[Ep. 400] Fighting for a Just Economy with Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit

Ladies, I’m so excited to have you on and to talk about your incredible book.

I don’t even know where to start.

I’m so excited to have you here.

And just like you really are women, then I’m like, gosh, those are some incredible careers and incredible things that you’ve been able to accomplish amidst a system and inside a system that is very unfair.

And that’s really what the book is about.

So the first kind of question I have for you is, how did the book come about?

Especially there’s you, there’s also the third author, June Carbone.

How did you get together and be like, we need to write this book now, this is necessary?

We’ve been writing together for years.

June and Naomi have several different books already on the market, like Red Families, Blue Families, and Marriage Markets.

We teach and write about gender in the family and employment discrimination.

So we talk to each other quite a bit about gender and economics.

And we did a back of the envelope calculation that showed that women college grads were losing.

And when we started our research more than six years ago, the overall figures showed that women were ever so slowly gaining on men, wage gap was narrowing.

But it seemed like promising news, except that after the mid 1990s, the only reason women appeared to be gaining ground on men was almost entirely due to the fact that wages for blue collar men were falling dramatically during the same period.

And when we looked at the numbers for college graduates, we found that the gender gap in wages was increasing.

What really shocked us was there was enormous progress in the gender wage gap in the 60s and the 70s and then into the 80s.

And then suddenly it just plateaued.

It’s like, whoa, what happened here?

And so we wanted to find out just what happened.

And that’s what started the book, was trying to get all of that research after we said what’s going on here, that the gender wage gap is plateauing.

What do you say?

I see this a lot, especially when people talk about this topic, especially women, there’s a lot of heated discussions about, no, the data isn’t there, equality is here, we’ve shattered the glass ceiling already.

Do you see these arguments still?

And I guess this book is kind of the answer to it, but I’m curious what your kind of thoughts are on those.

We looked at recent studies, 2019 Goldman Sachs got a lot of press for a study that said if present trends continue, women would not catch up with men in terms of wages for another 100 or so years.

And by the time we finished the book, we realized if present trends continue, women are never gonna catch up.

In fact, the most recent reports bear out those predictions.

They show that the gender wage gap as a whole between men and women increased between 2019 and 2022.

We don’t want to paint a completely bleak picture here.

It is true that the number of, in the US., number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 has been increasing dramatically.

And that number is now at a whopping 10%.

So even though there’s been an increase, it’s a very, very slow increase, and it’s still one out of every 10.

It’s also, you mentioned the glass ceiling.

We hear about the glass ceiling, but, and of course, that’s one of the, that is one of the stories that we can tell, but it’s even before you hit that glass ceiling, even before you get to the top, there are what the McKinsey Lean In Report finds, there are broken runs.

If you look at women and men maybe might start in entry level at around the same rate, and then if you keep looking at what happens at the ones who ultimately get promoted, the number of women and particularly the number of black women who are promoted compared to the number of white men falls dramatically.

So it is, and I like what the McKinsey Report says, I like, it’s a broken run.

It’s not just a glass ceiling.

It’s what happens before you get to the top.

That’s where women are weeded out.

And I know one thing that you talk about is the, it’s not a women issue, it’s a system issue.

And that’s definitely something that I’ve always thought, especially just my personal experience.

It’s like, hmm, I’m doing all the right things.

I’m just not getting the results that I was promised.

That’s so weird.

And you use the term winner takes all systems.

You want to kind of explain what that means.

I thought it was such a great term to really encapsulate what you were trying to say.

We use the term winner take all economy to describe a critical shift in the new economy as the ability of those who are at the top to take a much larger share of institutional resources for themselves.

The winner take all era starts with the increase in CEO compensation.

It rose a whopping 514% between 1990 and 2020.

In the 1950s, 1960s, the ratio of CEO to worker pay, it was about 20 to one.

Today, it is a mind blowing 399 to one.

Successful CEOs in turn began to reward their top lieutenants and managers and key employees with bonuses and stock options.

It could make the people who succeeded quite wealthy.

The bonuses are typically tied to short term reductionist metrics like sales or earnings or the production of Teslas.

They began to change corporate cultures and the change in corporate culture is that in workplaces where there are increased rewards for people at the top, those are the same workplaces that tend to pit employees against each other.

