00:00:05.920A grand jury found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million in funding to Casey DeSantis's, I almost said Casey Anthony, to Casey DeSantis's charity.
00:03:50.560So, like, the essays that I have to write every week for the newsletter, the outlines that I build for these episodes, and then the book proposal that I've been working on for the last six months, all of it requires reading because none of it's just coming off the dome.
00:04:42.100And so I've read a bunch of books already trying to chase down a lot of the theories
00:04:48.680and ideas that I like find the most interesting and like the things that I've been really mulling
00:04:53.100over and finding most difficult to like reconcile, which is why I think I published that newsletter
00:04:58.720a couple weeks ago that was like, here are 18 books that I've read in the last couple months
00:05:02.400that I think are useful for both my purposes, but also that you would probably like too if you like
00:05:07.100my writing. And I'm really going to try to use my experience in the personal finance industry as the
00:05:13.820entry point to look at a lot of these questions and kind of take these themes or these subjects
00:05:20.220that on their surface seem really straightforward and that are like really part of American ideology
00:05:26.460like charity and frugality and aspiration and the middle class and privilege and hard work
00:05:33.100and personal responsibility and all these things and kind of invert them and like expose the
00:05:40.480machinery underneath those ideas. I'm almost done with the proposal. It has taken me quite a while
00:05:47.020to write, but I'm excited about the editor that I'm working with, like the outside editor. You
00:05:53.700get an editor when you sell a book at the publisher, but I've been working with somebody
00:05:57.220outside of a publisher as well. A developmental editor. Yeah, a developmental editor that I'm
00:06:02.020really excited about because she has worked on basically my favorite essay collection of all
00:06:07.020time. I have high hopes for it, but it definitely feels scary because it's kind of a more permanent
00:06:13.640or like public shift from how my career started and what I'm kind of doing now. And it feels
00:06:19.880intellectually very challenging, but also very much worth doing. And I'm excited about how I'm
00:06:26.780going to change in the process of writing it and to be able to spend a lot of time on one subject.
00:06:32.360because as you know, for this show and also for my newsletter, we have to move on from things so
00:06:40.100quickly. The publishing cadence dictates that you get, I mean, at most like a month to work on
00:06:47.320something, but usually it's closer to like, in the case of my newsletter, a couple of days,
00:06:51.420or in the case of an outline, like two weeks. So I'm excited to spend like two years thinking
00:06:57.260about something and just seeing where it leads me and like not really knowing what conclusions
00:07:03.880I'm going to be drawing yet. So I'm very excited about that and a little bit nervous about it too.
00:07:10.960It's kind of funny because I was going through our questions and I feel like a lot of people
00:07:13.780were asking questions for you that are in line with the shift that I have watched you make both
00:07:21.040publicly and privately. There are questions that people asked that I kind of thought privately on
00:07:25.740my own mind was like oh this is just in line with what Katie's writing about now for her book
00:07:30.040proposal without getting too into it like penguin random house do you hear that do you hear that
00:07:36.540the people want to know they care they want to read this buy my book so one of the questions
00:07:42.700one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is where you stand on fire now personally and
00:07:48.500in general as a concept? Oh, that's fun. Where do I stand on it now? Okay, so I think that the
00:07:57.160underlying thesis of FIRE, which if you aren't aware of this, stands for Financial Independence
00:08:04.040Retire Early. And it is a personal finance strategy that basically encourages you to live
00:08:10.460as frugally as possible so you can save and invest enough of your income that you can live
00:08:16.020off of your savings if you want to, or you can like take work that doesn't pay very well.
00:08:19.900The logical underpinnings of fire is you're not free if someone else owns your time.
00:08:27.780And that if you need to work for another person to survive, if you have to sell your labor and
00:08:32.960your life energy to another person to survive, you are ultimately under their control. You're
00:08:37.760not free. And I think what's so funny is that the attraction that I felt to that philosophy
00:08:43.460eight years ago is very similar to the part of me that feels very compelled by Marxist theory
00:08:51.060and like the idea that Marx was ultimately arguing that capitalism creates this state
00:08:58.060of unfreedom because someone else owns your labor and I just think there's like an ironic
00:09:03.020similarity there that kind of explains why I could simultaneously feel attracted to both of those
00:09:08.380things. But I mean, fire is essentially about trying to escape capitalism.
