HIBT Lab! The Financial Diet: Chelsea Fagan

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. The Financial Diet is a media company that offers up personal finance advice. It started out as a blog back in 2014 when Chelsea Fagin was trying to get her own financial life back on track after racking up credit card debt and developing bad spending habits in her late teens and early 20s. Eventually, her blog turned into a video blog, a newsletter, a podcast, and live events. And today, the Financial Diet, or TFD for short.

is a multimedia business with more than 10 employees and multiple revenue streams. But unlike many of her competitors in the space, Chelsea Fagan has some pretty firm rules. She doesn't promote crypto. And she's not obsessed with growing the company or even growing her audience.

Her goal? to build a sustainable and manageable business. Chelsea Fagan, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Um, all right, so basically you've written that you

quote, destroyed your financial life between the ages of eighteen and twenty two, Uh, what happened t to you during that time? What was going on? Yeah, um so just for a little background, so I lived until the age of about eleven in Charlotte, North Carolina. Um my family was definitely low income at that time. We lived in a pretty low income community um And I've often sort of made the observation looking back that being low income in a low income community, you actually in many ways don't really feel your

kind of socioeconomic status very much, but we moved around that age to Annapolis, Maryland, which is an extremely affluent community. Um and I went to school and socialized with a lot of people who were very, very wealthy. Um, you know, it was very common for kids at my high school to get new BMWs for their 16th birthday or, you know, take lavish trips to Europe in the summer and all that kind of stuff. And we were more at middle income by that time, um, definitely still not wealthy by any means, but we were definitely in a better financial situation by my high school years than we were when I was a kid. But because I was comparing myself and surrounded by such high levels of wealth, I mean I also I worked at a yacht club, you know, often serving in very expensive restaurants, like because I was in that kind of context of wealth, I actually felt much more. poorer than when I actually was much poorer. Um but I I I had a huge amount of kind of insecurity and um

shame around money and typically people who grow up with those kind of money issues, it usually goes one of two ways. They either become big spenders and are very compulsive with money, which was my case, or you become kind of a hoarder with money and very obsessive and often overly frugal. Yeah. Um but I was a very compulsive spender, especially on things that I felt Like they conferred status, you know, clothing, uh restaurants, travel image. Kind of base things. Stuff, basically.

Stuff, yeah, and stuff that felt very specifically tied to that ideal of what a wealthy person was. By the way Not unusual for Uh a a eighteen to twenty two year old.

It's not an an unusual thing to do. No, it's not, I think, but unfortunately, my senior year of high school was still pre-crash. Of two thousand eight. So they had like Bank of America and other, you know, banks had like booths set up in our high school to get you a credit card. Zero percent financing, like right, all all kinds of stuff like that. Exactly. And so I got a Hello Kitty branded Visa credit card. Nice. Uh maxed it out basically immediately and then threw in the garbage. Um and never opened my mail. You were like, I that's it, I don't have to I don't have to pay.

I maxed it out and that's it. Exactly. Um, you know, obviously decimated my credit score, went to collections, um, I was constantly overdrafted, having to use check caching services because I owed so much money to my bank. constantly, constantly sort of running from my own financial mess, um, for sure. And and you were working at the time? Oh yeah, I was always um working full time, often m more than one job. All right, so you had all this debt.

And Mm-hmm. I think even like unpaid traffic tickets and Oh yeah, got my driver's license suspended. And and I it's important to say these things because There's a lot of shame around it, right? When we're especially when we're young. We hide these things'cause it's it it feels like it's embarrassing, but it's I think it's extremely common. for especially for young people to experience this because we don't learn um

financial habits when we're Kids. And so oftentimes uh many of us find ourselves in that position. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean it you mentioned the tickets. I mean, I got arrested because of, you know, my financial problems because it led to me driving on a suspended license and all that stuff. And for a long time I didn't talk about any of these things even after I had sort of cleaned up my situation because of that, you know, embarrassment.

