On American Exceptionalism, “Good” Jobs, and Manfacturing Nostalgia

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In this week’s Rich Girl Roundup review: We’re discussing a uniquely challenging crop of feedback, critiques, and questions about…

• the episode that generated some rousing back-and-forth about American exceptionalism 

• the conversation that prompted some of you to reach out and share your successes and horror stories

• one writer’s work that elevated my understanding of the relationship between our material conditions and family planning

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

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

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Past episodes: “Talking Tariffs and Trade Wars with Grace Blakeley and Kathryn Edwards”, “The $175K Factory Worker: What Happens When Employees Own Stock”, and “A $5,000 Baby Bonus, Birth Rates, and…the Manosphere?”

• The Ezra Klein Show episode on China

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Transcript

Katie:

Welcome back to another Rich Girl Roundup on The Money with Katie Show. I am, of course, Katie Gatti Tassin and every few episodes my executive producer Henah and I discuss all of your feedback, your questions, your comments, your critiques, your complaints. This week, we will be talking through our tariffs conversation with Kathryn Edwards and Grace Blakeley, which honestly at this point feels like it was forever and 52 news cycles ago, our conversation with Pete Stavros about ESOPs and employee ownership more broadly, and a really, really great discussion that we had with Meagan Day about the weird gender and economic dynamics that she sees as being the under-discussed core of the birth rate crisis. So Henah, what have you got for us today?

Henah:

Well, speaking of feeling like forever ago, you are officially in Denver, Colorado—which you were not the last time we did a Rich Girl Roundup.

Katie:

I hiked Red Rocks this morning.

Henah:

Oh, how was it?

Katie:

So I love my life. Everything rocks. I’ve never been happier.

Henah:

And scene. So are you ready to get your feelings hurt then?

Katie:

I’ve got a lot of psychological cushion.

Henah:

You have stamina now.

Katie:

Okay, I have some stamina. Do your worst.

Henah:

right, we’ll start off with a two star review from Rich Girl Cici.

Katie:

At least we got two, at least they gave us that pity second star.

Henah:

It’s titled Missing Rich Girl Roundups, which I’m sad to say I’m reporting this live from a Rich Girl Roundup. So here we are.

Katie:

Give the people what they want.

Henah:

But they continued to say, “This has been one of my favorite podcasts for about a year now. I really enjoy Katie’s analyses and deep dives into some challenging money topics. However, I really dislike the move to get rid of Rich Girl Roundups on Mondays. I find that the episodes now are just audio essays and no longer meant to educate people on tackling their personal finance. I love the show, but I found myself less interested in tuning in every week since the change.”

Katie:

Fair.

Henah:

So I think there’s a few parts to unpack here. Well, I would love to say that Cici misses my voice specifically, which thank you—

Katie:

I think that’s the undercurrent of this one. I think she says more Henah, bitch, come on.

Henah:

Ask and you shall receive. The heart of the review I do think is kind of similar to some feedback we’ve heard over the last few months, which is essentially, where’s the tactical stuff? And so we have some good news on that front. We’re working on something that’s going to make all of our practical and actionable content easier to find and navigate. So Katie, why don’t you tell the audience what they’ve won?

Katie:

Yes, so this is a project that we have wanted to do for years and it has kind of always gotten pushed to the back burner because other things have taken priority. But we are finally rehauling moneywithkatie.com. We’re building a fully custom site. We’re working with an incredible team to do this, and they’re basically going to revamp moneywithkatie.com.

So all of the tactical content, content that we have put together over the last five years is more easily searchable, more easily accessible. So lots of blogs, lots of resources on there. Everything from if you are just starting out and you’re building your first budget or analyzing your spending plan for the first time, to kind of the finer points of tax hacks that really aren’t as fun to listen to on a podcast, which I know some people do enjoy listening to tax hacks on a podcast, but a lot of that stuff just honestly does work better when you can see it in front of you and you’re not listening to somebody explain numbers to you.

So we are going to take all of those canon articles. We’re going to put ’em front and center. One example that Henah and I were talking about, something that has a tendency to get buried because of just the infrastructure of the site right now is, we have a lot of pieces that were written and we still update on a semi-annual basis like how to do a backdoor Roth IRA, the finer points of that process, or what travel rewards are worthwhile and how to use them, if you are trying to get into being a little more strategic with your credit cards, how getting to 50% to financial independence is actually more like reaching 75% because of compounding.

So hundreds of pages, Henah and I and the team are combing through all of them, and I think it’s going to be a really helpful place to find all of those tactical resources. Or you can buy my book, which is 267 pages of tactical information about how to manage your money and then move on with your life and move on to more interesting things.

Henah is holding up the book right now. I’m holding up my copy. Henah, what do you think of it? Don’t you think she’s pretty?

Henah:

She is pretty. I especially loved the dedication. I actually laughed out loud. What a great way to start the book. I’m not going to tell you guys what it says, but it is kind of a comeback to some trolls over the years. So am very excited.

Katie:

That’s how you know that your girl holds a grudge. It’s a 2018 troll.

Henah:

Well, I started reading the final ARC or the final published version last night, and it is so good. So it’s easy to read and it’s fun and engaging. And it’s funny, today is actually my three year anniversary of working here.

Katie:

Oh my gosh, is it?

Henah:

It’s today. I feel like I’m a walking directory at this point of every piece of Money with Katie content that has ever existed, and there was still stuff in here that’s new and fresh and exciting for me. So I feel like, I dunno.

Katie:

Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that. I’m so happy to hear you feel that way. Yeah, I’m really proud of it. I honestly think it’s a really good book. My goal is that now moving forward, if someone says, hey Katie, I want to know how to manage my money. I can be like, sweet, read this and you’re going to be set. You’ll be fine. So I’m pumped.

Henah:

Yeah, it’s very well laid out, but I’ll add too, I’m a fiend for the tactical stuff, so whenever I see Katie mention practical tips on FI or anything in the personal finance part of the newsletter, which subscribe if you’re not already on it, I get a contact high. I joked with you about that.

The thing is though, as we’ve said in past episodes, at a certain point, there’s only so many topics we can cover on the show while still remaining engaging and timely. And we’ve done, I think 260, 270 episodes now. And so I guess I would just point out that a lot of the personal finance best practices don’t really change and they don’t really need to be reoptimize via additional episodes. I don’t know that you want to hear the 2025 version of maxing out your 401(k) for two hours again. So I think this re-haul will be a really great way to still find what you need for your own life and allow us to ask some really interesting and bigger picture questions on the show.

Katie:

Yes, and I think about this from time to time. You know what, if you’re listening to this and you have a point of view on this, let us know. Email us moneywithkatie@morningbrew.com because we have such a robust backlog of tactical episodes. I was like, if people are that hungry for it, then we could do a series of reruns. We could do a six episode series where, okay, we’re going to pick the best of from the tactical stuff and run them six weeks in a row.