00:09:12.580Right. By using capitalism. Yeah, it does make sense.
00:09:15.620You're using capitalism in the sense that you're investing in capital markets,
00:09:19.300but you're like, you're almost trying to like, what is the fungus in The Last of Us? You're
00:09:26.340trying to like cordyceps bug capitalism for your own purposes. And I think fire is attractive to
00:09:33.360me in the sense that it's like one of the only financial philosophies that attempts to define
00:09:38.380what enough is. Like really no other personal finance way of thinking will put an upper limit
00:09:44.800on like what you should be saving and investing. Everything else is just kind of like endless
00:09:49.300accumulation. Fire at least will say, this is your number. Like once you hit this, you're good.
00:09:54.520But I think the issue is that that number is always going to be proportional to what you spend.
00:10:00.260So if you opt to live a very luxurious life, that FIRE number is going to be huge. And theoretically, you could spend, I don't know, $30,000 a month and then be like, okay, well, I'm rich and my FIRE number is $10 million or whatever. And it's like, well, should anyone really have $10 million? I don't know.
00:10:18.020So it's not without its flaws, but I guess all that's to say, I don't live a particularly frugal life. Like, I can calculate my FIRE number based on our family spending, but we haven't hit it yet. We don't have kids yet. So, like, our spending is going to change when we have children. And, like, I guess my approach so far has just been giving money along the way to, like, hitting that number instead of waiting until I hit it and then being like, anything over that I'm going to give away. I don't know.
00:10:44.000Well, you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't know shit about shit with money. But I also feel like one of the downsides of something like FIRE is that, yes, it is encouraging you to map out a number where you can opt out in. But it's also like inviting you into a mindset in a community where obsessing over money becomes like secondhand.0.94
00:11:04.820It's like, yeah, you can figure out how to do all this math and then you can get off the ride. But it's like, but then you probably don't want to get off the ride because it's literally like a video game or something to want to save more and more and more.
00:11:14.500Yeah, that is such an astute point. And I think that if you actually follow the FIRE methodology or you're in those communities, like people do become obsessed with money in like a very intense way. And it's kind of like a known thing of one more year syndrome where like, yeah, it's very hard to get off the ride. It's hard to put it in reverse. And it's not to say that some people don't do that. But like, I think you have to take that issue seriously.
00:11:38.980And I think what I've really been thinking about lately and what I find most interesting is like, what would it look like to build a world where you did not have to amass millions of dollars to like have a secure retirement?
00:11:51.580the fire world is serviceable for the world we have now and i think insofar as it encourages
00:11:58.860people to sort of reject consumerism and like mindless consumerism and to think really hard
00:12:05.320about what they're spending money on and what they're consuming i think that that's like a net
00:12:09.520positive within the broader american culture but it is very focused on like the individual it's
00:12:15.980very focused on like what can I personally do to secure my future and I think ultimately a lot of
00:12:22.000the sense of control that it gives you is kind of a mirage to a certain degree like like it's very
00:12:28.200easy to come up with reasons for scarcity yep if you're asking your money to make you feel a certain
00:12:33.260way I think you are setting yourself up for failure and that's easier said than done for sure
00:12:38.540but I mean I think that the scary truth of it is that there is so much of it that's still just
00:12:45.180completely out of your control like if the market crashes for a prolonged period of time right before
00:12:50.200you retire it like almost doesn't matter what you did until that point your life is affected by that
00:12:55.640and i just i think that that element of financial planning kind of goes like under discussed or
00:13:02.620underappreciated probably because it's so fucking scary that like yeah a lot of people are already
00:13:08.100so reticent to want to invest and save money and like delay gratification that if you really have
00:13:13.600a clear-eyed conversation about how little control we have
00:13:16.460and, like, how much stock market returns are dependent on
00:13:19.840essentially, like, American imperialism,
00:14:38.160But the catch-22 is, like, financial literacy is meant to benefit a group of people who really just need to be benefited by, like, policy change.
00:14:45.400And the group of people who are wealthy don't need financial literacy.
00:14:47.940I think over time I started to care a lot more about the income and wealth distribution in this country and started to see that as more of the problem.
00:14:55.220And I very clearly could recognize that financial literacy didn't change that.