that you're talking about, but I think You know, especially as it pertains to money, so many people are raised in such an extreme level of Taboo. with regards to money. Um whether they have it or they don't, you know, a lot of people are raised not to talk about it. And for people for whom it was a source of stress, all the more so. Um, but I think for me anyway, I uh it's almost sort of felt like a superpower to be so candid about money. Um

Because you really feel like when you're able to own that stuff and to sort of be unashamed Nothing scares you, kind of. Yeah. Alright, so you find yourself

With this debt, but also you're working and you start to do some writing. I think early twenties. What were you writing about initially? Any and everything, you know. It was also the era of the internet where people were heavily encouraged to write about their personal lives. So, you know, I wrote lysticles, I wrote essays about

Life, I wrote some r rather embarrassing things, honestly. I wrote a book at that time that was, you know, kind of similarly positioned. But yeah, I certainly wasn't writing about money. At the time. You were doing a lot of writing for Thought catalog, which is an an online publication geared towards

Uh millennials. a a pretty good opportunity to just kinda get your feet wet, even if If as you say, was stuff you're not super proud of, uh I mean you were writing, right? Yes, uh writing for sure. And I think

Once I was able to write things that I felt more strongly about, what it definitely gave me was I mean, I easily write five thousand words a day, um, because I'm just like so used to cranking out content. Um And it definitely, I mean, I started out as a writer there, and by the end I was the creative director for all of the branded content. So I was in charge of like all of the content that we were doing in partnership with brands to kind of pay the bills. So it did give me a really, really clear view into how to make money on media, which obviously proved useful later. Yeah. I mean it's it's I think it's instructive because a lot of

especially young people who are starting out, they don't know how to break into journalism or media or content creation, and there are outlets. But how did you even get in was it relatively easy to To start writing? Um Easy, I don't know. I think I mean I just cold pitched an article and it got picked up right away and the first article I wrote went viral and I had several But what was the article what was the first article called Now accepting boyfriend applications and it was a list of criteria. It was very

A snarky, I would say almost kind of mean uh and I still to this day get some disgruntled men uh Writing to me about it. And I actually met my now husband the Uh we our first date was the day it was published, so we'll talk about Kismet, but Wow. Um Accepted that application. But uh so yeah, I that went viral. And I mean I I wouldn't say it was

difficult, but I will say, I mean, I'm pretty candid about the fact I was writing for some pretty established outlets in the first year of writing, and it for a long time I wasn't paid for anything. I wrote for free for quite some time. Many, many, many articles. So in that sense, um, it was just, you know, a bit of a slog because you know, I act I was going to school at the time in France and I had a full time job. Um, so that was hard. So all right, so you eventually you become, as you say, the the head of a brand of content at Thought Catalog. I and I should mention while you're there you you put out a couple of books. And I I guess at a certain point you start

A tumbler blog. And you really start to kind of ta think and write more about personal finance. Um How did you start to kind of Write about it and think about it. What what was the impetus? Was it your own experience? Yeah, so when I sold my first book, I got an advance of twenty two thousand dollars, which at the time was lottery amounts of money. Yeah. That's right. Um it was life changing for me at that time. And it was the first time not only that I had that kind of money, but all at once. And so the first thing I wanted to do was pay off my debts because

I basically couldn't use my phone anymore because of all the collection calls I was getting. And so I paid it all off. And by the time I was twenty five, I was living in New York. And I, you know, I had a little in savings. I was making a very low salary at that time, but I was still combined with my now husband's income, you know, I was able to pay my bills and I felt like I had the ingredients to be an adult. uh financially, but I was only just sort of like making the bare minimum. So I started a tumbler at the time a personal blog to hold myself accountable. Two

kind of improving my relationship with money. And uh that's how I started doing it. And and when you say hold yourself accountable. It was y you essentially were Putting

all of your sort of spending habits out in public in order to make sure that you didn't Do something irresponsible? Yeah, and also to kind of create a support system, um, around it and talk to other people about it and feel less You know, anxious.

This was a Tumblr that was called The Financial Diet. Mm-hmm. How did over time That blog become A blog about personal finance that anybody could Relate to.