But I don’t know. I personally don’t think that it’s necessarily healthy to constantly engage with tactical information once you have already figured out your financial plan. So Henah just listed a lot of reasons about that, the best practices don’t really change. That’s true. But I think that the ideal in my mind is I want everybody who is in Rich Girl Nation, the community, to feel really confident about how they’re managing their money and then be able to kind of move on with their life and think bigger and ask those bigger picture questions and have those more interesting dilemmas or discussions.

You listen to something that we talk about, maybe you completely disagree, but it probably taught you more about your own worldview. You may have discovered something that you didn’t already know about the way that you think about something that we feel differently about. So I am happy that we are revamping the website because I do think that there’s so much good stuff on there and I want people to have easy breezy, beautiful access to it, but I’ve definitely been having a lot of fun with the direction that we’ve taken over the last six months to a year.

Henah:

Same. If you are interested in the book, we’ll put in the show notes. We’re, as of today, a month and a day from big publication day, which is very exciting,

Katie:

Crazy.

Henah:

And I’ll add a little teaser. If you live in New York, we are going to be doing a little launch party, so stay tuned.

Katie:

You can come and meet me and Henah, the star of Rich Girl Roundup.

Henah:

It’s actually, we’re actually going to announce a new show at that time.

But on another note, we got a one star of you, Katie.

Katie:

Oh, good.

Henah:

Titled “Mom of Three Teenage Girls” who wrote, “Way left leaning, at least offer an opposing viewpoint.”

Katie:

Every time.

Henah:

And I know that it wasn’t your mom writing this because you’re an only child, but here’s my thing.

Katie:

They could have been.

Henah:

In my opinion, I feel like we do a lot to have discussions in good faith with opposing viewpoints. And I think something that’s really cool is your view has evolved a lot over the years. So in some ways it’s like you’ve opposed yourself.

Katie:

I get enough of this criticism from my own mom, my own parents who are basically horrified by my career. So I don’t know, mom of three teenage girls, maybe you guys can form a support group, have a group text to complain about this with one another.

Henah:

I do also really want to add here, we tend to only get reviews when people are really hyped or really disappointed in something, right? And so if you are enjoying the show, please leave an honest review. We really work hard to bring you the most thoughtful and high quality show that we can, and we truly do read every piece of feedback. So if these Rich Girl Roundups don’t convince you of that, I don’t know what will, but it really does do us a solid when you leave us a kind review.

Katie:

Yeah, step up guys. My ego’s too fragile for this. Throw some stars my way, please. I’m begging.

Henah:

Throw her a bone. I actually, I have a nice one for you.

Katie:

Oh, good, good, good, good.

Henah:

I kept it as a surprise.

Katie:

Let’s go.

Henah:

We got a five-star review from Whit’s List that said “Best episode ever.” I’m not quite sure which episode she’s referring to from this batch, but she said, “Just listen to the new episode and oh my God, it’s so good. I’ve never purposely reviewed a podcast, but I had to leave one and say, this conversation was so well done and informative. It makes me feel more optimistic about our future than I have in a while. Thank you so much for your work. Love a 30 something tired, married, working economist Mom.” Whit, we are crying in the club. At least we have one mom on our side.

Katie:

Dude. When the people that actually know what the fuck they’re talking about are like this is going to like, let’s go babe. Economist. Yes.

Okay, we will dive into episode specific feedback right after a quick break.

Welcome back. So the episode that generated the most follow-up this time around from our past three episodes at least so far, because we are filming this two days after the baby bonuses episode went live. So I have a feeling we’re going to hear more about that one, but so far it’s been tariffs. So I guess we are keeping in line with the news.

Henah:

Let’s kick things off today with a thoughtful email from Jeff B. We’ve referenced him on the show before and he wrote, “Appreciate the show. I’m guessing I’m not your typical listener, 50-year-old white male who is a CFP. There were some really good explanations provided on the show and the discussion you were having on the trade-offs for the US of being the world’s reserve currency specifically stood out. Here are a couple of items I would challenge. Also, at fair disclosure, my wife and I are both in the group of people that have benefited from our current economic system. 1) The show started with an acknowledgement that the issue with the dollar as the reserve currency has been a long time in the making and that this does not fall on the shoulders of Trump, but it felt like there was a lot of blame for the structure of the US economic system benefiting asset owners on Trump and previous Republicans. I voted for both parties during my life and I’m pretty down the middle on my views, but in my 30 years of being in the workforce, 20 of those were with a democratic president. I have major concerns as well about the wealth and income gap, but I think it’s unfair to just point fingers at Republicans for this.”

So Katie, let’s pause here before we get into his next point. We also had Spyke our most regular commenter share, a similar thought that I wanted to add here. So they said, “This was another insightful episode. It’s so true that while Trump set fire to everything, the kindling needed to start has been building up for a while. Now we have a habit of forgetting and kicking things down the road to deal with later until another crisis ensues and forces us to reckon with it just a pile of kindling in every aspect of this country while wildfires burn literally and figuratively.”

Katie:

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s not like these two elements, the fact that the country was an economic tinderbox and that Donald Trump got elected, it’s not like those things are unrelated. I think it’s actually pretty clear at this point that he spoke to a certain brokenness and a certain unfairness in our economic system. He tapped into the emotions that people felt because even if you aren’t an economist or even if you don’t read about this stuff every day, I think a lot of people could sense that something was wrong and it was completely legitimate. And I think that’s at least partially why he was elected.

But we talk about Reagan a lot on this show, but I think it was Donald Cohen maybe who talked to us about this in the privatization episode that Bill Clinton was really the privatizer in chief. Bill Clinton took Reagan’s vision and really ran with it. Clinton was the president that really cut welfare in a meaningful way. So my perspective on the economic policy side of the last 20 or 30 years is that Republicans and Democrats were more or less equally likely to embrace neoliberal ideas. There’s certainly no disagreement from me there, at least at the high level approach to how we build our economy.

Henah:

Two sides of the same coin. So then he continues on to say, “2) What I missed in the discussion about the structure of the US economic system was a solution for these woes. I heard get out and vote and protest, but what do you want to replace it with? I heard give everyone free healthcare and good jobs. Well, that would be great if we could just give everyone a good job, but what are those good jobs and how do we get everyone trained so that they can actually do set job and how do we pay for that? Your commentators both agreed, we will not return to a manufacturing based economy. So what is left? Finance, tech, healthcare, those are all specialized fields that require a lot of education and training. I’m not a big believer in trickle-down economics either, but we have to ask why do those good jobs exist?

They exist as a result of the same system you were saying is skewed for the top. Yes, we have a system where the likes of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and others have accumulated ridiculous levels of unnecessary wealth. They were rewarded for their innovation and created something that didn’t exist before. Maybe that reward was too great, I don’t know. But how much wealth have they created for others as well? The hundreds of thousands of employees with six figure jobs and 401(k) plans. What other countries had the explosion of new companies and technology that has fueled the economic gains of its workers As the us we may not like everything about the system, but then what is the alternative? It’s one thing to say give more back to workers, but how and what does that really look like?”

So Jeff, I would be curious to know what you thought of the ESOPs episode when it comes to more fairly compensating workers that we’ll get to, but we’re also having a major guest return to the show next week. And Katie, when you were interviewing him, I think what Jeff was saying was pretty in line with what this guest was pointing out too.