00:14:59.500Because to your point, the people who are at the bottom and are really struggling, you can tell them that payday loans are bad, they still need to feed their kids. Like, okay, great, I shouldn't do this. I have to do this, right?
00:15:12.600Right. And to your point about complexity, I think that's the thing that bothers me the most. It's crazy, too, the amount of people that commented on that that were like, so what's your answer then? If it's not more education and more financial, people make mistakes all the time. I was like, dude, yeah, make a system that isn't so easy to fuck up in. Like, dare I say, the fact that it's so easy to fuck things up is intentional. That is like built in to the framework.
00:15:38.000Did people comment on your subsec post saying that?
00:15:40.260Oh, yeah. And I also got one that was like, well, you know, there's absolutely no financial literacy taught in schools. That is simply not true. As of right now, I believe 30 states require some sort of financial literacy to graduate high school, although I think based on the most recent report I've seen, it's like, I don't know, a third of them have full implementation and the others are in the process.
00:16:03.320But I wrote about this in my essay about the financial literacy crisis being manufactured.
00:16:10.520And what I meant by the word manufactured is not that people don't truly fail financial literacy tests, but that the accelerating complexity of the financial ecosystem that Americans have to deal with is intentional.
00:16:22.960It is incentivized to continue evolving beyond what you understand.
00:16:26.320understand. And so even if you teach kids in school about money, which I think the results
00:16:31.680are tenuous at best because children don't really have like the life experience to assimilate the
00:16:36.160information yet, by the time they are adults and it is relevant to them, a lot of it will be
00:16:42.640different. Buy now, pay later. That did not exist when I was a kid. The tax code has changed
00:16:49.200tremendously since I learned personal finance in high school. Things that were true in 2009 when
00:16:55.420i was learning about personal finance in school you know about how to file your taxes don't that
00:17:00.280is not true anymore same with like credit card rewards that's new as of like i don't know those
00:17:05.080have evolved a lot in the last couple of decades so i think like i don't know um by the time that
00:17:12.360kids grow up i just think that like if you're looking at what the logical core of the argument
00:17:18.520is. It's that what people need is information, and what people lack is the information. And I
00:17:26.200think in order to really believe that a lack of information is the core problem and thereby making
00:17:33.280financial literacy the solution, you have to basically ignore the information technology
00:17:38.720environment that we live in. Information has never been freer or easier to access. If information is
00:17:45.100really the thing that everything hinges on and that's what people's financial health hinges on,
00:17:49.240then you would expect people to be getting financially healthier over time as that
00:17:52.820information becomes more available to them. It's the opposite. People in the 50s and 60s and 70s
00:17:58.620had more robust financial situations and higher savings rates and, you know, less debt than
00:18:04.860Americans do now. So I don't know. I just think to examine the economic environment that people
00:18:10.600live in and that they are navigating today and the consumer culture that they live in
00:18:15.340and go, a lack of information is the core problem, it just strikes me as a very intellectually
00:18:37.820they're not they didn't just like spring up from the ground they're not divinely ordained they were
00:18:42.660built this way and like i do think our tax system is like the clearest example of that that everyone0.82
00:18:47.620can grasp because everybody has to do their taxes everybody knows it's a fucking nightmare everyone
00:18:52.380can see that it's ridiculous that you have to essentially solve a system of riddles to determine0.95
00:18:56.900how much you owe the government most other countries just tell you this is what you owe
00:19:01.560when you go check yes okay i accept and then you pay it and you're done it's not this like whole
00:19:05.720industry around taxes like it is in the U.S. So, like, yeah, sure, we could say people need
00:19:11.940to learn how to do their taxes, or we could make it something that you don't have to learn how to
00:19:16.980do in the first place. Like, those are the two options. We've been trying the former for a very
00:19:21.180long time. The savings rate has, like, never been lower. I'm like, I don't know, guys. We have more
00:19:26.280financial literacy material than ever. People have less money than ever. Do we think these things are
00:19:30.620maybe related in a way that, like, we should take a second look at? I would argue yes, but that's
00:19:35.500just me there's a chorus of people in subsac being like shut up literally you know i mean i was like
00:19:40.960that that got that found the wrong audience i will say it probably found a bunch of financial
00:19:46.100literacy uh someone responded and goes lady the national debt just hit 40 trillion dollars i'm
00:19:52.180like does the federal reserve need more financial literacy i'm like i know you're not suggesting
00:19:58.660that like monetary policy is downstream of like not having enough dave ramsey in school like give
00:20:05.440me a break okay i'm calling it now moving forward whenever we want to call someone out i'm gonna go0.98
00:20:10.540lady lady not your lady bitch okay katie we were supposed to do strikeouts on this doc as we go but0.99
00:20:18.500i don't know how to do that anymore and i've noticed that as my pregnancy progresses i um0.99
00:20:23.160increasingly have like a boomer relationship with tech so just okay don't worry about too much
00:20:30.120All right, I will handle that then. Thanks for letting me know. Caroline says through heavy breaths. Okay, on that note, Caro, how are you thinking about motherhood? And then in parentheses, as experience versus institution in your own life? What do you want to do differently or not? Is it even possible to plan it out?