They have zero sum games with actually negative sum consequences in which typically people are competing for dominance by showing no weakness, by displaying physical endurance and strength and engaging in cut throat competition.

And those practices, practices like those are linked to increasing gender disparities.

Naomi, do you have any kind of anything to add to that or?

No, I mean, as Nancy said, we’re using the term WTA economy, not in the conventional sense, but to describe the critical shift in a new economy as the ability of those at the top to take a much larger share of institutional resources.

Nancy mentioned the statistic of what the CEO to average worker pay has done, right?

It’s ballooned over the past half century.

And so that’s what’s different.

I mean, you asked us how this started, started trying to figure out why the gender wage gap has plateaued.

And what we found is that the reason it’s not that it’s, it’s sexism is still there, but in addition to that, there’s also this whole WTA economy that measures employees against each other.

And I feel like, especially with new technology and even working from home, I wonder if that’s even more now than ever has been.

I mean, keystrokes are being monitored.

Everything is being monitored, so you have more data.

And yeah, it’s not uncommon.

I just saw, it was so terrible.

I saw this one Instagram reel today of a woman in her car just explaining that she had her workplace review and she was penalized for taking paid time off.

She had sick days and she was allowed to take them, but she was given a warning for basically being like, you’re not committed to the company because she had to take care of her kids that were sick at home and one day she was sick.

Whereas a man could maybe rely on somebody else to do that and could show up at work and look more committed.

And there’s all these systems in place that penalize, usually the person who’s not the primary parent or what have you.

Right, and you’re absolutely right.

That workplaces that are like these care very little about supporting families or about employee wellbeing.

And that means that both male and female employees will experience substantial burnout, high rates of turnover.

And women, much more so than men, have traditionally been accorded greater share of family responsibilities at home.

And that makes it incredibly difficult to juggle.

And there’s still an expectation that women will be the caretakers.

And so when, I mean, there are studies of companies where they kind of wonder what happens to women after they have children.

And it’s not that women are opting out of the workplace.

It’s that when they come back, they aren’t being given the same assignments because there’s an assumption that they will be less dedicated.

And so there are attitudes, much as we think we’ve all triumphed over these attitudes, we all have them.

Yes, women should be, they should be the ones, women should be the ones at home.

And yet, on the other hand, when women are the ones at home, they are penalized.

I have a good friend who was the first man at his law firm to take parental leave.

And he was actually warned, you know, you shouldn’t do this.

It’s not a good idea.

It’ll affect your promotion chances.

And actually, I think it was so unusual.

I think it helped him.

And he ultimately did make partner, but it was unusual.

It was so remarked upon.

Versus if a woman had done that, nobody would have had it in their eye.

Well, I know there’s a data that I’ve seen too, that when men do show, oh, I’m also a caregiver, a father, I’m very caring, there’s like that softer side, they’re actually rewarded.

Women are penalized, men are rewarded.

Married men actually get a wage premium, right?

So if you look at the gender wage gap, married men are getting a lot more money.

Now, you talk about in the book, and you mentioned this earlier that we as two genders, we usually start on the same playing field, men and women.

And then as we go up kind of the corporate ladder, so to speak, that’s where things kind of start to shift.

Now, I think a lot of what we’ve seen is, oh, the shift is because women start to have families and opt out or what have you.

But that’s not the full story anymore.

I think there’s more data to show that that’s not the full story.

Sometimes it is, like you said, they realize they’re in the system where they just can’t win.

And then, I mean, that’s definitely, part of the reasons I left certain jobs is because I think if I stay longer, I’m not going to get any further.

And so the only way to go further is maybe look elsewhere.

Do you want to kind of speak to, what are some of those reasons that women are leaving the workforce, either to stay at home or to start a business, because maybe there’s more freedom in that way or what have you?

The rule of family responsibilities has always explained a part of the wage gap.

It continues to do so today.

What the second conventional explanation for the gender wage gap is that women make different occupational choices than men.

The difficulty though is that this line of thinking, focusing on women’s choices to take different jobs, to assume family responsibilities, is that those factors have always held women back, right?

They don’t explain why the gender pay gap for college graduates, which is the group with the greatest access to quality child care, increased after the early 90s.

It also doesn’t explain why black women who’ve long managed to a greater degree than white women to juggle work and family responsibilities remain one of the most disadvantaged groups in society.

