How I Get By

Marti is a travel agent who lives in Thousand Oaks, California. After 10 years in the travel business, the coronavirus pandemic rapidly put the brakes on it- there were virtually no trips to plan. Fortunately, she was beginning a transition into wellness coaching, and with the pandemic she’s pushed her new career into overdrive.She talks about the stresses and challenges of working as a travel agent, and her and her family’s budget cutbacks as a result of the fallout from COVID-19, but she also expresses her excitement for her new career in wellness, which she’s come to from her own experience with depression and autoimmune issues, which she is beginning to impart to her clients via one-on-one coaching, teaching classes and article writing.

Nick Morof works for an architecture firm in Paris. Just a year out of architecture school at USC, he’s already established a solid career path, thanks to strategic internships in Detroit, Tokyo and the one in Paris that led to his current full-time salaried position. He talks about the strict Parisian quarantine protocol he lived through (fortunately his roommate has parents they escaped to outside the city), living in tiny apartments, and the self-driven qualities that served him well in getting through a rigorous architecture program. He also discusses how he’s been a careful spender, and why he moved abroad for work (which has a lot to do with the way that aspiring architects in the U.S. are offered a pittance for full-time work). 

Christy works at a grocery store - part of a national chain - in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A recent college graduate, she talks about what it's been like as shoppers went into panic mode, navigating customers who don't follow public health guidelines, and the empathy involved in her job, one which she compares with being a therapist. She also talks about her mature relationship to income and savings, and the possibility of transferring to another store, maybe in Colorado, while she start grad school.

Phillip P. is a Santa Barbara-based landlord and project manager who works with multi-millionaires and billionaires. He talks about maintaining a minimum standard of comfort when he travels – which he does often for work –including everything from where he sits on the plane to where he draws the line when it comes to the quality of his hotels. He also describes how and why he expanded his work life into commercial real estate, the risks he took early on, and how he’s responded to the Coronavirus pandemic as a landlord.

Ethan Herschenfeld is a standup comedian and actor (his acting credits include: Girls, Boardwalk Empire, High Maintenance, and the Plot Against America) living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He's managed to reach a level of financial security that's very unusual for a creative type. He talks about how he's managed to do it (hint: real estate), his various early gigs including opera singer and college prep tutor, and, eventually, how much he spends, and even his ballpark net worth.

Allen (not his real name) works in corporate IT. He makes very good money, but only works about half of the year—the rest of the time he is “unemployed” (at least that’s how he essentially presents himself to people he’s dating). When he’s not traveling abroad, he’s traveling the country in an Airstream trailer, parking in RV parks, and periodically taking on corporate IT jobs along the way. He grew up mainly in the Seattle area, living in foster homes, being homeless, and hanging out with a group of what he refers to as “Asian suprematists.” He shares all these parts of his life, and also talks about how he does NOT like the work that he does for money, but accepts it for what it is, and that it allows him his “pretty luxurious” lifestyle.

"Uneasy Street: the Anxieties of Affluence" is Rachel Sherman's book about very wealthy families living in New York City. She talks with me about it-- everything from how she found her subjects to what big-picture revelations came from studying rich people--and I in turn talk with my collaborator Maia Laperle about our respective reactions to the book and rich people generally.

Zane Helberg is a Los Angeles-based comedian who organized comedy shows at recovery and rehab centers. It's a new career for him--he was recently in the restaurant industry, working as a manager for a small chain of sandwich outlets. The job paid very well but also ate up all of his time and obliterated his quality of life. He talks about how and why it got so bad, and how he managed to turn things around.

Colin Beavan is a Brooklyn-based writer and life coach. In the mid-2000s, he launched his “No Impact Man” experiment in which he and his wife and daughter led a carbon-zero lifestyle, in New York City, for 6 months. The project went viral, but Colin wrote books before No Impact Man (which also became a book and documentary), and has published books since, including most recently, “How to be Alive,” which explores how both science and traditional wisdom can affect our happiness. With his new work, along with No Impact Man, I got the strong sense that Colin would have a lot of insights relevant to our show (HIGB), specifically around what we want vs what we really need- and Colin delivers.

Berlin-based American Spencer McDonald describes his path to becoming a professional filmmaker, from driving Lyft in San Francisco to interning for a filmmaker in Portland - while doing odd jobs from wild-berry harvesting to carpentry - and barely getting by, and then getting paid to shoot commercials for companies to Lyft to Disney, sometimes making as much as $30,000 for a single one-month job. He also talks about why he left the cozy bubble of Portland, Oregon for Berlin, where he lives mainly with non-Americans and enjoys the more social, communal lifestyle.

