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- [00:00]
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- [00:56]
Mike Pesca
It's Tuesday, May 5, 2026. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. There is a new initiative out of the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, to get people off their meds, off their psychiatric medication, and in fact, top psychiatrists are calling for a greater emphasis on seeking medication. That's a Times headline. The idea that psychiatrists are pointing to is that sometimes patients are put or parked on these medications and not really reevaluated. And yes, they could in fact benefit from moving off the medications. Kennedy, I think, is not being so subtle. He is just saying that psychiatric medications are overprescribed. And he knows this because they're overprescribed. It's weird because though I am not on psychiatric medications or antidepressants of any kind, one of the things that makes me more depressed about things in American life than almost anything else is Robert F. Kennedy himself. I understand politics. I understand people with policy priorities, priorities that I disagree with. I don't understand how and why this guy rose to such prominence, even though the policies that he champions, though popular for a fringe, are just that, fringe policies. They're not widely popular. They hurt the Republican coalition. Basically. There's a lot of political science that says when you raise the salience of an issue, what you do is you make your own side happy, but you make the other side equally unhappy. And there was a whole other side of people, say, who are into giving their kids vaccines, who didn't really craft their identity around giving their kids vaccines. They just wanted to be good parents and keep some of the worst diseases and out of the bodies of their kids and now Robert F. Kennedy and the Maha moms. But really the anti vaccine part of the Maha moms comes along and makes you take a stance on that issue. So some of the pro vaccine people who didn't even think of themselves as pro vax just thought of themselves as people parents trying to ward off some rubella because no one wants rubella. Now, they may be politically activated, they may be voting on this. And the same could be happening about antidepressants. At least it's another data point where Robert F. Kennedy and the Scientologists find common ground. Tom Cruise has always inveighed against taking antidepressants. He does so on couches. Robert F. Kennedy, of course, has a different and more dignified perch to make his claims. Kid Rock Sauna on the show today, I will spiel about, well, pretty much the area of my greatest knowledge, fashion. But first, and once again, Joseph Moore is back. He has written a really interesting book that we got into yesterday and we delve into even more today. It's the idea of an idea and how that idea has changed how to get rich in American history. Joseph Moore did, and he's up next. So lately I've been getting a little, I guess the word is intentional about my wardrobe. You know, you want to look good, but you want to be comfortable. You want to look put together. You want to be put together. Enter Quince. Quince has the wardrobe staples for spring. They have 100% European linen shorts and shirts that start off at $34 and they're all lightweight and breathable. And I should also say that the reason they're able to beat all their competitors by 50 to 80% is that they do in fact, cut out the middleman. You always hear that, but it's true. They work directly with ethical factories. And you're benefiting me. I'm benefiting to the tune of the ultra stretch 24. Seven smart chinos. It is good that these aren't 24. Six chinos, you know, and I can't wear them Tuesdays. I could wear them every day. I'd like to wear them every day. It's like I'm getting away with something because to the outsider, they look like, I'll say dress pants to use that broad category. But to the inside, or me inside the pants, they are stretchy and comfortable and, you know, they don't feel like those hard, stiff, uncomfortable, starchy dress pants. They're fantastic. Refresh your everyday with luxury. You'll actually use head to Quince dot com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com the gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the gist foreign we're back with Joseph Moore. He's the author of how to Get Rich in American history. 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. And the last thing that Moore said to us yesterday was that the Consumer Protection Bureau has done studies and said that even beyond inheritance, a positive attitude combined with a habit of saving was greatly correlative to financial success. So I will start this interview with some pushback. One is it's easy to be optimistic if you're already doing pretty well, but if you have desperate circumstances, you're less likely to be optimistic and therefore that'll get picked up in the data. Oh, that depressed person, he's not doing so well. You know, what's the cause? What's the effect? Another pushback might be something like even if optimism correlates to success, it's just a correlation. There is a version two of optimism which will just get you ripped off by white gurus and snake oil salesmen. So I would say maybe for some it's better not to be too optimistic. So there you have it. Joseph Moore, what do you say to that?
- [07:04]
Joseph S. Moore
Yeah, no, that's. Those are, those are legitimate pushbacks. Right. But. So let's, let's start with the idea that. Great. If you already have success. Right. It's easy to get rich if you already have money. Here's the actual statistic of children born at the bottom of the economic scale today. Six in 10 get out, four in 10 become middle class, upper middle class or rich, and one in 10 make it to the top. Now that is not perfect mobility.
