Reasonably Happy with Paul Ollinger

Kids who grow up in stable, two-parent homes are less likely to live in poverty, have behavioral problems, and get in trouble at school. They’re more likely to go to college, attain stable employment, achieve higher earnings, and to get married themselves. So reports Melissa Kearney in her new book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. A professor of Economics at University of Maryland, Melissa argues that single-parenthood makes economic autonomy more difficult to attain for parent and child alike. So if we want to address inequality, we must acknowledge that family structure contributes to it, even if the conclusions run counter to the prevailing societal notion that any family structure is as good as another. Put simply, if you want a more equal society, it’s time to recognize that equality starts at home. In addition to her faculty position, Melissa is also Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group and a non-resident Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution. She holds a BA in Economics from Princeton University and a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Find the book here. Learn more about Melissa on her website here.  ⭐ Rate and Review Crazy Money here. (Seriously, do it!)⭐  ✍️ Get Paul’s writing to your Inbox here. (Seriously, do this also!) ✍️

Garrett Gunderson is a NYT best selling author and the funniest financial speaker you may or may not have heard of. The son of a Utah coal-miners, Garrett wants to teach others how to become financially independent and have a laugh along the way. He has written several money books, including Disrupting Sacred Cows, Killing Sacred Cows, and What Would Billionaires Do? among others. His new book Money Unmasked comes out next month.  We talk hair, comedy, good parenting, growing up half-Mormon, half-Catholic, frugal v. cheap, “financial dick pics," pre-2008 Arrogance, driving a Bentley, the power of laughter, the dirty word his grandmother loved, and what he learned from the death of his business partners. As you’ll hear, Garrett andI have a lot in common, so this is a bit of a sprawling and sometimes “inside baseball” conversation about money and comedy. Speaking of which, his comedy special The American Ream will be out soon.  Learn more about Garrett on his website and Pre-order the new book on Amazon here. ⭐ Rate and Review Crazy Money here. (Seriously, do it!)⭐  ✍️ Get Paul’s writing to your Inbox here. (Seriously, do this also!) ✍️

In an automated world without constraints or time to think, our spending has been super-charged. Markets, apps, and e-commerce are all designed to separate us from our money as quickly and consistently as possible. So argues Julio Vincent Gambuto in his new book, Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us in Bullshit. Paul and Julio discuss the book and their differences of opinion on how we have arrived to this subscription economy. Yes, Paul agrees, companies are intentionally removing friction from the transaction process to reduce the amount of thinking that goes into purchasing and subscribing to services. But he does not agree that this turns all of us into stooges who lack agency. Yes, Paul also agrees with Julio’s eventual conclusion that we all need to “redefine our relationship with money and how/where/when/why we spend and our needs, wants, and relationship with desire. Maybe it’s okay to not get everything we want right now.” Learn more about Julio on his website.  Thanks to our mutual friend Ethan Herschenfeld for connecting metro Julio. ⭐ Rate and Review Crazy Money here. (Seriously, do it!)⭐  ✍️ Get Paul’s writing to your Inbox here. (Seriously, do this also!) ✍️

“Parents Hire $4,000 Sorority Consultants to Help Daughters Dress and Impress During Rush” read the Wall Street Journal headline that nearly made my neck snap. As a middle-aged man whose kids aren’t quite college age, I was unaware of the #RushTok phenomenon on TikTok or the Bama Rush documentary that sparked a massive fascination with the sorority rush process at the University of Alabama. Trisha Addicks is the very rush consultant referenced in that WSJ article and featured in Bama Rush. She also happens to be my neighbor, so I invited her to come over and talk about how the whole process works. I had so many questions: Who are these families shelling out $4k for rush help? Why do they do it? How does one become a rush consultant? What’s the reason so many young women want to join sororities anyway? And how do you teach them the secret language including terms like PNMs, OOTD, the 5 B’s, and The Machine? The conversation really put the whole thing into perspective. In a world of private trainers, coaches, and tutors, a sorority consultant is just one more third party a family can hire to help their kid navigate life. And after you hear all she does for her clients, $4k might sound like a bargain. Trisha’s work and her company, It's All Greek to Me have been featured in the New York Times, the NY Post, CNN.com, NewsNation, UK Daily Mail, and many more. Follow her on Instagram here.  ⭐ Rate and Review Crazy Money here. (Seriously, do it!)⭐  ✍️ Get Paul’s writing to your Inbox here. (Seriously, do this also!) ✍️ #BamaRush #rushtok #sorority #sororityconsultant 