Katie:

Yeah, no, almost to the, I mean it’s kind of uncanny actually. Yeah, we had a pretty good little back and forth in next week’s episode that y’all will hear, not Jeff, but me and this guest, about a lot of these same topics and I kind of pushed back on it and we went back and forth a little bit, so I will be excited to hear what you think.

Henah:

There was also a moment where kids in the conversation mentioned how manufacturing won’t bring back the middle class the way that it did earlier. And so Adora wrote in and she said, “She went off about the nostalgia about manufacturing.” And Jessica Marie kind of picked up on that too and said, “Really appreciate how you all break everything down for us. I think the jobs we’re looking for are already here, they just aren’t valued yet. For example, childcare, education, elder care services that people don’t want machines doing. The capitalism of the past doesn’t work anymore, but what’s coming next will be better for more people.” So that seemed to be this common thread here. Katie, what do you think?

Katie:

I think people are wistful for what manufacturing jobs represent more than the jobs themselves. They were often union jobs. They often paid well, they didn’t require a college education. They often came with pensions. There was job security, there was good health insurance, but there’s nothing stopping the jobs that currently exist in the United States that won’t be replaced by AI beyond care, work and education. I’d also add things like the trades, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, construction, the entire service industry, hospitality. There are so many jobs in this country that we often hear in the news that, oh, we have a shortage in one of these industries. We don’t have enough of the people that know how to do these jobs. So I think making the jobs that are already here better is a good start.

But I totally understand Jeff’s frustration. I had this same beef when I started thinking about these things in the way that I have been, which is, okay, well what should replace it? Okay, you don’t like capitalism, we get it, but what are we going to do instead?

And that’s kind of the big question. How do we move forward? How do we build something better? And for one thing, I think the employee ownership conversation is a really serious part of this. I don’t know if it’s going to live in the ESOP land. I don’t know if that’s going to be the functional mechanism by which employee ownership becomes a more robust part of the economy, but I do believe that workers should have equity in the things that they’re building. Between 60 and 65% of Americans own basically nothing. No wealth net worth is effectively zero. Okay, we’re talking a majority of Americans. That to me is not a system that is currently working, working. That’s a problem.

And another element of this is the AI piece. We are headed for a future where a lot of white collar work, the professionals that are earning six figures that have the so-called good jobs are not going to have jobs anymore. And that’s either going to be a huge opportunity or an absolute economic meltdown depending on how our leaders handle it and who owns and controls this technology. That’s why I think worker owned firms are so critical in figuring out how to mainstream that implement it because a worker owned firm is going to make very different decisions about how their company employs artificial intelligence than a firm that is owned by a group of 12 C-suite level executives who are paid in stock options and are incentivized to get costs as low as possible.

So when it comes to how we’re going to pay for something like healthcare or childcare, I mean, I don’t know. How do we pay for our trillion dollar defense budget? The Federal Reserve buys and sells debt, and if you’re buying and selling debt to invest in your workforce via something like childcare, via something like sick leave, the argument that I would make is that while in return for taking out that debt, you’re going to get an asset that’s going to go up in value because the economy is going to be stronger with these services in it.

Henah:

I agree. And I also think it’s funny, we get a lot of pitch emails for the show, probably at least 10 a day, and I would say 95% of them are written by AI, and I can tell that they’re written by AI. It’s so clear that they are. And so I also think that AI has quite a way to go before it’s really starts replacing a lot, but it’s going to get here faster than we think. So we do have to start thinking about this stuff sooner rather than later.

Shifting gears a little bit, there was a general theme pushing back on a point of Keds’s perspective that I think it’s worth unpacking a little bit more. So Fernanda R wrote in and said that Keds’s POV seemed oblivious “about what’s actually going on in the US. It’s spreading misinformation about other countries is not a productive conversation. I understand wanting to be optimistic, but her arguments heavily rely on American exceptionalism.”

So I’d push back, I guess a little to say that Keds is a labor economist who testifies in front of Congress, so she probably does know what’s going on in the US to an extent. But Fernanda’s point about other countries and American exceptionalism was echoed by another listener Polly. So Polly wrote, “A lot of her facts about China are from 10 years ago or so, Chinese can’t decide how many kids they have. The rule has been changed almost 10 years ago. There’s no free speech in China. Chinese people talk about religion, government, politics, and money openly more than Americans in every corner.”

Katie:

I just think there’s a lot of, for lack of a better word, propaganda in the United States about what life in China is like. And I think that we saw that most clearly when TikTok got banned and people went to Red Note and Chinese citizens and Americans were talking to each other on Red Note.

And yeah, there is a great episode of The Ezra Klein Show. I know I brought it up in the episode, but I’m going to mention it again. It’s Ezra interviewing one of his conservative colleagues at the Times who I think is an opinion columnist, but it’s basically about the fact that most Americans don’t have any clue what’s going on in China.

And I think it’s really worth listening to one point that I have not been able to stop thinking about since the Red Note moment of pop culture where everybody was on the Chinese TikTok app. Somebody had said, well, you have freedom of speech in the United States, but your speech doesn’t mean anything. When you tell your politicians you want something, they don’t do anything. And I just think that freedom of speech has become such a buzzword and such a political lightning rod recently. But I do think it’s worth thinking about what is the value of being able to say whatever you want if it doesn’t actually translate to change if you’re only voting every four years or you’re voting in local election, sure, but I totally, totally know where Keds is coming from. I mean, obviously the Chinese Communist party and authoritarian regimes, that is a different way of life and that is a different style of government.

But I think Grace’s pushback made a lot of sense at the time where she’s like, well, I mean you guys are deporting people for protesting. So…

Henah:

I was going to say the same thing.

Katie:

I’m not surprised that people pushed back on that and I think it’s valid. I definitely think it’s valid and I think we have to be, I don’t want to say careful, but I think that it’s always good. I just read this book called The Jakarta Method basically about how the united, the CIA violently intervened in other countries in the 20th century. Any country that the United States government had business with that was like, we don’t want to be capitalists anymore. We don’t want to do business with you because y’all are fucking us over the CIA would basically be like, nope, too bad. If you just kind of go through the American education system if you never ask any questions, if you never dig any deeper. Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of conventional wisdom and a lot of common sense ideas in American culture that are not really based in fact, and I think that China has been and will continue to be an area where that is going to be perception and reality not matching up.

Henah:

And I think kind of the larger question too is does it really matter what country we’re comparing ourselves to? If at the end of the day the issue is this idea of American exceptionalism?

Katie:

Good point.

Henah:

We have to look at other countries so we can see that there are other systems that are working or other systems that are not working and compare it to us in that way. But at the end of the day, whether it’s China or a different country, the American exceptionalism is really, we end up just shooting ourselves in the foot by only thinking about it in that way.

So Jani, is a long time listener, she also spoke to this, but she ultimately asked a different question at the end, so she said, “Amazing episode with incredible insights. I think the only thing that came to mind towards the end was what’s the difference between telling people how many children they can have versus telling people they must have children and essentially forcing pregnancy on people.”

Katie:

Oh, bars.

