The food was mediocre, the car drove like a thrift store ten-speed, and the 40,000 steps I took through quads, bookstores, and food courts resurrected my plantar fasciitis.

It was one of the best trips of my life.

This was, of course, due solely to the fact that I got to spend 12 hours per day for three straight days with a person I helped to create, now towers over me at 6’3”, and who—soon enough—will be leaving home.

Let’s be honest - these college tours, like so many modern family rituals, arose as much for mom and dad as for our rising juniors and seniors. Sure, they help us get a feel for potential campuses and “demonstrate interest” to admissions offices. But the journeys themselves are really a last-ditch chance to cling to our parental relevance and see who our students have become in the eye-blink since we held their tiny hands and walked them into pre-school.

I read a scary statistic the other day on Facebook: By the time our children leave for college, we have already spent 90-95% of the time that we will ever spend with them. Granted, it was an intentionally provocative ‘Did You Know?’ meme meant to scare the reader, like “Did you know the average human has thousands of mites living in their nostrils?”

As disgusting as I find the idea of microscopic arachnids burrowing in my boogers, I’m much more threatened by the fleeting nature of family time. If I know nothing else, I’m sure that I matter to my children. And they’re 90+% done with me? Well, screw that, I’m kidnapping my son, and we’re going to go look at some SEC football stadiums!

Bruce Feiler, author of The New York Times bestseller A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us, describes ritual as “a tool to navigate destabilizing life transitions, combat loneliness, and restore human connection.” And when it comes to the spectrum of evolved coping practices, cruising highways with your child, eating Zaxby’s drive-through three times in 72 hours, and walking willowy quads sure beats bloodletting, widow burning, or Balinese tooth filing.1

So it’s no wonder that—for those of us lucky enough to afford them—college visits have become an American rite of passage.

The best thing about the road trip with your kid is that they pretty much have to engage with you, and the trek provides ample conversational material. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, I could ask non-threatening questions, like:

• “Could you see yourself going to school there?”

• “Does Greek life sound interesting to you?”

• “What was up with that New Jersey mom’s outfit?”

From there, we’d soon be discussing more personal topics. If things got quiet for too long, I would roll down both windows, forcing him to ask, “Did you fart again?”

To which I would reply, “No comment.”

Speaking of staying quiet, I tried desperately not to opine on how much nicer the facilities are today than when I went to school, point out the absurdity of one library having two different Starbucks, or mention that my generation’s idea of dorm room decoration was storing our album collections in old plastic milk crates.

However, we did talk about how the application game has changed: grade inflation, vanishingly small admission rates, and bloated—though optional!—average SAT/ACT scores mean that, past a certain point, college admissions is an exercise in randomness.

We also discussed the incredible life experiences waiting for him. After learning of the professional soccer internships available at one sports management program, he asked with delight, “Can you imagine if I got to work for Man City or Barça? That would be amazing.”

“Absolutely!” I replied, remembering Fitzgerald’s words about youth’s felicity and encouraging him to imagine a radiant future.

The whole experience reminded me of something legendary newspaper humorist Dave Barry told me during an interview when I asked him for advice about my teenagers’ college search. He said:

“You’re going to go out and rent a car and drive all over the United States and visit 17 colleges, all of which are going to blur together into one mass college experience. And then your kid is going to pick one, and it’s going to be great.”

I think he was saying, at least partly, that we feel obligated to make these trips, lest we deprive our children. But after spending these few days with my son, I understand what Dave really meant. We’re not making these trips because we have to—we’re doing them because we get to. Campus exploration provides little more than a plausible pretext to duct-tape our kids into the passenger seat of a crappy rented SUV and force them to indulge our immense, mostly inexpressible love.

Dave also meant that, after all the pressure to find the perfect school, we have to trust that everything will be okay. I think he’s right. I know that, wherever my son ends up, he is almost certainly going to do great.

I’ll probably be okay too, but I’m already making plans for Parents Weekend.

THE END

Check out my interview with Dave Barry and my conversation with Bruce Feiler.

“It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future—flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only pre-figurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

With deep reporting and rich detail, Bill tells the story of Leon’s father’s leap to his death onto Park Avenue, his time working with junk bond king Michael Milken, Apollo’s astounding success, and how Leon made billions re-financing Twinkies.

A man of considerable ambition and intellect, Leon’s professional instincts created an $18 billion fortune. His personal instincts, on the other hand, earned him a place on the Epstein list and an extortionate Russian girlfriend. (It happens!)

Bill is a former investment banker who spent 17 years on Wall Street, co-founded news site Puck, and has written eight substantive books, six of which became New York Times bestsellers. Today, we discuss his career and writing process, his book about the Duke Lacrosse fiasco, and how that relates to what’s happening today at Cornell.

Learn more about Bill on his website and read his Puck column here.

Follow Me on TwitterX and Instagram.

What do YOU think? Comment below.