The other thing that tends to happen, and we focus on this in the book and discussing the tournament in some workplaces, is that there are things that happen to women who lean in, because that’s been another explanation for the wage gap.

Women fail to lean in.

I bought into that.

I remember reading it.

I’m like, well, that’s maybe what I’m not doing.

I’m not leaning in.

And then I did, and it backfired.

And I know a lot of women have the same experience.

Exactly right.

Everywhere we looked, and in almost every story we tell in the book, women who did lean in, whether they’re working longer hours or questioning their bosses or insisting on raises or objecting to sexual harassment, they found that leaning in might mean getting booted out.

There is a great story by a Harvard economist whom we interviewed for the book, Professor Mark Egan.

And he wrote a paper based on a study that he and others conducted.

The paper is entitled When Harry Fired Sally, The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct.

And it showed that women who have leaned in are substantially more likely to be fired for financial misconduct than men who committed the same misconduct.

And they are also substantially less likely to be rehired.

And so this leaning in, whatever form it takes, can prove disastrous for women workers.

And that study was of people who had leaned in so much that they had committed some form of financial misconduct.

So the question was what happens when both men and women perform the same types of financial conduct?

It turned out that women were substantially less likely than men to engage in the financial misconduct.

And when they did so, they caused smaller dollar losses to their employer.

Nonetheless, they were substantially more likely to be fired for the misconduct and also substantially less likely to be rehired.

This was a study of a particular financial firm.

And I think that it’s the kind of patterns that we found repeated throughout a number of different businesses as we did research for the book.

And I know you shared the story at the start of your book of the, you know, woman employee worked at Tesla and was the one to, you know, kind of say, hey, there’s an issue with the cars we need to address for safety reasons and that, and then also her addressing, hey, there’s also some harassment going on, we need to address that.

And she was basically let go.

And I feel like these stories are so, they exist everywhere, but, and you also kind of touched on this in the book, we don’t hear these stories, because often what happens is, you know, you would think, oh, just get a lawyer and fight this in court.

And, you know, do you have a lot of money for lawyers?

Lawyers usually are super expensive.

And so what’s the more affordable or something that won’t, you know, bankrupt you is to settle and then you have to assign an NDA and then no one will know these stories.

And it’s a kind of a cycle.

So with that being said, I mean, how do we kind of get out of that system?

Like that seems like an impossible cycle to kind of break.

You’re absolutely right that the individual lawsuits are difficult and difficult in a whole host of senses.

One is it’s hard to find attorneys to take them.

Two is there are damage caps limited by federal law Title VII has pretty sharp limits on damage caps that haven’t increased since 1991.

There’s been a ratcheting back of class actions or the ability to do collective litigation.

One thing we have seen as more effective is combining the whistleblowing with harassment or discrimination claims.

In other words, if someone has the ability from the inside to say, there are some patterns of misconduct at this company, and this is a company that has winner-take-all themes to it, it is crunching employees in the service of more widgets, faster pace, bordering on the edge of ethical misconduct, we’ve seen those are the same kinds of companies that have the toxic leaders, the toxic environments, and not just for women.

Bringing the sunlight to those is hugely important.

Making sure there is airplay for those companies is a way to get not only the individual behaviors addressed, but also bring attention to the patterns of corporate misbehavior.

This is one of the reasons that the Me Too movement was so effective.

It was a form of, as we say in the book, essentially jiu-jitsu.

It took the very celebrity of the abusers and in our book, the large companies and turned that against them to topple them by saying, you’ve demonstrated bad behavior.

Me Too was also effective because it was extra legal.

It didn’t rely on finding a lawyer using a legal system.

It was the power of the internet and it was the power of collective action.

We are, the three of us are lawyers and we’ve actually been on different sides of employment discrimination lawsuits.

So we know both sides of employment discrimination lawsuits.

And yeah, as Nancy said, it’s not always that easy to find a lawyer.

And if often lawyers, if you’re suing a large company, it can be quite difficult to have an individual lawyer facing a whole array of the types of attorneys that a large company can afford.

And then there are limitations in the law.

And so in terms of how much can be recovered, but combining that with publicity, combining that with shining a light on what’s actually going on can be a way of getting some redress.

And so, yeah, once you find a lawyer, it’s great.

One of the cases that we followed in the book involved an individual who seemed to have an incredibly strong winning case.

And ultimately it was litigated and litigated and litigated.