- [07:32]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And it used to be better. Right.
- [07:34]
Joseph S. Moore
Well, let's. I'll come back to that. So it's not perfect mobility, but we have a lot more mobility than anyone is saying online or in the news or in politics. We have a lot more mobility than we think we do.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [07:44]
Joseph S. Moore
Now, if you wanted to know when was the easiest time just to land in the dead center? That is probably the generation that was born between 1945 and 1960. They probably had an easier time just landing in the middle.
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Mike Pesca
You mean from going to lowest quintile, Right?
- [08:04]
Joseph S. Moore
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Now why? Because poverty in 1950 was almost one in three. The poverty rate in America was very
- [08:13]
Mike Pesca
nearly the middle sucked is what you're saying.
- [08:15]
Joseph S. Moore
Yeah, exactly. So, like, like you're comparing. This is like comparing everyone to 19. I think it's like the 1916 Chicago Cubs have the highest winning percentage in the history of baseball. It's some ungodly, like almost 800% of their games there or, you know, you know, 80% of their games they're winning. No one's ever done that since. That's not because baseball's gotten worse. It's because everybody's gotten better.
- [08:36]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [08:37]
Joseph S. Moore
And I think we need to like, level set some expectations around. Yes. Some of that dramatic economic mobility was coming out of periods of rather extreme poverty. Now look at today, the state of Mississippi is the poorest US State and it is wealthier per capita than England, Italy and Japan. If you look, if you say, oh, we want to be more like Europe. Okay, well, that's great. I love Europe. I love going. I think, I love friends there. But if you actually look at the. The wealthiest nations on earth, the vast majority are very tiny. They're basically the size of small cities. They're city states. So the third largest town in Alabama is bigger than half by population, is bigger than half of the wealthiest countries in the world.
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Mike Pesca
So these are Monaco.
- [09:20]
Joseph S. Moore
Right. Singapore, Luxembourg. Right. Like Denmark is the size of by population. Denmark is basically Phoenix, Arizona. So when we think about how big the American economy is and how much opportunity there is in it, and that you're already starting from a place with 16% poverty rate, not 35% poverty rate, the idea that you cannot go ahead to me flies in the face of history. It doesn't mean that it was easy or that it is easy, but I just wanted to spell the notion that it used to be easier.
- [09:54]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. Totally agree. What about the idea that the. Is this all taking into account how much benefit one gets just by being a citizen of these middling European nations like France? I mean, in terms of social services and things the government provides for you for your tax dollar.
- [10:14]
Joseph S. Moore
Right. I mean, there's certainly. It is a much easier way to be. It's much easier to be dead center in a European kind of left of center nation than it is to be that exact socioeconomic spot in the United States. We work more hours. Again, this is not Pollyannish. Right. We work more hours for the money we get. We get less government benefits. But on the whole, so much of the messaging around that is driven by a kind of message of whoa. And it's so bad here that we utterly lose sight of the fact that it's actually better here statistically and in the real world than in most other places. If you actually look at the, the respondents, when people say in these surveys it's getting worse. And then if you ask them in the same survey what about your individual life? They'll say, oh, my life's fine.
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Mike Pesca
Right.
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Joseph S. Moore
It's everybody else who's having their life fall apart.
- [11:08]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Because of the doom and gloom industrial complex. Because of catastrophism. Right, right. Because of all the incentives for everyone to emphasize the negative. There are a couple of. There are many questions I want to ask you. I do want to get to your personal wealth story. How does it jibe with the advice in the book? Was it because there are 25 pieces of advice and the ones that surprised me a little bit. I think I'm, I think of myself as somewhat sophisticated. And so I know, for instance, that the best way to make money is to have a high salary, to be able to put some of it away and invest in probably the stock market and maybe the stock market in a way where you don't try to outperform the stock stock market. Am I right about that, by the way? I'll stop there.
- [11:56]
Joseph S. Moore
So my idea of the stock market is very simply this. You actually can beat the market, but you absolutely should not. Yeah, the, the, you hear this over and over. You know, every, every, you know, most financial books that you open say you cannot beat the stock market so you should buy an index fund. The problem with that is now you have 250 pages left to write and you need to sell a book. And so you're going to come up with all kinds of fun things that you can do while telling people to basically stop drinking lattes and buy index funds. By the way, the whole idea of the latte factor, which is, which is fine, but that, that idea goes back to the 1800s when people were saying if you just didn't smoke tobacco and invested the money instead, you could be all this has been around. Right.
