took a seat at the table. And so like, you are welcome at my table if you show up. But if you’re late, bring wine. So I appreciated that he was coming from a very different perspective, [00:39:00] arriving at a problem in a set of circumstances that people have been aware of for a long time.

So like the poverty rate, he kind of makes it sound like it’s stupid. In fact, it was an incredibly clever milestone in 1959, and the female researcher who came up with it was the first person to say it is being used in a way that is not being intended, like it was not designed to be used this way. The short version was she worked for the Social Security Administration and she was asked by, uh, a member of Congress, how much do people on social security need to get by and how much do we raise benefits?

Because this was before social security benefits were tied to inflation, and it was up to the whim of Congress to raise Social Security benefits every year. And he was like, well, this could be an arms race where either we leave people behind because we’re afraid of the budget, or we just give them more money than they need because we want them to vote for us.

So he is like, please come up with an exact measure. While she’s doing this research, she, she gets into poverty and how much it [00:40:00] takes to get by, not just for the elderly, but for children. We have almost no data. At this point, and there’s a 1955 Survey on Household Consumption in which on average Americans spend about a third of their budget on food.

Now, if you were to come up with a need of how much people need. That means that if people spend about a third of their money on food, then you can use the amount of money that food costs as a way to like get to a subsistence level that she can calculate for every American because we don’t have the same type of data we do now.

So she does this to write a paper on just how much poor people in particular children are in poverty in the US. And it’s like amongst policy circles, it’s a bestseller. Then six years later, Johnson declares a war on poverty. We don’t have a measure of poverty. He declares a war on something that he doesn’t have on hand.

There’s just been a book called The Other America that says actually 40 million people are poor. There’s all kinds of disagreements of how [00:41:00] many people are poor. And the White House Office of economic policy takes her number, applies inflation, and adopts it over time. And it’s not like they asked her permission.

It’s not like they said, “Molly, do you think this is a good idea?” She becomes known as quote unquote, Miss Poverty, but her own assessment was the best that can be said of this measure is that when it was useful, it was there not exactly a ringing endorsement for maybe you should adopt this for tens of millions of Americans in determining whether or not they need help from their government.

Katie: I wanna push back on one thing. From what I recall, my takeaway was not that he thought it was. A bad idea. Back then, it seemed like his assessment was like, this made sense at the time when food was a third of your budget. This no longer makes sense when everything else has become so expensive. Does that like ring true to you?

Because I didn’t feel like he was like bagging on her or on the original measure. [00:42:00] Just that like, well, it sounds like kind of what you’re saying, which is like it was applied then in a way that it was not intended.

Keds: Yes, and it was, I mean, as early as like the late sixties. You know, we are determining Title One funding for schools and people at the Department of Education are writing and they’re like, this Title One designation on poverty is awful.

Hmm. What he doesn’t bring up is that all of the problems of the poverty measure resulted in a supplemental poverty measure that’s also calculated by the Census Bureau. That doesn’t rely on the food measure at all. It varies across every locality, and it’s based on cost of living in an area, and it takes into account rent and food and medical expenses and childcare expenses and taxes.

And it looks at all of those things, and I think it’s a little unsatisfying to know that at sufficiency, the, the number of people in poverty are about the same. So if you were to take this like very sophisticated measure that looks at a level of sufficiency that’s determined by current spending on things [00:43:00] like health and cost of living based on, you know, various localities.

Rather than just say like, let’s do three times food in 1959 and extended forward for inflation, but like, let’s look at what people are spending today. It’s not like that poverty goes from like 15% to 45%. Got it. Or that the poverty line itself jumps up to $65,000. Even under these more sophisticated measures, like the supplemental poverty member, which has a, a whole other host of problems, what you see is that relative to official poverty, elderly people are more poor and children are less poor than the official poverty measure would estimate because the official poverty measure doesn’t take into account any help you get from the government unless it comes in the form of cash.

Mm. That’s a complicated aside, but I think it’s worth noting that like there’s no good answer on how to measure what people need. You have to make choices. You have to decide like, if I own my own house night and inherited it, should my poverty measure be lower than someone who has to rent? [00:44:00] How do I measure that?

How does the government decide that? And what kind of incentives are built into public programs? If you are incentivized that you get more money if you don’t own a house, especially if you don’t have a mortgage payment, right? Like the more detailed the government gets in a measure, the more behavior it incite in trying to get around it.

Katie: Wait, that was, was that still part one?

Keds: That was still part one. I’m so sorry. Okay, so part two, what’s the part two? Part two would be to point out that this benefit cliff that he’s talking about,

Katie: mm-hmm.

Keds: Is in some ways predicated on the idea that a hundred percent of people who are eligible for benefits will get them.

It’s like, oh, once you make $45,000 or once you make $30,000, you lose X, Y, and z When the reality is most of these programs are not at a hundred percent, there might not even be 90 or 70 or 50% take up.

Katie: What do you mean by not at a hundred percent? Like just like the people who qualify are not getting them.

Keds: Exactly.

Katie: But does that, though, does that disprove the benefit cliff theory? [00:45:00] Like I, I, I feel like there is truth though to the idea that like, once you phase out, you could end up in a position, like for example, I think the expiring a CA credits are a good example of this for like, there was one example I saw in a.

I think it was a CNBC piece where it was a family that made like $125,000 a year, and if they could lower their income by $4,000, they would get an additional $14,000 in credits. So it was, they were net ahead by working less. That to my mind is real.

Keds: It is real. It doesn’t hit that predictably.

Katie: Okay.

Keds: What gets in the way between what is written on paper about who is eligible for a public program and how much they get and what actually, which families are receiving benefits and how much they get, there’s some distance there. And so when we talk about the designed income gaps between who needs help and who is eligible [00:46:00] for it, that’s only half the problem.

The other half is getting people to enroll in benefits or get the help for which they are eligible, and that is the other half the problem. And so it’s a gap that exists on either side of the income cutoff. His point is well taken. People are struggling well above the poverty line. Of course, they always have.

Mm-hmm. And I don’t wanna demean, uh, what he was trying to advocate for, but point out that there are people with a lot less power and ability who don’t get the benefits that Congress has set out. I mean, like, Congress has set out so few benefits in our country

Katie: mm-hmm.

Keds: That it’s like, just so you know, there’s still people who don’t get the benefits they’re eligible for because of the design or implementation of the program.

And so I, I think there’s this aspect of like, see the whole board here, you know, we take up causes that feel personal to us of like, I’m a middle class person and my life is getting harder, but. We don’t arrive at good solutions if we don’t [00:47:00] understand the scope of the problem and people making too much money to get help from the government about a certain thing.

That is one part of the problem. But that help being designed and delivered in such a way that people who are eligible don’t get it, is a whole other problem. And it, if we don’t see both of them as being necessary to be solved, we will never come up with a good solution. Now, it wasn’t incumbent upon him to point this out in this piece.

It’s not like this was, this was his job. He was, he was trying to accomplish something that I think he did it very well, which is bringing up just the basic hardship that so many families face on paper.

Katie: Mm-hmm.

Keds: Right. It’s like his on-paper analysis of like, take this at the median, take this at the median, take this at the median.