And you can’t underestimate just what it’s like to be in court and to go through hours and hours of pre-trial investigations and then going to court, it can take over your life.

And so it’s quite an investment just to do a lawsuit.

On the other hand, there are, as you said, in some of the cases that we talk about in the book, some of the cases were settled pretty quickly, in part, we think, because the companies did not want all of the publicity that these kinds of cases would bring.

In some cases, there is also, there are also these non-disclosure agreements.

And so that does prevent other people who might be in the same situation from knowing precisely what happened.

There’s a move to do away with these NDAs and there’s some new laws on them that will help.

But they still exist, they’re still legal in a variety of contexts.

And yeah, they prevent some of the transparency that we need.

And I know that’s a big reason why a lot of women don’t speak up when people ask like, oh, something happened to you, why aren’t you speaking up?

There’s a lot of consequences.

You know, you can get blacklisted, you won’t get hired again.

It will, you know, you can’t afford a lawyer or if you hire lawyers and there’s lots of litigation, you run out of money.

There’s so many negative consequences.

I think it makes a lot of sense why many women who experience something like that, they’re like, the easiest route is to just quit and go somewhere else and just keep it to myself because I don’t want that scarlet leather letter because there is also, you know, I don’t want people to also think that I’m difficult and all these other kind of things that are usually put on women who speak their mind.

Absolutely right.

I mean, Naomi mentioned that there have been some changes in law fairly recently.

Several years ago, California enacted legislation that banned nondisclosure agreements for sexual harassment.

In 2022, Congress followed suit and partially banned NDAs in harassment cases in what’s known as the Speak Out Act.

Now it only bans the enforcement of confidentiality provisions regarding assault and harassment that were signed before the dispute arose.

In other words, employers are free to bargain for silence during an arbitration process.

But you’re right, women have been silenced pretty systematically.

One of the people whom we interviewed for the book was Deborah Katz, she is a lawyer celebrated who has spent decades bringing sex discrimination cases.

Her clients have included Christine Blasey Ford.

She was the Stanford Research Psychologist who testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

And Deborah Katz told us when we talked to her, she had a great line.

She said, silence has never helped us.

And she said it’s important to be effective by being willing to shed light on issues to ensure accountability.

She was emphasizing that publicity can be a powerful tool and not just for the individual, for other individuals.

But we also recognize how hard it is, as you said, to speak out because you fear that something will happen to you in your current job or in future, that whatever you say will follow you and you may never be hired again.

And so it takes a lot of courage.

And so the people that we talk about in the book, we completely admire their courage for speaking out.

In this day and age, it’s great that there are online platforms that have created movements online, me too being a big one of them and lots of other people saying this happened to me online.

So just going public, because maybe they know that there’s just no way I can do this in kind of the legal realm, which is great.

But again, too, this can have a really big impact.

It can take those predators out of the equation.

So maybe the behavior can stop in that kind of situation.

But then again, there’s always the consequence of death threats and all these other things that can happen to you online, which again, I think ultimately that is one of the biggest barriers for women.

Not being able to get what they need or out of this unjust system is just downright fear of survival.

There’s definitely been situations where it’s easier to say nothing than to speak out.

But kind of on a lighter note, you don’t just talk about all the problems.

So I think that’s really important to have the evidence because believe me, there’s still a lot of people who don’t believe that there is a gender pay gap even though the numbers are there.

You do talk about the solution.

And I think that’s the hardest thing for people to really wrap their head around is, how can we fight such a system that has been in place for so many centuries that has been doing this thing so effectively keeping so many people down?

How can we make that change?

Because I think even during the Me Too movement at The Height, people were like, I want to do something, but I don’t know what.

And I feel like there was just a lot of confusion, a lot of back and forth or wasn’t, this is, okay, this is the movement and this is what we’re going to do moving forward.

So did you want to kind of speak to in the book, how you presented, how we can move forward and start changing and breaking these systems down?

One of the things that we talk about and it picks up on our previous conversation is to break the silence, to start discussions at work and perhaps not in the, it depends on the workplace, right?

There’s some workplaces or it is safe to talk, others it is not, and sometimes one can find one’s best allies outside of work, but starting discussions about gender equality or about pay transparency or about career development opportunities, one of the people we interviewed who was a silence breaker was Melissa Tomlinson.