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Mike Pesca
But there's a lot of it with that was true. Your stats on alcohol consumption. Blew my mind.
- [12:40]
Joseph S. Moore
Yes. Yes. Yeah. So the number one thing respondents in the 1920s said claimed the reason they had gotten ahead. The number one, this blew the surveyor's mind because it wasn't what they wanted them to say. They said, actually the thing that has helped me the most financially is avoiding liquor. This is like even more so than
- [12:56]
Mike Pesca
budgeting, but we drank four times as much right. As we do now.
- [12:59]
Joseph S. Moore
Oh no, we are wildly less drunk than we used to Be as a
- [13:03]
Mike Pesca
nation less wildly sober. Yes.
- [13:06]
Joseph S. Moore
Yeah. So I'm, I am so back to this stock idea, right, that you can outperform the market. The people who actually to control $600 billion or more, they do beat the market by about half of 1%. They work 70 to 80 hour weeks. They went to Yale for four years and they do all that to get that 1/2 of 1%. In their world, that's a lot of money. If you take the typical 401k and try to invest it like that, you're going to work 70 hours a week to get roughly 3 to 500 extra dollars a year, right? Not, not total, just the extra. You're working the 70 hours to get the extra 500 bucks. That makes no sense. So there's no reason to. To try to beat the market because even if you could do it, which you actually can, it would not benefit you enough.
- [13:54]
Mike Pesca
You talk about fast and slow and you talk about Kim Basinger and buying a town. And I guess the timing was wrong for her town, which eventually did explode. Her town in Georgia, where you live in, it eventually did explode, just not on the time frame she was hoping for. So how is the fast and slow concept different from a couple similar concepts I may have heard? The nine best trading days in a market accounts for all of the gains. I think that was true in 2024. Normally things don't happen, but when they pop, they really pop. Is that essentially what you're trying to say?
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Joseph S. Moore
To a certain extent. I think really the message I have there about fast time and slow time is that we read financial history. Wrong. First of all, most of us spend most of our lives not reading a lot of financial history. If we do, it tends to be boom porn or doom porn. Right? Everything is falling apart everywhere, all at once. It's 1929, it's 2008, and these are the most popular financial histories you're likely to encounter. Here's the problem. Those are not designed to teach you how to handle your money. Those are stories designed to entertain you. It is a murder mystery where we are yelling at the book or the screen like the subprime mortgage lender is behind you.
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Mike Pesca
Run away.
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Joseph S. Moore
Right. It's meant to engage you. It is not meant to actually tell you what you should do with your financial life, because most of your financial life is lived in what I call slow time. This is actually not my idea. I kind of. I basically changed the words around from Benoit Mandelbros kind of concepts of fractal time. But this Idea that, that you are going to make these decisions that set you up to survive or thrive or not. When fast time does come, you know, what job, what career do you pick? How, what habits do you develop? Who do you marry? What do you get addicted to? These are the kind of things that are going to become very important when fast time hits, but they're not where most of your work is done.
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Mike Pesca
Right? Right. You gotta be in a position to take advantage of that by living your life correctly in the slow time way. That doesn't show the benefit for most of it.
- [16:03]
Joseph S. Moore
Right. And if you're gonna build a business, this is the example from Kim Basinger. Kim Basinger in the 1990s. Right. Ace of Base sees the signs of everything booming. And we're gonna. We're gonna open up everybody's eyes to these big opportunities. If you think about the 90s and everyone's memory, include mine. I was there. You were there. It feels kind of like this nostalgic boom era. And Kim Baser goes in and buys a town outside of Atlanta and says, I'm gonna make this a movie production studio and I'm gonna turn it into a tourist attraction. She. It takes way too long. She does not have the resources to fully pull it off. She ends up declaring bankruptcy. And everyone makes this. Truly, it's not just the butt of a joke. It is the. It is the whole idea. The premise of the show Schitt's Creek, which they discovered her story in a Google search and said, we could make a show off of this. Okay, who gets the last laugh? The largest movie studios in America today, the fastest growing by far, are outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It's where all the Marvel movies are made. You can't. Yeah, I can't take my kid to school some days because they've shut down part of Atlanta because we're filming some shit show. Everybody's watching the. The largest tour. One of the largest tourist attractions in Atlanta is called Chateau Alone in the very town she bought. She was right. It takes a long time to build out that kind of business that happens in slow time. And if we think everything's going to happen fast, we're wrong. And that's a mistake I don't want people to make.