What I would push back and say is that median household who’s living at the middle of every expense doesn’t exist. Just like there isn’t a household that is right at the edge of the benefit cliff, and for everything else, it’s too messy. Well, no, but I’m 100% with you that we need people who don’t [00:48:00] look like me to be better in our economy. Mm-hmm. I get to wear my economist badge. I get to wear my little PhD badge, but that’s not the same as a bunch of rich white men advocating for more help for the middle class. And I know that my voice will never matter as much as theirs, even when I get to be completely arrogant about it.

So I welcome that. And I think it’s good. Like I said, I just want people at the table. It doesn’t matter at what time they arrived, so I that I appreciate, but I think I, I wouldn’t want people to come away with the sense that he had alighted upon something that we didn’t know. Sure. Or he pointed out something that was brand new.

In some ways, he gets to take this really naive look at a very, very complicated problem, but I wouldn’t want people to forget the solution is so much bigger than what he was asking for.

Katie: I think that’s completely fair. And I think part of the reason that I think it stuck out to me was the messenger more than the message.

It was like, huh. Okay, [00:49:00] if this guy is talking about this, if he is doing a Substack series called My Life Is a Lie that examines these things, this is somebody who openly is like, I am a conservative money manager. When that person is making the series saying “My Life is a Lie” and look at how fucked up all this shit is, I’m like, something’s shifting.

And that really, that to me is encouraging and it’s really exciting because I think it, it, it means that like we are starting to arrive at something that is closer to a collective shared sense of reality. And I think it’s very hard for people in circles like his to totally discount or, I mean, ’cause trust me, they tried, all the conservative think tanks were out there shitting all over it, saying it was wrong and crazy.

So they tried, but I’m like, there, there are going to be some other wealthy. People in his [00:50:00] world of finance who have never sought out a voice like yours or mine, who are gonna hear that now and be like, Hmm, maybe there is something to this. ’cause he’s, he’s well-respected. I mean, like, that’s just kind of the, the reality of it.

This is a well-respected analyst.

Keds: I, I will tell you something that I like believe almost more than anything, which is that. When you are part of a fight, you don’t win just by finding best friends. Yeah. And people who look just like you and going to work. Yep. Right? Like there are a lot of people who sit next to you and you just need to know what chair you’re in.

Right. Like we’re all in a room, we’re all assembled because we wanna help the American economy be better. For so many families who feel like they’re struggling, there’s gonna be a lot of chairs in that room and like you might not like all those people. You might not agree with them about everything, but you just need to know what chair you sit in and respect that other people are in the room.

And I appreciate he’s in [00:51:00] a very different chair. I’m glad he is in the room. We don’t sit next to each other, but that’s fine. I don’t need to sit next to somebody. I just need to know where I sit. As someone who also writes opinion columns that gets absolutely dog piled on, on, on the regular. You know, this is kind of part of writing is that you?

Yeah. You don’t write just to have people agree with you. You write to start some conversation and so I’m glad he started so much conversation about this, and I do not mean to dog pile on him by pointing out that he’s Christopher Columbusing poverty.

You know what, and this is why we have discourse, right? I’m

Katie: I’m the last person that gets to dog pile. I’m the one that got a medical bill four years ago and was like, guys, did you know you have to pay for things in this country?

Keds: Oh my God. There were moments where I’m like, well, I’m just like really Columbusing into this problem where I’m like, did you…did y’all know that property taxes go up? I’m sure people who are 60 are like, of course they go, I’m like, property taxes. They like, they like go up. A lot, actually. [00:52:00]

Katie: Oh my God, thank you. So not a small part of,

Keds: thank you so much for joining me today. I guess this is to end it on like a, like a kind, like this part on like a philosophical, like this is how people learn things, is that they come across an experience and they’re curious and like that is always welcome to come across an experience and be curious and we all have to embrace our role as many Christopher Columbus’ in this economic world.

Katie: Just colonizing truth, colonizing truths. Y’all. That’s where we go. Thank you, Keds.

Okay, up next. You know him. You love him, folks, it’s Ramit Sethi. Who else? Ramit is a legend. We know this. He is a two-time guest on the show, and he also happens to be one of the most generous and surprising [00:53:00] mentors that I have had in the financial world. He called me once, sort of out of the blue earlier this year to basically encourage me to keep going and tell me, Hey, your voice is important.

Which is funny, based on the conversation that we had today. He’s just that kind of guy, which, um, is really especially meaningful because I think he’s one of the best to ever do it. He really changed the personal finance world for the better. If you ask me, so here is my conversation with Ramit.

Katie: I wore a cashmere shirt for you today.

Ramit Sethi:

Katie: Beautiful. I was like, I’m talking to Ramit. So I’m gonna wear cashmere. Well, I’m so happy you’re here. So excited to check in with you. And my, my first question for you is, what is the thing that you last read that you can’t stop thinking about and, and why?

Ramit Sethi: I read it just this week. There’s [00:54:00] an article called, uh, I have it on a tab open here, the Mundanity of Excellence, an Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers. Okay, this is an amazing article that somebody posted on Twitter and their comment was swimmers who are champions, don’t just swim more hours.

They are qualitatively different, and it totally reminds me of money because people who are great with money do not just track 50 more categories of things. So for the swimmers, first of all, they train differently. They are using different strokes. Their body movements are different, so that’s number one.

Second, their attitude is different. There was a story in the document about how they would come, the author would observe these swimmers at 5:30 in the morning. It’s early, it’s cold, and they were laughing. They liked [00:55:00] being there. They didn’t consider it a drag. And then there are these infrastructure apparatus things that they have differently.

Like a lot of them live in Southern California where the weather makes it easy to swim all the time. Or they have parents who have the money and resources to be able to send them to different swim meets. All this is strikingly similar to where so many of us just believe like, oh, I just gotta try harder.

I need to track more about russet potato prices. They think that that is the solution, but they’re actually missing the entire game. If they want to be champions or simply want to live a rich life, then they probably need to qualitatively change the way that they look at money, they think about money, they feel about money, and ultimately the way they behave about money.

Katie: Of those, uh, qualitative differences of the swimmers, which of those components jumps out at you most? What do you think is most important?

Ramit Sethi: I couldn’t say because

Katie: I know what I think is most important.

Ramit Sethi: Is it attitude?

Katie: Yeah. I think it’s the fact that they’re laughing at five in the [00:56:00] morning that it doesn’t feel like a drag.

Ramit Sethi: I think that’s probably part of it. It’s hard for me to separate it, like I’m happy at things that I’m really good at.

Katie: Yeah.

Ramit Sethi: I am not happy when I suck at something and I think a lot of us are like, the question is. How long can you go at something you’re not good at? Do you have a bigger “why” that allows you, for example, when you’re learning a second language to push through it and on and on and on.

But I do think that anyone who’s been in the self-development world for a long time starts to see the importance of attitude. And like sometimes you can change your attitude. There are some techniques and sometimes it’s like you either got it or you don’t.

Katie: Mm-hmm. Well, what do you wish people would admit about money?

Ramit Sethi: Oh, I wish they would admit that they actually pretty much like to spend money on eating out and their house. And I wish they would stop being delusional and lying and saying, travel.

