Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right with Arlie Hochschild

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Make financial progress with into It Credit Karma. It's straightforward, stress free and personalize for your financial journey. Download the app to get started Credit Karma Start making Progress today. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kuric and this is next question. Hi everyone, Yes, dear listeners, it's exactly a month since the election, and as we know, in many ways, it was a wake up call, a lesson that when it comes to both sides in this country, neither of us really get each other. Ourley Hoakeshield, our guest today, teaches sociology at Berkeley. Yeah. I know what you're thinking, Katie's talking to another person inside that bubble of hers, But that is not really the case because for the past ten years, Arley, who's the grandmother we all wish we had, by the way, has been traveling to ruby communities to get a handle on what's really fueling the anger in our country. For her first book on this topic, Strangers in their Own Land, she headed to Lake Charles, Louisiana now Pikeville, Kentucky. In the heart of Appalachia is the setting of her new book in this same genre, Stolen Pride, Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. Arley scales what she calls the empathy Wall and humanizes Americans in these communities so we can all better understand what is really happening in our divided country. Arlee High, be there. Goodness, I'm so excited to meet you and talk to you and thank you so much for doing this. I don't know if you had a chance to watch my hour, but it's so weird.

00:01:52
Speaker 2: Yes, you know I didn't. I just now saw it, but I look forward to seeing it on a white anxiety.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: Yes, and it's so so much echoes a lot of the things. In fact, I'm sort of mad that I didn't reach out to you when I was working on this project because it would have been perfect. And I think your name came up because it came out, I believe in twenty eighteen my series for National Geographic and I talked a lot to Joan Williams. I wonder if you know her. She wrote White Working Class for the Harvard Business Review and then it became a book. Yes, but I should have followed you around and we should have made a whole documentary together. That would have been awesome because.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: I would take you.

00:02:34
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting because everything you're writing about now and have written about in the past, is so relevant to the conversations people are having today. And that's why I was really excited to have an opportunity to speak with you, because I think so much of what you've written about, so much of what you continue to write about, resonates deeply today because I think you went out to explore what everyone is now asking, why are we so divided? Why do we seem like two different countries? And I think your work really answers those questions, first with a book you wrote previously called Strangers in their Own Land, and now a new book called Stolen Pride. I want to start at the beginning of this journey, though, if I could. What set you out on this path to understand what was happening really in Red America?

00:03:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel the way is if America is now living with two denials. There's the denial of the democratic side of America that's saying, who are these people? How silly of them to vote for Donald Trump? And what big sector of America that has faced tremendous loss and has lost faith in the government has response to that loss. There's a denial of the democratic side of America, of that whole loss story, and I think we have a big job ahead to address that. But we are facing I think a danger to democracy, and I think there is a discounting and a denial of that on the right side of America. So I think we've got two denials, need to work on both.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: I love the fact that you describe something called an empathy wall, and you really look at sociology and society writ large from an emotional point of view. Why are people feeling a certain way? And I think you lead with that Why.

00:04:48
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for the question, Katie, because I actually believe that we all need to become bilingual. That we're used to speaking just the language of rationality, and what we need to do is to be able to hear and speak in emotions, because there's a curious logic to emotions. There are emotional scripts. There are a whole different story unfolds if we look at emotions. We are emotional creatures. We feel fear, we feel distressed, we feel envy, and in my last book, I feel that we also feel pride and shame, and that unless we're listening to that, we're not seeing the whole story. And actually it feels like the main story, because why is it the main story. It's the main story because if we go back two decades and we look at three decades, look at NAFTA offshoring automation that has created the haves and the have nots of globalization, and so the haves who live in cities, who have bas for whom new opportunities have opened up, aren't looking at the situation of loss. It's not just deprivation, but loss of actually the white blue collar class. So they feeling frightened and a sense of loss. So they have turned to a charismatic figure who works through emotions. And that's why it's important. I believe, for example, that Donald Trump has I think actually as a person his experienced shame and very harsh father, and that would be neither here nor there, except that it's given him enormous insight into the pain of unwarranted shame that a lot of blue color men who feel in free fall have felt. And he I think offers a four moment anti shaming ritual that unless we are biling well, we don't hear and moment one, for example, and it happens repeatedly through different episodes, but moment one of this anti shaming ritual is Donald Trump will say something transgressive, like Asian immigrants are cooking and eating your pedcats and dogs. A moment two, the punditry shames Donald Trump and says, you can't say that. I mean, there was one article that turns out it's not true, and you don't repeat something that isn't true. Okay, So the punditry shames Donald Trump. Moment three, Donald Trump becomes the victim of the shamers. Look how hard it is to be put down, to be vilified, And have you been put down? They put you down to y'all, Well, they're putting me down. I'm actually taking the hip for you.