Leave a comment

Episode Notes:

• Catholic Disclaimer: I mixed up Immaculate “Conception” with “Assumption.” I ask your forgiveness.

• The other book I mentioned about the banana industry is called The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King. It’s a pretty fascinating story, actually.

• In our discussion of the Duke Lacrosse case, Bill mentions Roy Cooper who was the state attorney who assumed the case after Mike Nifong recused himself. This week, Roy won the election to be the U.S. Senator from the North Carolina.

Timestamps

00:00:00 Trailer

00:00:57 Intro

00:02:01 Why my grandfather changed our name from Cohen to Cohan

00:05:19 Andover and rooming near John F. Kennedy Jr.

00:07:14 The teacher who said I’d never be a writer

00:11:10 Hired on Wall Street a month before the 1987 crash

00:15:19 Rosebud and the fall of Eli Black

00:22:03 Who Leon Black is and what Apollo became

00:25:16 Mike Milken and the invention of junk bonds

00:28:34 How Leon Black bought Twinkies out of bankruptcy

00:32:18 The Russian girlfriend and the $100 million extortion demand

00:37:39 Why Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million

00:43:10 $130 million for The Scream

00:48:23 What everybody gets wrong about the Duke lacrosse case

01:00:23 Outro

No, I’m not talking about a toddler who won’t eat his broccoli or a comedy club manager who “knows funny.” I mean real terrorists - the kind who kidnap children and plant bombs at marathons.

Well, that’s what my most recent guest did for a living.

Kyle Vowinkel is a West Point graduate and retired FBI executive who mediated the peaceful surrender of the Boston Marathon bomber, helped to save a 5-year-old boy who was abducted by a crazy man in an underground bunker in Alabama, and participated in over 100 high-risk missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of only five agents ever to serve on both the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team and Crisis Negotiation Unit, Kyle received the FBI Director’s Medal of Excellence, FBI Director’s Award for Outstanding Counterintelligence Investigation, and the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Heroism, the Department of Justice’s highest award for valor.

In other words, though he would never put it this way and he doesn’t come across with this energy at all, Kyle is a law enforcement badass who served his country in ways you and I will never fully appreciate.

His new book, Shaping Chaos, is the story of his incredible career, the grueling training he endured to prepare for it, and the impact that service had on his family.

It also reminds us of the sacred duty of law enforcement and the critical importance of the Department of Justice’s political independence.

Get Kyle’s book here.

Leave a comment

We cover congestion pricing, sanctuary cities, the importance of supporting Israel, the rise of anti-Semitism in New York, the best gluten-free bagel in the city, and why she believes a Republican can finally win in Manhattan.

Follow Caroline on her website and Instagram.

Follow Me on Instagram and X (Twitter).

Timestamps:

• 00:00:00 Trailer

• 00:01:01 Intro

• 00:02:17 Mapping New York’s 12th District

• 00:04:29 How the DSA hijacked the Democratic Party

• 00:07:02 Congestion pricing, or how to tax the problem you created

• 00:11:18 A second Cold War in our own backyard

• 00:16:39 Running as a Republican in an 80% Democratic district

• 00:19:04 No federal income tax up to $150,000

• 00:21:37 Why supporting Israel matters to America

• 00:24:19 Is Zohran Mamdani an anti-Semite

• 00:28:43 Sanctuary cities and the Bronx ICE shooting

• 00:32:22 The best gluten free bagel in Manhattan

• 00:34:19 The biggest political realignment since FDR

• 00:37:20 Outro

Naturally, people were furious.

Social media lit up with accusations of vote-buying and speculation that he wouldn’t come through. One particularly passionate person said they would rather suffer “slow starvation and limb amputations than accept a share of anything from your bitch ass.”

(For the record, my bitch ass will happily accept that guy’s share.)

On the Pivot podcast, Scott Galloway minimized the gesture, saying Musk is “giving away crumbs,” while co-host Kara Swisher suggested daddy Elon should pay more taxes.

I find it fascinating how many people know exactly what someone else should do with their wealth. Whether they’re smart—like Galloway and Swisher—or not, it just rings disingenuous and naive, e.g., “I live in my mom’s basement while you build flying f’ing cars, but here’s some financial advice...”

Read more

Let me ask you a question: Can you allow your investments to ride without losing sleep or checking your portfolio every eleven minutes?

I have trouble with this. Even though I feel really good about what I own, I still peek at my balances a couple of times a day—just to make sure the world isn’t exploding.

In The Awesome Portfolio, Jared explains why owning one fund with 500 different stocks doesn’t necessarily make you diversified or safe from violent market fluctuations. He argues that a portfolio balanced across five different asset classes—equities, bonds, commodities (like gold), real estate, and cash—will produce very good returns and drastically reduce volatility.

Share

While nothing I say in this discussion should be considered professional financial advice, I think his idea is interesting and worth your consideration.