Katie: Travel.

Ramit Sethi: It’s always travel. I love travel. I go, “When was the last time you traveled?” “Oh, uh, uh, 2006. [00:57:00] But I’ve been busy since then.”

Well, maybe you just don’t like traveling. Maybe it’s not actually a priority because we can look at your spending and at your calendar and it doesn’t reflect that, uh, it’s not relationships because very few people, less than 5% of the people I talk to have dedicated money set aside for relationships. As an example, that would be, these are the people in the list that we are creating in December, during our Rich Life Review that we’re gonna give gifts to. Here’s the amount we’re gonna give. We’re setting aside money, our anniversary dinner, and then we’re gonna bring these two people on a trip or a vacation or take ’em out to lunch.

That is setting money proactively aside. So relationships, travel, these are all very popular, but when we look at what people actually spend their money on, it’s DoorDash. And like, alright, you wanna get a little Caesars Pizza delivered? We got two problems with that. Number one, you have horrible…

Katie: Not Little Caesars.

Ramit Sethi: Horrible, horrible palate. Awful, just horrible. And then second, why don’t you just be honest, because it’s really painful to [00:58:00] actually admit that maybe what I’m doing does not align with my view of myself as a world traveler or as some sort of aspirational person who’s out with friends and family all the time.

But I think the first step to living a rich life is being honest with yourself, honest with the people around you.

Katie: Is convenience still your primary dial?

Ramit Sethi: And I’ve turned it up even more. So money dial for everybody listening is like, there are a few areas of life. Money dial is the area you love to spend money on.

So the number one money dial for a lot of people is eating out or food. There’s health and wellness, there is travel. Mine is convenience. I love convenience. And so everything from, I have an executive assistant who helps plan things in my calendar, like the very calendar for this recording right now, it’s perfectly organized.

For the format that I like, I click it. The link is exactly where it should be. The prep document is exactly where it needs to be. Like I know I sound like a freak, but that’s [00:59:00] what I like and that’s what I spend money on. On the other hand, things like a car. Not that important to me.

Katie: Yeah. You like removing friction?

I think that there’s something that kind of, that unlocked for me in the last couple of years was investing in my craft. For me, I get a lot of fulfillment out of feeling like I am becoming a better writer or a better interviewer. And it was in investing in a better editor to work with someone that I could feel like they were really coaching me.

You actually, uh, suggested that I hire someone for interview prep when I am the interviewee.

Ramit Sethi: Yeah. Media training.

Katie: And that was not something that I had even considered spending money on before, but that money always goes a long way in delivering value. To me that is like deeply satisfying beyond just.

Being fun or enjoyable in the moment, but more fleeting.

Ramit Sethi: I love that. Yes. Craft. What a beautiful way to look at it. Personally I was happy to suggest to you to get [01:00:00] media trained.

Katie: You’re like, girl, you need help.

Ramit Sethi: I remember exactly what I said. I said, when you go on podcasts, are you a good guest?

And you were like, I think I’m pretty good. I was like, okay, I already know the answer. Because anyone who’s great, they’re like, I’m amazing and everyone else is not that good, but they can be. I know you, I’ve been on your show and I talked to you so many times. You are awesome. And what hiring media training allowed me to do and hiring all these coaches, like I’ve hired everything from a posture coach, personal trainer, therapist, like there’s so many different coaches. Personal organizer.

They taught me their craft and how to apply it to my specific situation. So I might tell stories in a certain way. They’re like, Hey, that’s great, but let’s just tune it this slight way. And I know that for you and all the media you’ve done, oh my gosh, what an impact

Katie: and what a good investment too. I mean, that really does pay dividends to be able to show up in a way that you can be proud of as an [01:01:00] interviewee.

Yeah, I mean I, yeah, I’m a yapper, not one, but two podcasts. Like she likes the sound of her own voice. We know this. Okay. What is one surprising thing that you have learned about money in your relationship?

Ramit Sethi: I learned with my wife how difficult it was to integrate two different worldviews on money, and I learned how great it can be when you do.

And it was hard. Although we grew up very similarly. I had been running a business for 15 plus years. When we got married, I had employees, I had distributions, I had all kinds of stuff, and we had different worldviews. Like my worldview, which I learned as we went to see a therapist talking about money, was I see money as growth.

Hmm. That’s what I see it as. Compound interest, growth, all this stuff. She saw it as safety and we didn’t even know that about [01:02:00] each other and much less had we deconstructed those views. But when we got together and we got serious and we got certainly got married, it was very important for me that we both.

Do money together. You know, it would’ve been really easy for me to just be the money guy, but I don’t believe in that and I think we both gotta do it. It’s a team effort and it took us a while to really get on the same page. In fact, today we had our regular money meeting. We had it in the morning, and we talked about we have an agenda.

We always start off with something we appreciate about the other, and we have our agenda that we both contributed to and we go through it and there’s some open questions, there’s some discussion. We happen to have some travel coming up. So we talked about some cool dreamy stuff and it was just like, oh, this is flowing.

And that is the result of years of work together. So big kudos to my wife. But the, the structure that we created, that is something that I think I learned and I was surprised by.

Katie: How often do you all have [01:03:00] that sort of meeting? What’s your cadence?

Ramit Sethi: Okay, so we do it once a week and um, usually, like what I recommend in my money for couples book is once a month.

That’s a good place to start. We do it once a week because we like these pulses and we keep it quite short, quite rapid. We have an agenda’s, a running agenda. Every six months, we do a mid-year review where we actually look at more detailed numbers. And then every December is the Annual Rich Life Review.

This is a fun one. You know, we, we pull out our phone, we find the most memorable 20 photos of last year, and we text ’em to each other and we talk about ’em. And sometimes they’re really happy and they’re like traveling and, and then sometimes they’re sad because sad things happen in life too. And we just talk about ’em and like, what did it mean to us?

What do we wanna do more of next year? Less of? We talk about where we wanna go, what do we wanna spend more on? Or what do we not care about? Let’s not do that next year. And then, then, and only then. This is like days later. We don’t do it all at once. We [01:04:00] take our time, we walk, we drink coffee, then and only then do we get to the actual numbers.

Let’s look at what we planned last year, what were we above, what were we below, what do we need to adjust? And then we make our plan for next year. So it’s this kind of beautiful multi-day process, but it’s the two of us plotting out next year based on what we loved and did not love about this year.

Katie: Ramit is grinning right now as he is describing this. He is glowing, which I think is really, really lovely. You know, your wife is an entrepreneur too, and I’m curious how having two entrepreneurs. How, how does that shift the dynamic when you talk about money?

Ramit Sethi: It shifts it in a big way. Big hu. A way that I did not expect, because when we met, she was not an entrepreneur.

And I had been an entrepreneur for a long time, so I felt like, okay, cool. I, I am, I got the entrepreneurship stuff. And then she’s not, well, it turned out that she became an [01:05:00] entrepreneur and at first she, like many entrepreneurs, she had like great results right at the beginning. And so she’s like, oh, this is easy.

And then it got tough. It was like really tough. I still remember this very vividly. We were living in New York and one night it was something like 10:00 PM it was later than we usually went to bed. And I came out and I said, come on, like, what are you doing up? Let’s go to bed. And she was sitting on the couch, the computer, there’s lights, were not too bright.