Henah:

“So much potential for the US to find its footing and what sets us apart, but people truly need to believe things can and should be better for everyone in order for that to happen.” Jani, if you are listening, I’d be curious to hear what you ended up thinking of the baby bonus episode.

Katie:

Yeah, I mean if your government does nothing meaningful to address the cost of having children like you too are basically being told how many children you can have indirectly by the very nature of your material limits, like the fact that you can’t afford childcare. It’s like, okay, well you also kind of are being told how many children you can have too.

Henah:

Bars twice.

Lemount chimed in to say, “It’s not that globalism is the enemy, but late capitalism capturing growth and trapping labor compensation in amber. If only we had politicians who could articulate that,” which made me laugh.

Katie:

Wow, what a visual.

Henah:

Right? Ultimately we had a lot of fangirling for both Keds and Grace. So Dan A emailed in and said, “Probably need to have a monthly podcast with Grace and Keds,” which I’m going to produce if they are. And Emily asked in and said, “Wow, these smart ladies provided so much nuance to the conversation. I’m grateful for how they are able to explain complex economic dynamics in accessible terms.” Which agreed because I was sitting in the background of you three recording feeling like the dumbest person alive (complimentary), so I always feel like my brain has been cracked open in the best way after hearing you three, whether you’re separate or together.

Katie:

No, well, I had a mini quarter life crisis after that episode being like, I am a moron. I should return my mic. I don’t deserve to have a podcast.

Then we had Vinogradova S who said, “Kathryn is my favorite economist ever since the last episode with her. I appreciate all the valuable and clear information she provides without hate or panic.” And Jared echoed that sentiment with, “Awesome episode, really great points on all sides, and I personally learned a lot. Love Keds can listen to her any and every day.” What about Katie, Jared? Do you love Katie?

Henah:

A good time to mention that Keds recently launched her own podcast, so if you’re tired with Katie, you can listen to Keds more often and that’s on Optimist Economy. I always want to say optimist economist,

Katie:

I know, we were joking with Keds before we recorded that episode where I called her optimist economist and she was like, well, we almost named it that, but then we were like, what did she say about it being the noun? Our name is two nouns.

So definitely go check that out. We had some big love for Grace too. Jess wrote, “Such a good episode with you, Grace, and Kathryn, Katie, inject it into my veins. I remember being introduced to Grace back in 2020 as Paris Marx had her on as one of his first guests on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, another great democratic socialist podcast. I was like, who is this brilliant economic female communicator? I have read and listened to everything she’s come out with since the light bulb moment for me on this podcast is when she referenced the market drop when Deep Seek came out. I hadn’t thought about that in terms of the overvaluation and lack of innovation of the magnificent seven monopolies. Mind blown as always, thank you for having these thoughtful and timely conversations.”

Yeah, I don’t think this is a secret because Grace is obviously always writing. She’s like 30 years old and has already published three books, but she interviewed me recently for the project she’s working on now, and that was when I decided not to return my podcast mic. I was like, okay, maybe I’m not a moron after all.

Henah:

Are you allowed to tell us what you spoke about?

Katie:

I am going to hold off. I’ll ask her next time I talk to her if it’s private, but I think Rich Girl Nat’ is going to love it. I think the topic is really interesting and I think her perspective is just one in a million.

Henah:

Yeah, I really admire her.

Katie:

Me too. One more from Reena who emailed in the day this episode dropped and said, “Just wanted to reach out and say thank you so so much for your amazing podcast and all the work you guys do to identify and research these topics. Nothing makes my commute to work better than rage-listening to you talk about how much better the world could be.”

Henah:

To close out on all this love for the three of you—now kith—we have Britney who added, “Great episode. It really opened me up to the interdependence of our economy. We’d love a follow up on if slash how this influences Money with Katie’s thoughts on general personal finance practices” with a wink face. And then she said, “I love the back and forth between the two guests. The episode definitely would’ve been all the poorer from either one not being there.”

And Katie, you and I had actually debated doing a roundtable group versus having them as separate guests in the same episode. So I agree that I think it was great to have them all together.

Katie:

What Henah’s not saying is that it was her idea to have them all together. I was going to stagger them and talk to one and then the other, and Henah was like, I feel like you guys should just talk to each other at the same time. And I was like, oh, do you think, I knew that these two are both brilliant, but that they do kind of see the world differently and have fundamentally different ideas about how economies should be structured. And so I didn’t want to set up an argument between anybody, but I’m glad. I loved the respectful disagreement. I loved when Keds was like, wow, I disagreed with so much of what you just said. I was like, oh my God, this is titillating.

Henah:

Well, I was more worried about from the perspective of, oh my gosh, we’re going to have a four hour podcast I have to edit, but ended up being great.

Katie:

Grace didn’t—she had to go. She was our [limiting factor] here.

Henah:

She was. So Katie on the note though of influencing your best practices, is there anything you would say about how your approach has changed, if at all?

Katie:

Man, that is the million dollar question, isn’t it?

Henah:

Asking for a friend.

Katie:

I would say the day-to-day of my money management hasn’t really changed. Speaking to the original comments that we were responding to at the opening of this episode, to me the best practices, personal finance under the current paradigm are what they are. And so I kind of just have been going along with my original plan that I put in motion like for four or five years ago at this point and haven’t really revisited tactically do I want to do anything differently, but I do want to spend more time talking about that. That does kind of feel like a gap that I would like to bridge between the day-to-day and kind of the higher level and theory. And I think it’s just tough because your average person in their capacity as an individual has much less latitude in my opinion.

Henah:

Let’s move to some rapid fire. So Marcie D. said, “An excellent episode, thanks for making me better informed with such a thoughtful discussion.” Provin1327 wrote at 15 minutes and 50 seconds,” Bitcoin has entered the chat,” which I believe would be referring to the first half of the conversation about the US dollar being the global reserve currency.

Katie:

So I actually was thinking about this the other day. I don’t know that Bitcoin is the answer specifically, but I will say that my perspective on the underlying value proposition of something like Bitcoin has really shifted in the last couple years. I think years ago I was like, this is a solution in search of a problem. This is all speculative. There’s no underlying value and I haven’t spent a lot of time unpacking it, but I will say that just my kind of general perspective on Bitcoin, I’m not going to be tweeting bitcoin manifestos anytime soon. Nobody worry, but I no longer think the entire idea is nuts.

I do think it’s a little bit ahead of its time and it wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up using something similar or something structurally reminiscent to solve some of these questions about US dollar hegemony. Do we want some sort of global currency? I think it’s a really, really interesting question that a couple of years ago I was like, oh, who cares?

Henah:

I’m laughing because I’m like, so you want opposing viewpoints, huh? Here is one.

Well, you know what, Katie to reward you because I’m feeling generous today. Let’s go. I have some two very nice notes to close this out before the ad break.

Katie:

Tucks hear behind ear. Tell me.

Henah:

So Riley K. said, “One of my favorite recent episodes, it’s been so easy to get caught up in the nihilism recently and with the AI boom, I found myself being regretful that I had to be born in this generation that has to figure out the robot versus humanity equation. Why couldn’t I be a 27-year-old in the seventies? Unfair.”