We also talk about trouble in the bond market, political risk, financial advisor incentives, and investor psychology, including how our emotions can wreck even the smartest investment plan.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Hey look - I had a piece in ‘The Hill’ today:

Nikole Hannah Jones Just Ran Head-first Into the Great Dumbing Down

ATLANTA FOLKS - come see me at the new Whiplash Comedy Club in Ponce City Market on 10/14.

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video with Jared!

What we saw from the outside: a formidable 6’6”, 220 lb athlete who had just signed a 10-year, $23 million contract. (about $85 million in today’s money)

What was happening on the inside: self-doubt, anxiety, and the stress of a boss intentionally sabotaging him in the press and among his peers.

In 1980, Dave Winfield signed the biggest contract in baseball history with the New York Yankees, who had won two of the previous four World Series. From the minute he arrived in the Bronx, Dave became an object of derision to George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ mercurial owner.

For no apparent reason, Steinbrenner insulted him in public, smeared him in private, and reneged on multiple contract obligations. He seemed to make the star player’s life miserable just because he could.

It seems counter-intuitive that a rich and famous athlete at the height of his physical and commercial prowess—someone who appeared to have everything—would describe those years as “the worst period of my life.”

And yet, that’s exactly the story Dave tells in his new memoir Touching All the Bases: A Story of Power, Purpose, and Surviving the Bronx and what he told me on this week’s episode of Reasonably Happy.

The 12-time All-Star, seven-time Gold Glove winner, and World Series champion lays out his side of the decade-long feud with Steinbrenner, and how he kept making All-Star teams despite the toxic work environment. We cover his getting drafted by three professional sports leagues, Hank Aaron’s warning about playing in Atlanta, signing the first 10-year contract in sports, finally getting his World Series ring in 1992, and, of course, the Canadian seagull that got him arrested.

Dave also shares what it was like to finally make peace with Steinbrenner before The Boss’s death in 2010.

Follow Dave:
Instagram: @davewinfieldhof
X: @DaveWinfieldHOF


Follow Me:
Instagram: @Paul-Ollinger
X: @Paul-Ollinger

Timestamps
00:00:00 Trailer
00:00:50 Intro
00:01:56 Pro baseball in 1973, when nobody played to get rich
00:04:40 His first bank went bankrupt, his second bank burned down
00:06:25 Growing up in Saint Paul
00:07:40 Drafted by the NFL without playing a down of college football
00:11:37 The yellow legal pad and studying the veterans
00:14:51 50 years of the Winfield Foundation
00:17:31 Free agency and the first 10-year contract in sports
00:20:05 Dinner with Ted Turner and Hank Aaron’s warning
00:23:13 Steinbrenner throws his lunch across the boardroom
00:26:22 “If you don’t like it, sue me”
00:29:58 How he kept performing through a toxic workplace
00:31:46 “The worst 15 years of my life”
00:33:19 Honorary doctorate in Syracuse, first pitch in the Bronx
00:35:09 The seagull incident in Toronto
00:37:39 Winning the 1992 World Series with the Blue Jays
00:39:25 Lightning round: toughest pitcher, best teammate, worst fans
00:42:53 Making peace with George Steinbrenner
00:46:22 Outro

There’s an AI video making the rounds this week on X, aka Twitter. It shows an '80s-era holiday-bedazzled mall, with schmaltzy Christmas music playing, and families strolling about, holding hands, presumably talking about who they love more - Santa Claus or Ronald Reagan.

The VHS timestamp evokes a supposedly simpler time, in an analog shopping world, filled with now dead or near-dead retail concepts like B. Dalton Books, Orange Julius, Sears, and JCPenney. The caption laments the decline of mall culture: “Amazon and private equity killed so much of American life.”

Reading this, I could’ve sworn I heard a record scratch and a voiceover ask, “Wait, what did she say?”

I’m not familiar with the person (or bot) behind the account, but with almost 10 million views and 98,000 likes, her idea has traction. It echoes a line of populist thinking I hear or read about constantly: Big, evil money murdered something good - in this case, the cultural touchstones of your childhood.

This assignment of blame might feel comforting, but it’s completely wrong. You killed the mall. I killed the mall. We all killed the mall, and I’d do it again, because when you clear your mind of all the nostalgic bullshit, you can see that the mall had issues.

Read more

Vitaliy Katsenelson grew up in the Soviet Union - in Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle. Today, he is the CEO & Chief Investment Officer of IMA (Investment Management Associates).

An award-winning writer, Vitaliy has authored two books on investing and the widely acclaimed Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life, which has been translated into multiple languages. Forbes has called him “The New Benjamin Graham,” and his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Barron’s, and The Wall Street Journal. His newsletter reaches a global audience of over 100k subscribers.

In this Substack live-streamed conversation from last week, Vitaliy and I discuss:

• Daily life up under a communist government

• The rise in anti-Semitism from both the Right and the Left

• Why he is so disturbed by President Trump’s profiting off of market-moving social media posts

Vitaliy lives in Denver with his wife and three children. In his free time, he enjoys reading, listening to classical music, playing chess, and writing about the intersections of investing and life.