- [17:23]
Mike Pesca
What was the key to your personal success that moved you from a Gardner web running bulldog to a Kennesaw owl?
- [17:32]
Joseph S. Moore
So I did many things. I founded a cryptocurrency that was an adventure, but that made me no money. I invested in a tech startup that went to zero. I did many Things that were educational but not profitable. Of the things that I did that paid out, the highest was after I had tried no money down. Real estate and human traffickers moved into one of the very first house that I ever bought. Human traffickers were the first renters. And I had to be on a conference.
- [18:02]
Mike Pesca
Did they pay on time?
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Joseph S. Moore
They did, actually, which was shocking. And they were. And they took care of anything you asked. I reported them to the FBI, the FBI and the local government, you know, police forces said, look, will you just let them stay there? We're gonna sit on the house. And they destroyed that thing, I mean, for two months. And they caught them. And I'm glad we did it. I would do it again. But it also cost me $24,000. I did not have to go in there after they had destroyed it. And at that point I had to do the. I was realized, like, I'm losing money. And not only am I losing money, like, I don't know how I'm going to pay this stuff. And for some reason in that moment, instead of going, well, this was a bad idea, I thought, I've been doing this now for, I guess at that point I had been. I had a couple of other rental properties, all of whom were losing money, by the way. And I thought, well, dang, let's see how high this thing will go, right? The Lord is my banker. My credit is good. I mean, I kind of had the, you know, the ability to say, I think I can find a way to get, to basically dig my way out of this hole. I ended up here buying half of a city street with no money, like very little money to my name. I was able to borrow enough to get it done and started working and I basically made it my full time job. I stopped researching the book, I stopped all of this and I said, I'm going to figure out this investing thing if it kills me. And what I learned is this real estate does not have to go up. It is a business like any other business. You have customers, you are serving their housing needs. And if you don't serve their housing needs, they'll leave. And we learned to run it like a business. My specialty became houses with drug dealers. I would buy houses with drug dealers in them. And I would go and sit down with the drug dealers. This like white dude from the suburbs sitting down with these rough and tumble guys, white guys, black guys, I mean, just all different backgrounds. And I would explain to him kind of what we had to do because like, you can't do that here, right? And I. Whatever you do somewhere else is your business, but you can't do that here. And if you want to leave, I will work with you so that you can leave on your time frame. And I just learned to sit down with drug dealers and talk through how we were going to get them out of the property. Was it always my best? You know, it led to some exciting exchanges. I did have a shotgun pulled on me one time.
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Mike Pesca
So you targeted the house. As you said, this has great value thing. Depressing the value is the drug dealers. And then you figured out a strategy to talk them through leaving.
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Joseph S. Moore
What I figured out was that slumlords had. Slumlords eventually go broke. And because they don't care enough to keep things up, they'll take anybody's money. Things start to get out of hand. They can't repair stuff enough, and eventually things fall down. So this happened in Chicago. Saul Alinsky, the famous labor organizer, they were in this big, tense kind of political movement against the landlords of Chicago. And there's a big meeting, and the landlords walk in on this particular block, and they literally slide the keys across the table, bring a piece of paper, and said, who do we sign over the deed to? And Alinsky's number two said at that moment, he realized, oh, no, we didn't know what was going on. We had the wrong villain, because they can't get rid of these properties fast enough. So what happens is these slumlords, they get into trouble, and it takes a lot of money to get out of it. But I figured I could go in, fix it. And eventually I got pretty decent at it. And so then I learned, you know, it's a lot easier to do that on expensive properties than cheap ones. And so I sold off a lot of that. I started buying much more expensive properties that also had problems at drug dealers and that kind of thing. And we just kept doing it and doing it, and I learned to do it like a business. I learned to treat people with respect, no matter who they were, no matter where they came from. And eventually it started to turn around. I was doing pretty well. I was doing well enough that before the COVID hit, I had already decided I was done working. And then, of course, Covid hit, and the values just took off. And that was nothing I did right. I had already gotten enough. I was. I was already wealthy enough for me, because, again, I come from a mobile home to feel like I'm going to be good.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah.