So On like the third day of operating TFD as just, you know, a personal project, my co-founder Lauren, uh, who was working at an ad agency as a designer at the time, emailed me and said, Hey, I love your work. I'm really love this blog idea, I'd love to redesign it as kind of material from my portfolio, I'm trying to branch out. I you know, she wasn't in love with her job. either and so she redesigned the whole thing for free as kind of a project and then

A few months later, John and Hank Green, who are Authors, YouTubers, they have a very, very large YouTube video production company, um, mostly in the educational space. They reached out to us because they have a kind of like a it's like a foundation essentially that gives grants out to things on the internet that they like and want to see more of. So they sent us Five thousand dollars, which again at the time I was like, Oh my gosh. And also I mean, you know, it wasn't just the money, it was

They shared us and they were kind of institutionally supporting us um in that way. Uh so We kind of took that as okay, like let's give this a try full time. We use that money to kind of set up the company legally and structurally. And we were both still like I was freelancing quite a bit through that first year, and she was also freelancing and doing some, you know, kind of catering jobs and whatnot to just kind of make the bills, but It was a pretty quick and precipitous transition. I mean looking back, I don't know what I was thinking. I was like on my work computer in the office, like spending all day working on my personal blog, and it was like, okay, clearly this is what you want to be doing. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, how Chelsea Fagan turned a blog into a business. You're listening to how I built this lab.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Chelsea Fagin, founder and CEO of the Financial Diet. So you at this point With this grant from John Hank Green, it's clear the financial diet will no longer just be a written blog. But it's gonna be a video blog as well, is it right? So that was about a year later. Um we kept in touch with Hank. I met up with him in New York for dinner. You know, he basically was like Have you ever thought about

Um, turning this into videos and I was not really even a watcher of YouTube at the time. I didn't know anything about it. And I was like, um maybe, why not? And he goes, Well, you know, we have this production company, if you come on, we'll give you the resources, teach you how to make videos, teach you, you know, uh the back end of YouTube, all of that. send someone out to New York to film you guys, this that and the other. And you know, we did a Rev share. So for the first two years of having a YouTube channel, we were um a co-production with Complexly.

Which is their YouTube production company. And then a few years into it, we went totally independent, um and took it all back in house. Um and to their credit, I mean, Hank is just uh very few people on the internet are as like decent a human being as he is, but they were very, um generous about making sure that we We got all the IP and w all of our rights and all, you know. keep a hundred percent of our money and all that. So it was uh we couldn't have landed on better people in that regard.

So as you kind of pivot towards video and of obviously continuing to write um Did you and Lauren start to map out what you wanted or what you imagined the financial diet could be? Not really. I think so I worked at Thought Catalogue

with uh Our third partner, we have a third partner, and she worked in the branded content department. So she was very responsible for getting clients and building out ad campaigns, which is how we make the majority of our money. And so she had left and was working at a nonprofit and I had reached out to her. This is maybe a year into our existence, maybe a little less. And I said, you know, we're really looking to kind of build this out into a proper business. Um, do you wanna

join in, help us out. So she started um for that first year or so nights and weekends. She got like a monthly stipend plus commission on everything she brought in. Um and of course some ownership in the company, but she really was the one who came on and sort of mapped out the business end of it. And so you've got this Essentially a personal finance media company that you're kind of building, but sounds like you're not quite thinking of it as a media company and at least initially.

No, I I don't think I was, but I also, like I said, I mean I I had enough of experience in the monetization aspect of it that from day one I had a pretty keen understanding of how to turn content into money. I think really the infrastructure of a business is what came later.

So let's kinda break some of that down. Um First of all, in terms of your audience, right? Um Who who was Coming to the site.