And she was someone who went to a campaign rally for governor when Christy was running for reelection as the governor of New Jersey.

And he was-

And she’s a teacher, we should say.

She’s a teacher.

Thank you, Naomi.

And after Christy did his stump speech, she approached him and said, why do you keep portraying our schools as failure factories?

And he poked a finger in her face and raised his voice and said he was sick of you people and told Tomlinson, do your job.

And it’s a picture, in fact, that went viral.

And throughout this altercation, she found herself shaking.

She stood her ground.

She saw confronting Christie as part of a larger fight, not just for teachers, but also for teachers’ values.

And it’s a battle for children who have become pawns in a conflict that seeks to undermine public education.

And she joined with a group entitled the Badass Teachers Association.

And she is currently, I believe, the executive director of it, which seeks to promote professional practices within teaching.

It’s that getting a collective core of support.

So starting conversations, finding a collective of people to move those discussions forward is one piece of something we found promising.

There are different solutions, right?

There’s the individual solution, what we can each do in our own workplaces or in our own lives.

And then there are also, we talk about some of the systemic solutions as well that will help in dealing with the winner-take-all economy, the WTA economy that we’ve identified.

But we do say that on an individual level, you certainly can make some changes.

And even if you’re not willing to go to the press or to become a member of the Badass Teachers Association, you can at least find allies within your workplace and also make sure to have connections outside of your workplace because you may, at some point, need to leave your workplace if it gets so toxic that you can’t stay there.

So starting conversations with others around you, both within and outside of your workplace, educating yourself so that you know, as you said, the general statistics on the gender wage gap, but also some companies are starting to move towards more transparency.

So making sure that people see that employees know what those statistics actually say for people who have some power within their companies, advocating for more inclusive policies.

If people do have a little bit of power, use that power because a rising tide will lift all boats.

And so if you can start to make some changes like that, that will affect everyone else.

And again, on the individual level, just making sure that you find mentors, that you are a mentor, that you can create a community both within and outside of the workplace.

So when you do speak out, you’ve got that supportive community of people you trust and who might also speak out with you.

That’s on the individual level.

There are also, and you also have to be, I mean, as I’ve learned in the negotiation process, you have to be prepared to leave.

You have to, you can’t, right?

You have to say, okay, enough is enough.

I’m going to leave.

If you’re negotiating for something, you need to know the point at which you will not give up, but say, that’s enough.

I will no longer stay here.

I will not take it on these terms.

So, and then there are more systemic changes, everything from raising the minimum wage.

Minimum wage in the US has been stuck at the same level for decades, and guess who’s most likely to work at or below the minimum wage, right?

It’s women.

So that will certainly help women.

It will of course help men as well.

But raise the minimum wage, start to attack more generally some of the practices, and in general, these non-disclosure agreements prevent all kinds of mandatory arbitration so that people can’t get to court.

Just we have a whole list of solutions.

The winner-take-all economy intentionally breeds insecurity, which keeps wages and benefits artificially low.

And so one of the things we suggest is look at policies that invest in children, invest in individuals, invest in communities.

One example that was pretty dramatic, we talk about it in the book, is the expansion of the child tax credit during the COVID pandemic.

And it demonstrated how quickly government policies can slash child poverty and provide stability to families so they can weather job crises or economic downturns, even before taxpayers filed their returns that government sent checks to many people of 600 per month for each child under the age of six.

And the child tax credit was a significant factor in reducing the child poverty rate by 46% in that single year to its lowest rate ever of 5.2%.

And so we look at examples like these throughout the book of ways there can be government policies that help raise the floor for children, for women, for families generally.

Absolutely.

You mentioned something, Naomi, the word allies, and it just made me think sometimes when we’re having these discussions on what we can do, we think of us as women, what we can do, but we also need men to do.

We need them as our allies.

They kind of have less negative consequences if they speak up on our behalf.

And I think sometimes they may not realize the impact that they can have within those work policies or really advocating for more inclusion.

I think this is also just a reminder for anyone listening.

Our allies are so, so important because, I mean, as we’ve seen over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a huge shift with more diversity and inclusion.

I think largely that is because we are all coming together.

One of the problems with this winner take all system is it’s very individualistic.

It’s just about the individual.

And I see that a lot in personal finance circles.

It’s all about me making my money.