Subscribe to Vitaliy’s Substack here or his newsletter here.

Subscribe to Paul’s Substack here.

Phil Gramm is an economist who served 24 years in Congress, including three terms as a United States senator from Texas and as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He later spent years in investment banking and now serves as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also the co-author of the book The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism, which seems particularly well-timed for our current moment.

I was thrilled to talk to Senator Gramm about his career, the misunderstood causes of the Great Depression and the 2008 Financial Crisis, and how alleged rates of inequality and poverty plummet when you factor in taxes on the affluent and the trillions in entitlements received by low-income households.

Senator Gramm entered Congress in 1979 during the Carter administration and served in the Senate through 2002, under President George W. Bush. Since he was a primary co-author of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, I was most interested to hear his take on the federal government’s $40 trillion in debt. Spoiler alert: it won’t end well!

I hope you enjoy this chat — I sure did.

“Tell me more,” says the drooling Vice President of Scripted Series.

The idea man continues, “Based on Less Than Zero’s even hornier origin story, it features tons of sex, cocaine, and Cindy Crawford’s daughter swimming in her lingerie. Bret Easton Ellis wrote the source material, and Ryan Murphy adapted it for TV.”

The brief pitch leaves the network rep with only one question: “Where do I send the check?”

The show is The Shards on FX, or maybe it’s from Hulu - I can’t really tell. Anyway, it’s about a serial killer who stalks the wealthy, gorgeous, immensely orgasmed teenagers of 1981 Los Angeles. It is crass, overly earnest nostalgia wrapped in the transparent absurdity of a serial-killer thriller.

I cannot stop watching it.

(Spoiler alert: the following paragraphs divulge important plot points.)

The spectacularly attractive cast features Evan Rachel Wood as a clichéd drunk, washed-up actress, competing for attention with her teenage daughter, Debbie. Played by Hayes Warner, Debbie is the quintessential 80s beauty - a feather-banged Barbie with a perfect body and well-earned daddy issues.

Her father, a juicy-permed film producer, slithers around Hollywood in Armani and his convertible Jaguar, seducing Debbie’s budding novelist boyfriend Bret with promises to acquire the young man’s screenplay (what would become Less Than Zero).

Meanwhile Debbie—follow me here—ends up in the sack with another bisexual classmate, Ryan. This guy not only has a huge schlong, but is Bret’s former lover, and recently banged Debbie’s mom on the set of a VHS porn production.

In this way and many more, The Shards scrapes the bottom of the television barrel, dispensing utterly deplorable, dehumanizing filth. It is putrid, vapid smut of the lowest order.

And I cannot wait to see the next episode.

Watching The Shards is a funny experience. I know Ellis and Murphy are manipulating me with their beautifully curated period piece. The pitch-perfect soundtrack, vintage Porsches and Mercedes, and designer wardrobes weave a tableau of the idealized ‘80s lifestyle. This is exactly the way you would have lived if you had loads of money, impeccable taste, and chronically absent parents.

You too could attend a prep school where kids smoke cigarettes, share Klonopin like Tic Tacs, and treat each other like human charcuterie boards.

The serial murders put a damper on the otherwise cheery zeitgeist, but we must endure them because, in the modern app-TV world, sex and drugs get you only so far.

These gruesome killings provide scenes where carnage and pop culture coincide in “on-the-nose,” but still glorious ways: a corpse in the parking lot of the Tower Records; hostage messages recorded on Maxell cassette tapes; a backpack with an Elvis Costello backstage pass soaked in blood. It’s that irresistible part of a Venn Diagram where kitsch and gore intersect.

Unable to turn it off, I consciously ask myself, “Why am I watching this nonsense?”

I feel the same way about another show in the “Rich White People Behaving Badly” genre, the Apple TV series Your Friends and Neighbors.

Its likewise beautiful, if older, cast features Jon Hamm, Amanda Peet, and Olivia Munn. They play out the preposterous plot line of Hamm’s newly divorced, middle-aged banker character who gets fired, then starts stealing watches, first-edition books, and rare baseball cards from his friends who, apparently, don’t know how to install Ring security cameras.

These shows aren’t different stories so much as they’re before-and-after pictures of the same appetites. But while The Shards teens come across as sophisticated beyond their years, the characters in Your Friends and Neighbors (YFAN) appear self-indulgent and childish.

The financial adviser who drives a Rolls-Royce (hint: if your wealth manager drives a $450k-car, get a new wealth manager), the man-child retired NBA star, and the psychotic billionaire, because anyone who has earned that much money must be a little bit evil, right?

Also, somebody gets murdered. Or maybe they don’t. But there’s a great deal of blood.

Both shows are reprehensible while being totally unmissable. But I hold the YFAN characters in greater contempt because watching people my age bumble around life is considerably more depressing. The teens in The Shards are shallow, but still radiate possibility. They’re using sex, beauty, drugs, and status to discover who they might become.