Do you have a sense of who your audience is? We're a very demographically narrow company, very niche. Uh well, I mean, listen, it is only in the world of personal finance are women considered a niche. I mean, we are the majority of the population, but We are our audience is almost exclusively women, um, which especially when we started was very unusual in the personal finance space. Um eighteen to forty. Yes, but with the largest section of that by far being like twenty five to thirty-four in that sort of like you know, young adults really getting your

They're also generally Professional. uh in some capacity generally have at least a bachelor's. A huge amount of them have postgraduate degrees, um, tend to be clustered in urban markets. But you know, it's a very specific type of woman. And I mean it you know, it's important to state that Even

A woman who Is educated, has money, works full time, et cetera. On average, women are still not The financial decision makers. They make day-to-day decisions in the household generally, but they're not the long-term financial planners of heterosexual couplings. So

the type of woman who is really interested in like building out her own investment portfolio or managing her own retirement or buying a house uh and kind of leading that process. Even amongst women who demographically fit the bill, It's a pretty self selecting group. Yeah. Uh, I'm curious how you

educated yourself around personal finance. You know, I was a a foreign correspondent early in my career. I covered conflicts and wars. I I I had no background in finance or entrepreneurship It was only in the last ten years that I started to learn about it and then start a show and now Yeah. Thousands of interviews later.

I have a pretty good you know, grasp and understanding of how it works. But it took time. for me to understand it. How did you Teach yourself about personal finance.

Kind of by osmosis. I Do take pains to say that I'm not a financial expert. I don't have certifications. I don't have my series seven. I'm not a CFP. None of that. So we we contract out to a lot of them and we have great relationships with a lot of actual subject matter experts that we work with quite frequently.

But I mean I look at the model that John and Hank have with a lot of their content where they're really they're communicators, they're educators. Their their job is to translate these ideas and not to be themselves scientists or what have you. And so I really sort of look at myself the same way in my relationship to personal finance. And so I think in some ways that relieves me of the responsibility of like I'm not out here giving people individual advice. Uh, you know, and especially when it gets to the more esoteric stuff, we pass that off to real experts. And I think what I want to stress to our audience more than anything is that This isn't hard. This isn't difficult to learn. It's not complicated. Anyone who's trying to make finance, personal finance, sound complicated or like it there's a lot of math in it or things like that, they're probably just trying to get money out of you. Um

'Cause there's really not that much to know, honestly. Spend less than you make. I mean, there's really not You know, uh there's only so many ways you can say it. Yeah. Spend less than you can make, the rest is commentary. Exactly.

I love that. You mentioned that you have a niche audience and uh I wanna I wanna sort of um mind that for a moment because the the quote unquote niche audience that you have. uh women twenty-four to thirty-five is probably the most valuable audience from an advertiser's perspective on earth, right? It's the highest spending Audience. Media companies want

women between the ages of twenty four and thirty five to be listening or watching their Yeah. It's an incredibly valuable audience, but you make the point that You don't need to make a a a program with mass appeal because You can actually

Have a successful business. By appealing to this. very specific audience. Exactly. And I think something that I learned early on working in media is that

You know, if you're dealing in scale. you're in a race to the bottom. There's no two ways about it. Yes. Um I mean the era of the Facebook click content farm That kind of stuff, most of those companies are gone.

But even the ones that survive, I mean They rely on what's called programmatic advertisements. So things like the automatic ads that play before a YouTube video or the banner ads that you see on websites, things like that. And what counts there is just maximizing eyeballs. And The

you know, value per eyeball is super low. So you gotta do clickbait and you gotta, you know, publish scandalous stuff or really sloppy stuff, or, you know, comment on trending topics you have no business speaking on. And For us, the value of an ad that we do per person, even setting aside the demographic value, which is high. Is so much higher because there is

А левов кваді, во спикін. About money already. So if our advertiser is in that space, you have the most direct relationship with that consumer. Um You know, we want to maximize the value of each piece of our content and each person in our community, and you know, that's never ever going to happen by casting as wide a net as possible. I don't want to speak to everyone. One of the things that I really like about

this era of content creators is that When I started out in in media, you couldn't do that, right? You had to go through a major media company. to have a platform. It was there was no other way. And that of course has changed dramatically, um, to the point where you've got You know, people who have

Hugely significant. quote unquote media companies. through YouTube channels. And one of the things I've noticed that you've done is you kind of walk your your

viewers and your readers through the how you can do that, how it's possible to do it. You actually wrote an article in twenty seventeen called How TFD Actually Makes Money. Um, which I thought was really interesting. I I read it. It might be probably a little bit outdated today. But basically you broke down

how your business is sustainable. Can you kind of Give us a sense of how Of what your revenue streams are. Yeah. And how it works.