Katie:

That is so true.

Henah:

“This honestly left me more hopeful than not and excited to be a young person in the era of remaking our society in the image of our collective aspirational value.”

Katie:

Oh my God, I have chills Riley, that’s so beautiful. Thank you.

Henah:

Tear it all down. And then finally Maggie B. with the compliment that is going to gas up your ego to the point of not fitting in the room anymore. She said, “Katie, I mean this in the best way. You have ruined podcasts for me, your academic approach, the level of knowledge thought and structure you put into the episodes and the quality of guests make this top notch.”

Which I have to say when I first saw the comment, all I saw was “ruined podcasts” and I thought, oh no. Oh no. Hide. Oh god, it ended up being okay.

Katie:

Oh my gosh, Maggie, thank you so much. That is maybe my favorite compliment ever and I just want to say cc the person who said that they were too academic. Maggie doesn’t think so, obviously. So what do you guys say about that?

Henah:

We’ll talk about your thoughts on the other two episodes then after a quick break when Katie’s head rightsizes to fitting back in the room.

Katie:

Okay, we’re back and we are ready to discuss our episode with Pete Stavros and his work to make ESOPs more accessible across the country. I will say this was in recent memory of the episode that I was most nervous to produce. I was very nervous for this interview.

Henah:

I guess, to give some backstory, this episode was a long time coming. I think we had discussed the possibility of bringing Pete on over a year ago. Is that right, Katie?

Katie:

Yes. He had been on my radar for a while and as I have been thinking more about what employee owned companies can look like and how they might strengthen our labor market and kind of like, okay, how do we start to get this stuff implemented? How is this realistically happening right now? What options do we have and where can we start? You have to start somewhere. It really felt like a no-brainer to get him on, especially given his unorthodox background, the fact that he works in private equity.

 I was like, well, this is a crazy hook for this conversation, but I was very nervous to talk to him because I obviously have publicly critiqued private equity on more than one occasion, and I wanted to have a respectful dialogue with him. But I also didn’t want to ignore the big picture element or what felt to me like the elephant in the room, which is that, oh, it’s pretty ironic that a PE firm is taking up this cause.

Henah:

Yeah, that was what the bulk of the feedback was about you actually. You sent me a text that you received from someone that personally in response to the episode and they basically hit you with a conspiracy theory that had me going heh?

Katie:

Yeah, so obviously neither one of us work in this industry, so I’m going to read the text. I am curious if anyone has thoughts on this. He wrote, “I’m loving the KKR podcast. My negative conspiracy view here is that KKR is looking at their portfolio and is over their hold period on a ton of stuff and can’t get it off their balance sheet, trying to get ESOPs more popular, and then they overcharge their own portfolio companies to take over the underperformers they haven’t been able to exit. That It’s less about a structure they want to use in their own portfolio companies from the start in structuring their entries, but instead is setting up another option for their exit that hasn’t really existed in a meaningful way. Should have asked them what KKR pref is on the equity versus what they’re giving out. Saw a deal last month that sold and employee stock was wiped and worthless because of the PE pref and they were the majority owner, so they pushed the transaction through. Cynicism aside, great show, Money with Katie.”

So like I said, I don’t know enough about the structure of their exits to know whether this holds water. I will say that they started doing this in 2011, so they’re about 14 years into this. It’s not like they just started and I feel like the new cycle around PE has kind of turned since interest rates started going up that their exits have not been as profitable. I don’t really have a perspective on this. I probably shouldn’t be reading it on air to 50,000 people. Sorry.

But regardless of the details, I do think it captures the sentiment, which is why I wanted to include it of like, okay, well what’s in it for them? So if anyone who works in or around this industry has thoughts on this theory inclusive of the fact that they have been doing this since 2011, hit us up and we will make a special exception and we will break our rule about only discussing feedback from the last batch and we will talk about it in the next Rich Girl Roundup. So it’s a very opaque industry. It’s very hard to get details about these deals.

Henah:

Yeah, I’d be curious if anyone does have insider knowledge on this, but regarding—

Katie:

A low level like KKR peon on who’s like, I’ll talk off the record.

Henah:

I wanted to share something that a listener sent us that is kind of related to all of this, specifically the point about employee stock being wiped and worthless. So I got their permission, we’re going to call them S. I think it’s really illustrative of what both you and Pete talked about in the episode as challenges of ESOPs and risk, but also what your anonymous friend mentioned. So first they shared this email ahead of hearing the episode, so they said, “I have an anecdote about ESOPs that has totally shaped my opinion about them as a negative. My first and former employer that I was with for nine years was an ESOP, and at first it seemed like a good thing because each year you were employed, you were further vested in the ESOP until we reached a hundred percent vested after so many years. Five, I think. This employer did not offer a 401(k) match because of the ESOP plan, and I feel it’s worth mentioning that my salary was a joke. I was naive and just grateful to have a job. It was an ad agency which was notorious for underpaying and overworking over nine years. My salary went from $27,000 a year to $56,000 a year. So I had a 401(k) I was contributing to and then was earning ESOP shares for each year that I was employed. The ESOP was sold as a super great benefit to us as employees under the guise that it meant we all were little owners of our company. So our daily contributions to the work we were doing also impacted that share price.”

Katie:

We’re a family.

Henah:

“At one point, my ESOP was worth $95,000 and this sounded great, but I couldn’t actually get to the money until I retired or left the company. I ended up leaving the company in 2021 and was hopeful I could take it with me to either roll over into an IRA or take the cash equivalent, which is the case, but it has to roll over in equal increments over the course of five years. Since I left the company in 2021, I was able to roll over three increments into an IRA to now have $45,000, but the shares of the ESOP have tanked so drastically that there’s only $5,000 left for me to roll over in increments for the next two years. My great nest egg that gave me a level of comfort for my laughably tiny salary dwindled in half and I wasn’t even at the company anymore to feel any level of ownership, just anger at the former owners and board of directors who made these decisions. Again, I don’t know if ESOPs have to be set up this way, but my very elementary understanding of what happened are impacts from Covid, which feels like a cop out at this point, and having to pay off the former owners with the company shares and essentially fund their retirement and lifestyle. As a Kentucky gal, I’m sure you can appreciate that they’re the type to have their own box at Churchill Downs for the Derby and live in the same subdivisions as Papa John’s and Rick Patino. So not a modest lifestyle.”

Katie:

That is so funny.

Henah:

“I’m only 34 and finally have a six figure salary to actually make a difference in my finances, so I have plenty of time left to continue building up that IRA and my 401(k) at my current employer that has a 6% match, but the people I feel for are my older or close to retirement friends I left behind who have dedicated 20 years of their lives to the agency and watched a huge portion of their nest egg just disappear overnight. Even though the ESOP was sold as this great benefit for the employee, it’s somehow still benefiting the employer/former owner more than the employees themselves. Some of these coworkers have been invested since the ESOP was started in 2009 and they watched it all disappear. I understand that investing is always accompanied with some amount of risk, but this almost felt like playing the stock marketing level of change slash risk and not so much to a 401(k) or IRA.”