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Speaker 1: That's fascinating because a lot of people wonder, you know, how can people who are struggling financially aspire or admire someone like Donald Trump who is so wealthy and so ostentatious and lives a life so completely different than they do. But you're talking about this shame sharing thing that happens that makes them gravitate towards someone that it's kind of a microcosm of what they're feeling daily in their lives.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, Katie, Exactly, Bingo and moment four, he gets revenge for the shaming. He tells them off. He turns shame to blame.

00:09:04
Speaker 1: That is fascinating. Well, let's get back to Stolen Pride, because well, this is really what we're talking about. But you ended up in Pike County, Kentucky, the Nations, as you mentioned, whitest and second poorest congressional district, which by the way, is just a few hours from where JD. Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy.

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Speaker 2: That's right.

00:09:27
Speaker 1: Well, that's really an interesting psychological turnabout that we can maybe discuss another time. But Stolen Pride focuses on a period of time in twenty seventeen leading up to a plan rally by a white supremacist named Matthew Heinbach, and you actually got to know him during the course of writing this book. And you basically start with Matthew Heimback and another figure in Pikeville who was trying to figure out whether or not to give Matthew Heinbach's organization a permit to protest in Pikeville. Tell us about these two individuals and why you focused on them initially in your book.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: I focused on them initially in my book because I saw a perfect storm. On the one hand, cold jobs had gone out, opiates, big crisis ongoing have come in. And then there was a neo Nazi march promising a false, I think answer to those problems. This is all white, so blame blacks. So I thought I was looking at a perfect storm, and so I decided to listen to the perpetrator, listen to those who were trying to protect the community against violence that Matthew him bat seemed to bring with him, and I also talked to those who might be hurt by his presence. There was a Holocaust survivor, a ima, a small local mosque, so the potential villains. And then I topped to bottom, side to side, interviewed people, just to try and get a pulse through what eyes would such a man be seen? Is there an appetite for fascists in such an otherwise beautiful area with good people? Could it happen here? And looking at emotions turned out to be the thing to do.

00:11:46
Speaker 1: And what did you discover, Arlie?

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Speaker 2: I discovered that the townspeople were disinterested in Matthew Heinbach. And they said to me, well, you know our grandfathers. You see those graves on the Hills. We decorate them Memorial Day because they fought against fascism. But the book talks about another parade, and that is for someone that they were taken with that having given up on regular government, here came a figure by the name of Donald Trump who saw them, they felt and understood their grievance. Meanwhile, the left was laughing at them and not seeing them. They didn't feel understood. Democratic Party seemed to be putting others out of them, gay as women and not had forgotten about social class and laws. And so this Donald Trump had appeal. And while they said no to Matthew Heinbach, they said yes to Donald Trump.

00:12:58
Speaker 1: Why did you focus primate early on men in this book?

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Speaker 2: I'm interested in who's in trouble and getting them out of trouble. And I think men are in a crisis. A white man and black men. And one man explained the crisis well to me. And our interview began with his saying, I'm trailer trash okay, And I said, well, what do you mean you know? And he described his family, said, we've been poor. I'm on disability myself, and I grew up with the drugs all around me and frightened of any knock at the door. And I'm used to being described as dumb hillbilly. And he said, this America has two primary narratives. One is of the successful middle class guy, and they say, well, good for you, you've you've had a good job and I can support family. You're a success. You had the American dream. And then America looks at a poor black man and says, well, you didn't get the American dream. But that's because of racism. And we understand that that's that narrative. But what about a guy like me, He said, who's or and male and white. There's no explanation for this. I don't have the American dream and it must be because I'm lazy or I'm done. So he felt anguished, and he didn't He wasn't for Donald Trump, but he wasn't for the Democratic Party either. He felt stuck in the middle. And I think Americans have of good spirit, you know, on the Democratic side understand him and reach out to him and say, hey, we do understand. And that that has been I think a missing piece of the Democratic Party for a while. Out the hole. They're not looking at social class and you need.