Stephen Johnson is a twenty-something tech entrepreneur who splits his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's a lifestyle that's actually far less pricey than you may imagine, because he's a member of the co-living space PodShare, which costs him only $1000 a month for adult-dorm style accommodations. He talks about launching his internet advertising business, FlipMass; the 11 items he owns (and why despite that, he calls himself a 'maximalist'); the life he leads in San Francisco compared with Los Angeles; and how he's able to live in a very non-private environment even though he's an introvert.

Elvina Beck talks about the origins of PodShare, a co-living space based in Los Angeles with several outposts plus one in San Francisco, how it works as a co-living space, the circumstances that led her to found the platform, and what her lifestyle is like as an entrepreneur and PodShare resident

Anna Scott, housing and homelessness reporter in Los Angeles and prior guest, talks about her and her husband's financial dynamics by way of clarification.

This episode introduces Elvina Beck, the owner and director of PodShare, a group of five (as of Aug. 2019) co-housing living spaces throughout Los Angeles along with one site in San Francisco. Elvina is also a resident - a ‘member’ - of PodShare, and she talks about how it all got started. We also talk one more time with housing reporter Anna Scott, in particular about Paul, an individual she’s reported on, who lives in an SRO-type hotel and has a steady job after many years of homelessness; she talks about the challenges of living in a small room with no kitchen, and the challenges of staying off the streets.

We continue to talk with housing reporter Anna Scott, this time about Renae, a woman she reported on who went from having a tenuous housing situation to having to live our of her car, a car she's leasing through Uber, and how she wound up in that place through a series of multiple circumstances. I also talk with producer Maia Laperle about my own housing story, in which I lost my housing due to a breakup, and spent a year looking for my own place, in New York City, in a market that was much more lenient (and affordable) than it is now.

Anna Scott is a full-time radio reporter for the Santa Monica-based NPR station KCRW, where she reports on housing issues in Los Angeles. She talks about her job, which involves talking to many people who are homeless or near homeless, and how she herself gets by, along with her husband and 15-month-old son.

Maneesh Seethi runs the company Pavlok, which produces wearable products to help keep you on task, including waking up in the morning, and they also offer coaching. It goes back to when they introduced the Shock Clock into the world. Maneesh spends about half the year in Medellin, Columbia, these days, and works with a remote company team that's based far afield, including in the UK, Asia and the U.S. He talks about the influence of the book The 4-Hour Work Week on his life, his objective with his wearables, which includes a different way for people to rewire their learning habits, how he manages to live on only about $2000 a month while his company "owes" him about 100k, and how he's going to be doing Pavlok until the day he dies.

Lynne Ferguson is a musician living just outside Seattle, on a section of Native land that she loves. For over 20 years, she's run Native Horsemanship Youth Program, a non-profit that teaches horse skills to tribal and special needs young people, and helps them heal their emotional wounds. She talks about her life as a musician, raising a family, living in poverty while she built her tiny house on her Native property where she runs her non-profit, and how she got through it all. She also talks about the inheritance her father left her, and how that now she has substantial money, she's having a hard time figuring out where to spend it...

Brian Gurien, a comedian and improver living in Brooklyn, talks about the reality of having a day job, which is currently a full-time, but not long-term, gig helping to set up passover camps in a couple of locales. Brian's admission that being in entertainment is NOT a long-term career option is unusual, and he's sticking with both comedy and improv for now regardless. He also talks about his past gigs, how he got into credit card debt, and what it's like when his co-workers ask him to tell them a joke.

Oliver Sykes lives off a trust fund. It's doled out to him in $5300 monthly increments that are controlled by his mother and the investment account she set up for him. This source of income has been complicated for Oliver throughout his adult life, both enabling him to overly depend on it and in turn limiting his independence, and also causing rifts in his relationship with his mom. He's currently trying to get a tutoring company off the ground, and makes about $200 a week from tutoring work. He's gone through various jobs and careers over the years, and his steady income from the trust fund has allowed him to bail out of jobs that he eventually grew disillusioned with. He has also struggled with mental health through his adulthood, which has directly affected his ability to work. His father has also suffered from mental health issues, include schizophrenia (which Oliver has been diagnosed with as well), and there are many parallels between his father's life and his own. He talks about the complexities of his dependence on the trust fund, the rocky relationship he and his mom have had, and the way his mental health has impacted his life in a wild ride of a story.

Special guest Paul Gilmartin is a full-time podcaster through his show the Mental Illness Happy Hour, on which he talks to guests about their traumas, addictions, negative thinking and really- just about everything related to mental illness. He talks about getting to the point where he could make a living from the show, as he does currently, as well as his time co-hosting the popular TV show Dinner and a Movie on TBS, as well as his years as a standup comedian.

In part 2 of our conversation with Caitlin, she talks specifically about working at Google as a software engineer, including everything from what she actually does in her job, what her work days are like (including the special Google perks), how much she earns, what her colleagues are like and what it's like working there as a woman programmer. She also talks about Google's larger reputation as a corporation, and how far along she is in paying off her grad school debt.