The new Netflix series Painkiller is based on a book my guest, Barry Meier wrote over 20 years ago. In Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic, Meier explores how Purdue Pharma’s drug OxyContin catalyzed a plague of addiction and death that has destroyed families and whole communities across the country. Between 1999 and 2020, 564,000 Americans died from an opioid overdose. In 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are available, opioids killed 68,000. That's 188 per day and each one of these deaths represents a son or daughter, a brother or sister or a mother or father, who is not coming back. Yes, people died of opioid overdoses before the 1996 launch of OxyContin, but it’s clear that Oxy and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive and deceptive marketing practices threw gasoline on a spark that has turned into a raging wildfire.  In our conversation today, Barry and I discuss the Sackler family's legacy of ethically dubious marketing of pharmaceuticals and how they made tens of billions of dollars selling OxyContin using the same techniques, like pushing free samples, while knowing that the drug was quite addictive. We discuss how and why the FDA approved claims that OxyContin was less prone to addiction in the complete absence of evidence proving that it actually was. And lastly, we discuss the extent to which OxyContin kicked off this opioid epidemic for which there is no clear way out. The Netflix series stars Matthew Broderick, Taylor Kitsch, and Uzo Aduba and is very well done. ✍️Get Paul’s Substack newsletter here.✍️ 🔥Follow Paul on Instagram. 🔥 Visit Barry’s website Buy the book here. 

Paul reads three of his latest pieces from his Substack, Money and the Meaning of Life, including: Dare to Suck: What you can learn about improvement from acting coach Lesly Kahn and author Mark Manson The Secret to Being Very, Very Rich Nobody Needs a House with 8 Toilets 🔥Paul publishes these essays (about) every other Tuesday. You should subscribe here. 🔥 🚀 Follow Paul on Instagram here. 🚀

If your new college grad son or daughter is unemployed, sleeping in their childhood bedroom, and watching All My Children every day, fear not - Laura Belgray has been there and she turned out okay. As Laura explains in her new, laugh-out-loud (LOL) funny memoir, Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You’re the F-ing Worst, sometimes it’s good to be unoccupied so that, when opportunity finally calls, you are there to answer the phone. The book, which her husband refers to as “Loser Sex in the City,” is a collection of hilarious, unfiltered stories about her life. Equal parts Nora Ephron, Tina Fey, Chuck Klosterman, and David Sedaris, Tough Titties is a celebration of failure, late bloomers, messy career paths, and lessons learned from indiscriminately blowing bartenders in the early 90s. So it’s no wonder that Kelly Ripa said of the book, “I didn’t want it to end!” Though slow out of the gates, Laura eventually found her thing and now celebrates the wonder of being paid for authentic self-expression. In this delightful chat, Laura and I discuss the primal fear of being disliked, how being a loser in 6th grade is related to her later success in adulthood. pre-Giuliani Times Square B.S. social media wellness gurus Mean Girls, Leg warmers Why Deb Fishbone is a shallow, basic bitch Getting paid to watch TV Learn more about Laura on her website.  ⭐ Rate and Review Crazy Money here. (Seriously, do it!)⭐  ✍️ Get Paul’s writing to your Inbox here. (Seriously, do this also!) ✍️ And yes, I said “Titties.” Here, I’m going to say it again: titties. Also, I know that All My Children is no longer on the air. Feel free to substitute: TikTok, Roblox, or PornHub