00:15:23
Speaker 1: To tired of your credit score playing hard to get into it. Credit Karma is the sidekick you never knew you needed. With personalized tips and step by step tools, you'll go from credit confusion to confidence in no time. Plus Credit Karma tailor's credit card and loan recommendations to your financial profile, making your financial choices feel like a perfect match. Download the app to start turning your credit game around Credit Karma Start making progress. Today we'll talk about what the Democrats should do more of moving forward in a moment. But you make an interesting observation in your book about how Republicans view success and really conversely poverty and how democrats view success. In other words, you talk about Republicans inadvertently blaming poor people because they don't have the pull them up by the bootstrap's mentality, and as a result, people in red states blame themselves, while Democrats focus on the big picture and say, it's not your fault, it's society's fault exactly.

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Speaker 2: It's a kind of a pride paradox, we could say. And it's poignant that those who have suffered the hit economically are also those who subscribe to individualism, and so they likely to say Look, if I make it, that's credit to me, and if I fail, that's my fault, that's my shame. Whereas people blue states are not taking such an economic hit, are more likely to have a circumstantial culture of pride and so well, circumstances were wrong. It's not me personally that's caused my own failure, so they're less likely to beat themselves up.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: That's compounded by this distrust or inability to accept the governs help. Right, So you have people blaming themselves and thinking that government should not get involved in their lives, at least financially or helping them. So it seems to me this has all the makings of a massive shame spiral for these people in red states.

00:18:21
Speaker 2: That's right, you know, saying, look, we need to lift the veil and think of feelings in order to see what's really going on on the other side. And that's an example of a painful feeling that we need to understand.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: I want to read something from your book because I think it so clearly illustrates what you're talking about. You write, So what happens, I wondered when workers are exhorted to believe that capitalism needs no government hand, and that each individual working in it bears personal responsibility for how well or poorly he or she fears. And then companies pull out, those left behind find themselves trapped inside a pride paradox. Of course, I'll say this parenthetically. You're referring to these centers where manufacturing got hollowed out and plants moved to either like non Union states or overseas, And I think this quote really describes how people felt. You talked to one man who I thought really encapsulated the downward spiral of shame. Who was that?

00:19:39
Speaker 2: Yes, Yes, that was. I'm so delighted that you found that quote. It did open my own eyes as well. And that quote comes from a young man who's forty now. And when I met him, he was homeless and in a drug recovery center and he had just graduated from it and twelve years of heroin he had overdosed four times. I've talked to him over the last six seven years, some in zoom, and I've talked to his sister who rescued him. He is an amazing, eye opening person.

00:20:34
Speaker 1: So how old is he now, Arlie?

00:20:36
Speaker 2: He's forty three, and I just talked to him yesterday. And you know what he told me about denial because I was telling him I think both left are denying things, but different things. And he said, the thing about denial is that you don't know that you are denying. I love this insight, and he's trying to help us lift our denial. And I'm doing it by giving my reader this man.

00:21:11
Speaker 1: Well, this is what he said. Shame comes gradually. Let me give you an example of guys around where I live. First thing, a guy gets his layoff slip, and he blames the inspector, then the supervisor. Then he shakes his fists at the Obama administration for putting in the Clean Air Act and adds in Biden and the Democratic Party in the deep State. Then, when his unemployment runs low and his wife asks for money for groceries for the kids, he faces a hard choice. If you need money and don't have a degree, you've got to leave. But his family's here and he doesn't want to leave. That's when he starts to feel bad about himself. He looks around at the jobs at nine or ten fifty an hour, and he turns his nose up at what he thinks of as girly service jobs because he can't support his family on that kind of money. But then his partner says, we need to feed the kids, so he takes the crap job, and she says there's still not enough money for food, gas and fixing the roof. It's then that his shame begins to get stronger, because now he feels the problem is on him, And if he leaves on Route twenty three looking for work and comes back empty handed, that's shame waiting for him at home. Then if he gets into drugs take it from me, he's ashamed. That can lead to divorce and separation from his kids. And now he's on the dole. He always felt superior to others he saw on the dole, and now he's on it too, So he's ashamed about that and mad that he's made to feel ashamed. Then he may read some op ed in the Appalachian News Express calling people like him a deadbeat for not supporting his family and paying taxes the town needs for its sewer repair. He's not a contributor. On top of all that, he sees on the internet people outside the region firing inside at him as ignorant, racist, sexist, or homophobic. Now he's mad at the shamers, and by this point he's forgotten about the shame. He's just plain pissing mad. Doesn't that say it all?