And she said, I’m looking at part-time jobs in case I have to go back to work. And I thought to myself like, oh my God, you know? And. I had been very careful not to try to step in and tell her what I would do as an entrepreneur. I had to remind myself, my STHU technique—shut the hell up, Ramit—just, she’s not one of my students, she’s my wife.

And so I remember talking about that and as an entrepreneur, sometimes the only thing you do is say, you’re doing all the right stuff. [01:06:00] Keep it up. You have something great. The world needs to hear it, but you just gotta stick with it. And you are. And she did. And she came out of that. And she grew the business.

She grew the business to an enviable level. She’s a personal stylist and she has an amazing business. Many people do not realize her business is incredible. And as two entrepreneurs, it actually shifted a lot for us. One, I think that her, her approach to money changed a lot. Hmm. In our early years of getting married.

She did a lot of work on her own money psychology, and also as she started to earn more money, that naturally changed things. She saw abundance. She realized that she can affect her profit margins, and so I’m watching this happen. I’m like, this is amazing.

Katie: I bet that was really fun for you to see.

Ramit Sethi: It was so magical.

I now think that one of the best things in life is to see your loved ones going through these experiences and experience it for them for the first time you’re seeing it happen through their eyes. It’s [01:07:00] so magical and whether you are a parent listening to this and you have seen your kids experience something magical, whether it’s your spouse, your, your brother, sister, whoever.

It’s magical. So it’s brought abundance into our life. It’s allowed flexibility. I think it also ma, she’s an extremely disciplined operator, so she brings that to our household as well. In terms of like some of the numbers she does our analytics when it comes to those six- and 12-month meetings, she’s really good.

Way better than me and so that has been amazing.

Katie: Oh wow. Ramit, it is always a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me again today.

Ramit Sethi: Thanks for having me, and congratulations.

Katie: Oh, thank you.

While most of the folks that I’m talking to today have been on the show twice before, in some cases, my next conversation was not a repeat guest, but she was someone whose [01:08:00] interview stuck with me for a really long time because her breadth of knowledge and ability to communicate complex historical ideas is pretty singular to me.

Meagan Day is an editor at Jacobin who joined me for an episode about the Manosphere earlier this year, and I found myself thinking about her when I started pulling together this outline.

Meagan, thank you again for joining me for this little pre 2026 check-in. Really excited to see you again.

Meagan Day: Yeah, it’s great to see you. Thanks for having me back.

Katie: Absolutely. So I am curious, after the year that we have just had, is there anything that you’ve changed your mind about recently?

Yeah, actually, yeah, there is, I think it’s been about five years in the making, but the last year has really solidified it for me.

So the thing that I’ve been thinking about that I think I’ve genuinely changed my mind about is that [01:09:00] I don’t think that you should be a discourse goblin. I think people should stop doing that. Uhoh. Uhoh, slowly backing into the shrub. It doesn’t mean that you can’t follow, participate in and enjoy the discourse.

I mean, life would be no fun without that, right? Yeah. What, what makes somebody a discourse goblin? I think being participating in a certain style of conversation that loses track of what’s actually likable about people enjoyable and worthwhile about life worth protecting a positive vision. You know, things like this.

If you just kind of focus on what you hate and smiting your enemies and embarrassing them in public and nursing grudges against them and so on, and. It’s all in service of a good cause, but you don’t make much reference back to the, the cause or how to achieve it. You’re just kind of playing your little on online game.

I think that that is, um, that is what [01:10:00] makes you a discourse goblin and, uh, and you should stop. And what the reason that this year really solidified this for me is that actually it’s Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City.

Katie: Hmm.

Meagan Day: He, I think, is an exemplar of a certain. Do you remember the Bernie Bros discourse?

Katie: Oh, yeah. Wasn’t that, was that AstroTurf? Was that fake? I, I feel like I remembered some. Brianna Joy Gray…

Meagan Day: This is also something I’ve changed my mind a little bit about over, over years, those who did not want us to win did AstroTurf and magnifies certain claims. But if I’m being honest, as a former Bernie bro, myself, I think we did, we were just kind of early adopters of a kind of political discourse style that actually did rub people the wrong way, freak people out, and I see Zohran Mamdani as in some ways a departure from that kind of left energy that was really cultivated. Probably [01:11:00] 2016 to 2023 would be its heyday. Zohran is not a goblin discourse. Zohran is literate in the discourse, and he’s also kind of a mensch, which is a different type of thing that you can be from a discourse goblin.

He likes average working class New Yorkers. Very obviously enjoys their company and wants to be out there with them, not among the kind of muckety mucks, arguing just on their behalf, but never sort of like walking among the pros. And this has made me realize that actually, I think we’ve gone a little bit as stray on the left, but this is not a left specific problem.

We might have been early adopters in this regard, but there’s been a kind of corrosive. This is what some liberals will call it. The, the, the coarsening of political discourse. But this is what I’ve changed my mind on. Yes.

Katie: This is where it’s like we need more civil debate.

Meagan Day: Right. Okay. So here’s the thing. It’s like, yes, the, the sort of civility mongers among the liberals are being [01:12:00] annoying. But there’s a kernel of truth in here, actually, which is that we are in a hyper tribalistic, hyperpolarized, indiscriminately, ruthless and dehumanizing political environment, which is very demoralizing to people, actually.

So if what we had before was this regime of bipartisan faux civility covering over, you know, various barbarities that were actually occurring in, in real life, now we have people being complete jerks and also all the same bad stuff that was happening before. It’s possible that the only thing worse than artificial niceness, while nothing changes is indiscriminate meanness while nothing changes.

And so I think that actually people are getting, they’re looking for an alternative. Um, I think it was kind of fun when Donald Trump came in with the wrecking ball and knocked down the kind of [01:13:00] palace of bipartisan decorum and civility, and a lot of people got in on that gold rush myself, very much included.

But as time goes on, I just kind of feel like there’s gotta be a better way to comport ourselves. Now, to be clear. I am not saying like I am a huge fan, for example, of Diabolical Lies. I love.

Katie: Oh, well thank you.

Meagan Day: I love to listen to, like you and Caro talk about shit that’s going on in a really funny way. Doling out, you know, deserved ridicule. Right. I also participated in this myself to some extent at Jacobin. What I’m talking about is not that we we’re gonna, we have to have that, we have to have corners for people who agree to talk about things that we agree on and, um, you know. Okay, good.

Katie: So our, our jobs are safe then, is what I’m hearing.

Meagan Day: You’re safe in my new regime. You’re safe. I do think that people should stop participating in the shit posting brigades, actually.

Katie: Hmm.

Meagan Day: I don’t think it’s good for political [01:14:00] discourse, and I don’t think it’s good for a person to individually to participate in, and in some ways I think it serves as a substitution for politics.

You get the feeling of politics because there’s a, there’s a degree of competition involved, team competition that feels an awful lot like politics, but when you put on the phone or close the laptop, like nothing, nothing. Genuinely, nothing has changed and no politics has actually occurred.

Katie: Have you read Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte?

Meagan Day: No, but people around me have, and they are recommending it to me.