Yeah, so The largest segment of our business by sort of Yeah. are our events. Um so that's classes, workshops Conferences, things like that. It used to be all in person, we did all digital for the pandemic. Now we're doing kind of a mix. And within that, there are about half that are ticketed.

Um, so we're selling direct to the consumer or the the other half is in partnership with a sponsor, uh corporate sponsor, and usually those are free to the audience. So just in terms of scale, that's the biggest part of what we do. Second to that Pretty close second is YouTube, obviously a a big big part of what we do. And that's the pre roll ads that run before your video. Well that and almost every video we do has a a sponsor, um brought to you by b it's baked in. You are or the or the person who's doing the video will say Thanks to our sponsor, whatever, Squarespace for whatever, whatever, whatever. Exactly. And we actually double dip. We have our uh pre roll ads on and we have the um corporate sponsor. And our audience uh we have the best audience, I have to say. They're very kind about You know, you you gotta get you gotta make your money somehow, ladies, you know. Yeah. Um, so they're really sweet. Uh so that's a big part of it. Um our grand partnerships are also distributed throughout our newsletter, which is where we publish articles and uh social media uh and all of that. Um Outside of that, we also we do licensing, we do uh we have a membership program for, you know, exclusive content and things like that. So we try to be as diversified as possible, but you know, at the end of the day, media companies there's only so many ways they can make money.

Uh how do you You know, when it comes to things like brand partnerships, for example, or, you know, content that is is made on behalf of a client. How do you How do you make decisions about

Where your red lines are. Yeah, it's tough. I mean we have this conversation all the time. Um It's not a perfect science. Also, I mean I hate to say it, but like in the world of financial services companies, you're gonna have a hard time finding any of them that have a Perfectly unblemished past, um, in some respect or another. Yeah. So, you know, part of it is kind of a gut check. There are hard lines for us. We don't do

weight loss stuff. We certainly don't do crypto, uh, even though they've flooded our industry over the past year with Crazy ad dollars. And I'm sure you gave up a lot of a a lot of potential revenue by not doing that. For sure, but I do think even financially it's in our long term best interest. I mean the personal finance people who were hardcore shilling crypto to their audience, uh, they saw serious blowback from their audience, especially now. And and what about as you say, there are a lot of

financial companies and and and companies that are selling financial products that really want your audience. They want uh young people, they want young women, whether it's fidelity or or e trade or uh a Robin Hood or you know, I I mean I'm just mentioning a few, but there are tons and tons of of options out there. How do you how do you handle that? Well, I mean you just have to disclose that it's an ad, right? And I mean we disclose yeah.

For financial services companies that we actually use all the time. You know, we've worked with Intuit. I'm I I've used Mint forever. We used to use QuickBooks for years at the company. You know, we have we've done ads for robo advisors that our own team uses. All that kind of stuff. So there are things In fact the times that it becomes a most blurry is when we're advertising for people that we have organically and and unprompted endorsed in the past. But I think, you know, obviously we're only working with um companies that are above board and that we would use ourselves or do. But we're you know, w we we're super careful about m making sure to properly it's a huge pet peeve of mine when uh digital creators and influencers don't properly disclose their ads.

We're gonna take another quick break. I'm talking with Chelsea Fagan, the founder and CEO of the Financial Diet. Stay with us, you're listening to how I built this lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm talking with Chelsea Fagin, she's the founder and CEO of the Financial Diet. So you uh in in twenty nineteen you tweeted that every employee Salary on full time employee makes at least sixty thousand dollars a year.