The adults in Your Friends and Neighbors have had their chances and screwed them up. Their promiscuity isn’t exploration - it’s a lifeline. Their drinking and using aren’t experimentation – they’re maintenance.

Maybe this is what our parents’ generation experienced from prime-time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty, i.e. the joy of watching flawed people make enormous mistakes in enormous houses. We get to envy them and judge them simultaneously—to covet their beautiful lives while reassuring ourselves that none of it would have made us happy anyway.

The Shards makes emptiness look exciting. Your Friends and Neighbors makes it look regrettable.

“My God, that was dumb,” I think after every episode.

Then immediately: “Same time next week?”

In that time, I’ve interviewed some pretty incredible people, from a superstar like LL COOL J to Peter Singer, the world’s most influential living philosopher, to dozens of amazing authors, academics, and winners of the Nobel Prize, Heisman Trophy, PGA Championship, and Olympic gold medals.

Upcoming episodes include conversations with former Texas Senator Phil Gramm and MLB Hall of Famer Dave Winfield.

Thank you for your support, interest, and for sharing this with all your friends and family!

Share

This week, I’m talking to , the guy behind the mega-popular Substack Young Money and author of a great new book called Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties.

After graduating from college and landing a finance job at UPS, Jack turned $6,000 in retirement funds into $400,000 by trading SPACs in his spare time. Then, by continuing to trade SPACS, he turned that $400k into $200k! This experience was expensive but vital.

Jack started publishing his thoughts about careers and finances on Young Money, and has built a following of over 60,000 “anxious but ambitious” readers. Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money, called him “one of the best money writers around.”

Perhaps that’s why he got a call from Penguin Random House and an eventual book deal. Like Jack himself, it’s a book of unbridled enthusiasm and optimism. It’s a trip to read about money through the eyes of a 29-year-old who’s had just enough interesting life experience but has lost zero of his youthful energy.

If you have a young adult in your life who has found her way or one who is trying to figure himself out, Young Money might be the perfect read for them. In the meantime, check out my conversation with Jack, aka, the pride of Tifton, GA.

We talk about working at UPS, billboards along I-75 (“Repent or die!”), the Allman Brothers Band, playing Call of Duty in his pajamas during COVID, Wall Street Bets, and the Wall Street Journal’s .

Stay gold!

Follow Paul on Instagram here and Twitter here.

Get Jack’s book here.

teaches economics at the University of Southern California, and is the creator and host of Econ Nerds, a project devoted to finding the economics hiding in everyday life. It’s like Freakonomics for the YouTube and Substack age.

Matt has the rare ability to take economic ideas that normally require a textbook, a slide rule, and three hits of Adderall to get your head around and turns them into entertaining stories about things like Ozempic, the lottery, OnlyFans, gentrification, and why it took humanity so damn long to put wheels on suitcases.

In other words, he can help you learn about economics without making you feel like you’re studying economics!

More importantly, Matt uses story-telling techniques to shed light on important issues where the data and the prevailing public rhetoric diverge. Examples include the true nature of inequality, what’s really happening with climate change, and the actual number of alleged police violence incidents. (HINT: it’s much lower than you might think.)

He’s using his great mind, a sense of humor and the power of economics to help spread understanding.

Follow Paul on Instagram here and Twitter here.

SUBSCRIBE TO ECON NERDS:

The Econ Nerds

The home for all Econ Nerds content.

By Matt Hill

The other day, I was doing research for an upcoming podcast interview with a 29-year-old author. I wanted to ask him about his generation’s outlook on money but wasn’t sure whether he was considered Gen Z or a Millennial.

So I opened a web browser and started to query, “How old is the oldest person in Gen Z?” But before I finished typing, Google autocompleted my search: “How old is the oldest person IN THE WORLD?”

As with so many internet rabbit holes, this one started with my hungry brain snapping at some juicy bait. I thought, “Heck yeah, I want to know that,” and hit Return. I learned so much.

As you probably could have guessed, the oldest person in the world is named “Ethel.” Ethel Caterham is 116 years old and lives—for now—in Surrey, England. Someday, humanity’s reigning longevity champion might be a “Chad” or a “Britney,” but that’s not going to be any time soon.

Currently, about half a million earthlings have reached the age of 100. While these “centenarians” comprise only .03% of the population, they consume 80% of the world’s soup and Werther’s candies.1 Who knew?

A person over 110 is known as a “Supercentenarian,” a title earned by only 1 in 1,000 centenarians. (Spoiler alert: the rest die.) At any given time, there are estimated to be 300 to 500 Super C’s on Earth, and Ethel is their Queen Bee.

Born August 21, 1909, Ethel was 20 years old when Black Friday kicked off the Great Depression, 34 on D-Day, and a spry 92 on 9/11. Can you imagine being so old that you think back nostalgically, “God, I miss being 92”?