00:23:15
Speaker 2: It really does say it all. It says it all. Yeah, And so what happens then if you have half the population that doesn't understand that story, or passes over it, or doesn't see its significance because they're not looking at feelings, then you have the situation we're in.

00:23:43
Speaker 1: You know, I've done a lot of reading and reporting on loneliness and the epidemic of loneliness in this country, and I have this thesis, and it's probably not original that a lot of people gravitate to these groups because they want to belong and it doesn't matter what group they're joining, they just want to feel a part of something. And as church attendance and community activities have declined and kawanis clubs and all those things that used to be gathering places for people are not as active or accessible, that people are joining these groups and then they have the foundation of grievance and loss. It's almost a replacement for community.

00:24:38
Speaker 2: I love your themes, Katie. I think it's right on. It's really brilliant.

00:24:45
Speaker 1: It's probably your thesis that I just stole.

00:24:48
Speaker 2: No, no, it's yours, and I think it's another way. And if we take the blinders of what's going on on the other side, it makes it more, it makes it understandable. And with this instead of the Kuwanas club or the bowling club, we do know that nowurd mobility goes with a loss of community and more people living alone and worse health. So put all that together with this new found community in politics where there's kind of a it's a Petrie dish for rancor and complaint and blaming you. Now we we shamed are blaming together collectively. How fun it is and there's kind of a euphoria getting rid of the blame and being how together. It's a new and scary form of community, but is a response I think to loss.

00:26:01
Speaker 1: When I mentioned that, I was thinking about Alex Hughes, who really ran into trouble. I'm going to do another dramatic reading for you, our Lee of your own book. Here we go. Alex Hughes was part of the eighty percent of Pike County residents who voted for Donald Trump in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty. Alex's American dream was not to own a coal company, but to earn a bachelor's degree, which required money his family lacked, or to be a government administrator. Alex's dream was to provide well for his family, perhaps as a small business owner, and the economic downturn had been holding a knife to that plan. His maternal grandfather had been severely injured in the mines and warned Alex's father and Alex himself to find safer work. At age sixteen, Alex moved in with his grandparents and started painting houses. By nineteen he had started a small business painting houses and married. But by the nineteen nineties, Alex's bootstrap yes sure strategy no longer brought in steady work quote and now I had to pay both my bills and my business loan. By then I was divorced and had my daughter to care for. So when I lost my business and got in debt for one hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars to the irs, that's when things really got bad. The house gone, the car gone, the furniture gone, my wife's and my wedding rings ponnd. I was in freefall. I felt like there was no place for me. I had to ask myself, what did I do wrong? This man's life, though, changed, didn't it? Arlie? When he saw an advertisement for a paid six month training program sponsored by a Louisville based company called Interapt. Can you talk about that and how transformative these retraining programs can be and why we need to do more of it?