But if we really want a world worth living in and a better world for our children or our families, we actually need to think in broader terms and the bigger picture of us as a community, a global community, a national community and smaller communities.

And I think often we kind of forget about that just because again, if you are working in a system where it is just you against your team, it doesn’t really breed collaboration and working together to find those solutions.

One of the points we make is that the W winner take all economy doesn’t just affect women.

It affects everybody who is working.

And so it affects men and women.

And so it’s also it’s in men’s interests to be allies and to speak out on their own behalf as well because that’s how we’re going to be able to change this whole system that has these disproportionate rewards for those at the top.

So it’s important to have men as allies in the workplace.

It’s important to have men as allies outside of the workplace.

We’re never going to change the expectation that women are primary caretakers until we have more equal sharing of that.

So it’s not just a question of women leaning in, right?

It’s not that question at all.

It’s changing the system, it’s building allies, it’s having men and women work together to change the system.

Yeah, it benefits everybody.

And I think sometimes it just gets lost.

Or there’s other messages that are louder that are kind of covering, you know, the message that actually works for everybody.

There are so many amazing things.

And again, great data, great research in this book that I think is so necessary, because we are not going to stop having these conversations.

As you say, if we just keep doing what we’re doing, we’re never going to close this gap.

And I think it’s really important for us to really understand where does that gap stem from and what can we do as communities, as teams, and individuals to fix that.

Because I remember being a kid in the 90s, hearing some of the says, oh, the gender gap is, you know, it’s getting better.

So I honestly figured once I graduated with my degree that I would have an easier time than my mom.

And there’s a lot more opportunities and there’s some benefits for sure being in this timeframe compared to the 90s, but still there’s a lot of barriers and they’re invisible.

And a lot of people don’t think they’re there, but they are very much there still, unfortunately.

So we need to acknowledge that and we need to do something about it because otherwise this is just gonna be, I don’t wanna have these conversations for another 30 years.

You know what I mean?

I don’t wanna be talking about the gender pay gap.

I wanna talk about it in retrospect.

Remember when.

So thank you for coming on this show.

Your book is called Fair Shake.

Where can they find more information about you?

I know you also have other books and you’re doing all these other amazing things.

Nancy, I’ll start with you.

Could anyone find you online or find anything that you’ve worked on before?

I’m the Associate Dean for Faculty and a Curators Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

My other writings are, the books are principally in the legal pedagogy and law practice area.

The Happy Lawyer is one.

The Good Lawyer is another.

Lawjobs, those books.

And those are, you can just Google me and find those books are there on Amazon.

I am the Anthony M.

Kennedy Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.

So pretty easy to find me as well online.

And I like Nancy and June, our third co-author, who’s unable to join us, but I’ve written a number of books on everything from, as you mentioned at the beginning, red families versus blue families to marriage markets.

I’ve written about step families.

I’ve written just a variety.

I mean, one of the wonderful things about our jobs is that we can write about so many different aspects.

I’ve written about elder care.

So we can write about so many different things.

And yes, please Google us.

Please look us up and please buy our books.

Absolutely.

Yeah, no, I think this is a really important book.

So thank you both for coming on the show to talk about it with me.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having us.

We’ve enjoyed the conversation.

And that was episode 400 of the More Money Podcast.

And I was speaking to Naomi Cahn and Nancy Levit and their other co-author who unfortunately couldn’t join us is June Carbone.

They are all the co-authors of the book, Fair Shake Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy.

I am giving away a copy of their book plus all the other books that have been currently featured on this season of the podcast.

There are quite a few.

So if you want to enter to win one of them, I mean, you can enter to win all of them, but you’ll only win one, but why not enter to win all of them?

I don’t care.

Just go to jessicamoorhouse.com/contest or check out the show notes for this episode to find more information about the episode, but also link to the contest, jessicamoorhouse.com/400.

So just a little life update.

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you know the big news is my tulips that I planted or my husband helped me plant or he really planted.

He really did do most of the legwork there, but I did buy the bulbs and I did tell him where to plant.

They have bloomed and I’m very excited because this is, I really don’t have a green thumb and you know, I really want, our neighbors have incredible gardens and I’m really trying to keep up.

So that’s the exciting news though, not really, though I am proud of it.

But in terms of the book, right now I’m in this limbo, which I’m loving because I don’t have to work on the book right now.

It is at the copy editing stage, so I’m waiting to get those copy edits back.