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Joseph S. Moore
But then, of course, Covid took it to a level I just to me felt insane. And I would tell anybody, if I tell people, make me poor, build more houses. The one thing that would undermine my wealth the fastest is if you built a ton of houses. Build them, we need them. And so that's the long and short of it.
- [22:12]
Mike Pesca
But the lesson there, in case someone is listening and said, well, the timing was right for you, just know the timing was wrong. And it's not that everything evens out, but fast and slow. And all these other concepts do say, if you get the macroeconomics right, that there is money to be made in real estate, which we've always known. And then you identified what made a certain investment depressed, and then you identified, decide what skills you could bring to it to take away that limiting factor. Well, apply that to another area. And you don't necessarily have to time it as great as you did. But maybe also you wouldn't have had the failures like the cryptocurrency and all the other false starts that you did. But that sort of lesson is more or less replicable.
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Joseph S. Moore
You would say, well, yeah, and I had built a successful real estate business before any of the explosive, like, values took off, because I'd learned it was, this is a business, we're just going to treat it like a business, right? I'm, I'm very, I believe very strongly in the idea that whatever business you're in, if you run it well, there's opportunity there. Real estate is just a business, right? It's a, it's a. So look at the. There's a recent stat out from IRS data and what they found is like, small business owners, the most common wealthy people in America are not billionaires. It's the people who are worth millions of dollars because they have a business that rips out carpet and replaces it, right? They have mobile homes. Well, I mean, one of the, one of the big ones is, is in schools, right? Like some guy, I can't remember what state he's in, but he has this huge business just basically in the summer, they go in, they rip out the old carpet, they put in new. It's always done on time so the kids can start school. He's figured out a niche. He figured, if I can rip out and install carpet on time every time, then I can do what these schools need done. And he's built a successful business out of it. I've met, in the course of researching this book, I met and interviewed with people from Avon. Ladies. I went to, like, no money down mobile home parks where people were trying to get rich in mobile homes. And I met with small business owners and I met with people. I met with famous financial gurus who we all know. And their shows are all the popular guru shows. And what I learned in that is like if you focus on building a business, you can still succeed in America today. You have to get good at it. You have to do it repeatedly. It is not sexy. Most of the real money is not going to be made taking a HELOC on your house and buying Bitcoin. In fact, don't do that. It's going to be made building a small business up to the point that either you can live on it or. Or someone wants to buy it.
- [24:56]
Mike Pesca
Joseph S. Moore is a self made man, a professor negotiator with drug dealers and now the author of how to Get Rich in American history. 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. Thank you so much.
- [25:11]
Joseph S. Moore
It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [25:20]
Mike Pesca
So lately I've been getting a little, I guess the word is intentional about my wardrobe. You know, you want to look good, but you want to be comfortable. You want to look put together. You want to be put together. Enter Quince. Quince has the wardrobe staples for spring. They have 100% European linen shorts and shirts that start off at $34 and they're all lightweight and breathable. And I should also say that the reason they're able to beat all their competitors by 50 to 80% is that they do in fact cut out the middleman. You always hear that, but it's true. They work directly with ethical factories. And you're benefiting me. I'm benefiting to the tune of the ultra stretch 24.7 smart chinos. It is good that these are in 24.6chinos, you know, and I can't wear them Tuesdays. I could wear them every day. I'd like to wear them every day. It's like I'm getting away with something because to the outsider they look like, I'll say dress pants to use that broad category. But to the insider me inside the pants, they are stretchy and comfortable and you know, they don't feel like those hard, stiff, uncomfortable, starchy dress pants. They're fantastic. Refresh your everyday with luxury. You'll actually use. Head to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N c-e.com the gist for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com the gist. And now the spiel. I don't know if you could tell by looking at me podcasting, being a mostly audio medium, I'm not that much of a fashionista, more of a fashion lista. I'm no Giorgio or Moni or Cory Warrow when it comes to putting on clothes or knowing how clothes should be put on or that they should be put on. More a glue horse than a clothes horse. Still, I knew the fashion event of the season was descending on my hometown. The New York Times, in fact, sent out a notification via email. The MEG Gala. Yes, maybe you got that Push alert. The headline read. The MEG Gala. All the Megs would be there. Kelly Ryan, the stallion. But no, it was not the MEG Gala. It was the Met Gala. And this year's Met Gala, I learned, was marked by controversy.