00:28:02
Speaker 2: Right? You know, we were just talking about the importance of community. Your thesis about hey, the loss of community, and then there can be these scary adheriant violence substitutes for community, while INTERAPT isn't just the opposite. Example. Here is a community of people that Alex joined who happened to pass the test to qualify for a six month paid training program in Louisville. And I went to visit that training program and watch it and talk to the students there, and one after another after another, all unemployed had been through rough rough times, many from eastern Kentucky kind of no good jobs, and they came there, and like Alex had felt kind of beaten up, he'd try to start a tattoo parlor, and he blamed himself. I should have seen the handwriting on the wall. Fewer people came in I wasn't making money. I didn't redirect. So he's kind of blaming himself. And he'd been turned down for a lot of jobs that he applied to, so he felt shamed and beaten up. So he got to this interact training program and he's sitting around the table with ten other students, and if he ran into a problem and he told him said, look, I can't do this stuff. You know, I'm not really skilled this way. The guy next to him was saying, oh yeah, I used to feel that way. Here's it's easier than you think. And they would help each other and he he became a great helper to the others and felt good about himself to be the helper guy because he really was gifted with this. And it was, he later said, transformative. He got his self esteem back, and that's what we're talking about. We're talking about getting your pride back. And a lot of your pride can be based on helping others. And in his case, you know, the sweet, wonderful person, and he got to be the giver. And so that was true for other students in this class, whom I followed back to the tiny towns where I interviewed them, some lived in places that weren't on the Google map that had to meet somebody at gas station to go and visit them.

00:31:06
Speaker 1: If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com. How did you get people to open up to you, Arlie? I mean, you're a woman about my age, maybe a couple of years older. Old you are, you know, from Berkeley. Was it hard for you to get people to trust you, to open up to you, to tell you their stories and to share their shame.

00:31:52
Speaker 2: No, No, it wasn't hard, and it's I think you're the same kind of person as Ion. It takes a little at first, and then you're two people and you're sitting down and I'm really interested to get to know their story. And I think what it takes is first you get your alarm system off, and then if there are stereotypes to deal with, you deal with them. Like one guy said, oh, you're from Berkeley, California road and well, people look down on us. You know, it's done. Hill relyes like that and people have stereotypes of us, and I said, yeah, people have stereotypes about people that come from Berkeley, too, So there was a laugh at that. And then I share that my grandma grew up on a dairy farm in Maine, you know, and I was howeing the garden and loved it, but you know, she those broccoli really need tending. And they say, well, we you know, we're ridiculed for accents, our Southern accents. And I said, well, my father had a very strong Boston accent. He used to call me Ali's heard my name. I'm used to it being whirling. So we're in the same ball. It's not so different like that.

00:33:21
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people could learn from taking your approach. I do think that people who have college degrees have been condescending to a lot of these people. I think it's less about their income and more that they believe to your earlier point that blaming immigrants, blacks women for their troubles is just racism and sexism and xenophobia. How did you come to understand if people were that way and did you forgive them for those attitudes.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: Yes, there are things I heard that I personally disagree with. And going in I tell people that we're not going to agree on a lot of things. That's not why I'm here to tell you what I believe. I'm really here because I think a lot of people on the Democratic side of America aren't listening and don't.

00:34:26
Speaker 1: Get to know you or don't understand.

00:34:29
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right. And I guess what I would add to that is that on the left there are rightesses against you know, men, I can'tst white men, and that we need to look again and dismantle. In other words, they feel like a minority group. I know it sounds.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: Strange, but well, they feel like they've been the target of reverse racism, they would say. In fact, many of them told you that right they did.

00:35:01
Speaker 2: So. I think it's time for people on the left to take their alarm system off to actually actually start, once we catch our breath, to build new empathy bridges to portions of the white working class. I don't think it would be hard to do. And there are many ways in which Donald Trump is far more extreme than his followers, and those would be issues on which we could get common ground, for example, climate change. They're a majority of Republicans, there majority of Republicans strong majority of Democrats agree that the government should spend money in remediating climate change. I don't agree on the causes of it, but they do agree something should be done about it. Majority of bare majority of the public, and strong majority of Democrats agree that children in schools should learn about climate change and the dangers of it. So that's crossover territory. I think prison reform you would find quite a lot of cross party agreement and reproductive rights. So rather than kind of settling for judgment, we should realize that we've actually been in denial about a whole social shift that has led a lot of Americans to become predisposed to a charismatic leader that's with great promises of a new day. And it's happening not just in America, it's happening actually around the world. In this last election, there's been a giant move away from income and governments toward right wing government. So you know, we shouldn't say, oh, what did can will do wrong? You're in there, Okay, we should do those appraisals, but there is a larger set of forces and we should I think that's what these last two books, especially my last strangers to tune into the circumstances and then the feelings that those circumstances make people feel. So you get our answers from.