Ethel told People magazine that her hobbies include gardening, puzzles, and visiting with friends. Shockingly, she did not mention jiu-jitsu, MMA, or parkour. There is no record of Ethel taking part in the Tide Pod Challenge.

Ethel is almost twice my age. The idea of living that long blows my mind. At 57.5, I don’t think of myself as old exactly, but I sure don’t feel young. I’ve got creaky knees, crow’s feet, and my hair is a misty mullet of a memory.

None of us knows when our time will come, but the actuarial tables give me an over/under of about another two decades. I guess I’d take that, but I’d prefer to beat the odds by a little bit. It would be nice to play golf until I’m 80, then enjoy a few years puttering around the old folks’ home, hitting the dinner buffet at 4:30, then hitting the sack at eight o’clock. I think I’d like to bring things in for a smooth landing just before hitting the big 9-0.

I have no desire to squeeze out another 26 years beyond that! If I lived to 116, my children would be 74 and 76, respectively—and I started late! My poor kids—err, my poor septuagenarian offspring—would have given up on the concept of an inheritance long before that time, if they were even still alive.

Sadly, Ethel’s husband Norman died five decades ago, and both of her children are likewise deceased. One of her daughters died in 2020 at age 82.

That’s crazy. Think of the things you can do if you live this long.

Not only can you share diapers with your 82-year-old daughter, but you could attend your 94^th college reunion! (Not that there would be anyone else there.)

You can reminisce about the good ol’ days under President Coolidge, remember when the zipper was invented, and utter phrases like “100 years ago, when I lost my virginity…”

And you get the benefit of compound interest—if Ethel saved a mere $100 per month, starting when she was 26, today that would be worth over $37 million!2

I love the occasional stories I hear about the 95-year-old who still drinks whiskey daily and smokes Marlboro Reds. I find these tales way more interesting than that goofball who wants to live forever. But that’s not Ethel. She never smoked and advocates all things in moderation, including booze.

Perhaps the most important lesson Ethel can share with is her rule to never argue. After all, who’s go the time to argue? Ironically, she does! She’s had more time to argue than anyone else in the whole world.

But she makes a good point. You’ll probably never hear the oldest person in the world tell you she spends her days either protesting about Trump while wearing a pink hat or wasting her day “owning the Libs” on Twitter.

“Never argue with anyone,” she says, summing it up. “I listen, and I do what I like.”

In other words, keep a positive mental attitude and enjoy life in moderation.

Who could argue with that?

THE END

Brad Todd is a political consultant in Washington D.C. You’ve probably seen him on CNN being smart and cordial.

Paul Ollinger is a comedian, podcaster, and writer in New York City.

We are both graduates of Rhodes College in Memphis, TN.

Check out my 2025 conversation with Brad on the Reasonably Happy podcast.

“People do not decide their futures: they decide their habits and their habits decide their future.”

– F.M. Alexander

If you want to improve, be kind to yourself. That’s the message from this week’s guest, Dr. Beth Cabrera, a positive psychologist, professor, and author of the new book Being Well: A Positive Path to a Healthier, Happier You. Beth is also an old college friend who's now the first lady of Georgia Tech.

In her new book, Beth argues that willpower and guilt are the wrong tools for lasting change (sorry, Catholic and Jewish moms). Because our brains are wired to survive, not thrive, and default to scanning for threats instead of good things, feeling good is actually the more effective fuel for building habits that stick.

We cover the chicken-and-egg question of whether happiness causes success or success causes happiness, why optimistic salespeople at MetLife outsold others by 88%, how much of optimism is genetic versus learned, the brain's negativity bias and why social rejection registers like a broken arm. (So, please don’t reject me. Please!)

Beth and I talk gratitude, hedonic adaptation, the basics of diet, sleep, exercise, and meditation, what it's actually like being the first lady of a major American university. And how the way to cheat death is to have a Purpose (capitalized intentionally).

Get Beth’s book here. See her website here.

Follow Me (Paul Ollinger) on Instagram here or on X (fka, Twitter) here.

We got pinged because our home is owned by our trusts, which are not New York entities. The good news is that, since we are legit full-time residents, we will get out of this. Still, it’s pretty scary to get this kind of unexpected invoice.

Suffice to say, it’s a wild time in New York city real estate. In addition to this new second—or third or fourth—home tax, there are a ton of policy changes in the works, including but not limited to:

• The mayor and the Rent Guidelines Board just implemented a two-to-three year rent freeze for all the city’s rent stabilized units, comprising 41% of the supply of rental housing in the city.

• Pending in the City Council is the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) that, when it passes, will impose major restrictions on a multi-family unit owners’ freedom to sell their building.

• Potential “Mansion” Tax reform could lower the threshold from $1 million to $500,000 transactions, increase rates by 40%, and switch the liability from the buyer to the seller.

In short, there’s a massive amount of uncertainty about the future, but all trends point to an increasingly hostile and expensive environment for property owners.