Katie: So osmotically, you’ve absorbed it in some way or another. It’s more like short stories that are all kind of connected to one another. The final short story is about someone who is, she’s a little bit nihilistic, but she’s also kind of a chaos monger.

And the punchline of the story, without giving too much away, is that she ends up channeling all of this frustration with identity politics and [01:15:00] the insistence that she must categorize herself in some way or another. But in any case, she ends up essentially creating this prolific online bot farm where she ends up deploying these bots to just sow discord.

And the whole point she’s trying to prove is like we’re all wasting our time ’cause we’re arguing with bot farms. It’s absolutely brilliant. The piece is brilliant. It’s so funny, it’s so well done, and I can’t help but think about that when you tell me this about, you get the feeling of politics, you get the feeling of productively engaging.

You get to either like dunk on the right or own the libs, but then you close the laptop and it’s like, well, what really just took place there? What have I really just contributed to? And I think you’ve rightly pointed out that the answer is nothing. So a follow-up question that I have for you is, you kind of set this up as this is something that you’ve changed your mind about that like, we, we aren’t really getting anywhere with this, but my, my assumption is [01:16:00] that before, it’s not like you thought dunking on people online was necessarily like a winning political strategy.

So I’m curious, what was the merit that you maybe saw before in the, the prior way of relating to one another? Like what do you think the promise of that strategy was?

Meagan Day: I’m sure I never at any point consciously thought shit posting is gonna change America. Like I never actually believed that that was the theory of change.

Katie: Shit podcasting, however, might.

Meagan Day: I always believed it and I, and I continue to believe it actually. That’s not even necessarily entirely untrue. I think that like long form and personal, more intimate or parasocial forms like that actually are different from like online, like roving in bands online to repeat the same cliched, little hyper niche online turns of phrase to demonstrate that you disagree with the target of the mass bullying and the other friends can see you doing that and you’re developing like a group identity.

It’s more of [01:17:00] like a psychological rather than a political thing. Hmm. I think podcasting is actually different as is writing essays. So what did I think was going on before? Okay. So I think that like many on the left, we were very, we irritated by liberal decorum gatekeepers. The people who were demanding civility while actually, entirely outraging processes were occurring on a daily basis.

And they were saying, now, now be civil. We really thought that being kind of a jerk, being a bit of a vulgarian was actually gonna be somewhat democratizing. There was, there was a whole movement, which I’m gonna just associate myself with, just as a matter of time and place, um, and affect the dirt bag left.

Oh, sure. The idea was let’s just be fucking, yeah. We’re not, we’re not here to play. We’re not gonna make friends. You know, the truth of the matter is we actually definitely were there to make friends with each other. Okay. That’s a separate thing. Donald Trump [01:18:00] came in sort of like a wrecking ball, like I said earlier, and while a lot of us really obviously deeply despised his politics, we kind of liked.

His attitude. The vibe, the vibe, the vibe a little bit, not the vibe of the politics, but the sort of like, I don’t, I don’t care. Like I’m, I’m just, oh yeah.

Katie: It’s like the, uh, the Shane Gillis where he talks about the first presidential debate.

Meagan Day: I think that we thought that it was high time that the artificial civility.

Uh, you know, edifice was torn down so that we could have an honest, brash conversation about politics and systems of power in this country. And if it took someone on the right to do that, we would just get in on it getting rid of civility in general actually is not necessarily great because it is very politically demoralizing and when people are pol, so most people are just, they look at this, they look at all this tribal warfare and all of this nastiness, and they don’t understand the references and they’re feeling the radiating misanthropy coming off of the whole discourse and they’re saying, no thanks.

[01:19:00] I’m gonna go have Thanksgiving dinner with my family, or I’m gonna go apple picking or whatever. I’m just gonna go to work and go home and watch tv. Right. Um, and then some people, apple picking is one hell of a. I actually have no idea where that came from. I think it would be, I’m

Katie: just gonna go Apple picking actually.

Little like George Washington, Freudian slip, I’m those

Meagan Day: I was conjuring normie family values kind of something. So somebody being like, I’m gonna go Apple picking instead of your nonsense. Right.

Katie: Have you seen the recent poll that’s like, um, news avoidance in the US is at like all time highs. Like one in two Americans just completely shuts it out.

’cause they’re like, and they’re all—

Meagan Day: Apple picking.

Katie: Every single one of them.

Meagan Day: That’s right. So then when a subset of people do become politicized, this is what they become politicized into.

Katie: Hmm.

Meagan Day: Discourse wars. And I don’t think this is actually very sustainable. I think we want people to be politicized into some positive activity and like, uh, you know, mass movements for change [01:20:00] and whatever, whatever your politics, you should want that because that is how to further your goals. Zohran Mamdani does not speak like that. You know, you would think the man had never looked at Twitter or x.com or whatever. And, and I think that’s really important to his victory and how he was connecting to ordinary people.

The same people who I am alleging are usually Apple picking. They’re able to, um, I think that he got a lot of buy-in from people because he was exuding something positive and productive and not obscure and, um, relatable. And, you know, people’s hearts are very guarded, like they like the idea of healthcare and, and childcare and you know, jobs guarantees, and fast free transit and things like this. They, they like the sound of that stuff, but their hearts are very guarded against disappointment. Yeah. And so how you get buy-in from people? Definitely not by making them feel dumb or making them feel like you are engaged in some sort of blood sport against [01:21:00] some other people in a way that is unpleasant and alienating.

Katie: There is something magnetic to our baser instincts about the Trump style politics. There’s a reason that that became so popular. But there’s also something magnetic about somebody who is just relentlessly upbeat and positive and has a pretty clear, productive vision for what he’s trying to achieve. And I think that that’s what this showed.

And I think to your point, there is a lot of fatigue. There’s also, um, something that I think speaks to your comments about throwing baby out with the bath water. With the civility thing I’m just reminded of, and this is a critique that I made, so I’m calling myself out on this one, but back when I think it was the, they bombed an apartment complex in Yemen and the group chats leaked because Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the chat on accident.

I mean all time, kind of like comedic levels of [01:22:00] incompetence. But a lot of the news coverage was about kind of the protocols that were broken and the wrong, we’re using the wrong chat app to decide which apartment complex we’re gonna blow up to go after one person. And there was this overwhelming sense that I had reading it of like, are we really worried about how they were communicating that they were about to kill a bunch of innocent people to go after one guy?

Like it feels like we’re missing the forest for the trees here. That to me did feel like a conversation that was obsessed with protocol and obsessed with the proper way to commit a war crime. But at least we were angry about it. I’m gonna contrast that with what I would characterize as like a surprisingly minor outcry to the Venezuelan boats we keep blowing up. And it kind of feels like what happens when you just totally do away with all of the protocol and all of the decorum, is that it becomes a race to the bottom where nothing becomes surprising [01:23:00] anymore.  

Meagan Day: I think that’s a really good illustration of like the baby with the bath water concept on a social level. “Ted Cruz’s wife is ugly,” is a major violation of protocol—

Katie: But we hate Ted Cruz. Everyone hates Ted Cruz hate. So people were like, whatever, fuck it.