Probably a little bit more now,'cause that was a few years ago. Mm-hmm. Tell me about How you think about it Pay structure.

at TFD. Yeah, so it well it is more than that now. But um You know, we are not a non profit and we're not a co op. However, we do kind of have a bit of a hybrid model where almost everyone in the company

uh has some kind of base plus some sort of rev share commission bonus, et cetera. There are certain employees who prefer to keep their base low and they like to get a higher variable compensation or vice versa. We also recently implemented a four day work week without a pay cut, so that's effectively a twenty percent bump for everyone. We try to be very uh you know, as equitable as humanly possible. The range of uh compensation in the company is pretty narrow. I'm smack in the middle of it, so I'm not even like paid more than everyone else, not by far. Because I think for us, for myself certainly, and I think we've cultivated a team where what is most important, most valuable is work life balance. And you know, we all have six weeks PTO, we have a pretty aggressive maternity leave, all of that kind of stuff. And Outsize compensation for executives.

really flies in the face of that. So by having that more co-op like model. Um, it really allows us to kind of have the best of both worlds and it also keeps our employee retention basically forever. Like no one leaves, essentially. So that obviously in the long term ends up saving us a lot of money and time as well. How many people work for TFD now? Uh twelve total. uh employees and partners. Um

And then obviously a ton of contractors. So that's that's a a really significant um number of of people working. And You've been

very transparent about your own finances, even you know, what you pay yourself. Can you give us a sense of what what the overall revenue for TFT is for year? Yeah. Um well, we took a big old hit during Covid, but um this year we're probably gonna end up somewhere between one point five and two million dollars in revenue. Well. So you've got a really robust business that started out as a tumbler.

And you know Give give me a sense of what your sort of visioned for it. the YouTube videos. You've got the newsletter, you've got the events. How do you envision growing the company even even more over the next

Five years. I think the difference is that I really just don't view growth as the metric of success really. Interesting. You know, it's nice to grow a little bit year over year, but we've never taken on any investments, um you know, outside investors because what they want is growth. That's yeah the most important marker of success. And I mean that's capitalism, right? Like the line has to go up. Sure. Um

You're looking for sustainability. Exactly. Like I would be very happy with like a twenty percent year over year growth rate, but like everyone has an awesome life and everyone's paid really well and we're making, you know, work that we really enjoy and We get to go home at the end of the day, you know, uh and keep our four day work week and all that kind of stuff. So, um You know, as far as my role within things, it's been for the past several years, the trajectory has been making myself less and less financially. necessary for the company just for sustainability purposes and also like you as the face of it, you mean. Correct. And because also, you know, I just don't think that's it's not sustainable, but also, you know demographically we we wanna have people of all kinds of i financial experiences talking. So yeah, I mean I think at the end of the day, eventually, you know, I'm gonna die. So

uh if nothing else, that'll be the end of it for me. But I genuinely don't really think in terms of a five year plan, mostly because with COVID, with how fickle these platforms are, with how quickly these things can change. I know that any plan that I have today For what our digital strategy or our revenue strategy will be in five years is probably gonna be totally obsolete. Well it's almost like your Your strategy

Or your pro, rather, it runs entirely counter to the The kind of hustle culture. That you see among financial bloggers and YouTubers. A lot of them are get rich quick schemes or you know, meme stocks and and I'm generalizing. Of course there's some outstanding financial advisors on YouTube and making podcasts, but

M many of them are not. And it seems like your approach is like we're fine with growing slowly. We're fine with having a smaller audience. We're fine with It's kind of being a bit under the radar. Oh.

For sure. I mean, also media is such a disaster zone of an industry. I mean, like half the companies that were around when we started in our space are gone. Basically, every media company has gone through layoffs, restructurings, pivoting to video, pivoting away from video. You know, I mean, I have many, you know, friends and acquaintances in the industry, and almost all of them have had an incredibly turbulent past 10 years professionally. We've never laid off a a single employee. And Uh, we've never had an unpaid intern. We've never had to do any of these things. Like I Even during Covid, you know, the level of job security that we all kind of get to experience is To me, that is way way.