To try to make sense of how it works, I interviewed this week Paula Pant, founder and host of the Afford Anything podcast, a former newspaper reporter, and Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University.

Paula is a NYC-based landlord who has developed an expertise on the city’s rent stabilization system, where it came from, and how it works.

Subscribe now

Most people assume that rent stabilization exists to help poor people, but that’s not the priority. It operates more like a lottery system where random, lucky “winners” lock in below-market prices regardless of how much money they make. In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal analysis indicated that more than 86,000 rent stabilized households earn over $200,000 a year!

The system and its adjacent policies protect bad tenants, disincentivize capital investment and construction, and have led to 57,000 vacant apartments because it’s less expensive to leave them empty than to participate in the city’s rigged game.

The whole thing is wacky and totally non-obvious. I learned a ton talking to Paula and I know you will too. Check it out.

Follow Paula on Instagram here, or X (aka, Twitter) here. Get your free download: 7 Expensive Rental Property Mistakes to Avoid

Follow Me (Paul) on Instagram here, or X (aka, Twitter) here.

Get tickets to see me live in Sarasota 8/13-16 here.

Timestamps

00:00:00 Trailer
00:00:59 Intro
00:03:03 Hyper frugal in her twenties, for all the wrong reasons
00:05:31 A $27,000 down payment on an Atlanta triplex
00:08:21 Never be a landlord in New York City
00:08:33 The price to rent ratio, and how to run it on any apartment
00:14:10 Nobody has a right to 12% returns, and what a 9.9% cap would actually do
00:16:24 Rent control versus rent stabilization: 16,000 units against a million
00:20:16 If it were designed to help poor people, there would be means testing
00:23:36 True working class people are subsidizing the rich
00:24:23 How the units actually get handed out, and the friend earning over $300,000
00:30:32 The Rent Guidelines Board, the 7 to 1 freeze, and the resignation in protest
00:37:07 Check credit or verify income, but not both
00:41:21 The 2019 law and the $100,000 turnover no bank will finance
00:49:25 57,000 vacant units and the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act
00:54:22 Austin as the model, and where Paula puts her own capital
00:57:13 Analyst, not advocate. Data over dogma
00:58:36 Outro

This week, Zohran Mamdani announced that New York City will open five city-owned grocery stores beginning in 2027.

While I would normally applaud a politician keeping his campaign promise, the mayor’s plan to peddle poultry and potatoes is a dangerous distraction from far more serious problems. And it’s all part of his bigger, disturbing vision for a socialist city regime.

Government-owned grocery stores are a bad idea. For starters, they will hemorrhage cash. The initial build-out budget is $70 million, not including the cost of using city land and buildings that could otherwise generate funds for empty municipal coffers. He promises staple items at prices 30% below other retailers that survive on margins of just 2–3 percent (how’s that for “price-gouging”?). So, the stores will open tens-of-millions in the hole, then lose money on every sale. Not a great business model.

These stores will also compete with small, private businesses. Even if Crazy Z’s Mini-Marts aren’t selling prepared food, cigarettes or lottery tickets, their taxpayer-subsidized prices will penalize neighboring bodegas operated mostly by independent owners, many of whom are first generation immigrants. So much for lifting up el hombre pequeño.

The bigger issue here isn’t the stores themselves—it’s what they stand for. In his 2026 inaugural address, Mamdani boasted, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

In Mamdani’s world, every problem has the same answer: more bureaucracy.

• Wife was mean to you? Call the NYC Department of Hurt Feelings

• Shower drain clogged? Consult the Manhattan Bureau of Pipes and Hairballs

• Your brother got a cookie bigger than yours? Text 311 and enter keywords #Inequality #MeUnhappy #NotFair

Like the man said, there’s no concern too small for government.

Yes there is! Indeed, the whole reason governments evolved was to help our predecessors deal with problems that required collective action in the form of massive resources, cooperation and coordination. If you or I could staff our own police department, pave thousands of miles of roads, or maintain a sewer system, we wouldn’t need government.

But Paul, “discounted groceries” sounds so good! Yeah, so do “hangover-free alcohol” and “zero consequence sex.”

Unfortunately, these staples are anything but cheap and, most importantly, they’re a huge distraction from far more critical projects. Since time and tax dollars are finite, every hour or dollar spent trimming the crusts off subsidized PB&J’s means less work done on more important issues.

Every grocery store press conference Zohran conducts is less time fixing schools in which 43% of students fail to meet state reading and math standards. Every million dollars squandered on public cheese shops is a million less invested in the tens-of-billions of dollars in deferred maintenance of city-owned infrastructure or emergency preparedness.

Don’t think this matters? Los Angeles reservoirs ran dry just before fires reduced 10,000 homes to ashes in one of the most catastrophic disasters in U.S. history. That’s what happens when government takes its eye off the ball.