So she sent all of that, interestingly, prior to listening to the episode, she was just reacting to the show notes that we had put in the newsletter. So we asked her, let us know what you think after you listen.

And so she sent me this. She said, “Katie mentioned CHI Overhead Doors at the beginning, and we actually had a representative from CHI come to one of our town halls and give a talk on why the ESOP was such a great thing. It was shortly after when we gained a new CEO in 2014 and his sole intention was to diversify our company by taking us from a single ad agency to an entire portfolio of media companies, in my opinion, to make the company more sellable. But that hasn’t happened yet. It was exciting to see my best and grow year over year and given how we were educated about it as employees, it felt very much like a good thing. Our yearly town hall was always themed around the new stock price, and we were awarded our ESOP statements for money we couldn’t access until we left or retired. The new CEO is very outspoken about not liking the ESOP. Not only was he yet spoken against it, but the former female founder/CEO and female COO were all out of touch with reality. When it came to entry level workers like me after my first child, I was innocently given advice by the COO to hire someone to clean my house, and then the CEO told—”

Katie:

She got Sandberg-ed.

Henah:

“And then the CEO told me I should be eating meals from Longhorn Steakhouse our client at least once a week for research. Both of these things happened while I was making $30,000 a year. Honestly, all of our mindsets as employees were hoping we would be sold to some global firm like Publicis Group and be overnight millionaires. I know several former employees who had retired and hadn’t started shifting the ESOP out of the company yet and lost more than half of their retirement.”

“Kate and Pete also mentioned the trade-off of an ESOP over other benefits. We were not receiving a 401(k) match or bonuses. I would also argue not competitive salaries, but honestly I think I was being severely underpaid, whereas not all of my coworkers were. I liked hearing Pete’s additions at the end of companies offering the options for diversification earlier in the journey. I’m sure most of my friends who are close to retirement would agree that that would’ve been a huge benefit because their ESOP was at the mercy of the one company continuing to grow, but we didn’t understand the caveat that the family still needed to be paid off for their portion of the loan to convert the business in 2009. Overall, I like Pete. He seemed genuine and I honestly do see the positives to an ESOP, unfortunately, it just hasn’t marked out as prettily in this case.”

Katie:

Prettily. This is a perfect example of the risks and I’m so grateful she was willing to share this experience with us so that we could have a firsthand account of what happens when a company isn’t implementing it in an ideal way. It does sound like being able to diversify and take money off the table earlier would’ve been a game changer in this situation would have made all the difference. I was curious too, because $95,000, the original value, obviously she said it went down to like $45,000, so that works out to a $5,000 bump every year, which yeah, I mean that’s great, but it’s probably more representative of not a middle of the pack performance, but obviously you’re never going to be like, I’m not happy I have this $45,000, but I can see why in her case you’d be like, well, I would’ve rather just have been paid a reasonable salary that entire time.

Henah:

Right, it’s not at the expense of getting paid a livable wage.

So on the flip side, we also heard from someone who benefited from ESPPs. It’s a little different than an ESOP, but thought it might be worthwhile to share. So their name is Isabella, and they said, “After listening to the $175,000 factory worker episode, I felt inspired to share my own little ESPP success story, one that I partially owe to your podcast. Back in 2023, my company launched an ESPP program, a 15% post tax discount on the lower closing price of our stock. After tuning into your 2023 episode, Your Guide to Stock Options, I decided to start contributing 2% of my salary. I took your and your expert guests, James and Scott’s advice to heart and sold the shares ASAP after purchase, but only when I saw a gain, and then I rolled the proceeds into my Roth IRA where I scooped up some VOO and VGT. My goal was to make the IRA max feel a little less painful just to fund little ESPP-to-ETF pipeline.

“Fast forward to this year, things got really interesting. My company was acquired by a VC backed firm. The stock was bought out at $124.35 cents a share in late April, 2025. My contributions, however, purchased stock based on the January 2nd, 2025 closing price of $100.48, but at a discounted cost of $85.41 cents a share. That’s a pre-tax gain of over 45%. Needless to say, this is not the norm, but it was a very fun and profitable realization when the acquisition is finalized. I’ve already cashed out and moved everything to my 2025 Roth IRA and just in time with current tariff concerns, creating a discounted stock market. Thanks for all the knowledge and laughs. Your show gave me the confidence to make the most of this opportunity.”

Katie:

Hell yeah. Okay, good for you, Isabella. That’s awesome. Yeah, this is slightly different from the ESOP conversation. Like you said, ESPPs are a different sort of program, but I do think it highlights kind of how you can get creative with compensating workers and the role that equity can play. We have options here.

Henah:

Another critique that came in from someone named LAC582 wrote, “Good discussion, but I would’ve liked to hear Katie press Stavros more on why he thinks the system has grown less fair for employees in terms of pensions, wages versus assets, et cetera. I’d also like to have heard more about profit sharing and other models where employees don’t have to wait until their company is sold to benefit from their state.”

Katie:

I feel like, gosh, what is that startup? There’s some startup that does a really interesting profit sharing plan. I’m going to look into that because I do think profit sharing is an interesting way where you actually aren’t really challenging the ownership structure necessarily, but people are still benefiting. They’re still being paid cash for the work that they’re doing. They’re still benefiting. They have upside, and I think that’s really interesting.

I also think it’s totally fair that he or she, I don’t know, LAC582, they/them, but I think it’s totally fair that you wish I would’ve pushed back more because in retrospect, I also wish that I would’ve asked him to unpack that more as well. I feel like what he probably would’ve said based on what he did say is that it’s because capital has just become more productive faster because of technology, and therefore assets are going up in price more quickly.

But I think that there’s also, you almost can’t have that conversation without talking about a couple major things. One is the 1982, I believe, legalization of stock buybacks and expanding, making those easier to do for one thing. I think the fact that the way the 2008 great financial crisis and pandemic were handled by the government and how a lot of the money that was injected into the system to prevent collapse ended up just flowing into assets. I think that that’s a major part of this too. I actually would’ve loved to hear Pete’s thoughts on when he was like, oh, wages are slowing down. Oh, workers can’t buy assets anymore. And why is that?

Henah:

What’s the opposite of Pandora’s box? Just like a present?

Katie:

Yeah.

Henah:

A little gift. I just feel like getting us to talk about ESOPs is the present of opening up all these other models that are out there, ESOPs, co-ops, worker, profit sharing, et cetera. Because I do think that even if he didn’t have all the answers or it’s not exactly a perfect model, it gets us moving in a direction that is a little bit more equitable.

Katie:

Totally,

Henah:

It’s clear, at least to me, that Pete’s intentions and hopes for ESOPs and employee ownership are genuine and an earnest whether or not they always play out like that.

But there were a few other shorter comments that came in. So Bea said, “Fantastic, but now do we need a ‘Good guy? PE follow up’”, which had me cackling.

Katie:

No, no. What we should do is we should get Brendan Ballou and in the same episode and be like, now kith. Talk to each other.