People magazine called Laura Wasser “the celebrity of celebrity divorce attorneys,” which makes sense considering she has—according to Wikipedia—handled cases for A+listers like Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian, Johnny Depp, Ryan Reynolds, Dr. Dre, Kevin Costner, Maria Shriver, and Jimmy Iovine, among many others. And while “celebrity divorce attorney” might conjure up images of a rapacious shark in Prada boots squeezing every dollar out of her clients’ exes, Laura preaches the gospel of divorce with dignity. Her book, It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way: How to Divorce Without Destroying Your Family or Bankrupting Yourself is a jungle guide for ending a marriage while preserving decency, values, and a couple’s wealth. As she writes, “…the more acrimony, argument, and angst, the more money your attorney makes. We profit from your inability to resolve issues.” In other words, don’t pay your lawyer $1,000/hr to determine—as famously captured in When Harry Met Sally—who gets the “stupid, wagon wheel, Roy Rogers, garage sale coffee table.” Her book is a plea to all those going through one of the most stressful human experiences possible to summon your best self and think about who you want to be when the dust settles. Laura and I talk about the fundamental language of divorce, including spousal support, child support, no-fault divorce, community property, and also the more philosophical dimensions of the process, like the concept of “fairness” and how one defines “winning.” Sincere thanks to my former Facebook colleague, Matt Jacobson for making the connection to Laura. I appreciate, Jake! Follow Laura on on Instagram and learn more about her practice here.   ✍️Subscribe to Paul’s Substack here ✍️

If you’re trying to hide assets from your spouse or soon to be ex-spouse, beware! Whether it’s Cayman Islands bank accounts, bearer bonds stashed in a safe deposit box, “hidden" real estate, or hundreds-of-thousands in Bitcoin, Nick Himonidis and his team at NGH Group will probably discover your secret stash. Nick is an attorney, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Crypto Currency Forensic Investigator, which is a fancy way of saying that he is a high-end, sophisticated, and technologically-proficient private investigator. He and his team have have uncovered many millions of dollars in undisclosed assets in single cases. In this conversation, Nick offers insights into how he and his colleagues go about their work, why you’ll probably get caught, and why—if you’re going to hire a private investigator—it’s vitally important TO YOU to hire one with a high degree of professional ethics. Learn more about Nick and NGH Group on their website.    ✍️Get Paul’s writing to your Inbox here ✍️ About Crazy Money: Unlike traditional personal finance or investing shows, Crazy Money is not about how to make a million bucks, how to beat the stock market, or how to save money by switching cable providers. It is about deciding what role we want money to play in our lives and how we can use it to achieve our best selves. Topics covered include: philosophy, happiness, contentment, meaning, dreams, purpose, success, mental health, Buddhism, Stoicism, the hedonic treadmill, morality, mid-Life Crisis, business, work, careers, authors, books, consumerism, values, capitalism, economics, investing, saving, spending, personal finance, charity, philanthropy, altruism, affluence, wealth, wealth management, culture, society, and status. Crazy Money is edited by Mike Carano. Are you really still reading?

Having experienced divorce as the child of a wealthy family, Olivia Summerhill understands the massive impact parents fighting about money can have on their children’s lives. Today, Olivia provides financial consulting for ultra-high-net worth women going through divorce. Her typical client has a household net worth of $100mm or more, so she provides advice on everything from stocks, bonds, art, planes, country club memberships and cosmetic surgery! As importantly, she helps her clients clarify their values, financial priorities, and to visualize their lives post-divorce. The host of the Divorce for Wealthy Women podcast, Olivia is both a Certified Financial Planner and a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst. In this super-fun and sometimes-scary conversation, we discuss pre-nuptial agreements, shame around money, the concept of “fairness” in a divorce, and a book that she loved and I absolutely did not! She spoke to me from Seattle where it was 5:00 a.m.! (that’s three exclamation points in one episode description! I mean four! No, wait five…). Learn more about Olivia and her services on her company’s website.   ✍️Read Paul’s Substack here ✍️ 🎤 See Paul’s upcoming shows here 🎤 About Crazy Money: Unlike traditional personal finance or investing shows, Crazy Money is not about how to make a million bucks, how to beat the stock market, or how to save money by switching cable providers. It is about deciding what role we want money to play in our lives and how we can use it to achieve our best selves. Topics covered include: philosophy, happiness, contentment, meaning, dreams, purpose, success, mental health, Buddhism, Stoicism, the hedonic treadmill, morality, mid-Life Crisis, business, work, careers, authors, books, consumerism, values, capitalism, economics, investing, saving, spending, personal finance, charity, philanthropy, altruism, affluence, wealth, wealth management, culture, society, and status. Crazy Money is edited by Mike Carano. Are you really still reading?