Meagan Day: I guess my point being that like there was a kind of primness or stiffness to politics before Trump that belied how ugly a lot of the actual processes that it set in motion and protected really were.

And so it was very cathartic to see someone come in and just say whatever the hell was on his mind with no regard for the rules of decorum and propriety. The vibe is sadistic. There’s an energy in this country that is actually very dark and mean-spirited. And my fear, my genuine fear, is that when people see that they social cohesion goes out the [01:24:00] window.

The idea of living in a society and being interdependent with other people in the society goes out the window. If the vibe is mean, nasty, ugly, sadistic, cruel, indiscriminately mean. What do people do? They say, I’m gonna look out for number one, I’m gonna look out for me and my family against everybody. I, I, it’s dark out here.

And in fact, social trust is something that’s measurable. And social trust has been declining precipitously since 1950, but in particular with a steep decline since the dawn of the Trump era. So this is what I mean by load-bearing structures being torn down. People are, I think, retreating into a hyper independent way of an individualist way of thinking in response to the vibe of cruelty, hatred, blood sport.

And we still putting us something positive out there, like Zohran even just going around and like, you know, high fiving cab drivers and like, you know, doing tai chi with, with grannies in the park. That that is just [01:25:00] like, I like you. I live in a society with you. You are my neighbor. I want the best for you.

And I think that if we all work together, we can get it. That does something to repair some of the social fabric that has been. And it’s not good for the left for this to be destroyed just because it’s fun to participate with your own, you know, tribal warfare gang in some of the like nastiest of the blood sport doesn’t mean that it’s actually good for the left.

Overall, the left thrives in conditions of high social trust and high social cohesion. So you and listeners may or may not be familiar with Thomas Merton, who is one of the more prolific writers of the 20th century, um, coming from the Catholic contemplative tradition,

Katie: oh, you’re always good for an obscure reference.

Okay. I don’t know Thomas Merton, but I’m glad to have another contemplative Catholic in our midst

Meagan Day: curveball. But I, I was reading some Thomas Merton the other day, and I think that this passage is about being like a bitchy monk. It’s like, don’t be such a bitchy monk. It’s like a chastisement to his fellow [01:26:00] Hermitage dwellers.

But I actually think, I think it works well in our context. So I’m gonna read it. I’m gonna read this out loud. I love this first phrase. Okay. “A clever kind of insulate civility, A peculiar combination of ambition, stubbornness, and flexibility. A third ear keenly attuned to the subtlest modulations of the fashionable cliche.

With all of this, you can pass as a saint or a genius, if you conform to the right group, you’ll be blamed in a way that gives you great pleasure because the blame will come from an outgroup by which to be blamed is praise. You may not be enthusiastically praised even by your own friends, but they know exactly what you’re driving at.

They fully accept your standards. They dig you. You are canonized. You are the embodiment of their own complacency.” It’s a little obscure, but bear with me. That passage, I think is about Thomas Merton talking about maybe like your order coming together to shit on another order and [01:27:00] feeling really good about itself and how complacent all of you are actually being instead of hewing to the pursuit of light and truth.

That is your actual calling. That really stood out to me as, um, well maybe these dynamics are, are actually not super time specific. Maybe they do repeat throughout the ages, or exist since time immemorial. But anyway, don’t be a bitchy monk.

Katie: Words of wisdom for 2026. Don’t be a bitchy monk. Oh my gosh. Thank you, Meagan.

Thank you so much for this. That was exactly, I don’t know what I was expecting, but in some ways it was exactly that.

The final conversation that I wanted to have was with a woman who wrote the book that redefined my outlook so definitively that she’s already a two-time guest. Grace Blakeley, the author of Vulture Capitalism. What is there to say about grace besides the fact that it doesn’t seem fair, that someone so [01:28:00] brilliant also gets to have a British accent?

She has been working on a new book, this one, about competitive individualism, so I was very thrilled that she was able to make some time to chat,

grace. So happy to see you again. A lot of our listeners are really big fans of your book, Vulture Capitalism.

Grace Blakeley: Oh, great to hear.

Katie: And I was curious if you could tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on this year.

Grace Blakeley: Yeah, so this year I’ve been focusing on a new book project that’s kind of emerged out of the discussions I’ve been having around Vulture capitalism, uh, because, you know, the whole book was really making this argument that capitalism isn’t a free market system.

It’s a kind of system of, of oligarchy in which big, powerful corporations cooperate with financial institutions, governments to kind of get their way. And this is really a system characterized by kind of top-down control and domination. And that’s really what makes capitalism, capitalism. It’s that the [01:29:00] people who own all the stuff get to basically tell everyone else what to do.

And so the alternative to that is this idea of a kind of democratic economy. At the end of the book, I look at all these really exciting movements that aim at kind of democratizing the economy, whether that’s, you know, in the labor movement, whether that’s community organizing, social movements, whatever.

And a lot of the conversations I ended up having on the book tour were with people, often young people, who were like, I totally agree with all this. I love what you’re saying, but I have no idea how I’m supposed to get engaged in any of this stuff. Like it feels so alien to me. I share stuff online, but I don’t know how to move that into the real world.

And so I started really investigating what is behind all this. It was basically like I kept getting the same question, which is people standing up in my book talks and being like, what can I do? And I was like, why is everyone asking this same question? Because I feel like 50 years ago, you know, when my grandfather was like a trade unionist on the left in the labor movement, people weren’t running around being like, oh my God, what do I [01:30:00] do?

They were like organizing. So I was like, what’s the big shift that’s happened over the last kind of 50 years that’s brought us to the situation where nobody, everyone realizes there’s a problem, but we all feel so stuck and unable to respond. And I realized it came down to this issue of individualism.

The way that we’ve been encouraged to believe that we are these isolated, atomized individuals bumping up against one another in like competitive free markets. And whoever gets to the top is the best and whoever falls to the bottom of the is the worst. And we blame ourselves when things go wrong and we’ve forgotten how to cooperate.

We’ve forgotten how to work together. So basically this book project is looking at that. It’s looking at individualism and how we can kind of fight back.

Katie: Mm. Are there any thinkers historically that you’ve been. Looking to in this time as you do your research, like is there anyone’s work who’s been inspiring to you?

Grace Blakeley: I mean, I always go back to Marx.

That’s my number one. The whole book, Vulture Capitalism, was inspired by going back to reading Capital and looking at the [01:31:00] problem that Marx had with economics—political economy as it was called in his day—and how we kind of needed to like update and revive that to critique modern economics, which is all centered on these ideas of, of free markets.

There’s this big debate about how to kind of organize workers, basically, how to organize the people who are doing the labor into a movement that can transform society. And that’s the transition from like a class that exists as an, as an idea, as an abstraction to this idea of an organized class. Um, and this is the idea of kind of like raising class consciousness.

Now that debate has shifted and changed a lot because of the really kind of like fracturing of the class system, both globally and domestically. So the way that, like for example, a lot of the workers have been moved to the global south, or at least like that work has been moved to poor countries. [01:32:00] And instead you get like middle class professionals making it seem as though we don’t have such a like bifurcated class system.