Henah:

I was going to say, when you tell people, you see the trope on shows where there’s two people in a fight, so you tell them that you want to talk to both of them, and they show up and it’s just the two of them.

Katie:

Yeah! So Gretchen Morgenson was the other, I think Brendan’s book and Gretchen Morgenson’s books about private equity came out almost at the same time, but Megan Greenwell, I was like, there’s another, Bad Company.

Henah:

Yeah.

Katie:

Let’s do a PE follow up with Megan Greenwell. Megan, if you’re listening, we would like to have you on to talk about bad company. I’m going to read you guys the description: “In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (banger), Greenwell tells a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the idea of the American dream itself.” Oh my gosh. And it comes out on the same day as mine. More to come.

Henah:

Okay, and then Jessica Marie going two for two with comments in today’s episode shared, “This was so fascinating. I had no idea that PE could advocate for employees like this, they’re so often presented as the opposite of that. For example, the viral Joann Fabrics video and the empathy gym is just simultaneously shocking and obvious,” and then she puts in, “CEOs who genuinely care about their employees, have a better culture, is kind of a duh, but fascinating that it was actually measured. Wow.”

Katie:

And then MisterRaunel, another regular commenter, said, “Shared with my classmate who’s all about employee ownership. Thanks!” No, thank you. Thank you for sharing.

Henah:

And then finally, some rapid fire. So one note from Kate S said, “I needed this today.” And then MKSNeed, which I just realized this username might actually be Money with Katie Show Need, which is very kind, but I’m presuming so maybe not. It could just be their initials. So they wrote, “Okay, Henah with the ad read!” Which made me both laugh and smile. So I just want to say if you heard that ad read did not immediately skip over, I appreciate you. So ad reads could be my new gig if this doesn’t work out.

So Katie, are you ready to move on to our final episode about baby bonuses, birth rates, and the manosphere?

Katie:

I’ve never been readier.

Henah:

Okay. So I actually want to give a little insight into the production experience for this. So I think this is worth sharing. As you all know, our episode’s release on Wednesdays, so basically Tuesday night at midnight, and as of 10:00 PM the night before, we were still finalizing this episode. It was I think 10:00 PM when I scheduled it. So Katie, you talked to Meagan on Monday night for close to two hours, and we had to pare down a lot of the episode just for sheer purpose—

Katie:

I think I cut like 45 minutes of it.

Henah:

But there was so much eye-opening and frankly new commentary in my opinion about what’s been going on lately and kind of weaving these strands together of wealth, self-esteem, and birth rates. And so I was really happy with how the final product turned out, especially because of how close we were to the wire. So how are you feeling now that it’s out in the world?

Katie:

Oh my God. I personally felt so grateful for her perspective because, and okay, I know it’s very rich for me to be the one to say this, but I was getting kind of tired of the barrage of identical responses to the baby bonus. Like, oh, you want us to have kids? Huh? Then give us X, Y, Z: childcare, healthcare, paid leave. Okay, we get it. And again, like I said, rich coming from me, but yes, that’s common sense. We know that.

But also it just felt like we were kind of skimming the surface and given what we know about global birth rates, that they’re falling everywhere, including in the places that have that. In a way I was like, I feel like there’s a deeper story here. I feel like there’s a more interesting way that we could be talking about this. And Meagan delivered. She rocked my world.

Henah:

Yeah, I was reading the transcript and I was like, oh, banger. Oh, another banger.

Katie:

She’s dumb smart, honestly.

Henah:

So Spyke commented on this episode and said, “Loved this episode. I appreciated the historical breakdown and how the patriarchal system is also harmful for men and our bank accounts. As a woman, it scares me to see the rise of misogyny and the radicalized boys online. Instead of looking towards societal pressure and oppression, they choose to blame us for their lack of opportunities and self-esteem. I cannot blame younger women for not wanting to date or have children when we aren’t creating an adapted society for families to thrive.” And relatedly, Adora wrote, “The gendered segregation of content is very scary and interesting, sad face.”

So one thing that’s really interesting to me about Spotify comments is now anyone can like other people’s comments and Spyke’s comment in particular, the one we just read, was racking up likes. And I totally see why, because I feel like it really summed up the through line here very succinctly.

Katie:

It’s like, yes, our material conditions absolutely matter here, but they might matter in a different way than we think they do. You can give these young women all those benefits tomorrow; they still are not going to get willingly knocked up by a guy who watches Andrew Tate. But I think what Meagan said was really important. We can’t demonize these young men because regardless of their personal culpability, no matter how angry we are, that this is the path they have chosen if we are interested in fixing this problem, telling them they are despicable is just going to drive them further into the manosphere.

Henah:

It’s a tricky balance. And there’s actually a comment from someone named 123LeahMarie, who added on here and said, “What a cogent exploration of our current gender dystopia, their anthropological aside about polygamous cultures being unstable shook me.”

Katie:

Same

Henah:

“Elon has 14 kids with several women while Gen Z men can’t get girlfriends. We’re in a chillingly similar position to our sister wives counterparts.”

Katie:

Dude, I think that is so smart. I think that is such a good observation.

Henah:

It’s very astute and also lots of big words. It was a very SAT response.

Katie:

Okay. And then Nancy S. wanted to push back. She said, “A topic worth exploring, but also so hetero coded. Maybe an episode about gender role orthodoxy might be, but I’m surprised this bias wasn’t named. Many LBGTQIA+ plus people or parents want to be and benefit from fertility science. What is the impact when we assume every single straight woman equals every single straight man? Do gay men measure their self-esteem or destabilize society similarly? If not, what solutions can this offer? Hope this is discussed in a Rich Girl Roundup.” Hello, Nancy. Welcome back.

Henah:

Hello.

Katie:

Yeah, I think that’s totally fair. The reason that we focused on the heterosexual dynamics is because I think that’s where all the gender chaos is right now. People who are trying to figure out what it means to be a man or be a woman. And obviously I am a heterosexual cis woman, so I do have my own innate blind spots just from my lived experience. But it does seem to me that gay men, lesbians, trans folks, other gender queer people are a little more liberated from these traditional ideals. They don’t get as hung up on the old school notions about their gender and well, Meagan is gay and married to a woman. So I did feel comfortable letting her drive, and I asked her what she thought about this. I shared this comment with her and I was like, hey, any thoughts?

And she said, “When we talk about the higher earner being the one who naturally stays in the workforce and how that’s mostly men because of the gender pay gap for same sex couples, it’s much the same because it is largely a function of income discrepancies, not just ideas about gender. There were probably some places that an acknowledgement of same-sex relationships could have helped elucidate the issues even further. I just didn’t think to do that because I consider myself a curious and open-minded explorer in a strange land.” And then in parentheses, she wrote “gay”. So thanks Meagan. I love you.

Henah:

Fair. So piggybacking off of that, someone who will call G emailed us to talk about their experience with the costs and quality of care, and they said, “My kid is now six months old. We have to pull him from his existing well-rated daycare because it turns out that daycares are actually designed around keeping your child alive while you’re at work. They don’t follow normal standards of care for him by feeding him on cue. They’re constantly over ratio. The state ratio is four to one, but they’re regularly five to one when I’m dropping him off in the morning, and they won’t hold him to feed him his bottle, expect him to figure it out himself in a container. This daycare is a top-rated daycare that costs $1,920 a month for infant care.