Preferable to, you know, being big and splashy and growing um really quickly for sure. A very different approach from another New York based. financial media company, the Morning Brew, they're on our show. Maybe a year and a half ago. Um

And I mean it's a similar kind of model, but but in the end they took on a large investment and so, you know, are now I mean, is there a world where you would ever Even entertain something like that?

Probably not. We've gotten into pretty protracted conversations with several different potential investors who are either looking to outright buy us or to invest heavily and you know, we even got to well into due diligence in one in instance. And I think What I learned from all of those experiences is that there's no iteration of TFD that takes on investor money that doesn't kind of nuke the editorial and labor practices to some extent. It w it would just be such a compromise, you're saying.

A thousand percent. I think personally, I would feel like it was a huge betrayal to my team. Like in that instance, I feel like I would have to like offer everyone some money and be like Yeah, here here's the money. If you guys want to leave, leave because it's not gonna be the same party uh you know it was before. But I just don't see a reason to do that, especially if I'm uh not even myself financially necessary to the company anymore. Like you know, there's no reason if it's not broke, don't fix it. And the kinds of pressures for

Not just growing quickly, but also maximizing profit, which we intentionally don't do. Those would become insurmountable because if someone is investing in you, they want to see a return and they have every right to want that, but then Then we're obligated to put profit first and There's no way that w the way we operate today could be sustained in a growth first, profit first model.

Do you think that it is possible So much competition for eyeballs, right? And much harder today to get attention than when I started. twenty. eleven.

Do you think that it is. Possible. For somebody completely unknown like you were You know? Ten years ago when you started.

To create a YouTube channel and turn it into a sustainable business. Of course. I yeah, of course I do. In some ways it's harder, but in some ways social media does make it easier for people to find what they like and to form communities.

You know, and I think There definitely is more competition, but even just from like an ad dollars perspective. You know, when we were starting out, even YouTube wasn't taken that seriously by advertisers. We were having to fight tooth and nail for the scraps of ad dollars that were left over. And now

Digital add spend is where People are going first. Um, Chelsea as you know there there's been a lot more discussion over the role of capitalism and justice in our society

Certainly over the last year. Yeah. And here you are, you're running a financial um blog of a personal finance Sort of advice.

um operating in a capitalistic system. But It seems to me that you have a a a rather more nuanced view of capitalism. Can you Can you kind of outline How you think about capitalism? Um

Wow, uh Yeah, I mean at the end of the day, like I am a capitalist, quite literally, right? Like I Not a very good one, uh by

sort of extraction of resources metrics, but I am a business owner and I am also an investor in the market, and there are many ways in which the life I live and the things I do are definitely a a product of a of a capitalist environment, for sure. And as someone who's sort of won at capitalism, I feel maybe not the most well positioned to criticize it. But I do think that the version of capitalism that we have in America is just needlessly harsh and destructive. Um, you know, keeps people in a cycle of poverty. You know, there are a a million and one problems with the version of it that we have today. But I don't, I've never lived under communism, so I can't

you know, or or m more literal socialism, so I can't say whether or not I would love it, but I do think that having a much more sort of regulated and um Infrastructure capitalism with much, much more limits on wealth accumulation, much higher taxation, um, much more support and resources for lower income folks. All of that I think is absolutely necessary. Whether or not that's realistic for our country, I mean I really don't know. I do think.

I personally s a lot happening. politically, especially at the state and local level, that I that I feel heartened by for sure. Chelsea Fagan is the founder and CEO of the Financial Diet. Chelsea, thanks so much for coming on the show. Well thank you so so much for having me. It's been a huge pleasure. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at HowI Built This, and mine is at GuyRoz, and on Instagram, I'm at guy.ros.

If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Chris Massini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our music was composed by Ramteen Erablui. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Esteves, Casey Herman, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulsen, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Josh Lash, and Elaine Coates. Niva Grant is our supervising editor, Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. how I built this.

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