But never mind that – let’s spend $70++ million to help New Yorkers save 60 cents on Cheerios!

If the goal were about feeding poor families, there are far better ways to do that. The city could simply send $500 gift cards to the poorest 140,000 households, meeting the same objective more efficiently while supporting existing food retailers.

However, that’s not the objective. This is about the government insinuating itself into areas of life where it doesn’t belong. It’s socialism’s matriarchal creep into citizens’ everyday life, absorbing power from individuals toward the end of state control.

Taxes go up. Freedom goes down. And once government gets into in your business, good luck getting it out. It’s misguided at best and breathtakingly arrogant at worst.

We should expect much more of it in the future.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Leave a comment

• Why it's easier to buy heroin than hire a hitman,

• Iran's legal kidney market versus America's black market,

• Winners and losers of rent control in New York,

• Why I can’t get a horse meat hamburger in California, and

• What a real accounting of scarcity and trade-offs actually looks like.

  Want more great podcast episodes about prostitution and horse meat? Subscribe now ↓↓↓

Get tickets to see Paul in Sarasota, Florida here.

Follow Paul on Instagram here and on X (i.e. Twitter) here.

Rate and Review Reasonably Happy here.

Timestamps:

• 00:00:00 Trailer

• 00:01:07 Intro

• 00:03:48 What market design actually means

• 00:06:57 Markets are better at producing efficiency than equality

• 00:10:08 What makes a transaction “repugnant”

• 00:11:45 Same-sex marriage as the textbook repugnant transaction

• 00:15:45 Why it’s easy to buy drugs but nearly impossible to hire a hitman

• 00:17:32 Iran’s legal kidney market and America’s black-market problem

• 00:22:10 The case against price-gouging bans, from Sydney to snow shovels

• 00:27:07 The real winners and losers of rent control

• 00:28:12 California’s ban on horsemeat, and the loophole New York doesn’t have

• 00:35:59 How a PhD in operations research became a career in game theory

• 00:37:02 The 3 a.m. phone call that announced his Nobel Prize

• 00:40:40 The kidney transplant shortage and what it will take to fix it

• 00:41:51 Outro

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind—a New York Times #1 bestseller—Gad argues that empathy, while one of humanity’s greatest virtues, can become destructive when it’s untethered from reason and directed in ways that undermine the very people and institutions it’s meant to protect.

Whether he’s discussing evolutionary psychology, free speech, or consumer behavior, Gad has a talent for blending rigorous research with sharp wit, and for challenging conventional wisdom.

Those challenges have made him a controversial figure. Not coincidentally, the long-time professor of marketing at Montreal’s Concordia University is now a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. (Hotty Toddy!)

Today we’ll talk about the evolutionary roots of human behavior, the cultural forces re-shaping the modern West, and what it takes to think independently in an age of ideological conformity.

Follow Gad on X here.

Get tickets to Paul’s upcoming shows in San Francisco, Southhampton, and Sarasota here.

Leave a comment

Also Me: You mean the people who started Johnson & Johnson, makers of BAND-AID, hip replacements, and a thousand prescription drugs?

Me: No.

Also Me: Oh, you must mean the family behind SC Johnson, the Wisconsin-based consumer products like Ziploc and Windex?

Me: No.

Also Me: You mean like Howard Johnsons?

Me: God no, you big dummy. What are you, stuck in 1966?

Also Me: Sorry, I’m not smart. Who are you talking about and why are there so many rich families named ‘Johnson’?

Me: Well, ‘Johnson’ is one of America’s most common surnames, so it would follow that there’s a few that have crushed it. The specific family I’m referring to are the founders of financial services firm, Fidelity.

Also Me: Fidelity - they’re kind of a big deal, right? And why are you asking?

Me: I’m asking because my podcast guest this week is Justin Baer, award-winning journalist at the Wall Street Journal and author of the new book House of Fidelity: The Rise of the Johnson Dynasty and the Company that Changed American Investing. It’s going to blow you away how big they are.

Also Me: Okay, how big are they?

Me: Fidelity is one of the largest private companies in America and they administer over $18 trillion in assets—that’s greater than the GDPs of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France combined. (Or, it’s18 Elon Musks.) Last year, they earned almost $13 billion in profit, half of which goes to the family.

Also Me: You like italics a lot.

Me: I do. Anyway, in this conversation, Justin and I discuss:

• How this financial family dynasty was built

• Succession planning for a complex and massive family business

• The rise of Abigail “Abby” Johnson, Fidelity’s Chairman CEO and founder’s granddaughter, with estimated net worth of $35 billion (check out her LinkedIn profile below).

Also Me: Sounds great. I’m going to listen and check out Justin’s book here.

See Paul (aka, Me) Tell Jokes Live Near You!

• Los Angeles: The Venice West, 7/21

• New York: QED Astoria, 7/31

• San Francisco: Cobbs Comedy Club, 7/23

• Southampton, NY: Sticks and Stones Comedy Club, 8/1