“I’m nonbinary and the birthing parent and my spouse is non-binary. I’m a UX designer at a Fortune 500 bank. My spouse works for a tech nonprofit. We make really good money, $280,000 combined a year, but I’m quitting next year to either go back to school or get a new job abroad, likely to never make this amount of money again. I’m regularly faced with a complicated decision of where to send my kid to daycare, given that often these centers are too big and operate on thin operational margins that often impact your child’s wellbeing. And the small ones at home are often facing similar staffing issues. We can of course afford the fancy daycare that’s over $3,000 a month. We interviewed a nanny for 25 to 28 hours a week to be at home, and we’re trying out both this week, but I’m saying this because we don’t have the traditional gender dynamics around care.

“We both transitioned into tech in 2020 so that we can have healthcare, but we hate it here. My partner, thankfully, has EU citizenship. So we have the luxury of potential stability in lower paying careers in another country, but it means starting over in our nearly mid-thirties. Care in the US is not only unaffordable for the majority of people, it’s also barely care. It’s, frankly, supervision. I would argue that is a factor for why a lot of well-paid, highly educated families end up staying at home after having kids. This is the other part that I wish my liberal friends understood. I sure as hell did not know how. It’s actually really hard to find any daycare that cares for babies well that are under 18 months old and you end up stuck. We can afford to move to nicer daycare, but most people can’t. Universal childcare isn’t going to be enough, in my opinion, unless it establishes standards of care and pays people enough for the job of care work so that it becomes attractive to more people.”

Katie:

So I just thought that was a really fascinating perspective worth including, which is actually tangentially related to another piece of feedback that we got around kind of the practicalities of this.

Henah:

Shifting gears a little bit, Pringleyum, hey, how you doing? Haven’t heard from you in a couple episodes. Wanted us to address—

Katie:

Where have you been?

Henah:

They wanted us to address the Scandinavia of it all. So they brought in a topic—

Katie:

I feel like I addressed the Scandinavia of it all way too much. I almost didn’t want to talk about Norway in that episode. I was like, people already be like, we get it. Shut the fuck up. We know, Norway.

Henah:

I also was like “Katie, girl, Norway again.” But they brought up this topic that we also explored recently, which was Sovereign Wealth Fund. So they wrote, “If we’re going to talk about Norway’s amazing social programs, you also need to mention how they’re able to provide them. It’s through their $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund, largest in the world for a population of 5.5 million, aka $300,000 per person. I’m all for subsidized childcare and paid parental leave, but it’s going to have to come from taxation (hard and unpopular). Whereas in Norway, it comes from their fat oil reserves (easy).”

Katie:

I mean, fair. I would say our GDP per capita is still pretty comparable. Our economy is producing a similar amount of wealth per person. I do think it would take a lot of education, for example, like Keds saying, okay, well for the cost of the tax cuts that they’re trying to pass right now, you can get universal childcare nine times over. The money is there. We are just spending on other things.

 The other thing that I feel like is worth saying, and it’s to me in my head related to the AI conversation, we’re going to get to the point where we don’t have a choice. I think that that’s something people really don’t understand about this. Not that PringleYum—love ya, where you been. Not that you don’t understand this—but I think in general, when people are like, well, how are we going to pay for it? Well, well, how is that going to work? I’m like, dude, I don’t know. But we are not going to have an option after a while. I think that that’s what I really wanted the be conversation to convey is this accelerating breakdown of society, of family life, of people’s economic conditions. This can’t go on this forever. At some point, we are going to have to start changing the way that we’re running things. To me, it’s more of like a when, not an if, and so happy to talk about the how, but the money’s there.

Henah:

She said, let’s get this revolution started, baby.

Katie:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t think we’re going to have a choice. I think some of this stuff is going to have to change or you are going to witness a destabilization of society. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I think we’re pretty clearly on the path there. So ending on a high note, just a little optimist economist for you. I’m like, well, society’s breaking down, so figure it out.

On a lighter note, we’ll finish with a little fun one, Natalie M. wrote, okay, it’s the emoji of the person shaking their head no. And it says, “Men used to build houses.” And then the emoji shaking your head yes, and it says, “Men used to head west and unionized.” I think that is so freaking funny.

Henah:

That is so good. Then we had Georgi L. who wrote in to say, “As a young-ish, Bulgarian had moved to a different country some years ago. I love the note. In the beginning I have been telling people that Bulgarian is us light in terms of its overly individualistic policies, but people usually hand wave that away or hatred towards anything but capitalism. Guess where that stems from? It’s so deep that people would gladly live paycheck to paycheck. As long as nothing remotely ‘communist’ comes near them.”

Katie:

So we now know that we have at least one listener from Bulgaria. So thank you, Georgi. Then Ivana T chimed in and said, “Love every episode. But this time around, I especially loved Meagan’s full throated appreciation for public service and the public sector. As a state employee, it was so heartening to hear someone so clearly share not only the necessity of public servants, but the capacity it has to provide high value, high impact, and high esteem building work for its employees while imperfect. I feel so fortunate to have such stability in Washington state. Thank you for the recognition.”

Okay, one little piece on this for me is that I do think that in a weird way, this kind of ties back to the earlier conversation that we were having about good jobs and like, okay, well, who’s going to create the good jobs and how are we going to pay for the good jobs? And I do think it’s maybe a little bit ironic that so much of the federal workforce is being cut at the same moment. There is this focus on bringing good jobs back to America. You could kind of argue that the federal government jobs, the state government jobs, public service, those are the good jobs. Those do have a lot of capacity and potential to be the good jobs that we say that we want.

Henah:

Oh, for sure. A hundred percent. And listen, if it’s not already clear, we have such appreciation for the public sector and the work that you all are doing, especially now. So thank you from our team as well. Finally, to end today with a very nice piece of feedback, Joaquin Z wrote and said, “This podcast and their guests are the answer I was looking for when I started looking for a voice that thoroughly and eloquently addressed the invisible implicit forces at play in American society. It started with Charlotte Howard from The Economist, and now you, Katie, have elevated the platform of conversation towards deeper thought. Thank you for all of your efforts which mustn’t be few.”

Katie:

Period. No. Now I’m Googling Charlotte Howard, the economist—

Henah:

I think she’s the Deputy Director of The Economist, I believe.

Katie:

Damn, let’s go. What a parallel. Thank you so much.

Henah:

I also saw Charlotte Howard, and I was like, I don’t know, Joaquin, if I would put them on the same parallel, but sure.

Katie:

You asshole. Lemme have this. Let me have this. I feel like I deserve this and you need to just let me have it and we’re not going to ask questions.

Henah:

Alright, I’ll give it to you.

Katie:

Well, that is all for this edition of Rich Girl Roundup. Thanks for being here. As always. In next week’s episode, we are bringing back the guest who shattered our download records. So get ready. Stay tuned for another insightful conversation. And those of you that are like, where’s the tactical—ask and you shall receive.

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