- [27:52]
Joseph S. Moore
But this year's gala is also facing controversy, particularly around honorary co chairs and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos. Critics cite Amazon's labor practices and are
- [28:04]
Mike Pesca
calling for a boycott. There were reports that protesters left bottles of, quote, urine inside the Met to protest the presence of the Bezos is given that Amazon denies bathroom breaks to employees. The urine, again in quotes, is in quotes because it turned out not to be urine but colored water. The group staging the protest used fake urine in the bottles. These leftists, they're just so inconsistent. On the one hand, they'll argue for actual killing of CEOs, but they can't quite commit to real urine, which would seem to be an abundant supply. Propaganda of the deed, indeed. I'm glad there was no real urine, but there was real consternation with Jeff and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos. The sharpest drive by came from Robin Given, writing in an op ed for the New York Times. The point was simple. I don't want to overstate this or complicated, but Given was trying to tell us that Lauren Sanchez Bezos dresses badly. Given writes her version of fashion exudes personal indulgence and broad disregard. Sanchez Bezos, Given argues, represents what fashion, buffeted by social and technological change, has surrendered to, quote, economic inequality in human form, with pink glossy lips cinched into a couture corset. The corset came up repeatedly. Given. Imagine Miranda Priestly of the Devil Wears Prada, critiquing someone for wearing the outfit that Sanchez Bezos wore to the White House. And she says that Sanchez Bezos represents an extreme version of femininity, defined by a snatched waist and a cantilevered bosom. So that was the Point that Sanchez Bezos status as a fashion expert or even a decent and competent practitioner strain credibility just as much as she strained against the confines of that blue origin spacesuit. You know I once again am speaking about the bosom. It's not, I need to say, it's not the cantilevered or shelf like nature of the bosom that makes it stand out. And stand out it does. It's the almost perfectly spherical quality of each individual bazoom. And I want you to know it is okay if I talk about the size and shape of a woman's body because I've been granted to do so under the guise of political critique. Thank you New York Times and Robin Given. And I will say this, if Given did not object to Sanchez Bezos politics or perceived politics. Sanchez Bezos doesn't want to get into politics. There is no way the New York Times would allow this kind of body appraisal. The critique boils down to this. Sanchez Bezos dresses like trash. But really this critique is a stand in for Sanchez Bezos is trash who wears dresses. I remember at the start of Kirsten Sinema's Senate term her outfits were celebrated. The press thought they were getting a certain kind of radical break the mold Democrat. Here was how the Washington Post described her swearing in ensemble quote, frothy and light hearted. More quotes. It was a little sexy, but mostly sassy. It was a rejection of stuffiness. It was the antithesis of gruff white haired men in dark suits. And if anyone thought it was inappropriate or silly, well the only response to that sentiment is that cinema won the election and her constituents surely know exactly what they were getting, which is not their grandma's senator. But then of course cinema took a turn. She her outfits didn't change. In fact she wore some of the exact same outfits. But when she turned out to be more conservative or thwarted the Biden agenda more than expected, those very same dresses were recast as kooky. They were even used to diagnose her conflicted psyche. Here is a quote. Her schoolgirl skirt was a quote blithe curtsy in the face of the working poor. Cinema's esthetic choices confounded quote. She has made everyone stop and look. Everyone waits expectantly and she doesn't have much to say. And that critique was also written by the Washington Post. Robin given the style did not change, the critics perception of the model did. Maybe writing about women's fashion is just a proxy for being complimentary or cruel, depending on one's opinion of the person wearing the clothes. This year's Met Gala's theme is costume art, though every year the unstated theme is outrageous consumption as a means of adorning the body and people love it. The costumes, the outfits they routinely cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. And when a wearer is a millionaire actress or sports figure or celebrity whose wealth far exceeds the incomes of most Americans that's great, that's fun, that's aspirational. But add a few zeros to the net worth and it becomes a net negative and the wearer becomes objectionable and the source of boycott or at least taking the piss real or imagined. And that's it for today's show. The dapper Cory Wara produces the gist that Beau Brummel Ben Astaire is our booking producer the fashion plate Kathleen Sykes runs the gist of list Mike Pesca that substack.com and the ever stunning Jeff Craig runs our and edits are how to the luminous and transcendent Michelle Pesca is the CEO of Peach Fish Productions improve and thanks for listening.