Caitlin is a dancer and choreographer, and she's also a software engineer at Google in New York. In the first part of two episodes, she talks about her various living situations over the years in New York, and a three-year stint in Denver, including her current one with a roommate in Brooklyn that she's much more happy with; learning to code, getting a masters degree at NYU and the steps that led her to becoming a Google employee; how technology may factor into her future dance projects; how hard it is to make a living from being in modern dance, and how it's hard for anyone to, ultimately, be satisfied with what they do.

Chef Antonio has led a life of highs and lows since being in San Francisco- mainly an extravagant lifestyle when with his ex-, including lots of dining out at great restaurants and buying lots of nice things, followed by a very hard landing after they split...including homelessness.

Deanna is a real estate agent in Portland, three and a half years into that profession. She defies virtually every stereotype and model of a real estate agent: she's an activist, she's (currently) a renter, and she's vegan. She talks about how much she makes as an agent currently, how much she'd like to make in the next year or two, and her ambitions of buying a modest (roughly $250,000) house in Portland, as well as another modest one on the Oregon coast. She also talks about her veganism (she's not a proselytizer, she's a supporter of those who are trying to maintain the diet/lifestyle), her food budget, her activism, and the reasons she loves Portland specifically and Oregon as a whole; if she were to leave Oregon, she'd leave the country altogether.

Angie lives with her boyfriend in a suburb of Detroit, studying nutritional psychology and working part-time as at a Mediterranean wrap/bowl joint. She also has multiple side gigs, everything from being a fetish model to trimming marijuana plants to selling hugs on the street. She talks about her wild journey that took her out of high school to Humboldt County, to the Big Island of Hawaii, and back to Michigan, including a near-death experience that took place on that not-quite-paradisical island.

Jim is technically retired (he collects social security), but he earns a very substantial income from the rent he collects on about a dozen properties, both residential and commercial. He talks about how he got into real estate and real estate investing (it began when his wife gave him a 10-year warning that she was going to retire), various investing strategies that he advocates for listeners (especially in more affordable regions of the U.S.), why he's not leaving his properties or savings to any of his four children, and how and why he spends just about all of what he earns. Jim and his wife split their time between Ft. Myers, Florida, a mobile home and the road, and Las Vegas.

Jordan is an aspiring musician who lives in Loveland, Colorado (about 20 minutes from Boulder) and does multiple gigs: she sells jewelry on Etsy, she bakes cakes for random friends’ events, she cleans houses, and, most importantly to her, she plays the harp and sings. She talks about the surprisingly high cost of housing in this part of central Colorado, her and her husband applying for a home through Habitat for Humanity (she’s on the list and waiting to hear), and how she mainly gets to her various gigs when her son is in daycare. She also talks about how she was drawn to the harp (initially through the musician Joanna Newsom), how she gradually bought her way into bigger and better harps over the years, and what her experiences have been playing in public, mainly busking in high-traffic public locations.

Did you ever wonder what it's like working in a fish cannery in Alaska? Matt talks about his experience working in an Alaska cannery for six weeks over the summer. He found out about the work through a friend, and saw it as an opportunity to do a "hard re-start" of his life after being disillusioned with work in the hospitality industry. He talks about the work he did at the bottom of the totem pole as a 'fish processor', how much money he was earning and what one could potentially earn, and how the experience gave him tons of perspective on his relatively privileged lifestyle in San Diego. He also talks about what career he's interested in jumping into next: advertising.

Mark works as a cook at a brewery in Eugene; he also makes paintings which he occasionally sells, and does seasonal work as a maintenance man. He talks about his prior life, in which he made plenty of money but found that he just became overworked and a mindless consumer. Now he makes just enough money to get by on, with no real margin, but believes things will ultimately take care of themselves. In a follow-up call, he talks about a couple of big changes in his life: his job and his home.

Steve lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he works with draft horses (similar to the Clydesdales from the Budweiser commercials). He runs carriage tours around town; he provides them to music festivals including Bonnaroo and Coachella, where they're mounted and used for security; and he uses them to teach leadership training to corporate groups. He's a former science teacher; he worked for a decade in Orange County, California, and he talks about the surprisingly similar parallels between his two careers. He also talks about the history of his compound, which includes a horse arena and a mansion. And he also talks about his income, both as a teacher and now running his very unconventional horse business, and his very simple priorities for winning, including keeping enough hay in the barn for his "ponies."

Sophia is a traveler who juggles a few different gigs, from a face painting business to more recently an Airbnb management company. She also earns passive income from the housecleaning business she started while living in Seattle. She talks about her various gigs, including the perils of being a house cleaner, as well as her tendency to work less and explore more, her hitchhiking - both the virtual kind, via Craigslist ride shares, and the actual, more dangerous kind - and bus travels, and how she's turned out well despite a difficult adolescence.