And also then like the shifting nature of work for like working class people in the rich world. So like the move towards the service economy, towards retail areas that are harder to organize. And so there are some theorists who have looked at how we mobilize this globalized, diverse counter capital class, shall we say, into a movement capable of taking down these capitalist institutions and some thinkers that I really like.

On that front there was, uh, some, uh, a couple of political theorists who wrote a book looking at organizing a kind of ecology of different movements into a kind of hegemonic block into a powerful block that was capable of like bringing lots of different people together around a core [01:33:00] set of aims.

And then using that to take on the powerful. And that’s kind of morphed, I think, into a lot of what we’re seeing today, which is people like Zohran and people like Zach Polanski pushing this kind of like populist economic agenda that centers issues of economic justice, also racial justice, climate justice, um, but really like tries to bring together this big coalition of people with lots of different interests from lots of different places to like fight back against the tiny little slither of people at the top who are genuinely benefiting from this system.

Katie: So I guess on that note, what was the last thing that you read that you cannot stop thinking about and why does it have you so enthralled?

Grace Blakeley: So one book that I read probably a couple of months ago now, but which like I keep coming back to because it’s always in the news, is Karen Howe’s Empire of AI. I don’t know if you’ve read that one.

Katie: Oh, I was sitting next to somebody on a plane the other day who was reading that.

Grace Blakeley: It’s really good and what it’s also like, it’s journalistic [01:34:00] so it’s super easy to read. It’s like based on lots of, you know, interviews and research over a very long period of time, she writes extremely well and it’s just like a fascinating insight, not only into the business model of open ai, but also into like the personalities driving it and their kind of like weirdness and idiosyncrasies.

So I really enjoyed, really enjoyed that book. Another really big, fascinating book that I read recently is by Sven Beckert and it, it’s just come out, it’s called Capitalism: A Global History, and it’s so good. It really makes these points that I kind of like talk about in in Vulture Capitalism about how politics and economics aren’t separate.

Capitalism is a joint project by both big corporations in the state and he like roots that historically, which is super fascinating. Amazing.

Katie: I will check that out. So looking forward to 2026, what’s on your mind personally and professionally? Are there any like big changes that you’re gearing up to make that you feel excited or nervous about?[01:35:00]

Grace Blakeley: obviously, I’m really looking forward to continuing writing this book in 2026. I’m hoping to get it done for the end of next year. So a lot of my next year will be focused on writing that. I have also really gotten into writing on Substack recently, which I’ve really enjoyed. So I’m, I’m really looking forward to putting more, more time and effort into that because it’s allowed me to do what I’ve always wanted to do, which is have a platform to respond to like key issues in politics and economics that I find interesting.

And editors would always come back and be like, Hmm, no one really cares about this little thing that you’ve discovered in like financial markets or this issue that you’ve found in like, you know, Sub-Saharan Africa or whatever. And they always cut the pieces that I suggest. And I was like, okay, well maybe the things I’m interested are just boring.

But actually, since being on Substack and growing really quickly, I’ve realized there’s a huge appetite for basically like critical political [01:36:00] economic analysis. So like looking at stuff that’s going on in the world economy and saying, okay, what does this mean? What does this tell us about the nature of capitalism?

And also how can we kind of like find opportunities to resist? Because another thing I’ve been doing on Substack, which I’ve loved, is interviewing unionists, activists, campaigners, who are doing amazing stuff in their places, in their firms, and just saying, you know, what is this struggle? How can we support you?

So yeah, I’m excited to continue doing that.

Katie: So you’re writing on Substack pretty regularly while you’re also writing this book? That’s a lot.

Grace Blakeley: Yeah, it’s a lot.

Katie: So how do you keep it all straight? I feel like that was a huge challenge for me was like trying to continue publishing on a weekly or biweekly cadence, like having new things to say while also trying to work on a 260-page manuscript. It’s hard.

Grace Blakeley: And like the main reason it’s hard is not because I kind of like get it mixed up. It’s more because the big challenge with writing a [01:37:00] book is that you don’t have that kind of like immediate instant graphic that you get when you publish a piece.

You write a piece, you publish it, and you’re like, oh yes. Likes, clicks, shares.

Katie: Yeah.

Grace Blakeley: And so it’s very easy to get sucked into the kind of algorithmic led model of like just publishing as much content as you possibly can in the hope of like growing and yeah, the numbers going up and it’s all very exciting.

Katie: You’re right, the, the types of writing are very different. You’re writing a book which is inherently generative and proactive and like you are stepping back and it’s completely separate from, I mean, I shouldn’t say it’s separate from the zeitgeist ’cause it’s, it’s very zeitgeisty, but it’s separated from the news cycle.

Do you have a process for that stepping back and kind of like, how, how do you keep it fresh? Is there a a strategy that you have for that?

Grace Blakeley: I think reading is like the most important thing in the world and I’m super, mm-hmm. I’m incredibly lucky that basically anytime a new book comes out that is remotely relevant [01:38:00] to anything I’ve ever written about, the publisher will send it to me.

They send it to you. So I’m constantly being inundated with new books and like, I cannot possibly read them all, but I do try and give it my best go. And that is like so important to make time for reading. Like I would say that’s the most important thing that you can do as a writer. Yeah. And also not to view it as like an indulgence ’cause it’s such a critical part of the whole process.

So yeah, taking time away to to read. And also just like, you know, the more time I spend on social media, the less productive I am. It’s such a boring observation, but it’s just so true.

Katie: Alright, let’s do like a little economic vibe check to finish. Sounds good. What is your operating diagnosis of our present moment?

Grace Blakeley: From an economic perspective, we are living in a very, very fragile moment right now. You know, I don’t think it is gonna be news to anyone to say that, uh, we are obviously in the midst of a pretty significant bubble in technology and AI in particular, but this kind of hasn’t been so much of a problem up until now [01:39:00] because it’s mainly been driven by stock markets, basically soaring valuations for the big tech companies.

The issue that we’re seeing now, and that is only gonna accelerate in the coming years is debt coming into that scenario.

Katie: Hmm.

Grace Blakeley: So the infrastructure boom, being driven by debt instead of alphabet, sitting on these huge profits that it’s built up for years. Using that, those retained earnings to finance it investment, we are gonna increasingly see those companies relying on debt and not just debt from banks, either debt from what’s called private credit markets, so like non-bank financial institutions, hedge funds, asset managers lending money to big tech infrastructure providers, generally speaking, to finance the, the rollout of these new data centers. Um, I’ve written about this quite a lot on Substack. There’s lots of intricacies to this story that it’s important to get ahold of, but basically it’s this interlinking between the AI bubble and a bubble in private credit, which is potentially [01:40:00] quite dangerous, because when you add debt to a financial bubble, things get difficult. Why? Because if you’ve borrowed to invest in something and then the value of that thing falls, you end up in negative equity. Like if you borrow on a mortgage and you buy a house and the value of the house falls, you’re in a bit of trouble and your bank might say, you need to pay us back immediately.

The same sorts of dynamics happen in financial markets, and that’s what drives really bad bubbles. Bubbles like the tech bubble of the late 1990s, early 2000s, where you just see share prices fall are less bad. Money gets wiped out, investors lose cash, basically, but it doesn’t create mega systemic issues for the rest of the economy.