So I have been working tirelessly on doing a big update to my wealth building blueprint for Canadians course.

So if you don’t know anything about it, you can find all the information at jessicamoorhouse.com/course.

But as the name may suggest, it is a course about how to build wealth through investing, but specifically passive investing and specifically just for Canadians.

Because what I found and what I’ve honestly heard from every single student who’s entered the course, there’s a lot of investing courses out there and they are American.

Or they say they’re for Americans and Canadians, but then you enter there and they don’t have all the specifics you’re looking for as a Canadian.

So it’s just like some of the tax rules and retirement rules and all these kinds of things that are really important for us or going really deep about different products or platforms specific to us Canadians.

And I’ve got video tutorials of me opening up, you know, robo-advisor accounts, doing trades on Canadian trading platforms, things that people who are non-Canadians can’t really show you because they can’t have access to these things.

So if you’re interested, jessicamoorhouse.com/course, I think it’s pretty incredible.

I’ve had it since 2021.

It is a course that honestly I have not actually really ever marketed properly, not properly, but I’ve only done organic promo.

So I’ve only ever mentioned my course on this podcast a few times on my YouTube channel and my newsletter, which I send out maybe once per month.

But I’ve realized this is an incredible course and I want more Canadians to know that it exists so they can learn how to invest on their own for low fees in a passive way and have access to me to provide feedback and guidance.

So I am definitely going to be doing some more marketing, doing some like social media kind of stuff and maybe some advertising and some webinars because I have not done a webinar.

I don’t think I’ve done a webinar since 2021 maybe.

I don’t know.

It’s been years.

So that’s something that you can look forward to.

But again, if you just want to look more into it for yourself right now, jessicamoorhouse.com/course.

Currently how the course is structured is it’s by application only.

And then if you are a good candidate, then you have a call with me and then you can ask me whatever the heck you want.

I’m probably not going to always do this, but for the past few years, it’s actually been really incredible getting to know a lot of you.

A lot of the people that are in the course are podcast listeners and finding out, what are you struggling with?

What do you want to learn?

And seeing if the course can help you with that.

And also I’ve got to say, talking to hundreds and hundreds of people over the years in these calls has been just a really cool thing for me to learn more about you and to just be better at what I do as an educator.

So thank you for anyone who’s done those calls with me.

So anyways, you know where to find that information?

That is where you can find it.

And yeah, let me just tease who I’ve got on the show next week to wrap things up.

Oh yeah, I’m excited about this.

This is a great episode.

I learned so much.

So you know, I had episode 393, I had Sean Stewart from Airmiles on the show.

Great episode to learn more about Airmiles, how to optimize that program.

It is, in my view, it is a free fricking reward program.

Why isn’t everyone just participating in it?

Cause I hate going to a store and hear, I was just at the grocery store today.

So the Sobeys and their reward program is seen.

And there was a guy in front of me and they’re like, oh, do you have the same points?

He’s like, no.

And then we all, me, him and the cashier, all had a conversation.

She said, oh, do you want to sign up?

He’s like, oh, I guess so.

And then we had a conversation about just like, it’s like money on the table if you’re not participating in this free plan.

You know what I mean?

Like it doesn’t cost you anything, but you could get something if you’re shopping at this place and that’s the reward system and you can be accruing points.

So since we already had an episode about Airmiles 393, that’s the episode with Shawn Stewart, I have another expert to talk about Aeroplan.

I’ve got TJ Dunn.

He is the editor in chief of Prince of Travel, which is a really big and popular, you know, travel website, blog, YouTube channel.

They’ve got some really great content and they really kind of specialize in Aeroplan.

And so that is what we’re gonna be talking about.

If you wanna know more about how do I optimize that program, how do we get more Aeroplan points?

How do I get those business class or first class seats?

That is what we’re gonna be talking about.

And there’s some really great information in that episode.

So that is what you can look forward to next week.

And with that, I mean, just to let you know, we are wrapping up this season very soon.

I can’t believe we’re already in May.

How is that happening?

We’re gonna wrap up this season June 5th.

So just a few more weeks of the More Money Podcast until we take a summer break.

But a big thank you to my podcast team, video edit by Justice Carrar and produced by mravcanada.com.

I will be seeing you next Wednesday.

So with that, have a good rest of your week, good weekend.

See you soon.