Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we chat with

brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. I'm a writer at Axios and co-host of Slate Money. And I'm here today with the incredible Bridget Schulte, the author of a new book called Overwork, Transforming the Daily Grind into a Quest for a Better Life. Bridget, I'm so glad you are here. I'm a huge fan of your work. Can you tell listeners who you are and what you do and what the book's about? Yeah, sure. Well, thank you. It's so great to be here. I'm a huge friend of yours, so right back at you. So I'm Bridget Schulte. I'm a long-time journalist. I spent a lot of my career at the Washington Post. There, I wrote a book about time pressure and gender sort of based out of my own life.

Like, why was it so difficult to try to, you know, do a good job and raise children and, you know, have a life outside of work?

And then that book is really what led to this book.

When I was finished with overwhelmed, I became convinced that so much of our modern misery originates in our work

culture. And so I really wanted to do a deep dive into trying to understand what drives

over work culture. What are the consequences? And more importantly, how do we change?

Well, when we come back, we're going to get into all of this and more, and it's all coming up on

money talks.

It's really great because you talk about all kinds of overwork.

I mean, you're talking to hourly workers, retail workers, grocery store workers, but also lawyers, but also

teachers. You hit everything and you look at it from, you know, the micro perspective, how people

sort of overwork themselves and workaholism. And you're underplaying it because you do come up in the

book. But you also zoom out, you know, so wide lens.

And it gave me comfort to think about the reason I'm overworking isn't only about me or any

tendencies I have, but there's a whole culture, a whole legal structure, a whole corporate

structure all there sort of making us all kind of like

just slaves to the daily grind 24, 7, 7 days a week. Well, it's really true. And I think when I started

this, that was probably one of the biggest revelations in our, first of all, in most business press,

a lot of times what we focus on are workers like us, you know, knowledge workers or professional

managerial workers. And, you know, I think that was one of the first shocks is that 44% of the

U.S. workforce is considered low wage. I mean, that's almost half. And we're completely ignoring

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