When you add debt into the mix, it definitely does. So that’s what I’m looking at. And then I’m looking at the fact that beneath that bubble, those two bubbles, the US economy isn’t growing. Jobs are not looking great. Incomes, particularly for, um, low-income workers are looking really bad. Household debt for low-income households is [01:41:00] piling up and the whole system looks astonishingly fragile.

Katie: Is the reason they’re borrowing so much because the amount of capital they need to build this stuff is just so great that like private credit markets are the only place they can go to get it?

Grace Blakeley: Exactly. So there’s a couple of different things going on here. Firstly, and there are different dynamics in different parts of the market. So for OpenAI, right, which is like a new-ish company that is obviously responsible for building LLMs like ChatGPT, it doesn’t have the history of market dominance and therefore very large profits that affirm like Alphabet or Meta or Amazon does the kind of much bigger tech companies have up to now been able to finance a lot of their investment just through retained earnings because they’re so big and powerful they haven’t needed to borrow.

So that’s a big part of what’s been driving that boom. OpenAI is in a different situation. The model is less integrated for OpenAI. It has built the LLMs, it uses [01:42:00] compute from lots of other different partners, from data center partners, from you know, Microsoft, whatever. And it’s those partners, particularly Oracle, that have built up tons and tons of debt trying to keep up with OpenAI’s demand for compute by building these huge data centers. And then of course there’s the role of Nvidia, which supplies the chips that go into the data centers being built by Oracle. And if you look at, there was a, a really well circulated article in Bloomberg that showed the financial links between all of these different firms.

Katie: Yes. That visual was incredible.

Grace Blakeley: Yeah. And basically, which said there’s a little bit of kind of what was once known as like vendor financing going on, which is essentially when you lend money to someone buying your goods. And it looks like you’ve seen a massive increase in orders, but actually it’s kind of all this big circle slash Ponzi scheme.

So there’s a lot of that going on as well. But basically what’s happened is that a lot of these firms that are responsible for building data centers, both the big tech companies themselves and the Oracles and the [01:43:00] other whatever, are increasingly turning to debt to finance their infrastructure building.

Now the banks are much more heavily regulated than they were 20 years ago in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis. And as a result of that, a lot of lending has been kind of squeezed out of the banking system and into private credit markets. Hmm. Um, so, you know, like BlackRock for example, the world’s biggest asset manager is a big lender to these firms that are building data centers.

There are pluses and minuses to that. Private credit operates at lower levels of leverage. There’s, there’s danger of bank runs, those sorts of issues. But it also means that like everyone’s pensions are exposed to the AI bubble, obviously, but like, you know, in this kind of roundabout way as well via this cycle of kind of debt and, and borrowing and lending.

And also these firms are less tightly regulated than banks, which again, creates issues. And another [01:44:00] thing is that, that I was reading about the other day, is that the data centers are securitizing their assets into these nice little packages that investors can buy.

Katie: Oh, no. They’re like, what if we did mortgage-backed securities again, but for artificial intelligence? Let’s run that back. That ended so well!

Grace Blakeley: Exactly. Instead of like different types of mortgages. It’s like data centers that are rented out to different types of firms. Some much more likely to be able to repay their debts and some less likely.

So that’s a whole other issue that’s wrapped up in there.

Katie: I’m almost afraid to ask, but I’m gonna ask ’cause I wanna know. Let’s say this starts to unwind. Mm-hmm. What does a meltdown of this size look like where you have a stock market bubble underpinned by a bubble in the private credit markets?

Grace Blakeley: It’s kind of hard to say because private [01:45:00] credit has never been this big.

Lots of people say we don’t really need to worry about it too much because of this, you know, like big financial crises generally happen when the banking system starts to buckle because banks just operate at such high levels of leverage. You know, they have relatively small amounts like in the bank compared to what they’re lending.

But the private credit, it’s different. There’s, there’s less leverage. The issue is just that, like, obviously we’re all exposed to the banking system a lot, and that’s why what happens in, in that system matters for all, all of us as well and why banks are so systemically important. But we are all also really, really heavily exposed to the lending of like the big asset managers, the investments of the big asset managers.

It’s been like this long-term project to kind of democratize the stock market and financial markets to allow normal people to get involved. There’s been another really big push recently under Trump to allow like, you know, private equity to [01:46:00] access mom and pop funds, right?

Katie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. They wanna like put it in the 401(k)s.

Grace Blakeley: Yeah, so like normal people are increasingly exposed to these things, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that it’s still a relatively small proportion of the world economy that has the kind of savings. To be able to invest in these things that would be able to like even have a pension.

So the question as to whether or not this is amplified and become systemically important is it’s very hard to say.

Katie: Yeah.

Grace Blakeley: And we just, we haven’t been here before. What happens if millions of peoples of pensions are wiped out overnight? Presumably the government just steps in and bails them out. But who gets the bailout?

How does that whole process work? Are these firms actually big enough to carry on anyway? Would people just have to take the hit? It’s a very, very big open question.

Katie: Yeah.

Grace Blakeley: What I think is fairly clear [01:47:00] based on our experience from recent. Crises or just like all of history is that the wealthy will do a lot better to, will like organize to protect themselves in that context.

’cause they’re good at telling governments what to do. So generally speaking, it’s gonna be retail investors that are gonna be the most screwed. And we also have to bear in mind the like background economic context, which is how screwed everyone is anyway. Because the underlying economy, aside from AI and private credit is doing so badly.

But hey, this is also a moment of opportunity, right? Because for so many people, the response to economic insecurity is just to be like, it’s fine. I have my little pot of savings. Yeah. And I’ll invest that. You know this so well and then I’ll be okay. Right? Right. But if that promise breaks down and it’s like that, you can’t compensate for the fact that you’re being screwed over by saving and investing, those people get radicalized and they start getting really pissed off.

And if like the good guys can mobilize them instead of the bad guys who have historically been [01:48:00] more successful, then that’s an opportunity.

Katie: Okay. So our, our forthcoming global financial meltdown is a radicalizing opportunity for, uh, individualism to break down once and for all that, that feels like a better note to end on.

Grace Blakeley: Maybe it’s a stretch. I don’t know.

Katie: No, I think, I think, I think there’s something to that and it’ll be, we’ll just have to see, right. I think the underlying truth here is that when I hear this, there is that instinct to be like, oh my gosh, how do we protect ourselves from this? Because it all feels so out of our control.

And I think the fact that it all is so out of our control is kind of the problem. Yeah. That is the point that we don’t have any control over how these decisions are being made and how all of this wealth in society is being marshaled. And that is the crux of the issue that is worth exactly noticing and worth attempting to fix.

Well, we brought it home.  

Grace Blakeley: That’s also what Mark said 150 years ago.

Katie: Well, thank you so [01:49:00] much for joining me for this final conversation.

Grace Blakeley: Thanks so much for having me, Katie. Um, and thanks for doing the podcast and having me on. It’s been, it’s been so cool chatting to you, um, periodically over the last couple of years.

Katie: Yeah. This is the Threepeat, the Grace Blakeley Threepeat.

Okay, everyone. The bittersweet moment has arrived. That is all. Until next time, this has been The Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew, and this episode was produced by me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is president of Morning Brew.