00:20:49.660Um, no, it's not, not possible to plan it out. So much of this, this journey, I feel like I'm
00:20:58.260talking on The Bachelor, my journey, so much of my journey, it's been so interesting because like
00:21:05.920my pregnancy has been, has been the lowest priority consistently for the last year. And
00:21:12.480even moving forward, I find myself figuring out how I'm going to be a mother in between the spaces
00:21:18.940of my career, which is a pretty weird feeling. And I don't say that like cynically, it's just
00:21:24.260that that is practically what's happening. And a really easy example I would give is that
00:21:27.740I am going to be doing international touring next year and there will be a lot of travel
00:21:34.040and Riley is going to help me with the baby. The baby is going to be coming with us. And that was
00:21:39.620a decision that we kind of made as a family for a number of reasons. I mean, obviously for my
00:21:44.360writing career, but also because of material financial reasons for trying to create stability
00:21:49.200in our lives, all of these kinds of things. And it's been really humbling to already experience
00:21:55.760all of the ways in which nothing ever perfectly fits. So I think I am trying to be very, very
00:22:02.340patient with myself. I think I want to extend a lot of patience towards Riley because like his,
00:22:09.280his experience as a father has been kind of decided for him in a lot of ways because of
00:22:13.300how yesteryear has gone he has been incredibly supportive in that way but like I am aware that
00:22:17.940we are just doing things as a family that are going to be very different than how a lot of
00:22:21.940people have a baby but I think my only real goal is like technologically related like I have no
00:22:30.500interest in having my child on social media to learn how to do strikethrough text again
00:23:51.000Katie, how are you feeling about my maternity leave?
00:23:53.180That was a question a lot of people had.
00:23:54.580feeling I'm feeling nervous that you're gonna forget about me I already forget about everything
00:24:02.220all the time okay well oh but we do get to see each other in October I get to see you and meet
00:24:08.640your baby in October because we have a like a publicity thing happening then but um I'm really
00:24:16.160excited for you honestly because i do think that this is gonna be quite life-changing i'm excited
00:24:24.640to see how it changes you i'm also just like really grateful that you're gonna get a little
00:24:30.820bit of time away like not really because we're still gonna be recording and your other projects
00:24:35.860and work like doesn't really turn off and stop but i don't think unless you were like up close
00:24:41.600with it. I don't think it's possible to comprehend what having even a fraction of the scrutiny and
00:24:48.440attention that you have had this year is like and the toll that it takes on a person and just the
00:24:53.380absolute intensity of that experience while also pregnant for the first time and like trying to
00:25:00.560remain psychologically stable and healthy and in a good headspace. Imagine that you create something
00:25:07.820And it's like, you feel like it is the best thing that you have ever done. And suddenly, everybody is talking about it. And you're like, oh my gosh, yay, this is the dream. I'm like being read and discussed so widely. And then every time you look at your phone, it's like another stranger there talking about why they hate it and why they hate you. It's just got to be so alienating to go through it kind of fundamentally alone.
00:25:30.120Like, even though you have a support system, it's still your face and your work that is constantly being scrutinized. And so I just think, like, on a human level, it's a very unrelenting stream of often very personal and hurtful things to have to process, like, kind of on a daily basis.
00:25:45.240And so, I don't know, all of that to say, I am excited for you to have a time carved out at the end of this year where you are going to get to focus on as much as possible your family and, like, mothering without having as much on your plate.