00:37:32
Speaker 1: I was going to say the first step is obviously understanding, but the second step I don't know. I'm very a solution oriented person. And since your book is called Stolen Pride, Lost Shame, and the Rise of the Right, I guess my final question to you, Arlie is how do we collectively as a nation restore pride to some of these towns and some of these people.

00:37:58
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think by making clear that that left and right share, first of all, the goal of restoring right. We get it, we want it. That's the first thing to do. And in doing that first thing, we have to realize that actually people on the left are less good at listening across the partisan divide. Recent research found that people on the liberal left are more likely to break off contact with people that say something they disagree with than are people on the right. Whites are more likely to do it than blacks. So paradox is that research also shows that conservatives are more likely to soften their positions if they get to meet somebody face to face and sit down and get to know them personally. So we need to break that impass for starters and then search the kinds of issues in which we could come to some common agreement. I met a lot of people in these deep red communities who were for renewable energy. One big MAGA leader pointed to me said, all those those sought off mountains there, we need some windmills on the windmills. So that's a Biden built back better and the inflation reduction at kind of measures of pain for that kind of thing. So he he doesn't kind of acknowledge it, or I don't know. One could say, hey, that's a good idea. You know, we should have windmills, so get rid of the shaming by me and on with on which both sides could outly agree. I think that's the way to go, and just being a bystander it's not the way to go. We all need to participate. Now it's serious what we're facing.

00:40:18
Speaker 1: I kept thinking about Brian Stephenson, and my team is so sick of me fawning over Brian Stephenson. But he talks about the need to be proximate, and I think the fact that there's not much co mingling between people who live in urban centers and people who live in more rural communities is part of the problem that we just don't know people who are really that different from us, and we all are in our little bubbles, and I think those need to be penetrated from both sides.

00:40:50
Speaker 2: You know, we used to have labor unions that were basically the middleman between the working class and the Democratic Party. Those got undercut by offshoring.

00:41:05
Speaker 1: And by greedy corporations. I should add, but although I know unions sometimes get out of control, and I have arguments with friends about unions, and you know, if they're corrupt and they overreach, but I also think they're so important to protect people from greedy corporations who just care about quarterly profits in the bottom line and pleasing their shareholders. Right, that's right.

00:41:29
Speaker 2: And the terrible thing is the more we don't have things like unions that ameliorate people's lives, the more distressed they are, the more emotionally open to charismatic leaders. So we need to break the cycle.

00:41:49
Speaker 1: My daughter reminded me of an FDR fireside chat that he gave about the key to stability is really economic prosperity. For every one, and if you don't have that, or there's such a huge chasm between the haves and have nots, that is a recipe for terrible unrest and social instability and worse. So yeah, I think that we need to figure out how to make everyone feel like they have a chance to just have a good life and create you know, stability for their families and for their children.

00:42:30
Speaker 2: Right, and that just pointing to an enemy, you know, the intruder of the immigrant, you know, the black, the woman is not a real solution. But I think we need to get new channels across this political divide to stop that blaming and get some faith back, some real community back in America.

00:43:02
Speaker 1: Well, we'll see if that can happen. I think your book is a great start for people to read because I think what you do is humanize people. And I think so many groups have been dehumanized in our current culture, whether you're talking about immigrants, or you're talking about black Americans, or you're talking about poor white men in rural communities, and I think to give them a name and a face and to tell their stories is really critically important for us to better understand what's going on and try to fix it. Harley, It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed meeting you, and I love your work and I'm going to recommend it to all my friends who are scratching their heads and trying to understand what's going on in this country of ours.

00:43:54
Speaker 2: Thank you, Katie, you do wonderful work too well. Thanks a chance to talk to you.

00:44:00
Speaker 1: Thank you, Aurlie. And hopefully we'll meet one day in person.

00:44:04
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm looking forward to that.

00:44:15
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world, reach out send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows into It. Credit Karma makes navigating your credit score straightforward and stress free. With tools and personalized guidance, you can piece together your financial puzzle with ease. Whether you're looking for ways to build your credit score or searching for the perfect credit card, Credit Karma has you cover plus with ongoing insights tailor to your financial progress, you'll stay on top of your game. Join the millions taking charge. Download the app and see how simple better credit can be. Credit Karma Start making progress today