Andrew owns and operates a drone as part of his living- he rents it out and his services operating it for photo and video shoots around the Los Angeles area; because it only makes up about 40% of his income, he also drives food and alcohol delivery (thru DoorDash and Saucey), and works another 20-30 hours a week as a valet at events; he talks about what it's like trying to grow his drone business, as well as his other gigs, and the numerous other gigs he's had, in Rochester, New York and Key West, before moving to L.A. a few years ago.

Melody is a stay-at-home mom of five kids in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. She talks about managing the family's finances; how she and her husband re-structured their lives around his becoming an electrician and the path they've taken to get to the point where he makes six figures; how she networks online for free clothing and sporting goods for her kids, as well as big discounted group vacations; how she and her husband and saving for retirement, and not necessarily for putting anything away for her kids' college educations so much as facilitating the careers they become interested in; and how they donate a big portion of their savings to charities through their church.

Donte is a porn actor living in North Dakota. He talks about growing up poor with a single mom, his various gigs before he got into porn, including a stint in the Marines, and how and why he got into being a pornography performer, starting briefly when he was 19; he also discusses the logistical challenges of having bad credit, which is for the time being keeping him from renting a place in San Diego, where he shoots his porn films; his various injuries, which he treats with a steady dose of pot smoking; why he performs primarily in gay porn, and his work doing Chatterbait; life with his family, including his complex relationship with his wife, and spending lots of quality time with his young daughter.

Lois is a retired middle and high school teacher living in Manassas, Virginia. She talks about her surprisingly lucrative retirement income (from state and county pensions, and then social security), how she's navigated discord in her family in relation to an inheritance, and her unusual retirement activity: dumpster diving. She salvages perfectly in tact and even valuable goods from the local thrift store's dumpster, discussing some of her best finds, as well as her one-time run in with the local police.

AnnMarie lives in the Hudson Valley (NY) and has several vocations - herbalist, caregiver, outdoor education teacher, musician - and she's passionate about each of them. She talks about her various jobs, why she chooses to maintain various gigs as opposed to focusing only on being an herbalist, for example, her shared living situation (including an in-home apothecary) and her penchant for taking vacations mid-Winter.

Anthony is a YouTube vlogger and Uber driver living in Huntsville, Alabama. He just returned to the U.S. after spending a long stint in Manila, the Philippines, where he was able to vlog professionally. He talks about the realities of being a vlogger, living in the Philippines, and his newest gig as an Uber driver in Huntsville, as well as what life is like for an adult living at home, including answering the questions: what's appropriate dating protocol in that situation?

Josie is a budding entrepreneur living in Montana- which turns out to be a great state for individuals starting their own businesses. And Josie's business? Chocolate! She's a maker of fine chocolates, and talks about what goes into making them, what it's like starting her business - including living in 'situational poverty' - and her former life as a preschool teacher living in Seattle.

Courtney, aka the Traveling Cocktalian, goes around the country bartending and bar consulting. She talks about her love of the craft, interacting with her 'guests' (in her world they don't call them 'customers'), her home base in Kansas City, where she owns a house with her partner/not-quite-husband, and what kind of life she's building toward in her ultimate bartending fantasy.

John is an adventurer who lives a little more than half the year in the Portland, Oregon area, with his partner, and the rest of the year up in Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. His income is very minimal - in the $3000-6000/year range - and so he lives very simply, camping in a tent and often cooking outdoors. And he makes money by taking on the occasional gig (which has included paid storytelling) and selling re-tooled motor scooters. He left his full-time union job being a grocery store meat cutter a couple years prior because he was done with unpleasant competitiveness of the working world.

Somiko is an apparel and accessories designer and has a body painting business, and for several years has been getting by as a lab rat in medical trials. She talks about what it's been like being a study Guinea pig, and how it's helped her support both herself as well as her partner and son.

Ashley is a young woman with great financial conscientiousness, who follows a version of what's referred to as F.I.R.E., or "financial independence, retire early." She's transitioning from her brief career as a speech therapist into a new career working for the government, and saving her money both thoughtfully and strategically.

Dave is a comedian and does improv comedy in New York City. He also has a day job at Upright Citizens Brigade theater, one of the biggest improv schools around.

Evan talks about his cyclical lifestyle between adventuring (climbing, hiking and caving) and days jobs, mainly including working for AmeriCorps in Arizona, eliminating invasive species. He also talks about how and why he chose to live primarily out of his car.

In the very first full episode of How I Get By, Julie talks about substitute teaching, hedonism, her past work in real estate, her tendency to go with the flow, and why she's chosen a lifestyle that's both carefree but still not without hard work.

In the Preview episode, the reasons for starting the podcast are explained, and Michael Shaw tells his own story of how he gets by...