Over the next 20 years the United States will see a massive transfer of wealth as boomers leave trillions of dollars to their children as they pass away. A contingent of those children are asking, “What if we got that money, now?” Millennials and Gen Z want to be able to take advantage of the money they stand to inherit before their parents pass away. While a majority of parents actually do help their kids, many with the means are surprisingly reluctant. 

Bill Perkins argues that these parents should let it all go. Perkins is an entrepreneur and the author of the book Die with Zero. He argues that the money would be better spent while your children are young adults rather than in their 60s when they may already be set up financially. Perkins joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain the philosophy behind his book and why the best time to give is now. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What you’re essentially saying is before you pass on from this earth and leave your kids a big inheritance, maybe instead give that inheritance away sooner.

If you’re going to leave money to your kids, you should be thinking about what’s the right amount. That’s probably the first thing that people think about. But one of the things that people don’t think about is when is the right time? And I argue ferociously that it is not when you die. It is actually well before you die. So that gift makes the maximum impact on their lives.

So you would be agreeing with the millennials who are feeling some kind of way about their parents sitting on the inheritance for now and waiting until they pass on. You think that the youths have a point?

Oh yeah. I’m their best friend. I am definitely their best friend. When you leave an inheritance to someone, you’re trying to have maximum impact on their lives so that they may be able to enjoy it. And that time is not at 86 or 60. The time that they can convert that capital into meaningful experiences at the greatest rate without that much decay is between 28 and 33. 

Why is that? What’s happening between 28 and 33?

The sharpest and the biggest calculator you will ever be is at 28. And you reach physical maturity at 33 and then it plateaus and declines. And so what that means is that your mental acuity is declining and your physical abilities are declining at various rates, which means that your ability to convert that money into experiences that you enjoy or can do decline as you age. Most of your life is still ahead of you. At 60, most of your life is behind you.

Are you literally advocating “die with nothing”? Or are you saying, “Hey boomer, maybe have a responsible cushion and give your kids the rest.” What are the mechanics of this?

I am arguing to get as close to zero as possible. Knowing that there are uncertainties in life, that’s going to be probably an impossible goal — especially the biggest uncertainty, when you’re going to die. The uncertainty around what things will you be doing later in life besides hanging out and maintaining yourself. But this is an iterative formula, and if you are not on autopilot and you deeply think about it, you can be more efficient with the allocation of your resources and how you split those things up.

There’s a mathematical reality to some of this. If you’re a boomer and you’re sitting on money, you invest it. Having that money compound over 15 or 20 years, you could be giving your kid, when they are 60 or 65, just an enormous sum of money versus a much smaller sum based on how investment works when they are 33. What do you think about the argument that it’s better math to wait?

I would say that they’re not truly understanding the purpose of the money. Would you give your kid who’s 30 a rattle or a binky? So the understanding of the purpose of the money is for them to have a fulfilling life, not to have a bunch of zeros. And so what matters is how do they convert those zeros into a fulfilling life? And so because you decay — that’s the unfortunate part of having a human body — and then you eventually die, the ability of you to convert that money into the adventurous life or fulfillment that you choose declines with age. And you could just have a thought experiment. How much would you pay of your net worth to be 30 again? 

Jesus. One hundred percent, and I’m not 65.

Exactly. And so you can easily see that I’m not going to make enough capital to make up for the difference in age, right? Because that money helps make the life.

We know that this is a very hard conversation to have. It’s hard for parents to talk about not being here. It’s hard for kids to approach this without seeming greedy. How do you suggest families broach this conversation?

The one thing I don’t tell people is whether you should be leaving an inheritance or not. That’s up to you. There are some people who are just like, “All my money is for me. The kids, I gave them an education or gave them whatever they need, a shot in life, and they have to go make their own way.” That’s one. But those who intend to leave a gift, once they’ve thought deeply about it, I think they will come to the logical conclusion that it’s not a bequest. It’s an inheritance and that there’s a better time. And so in my mind, it’s a gift of love. It’s a gift of opportunity. It’s like, “Here you go. I’ve been fortunate in my life to be able to pass on the gift of choice. And here’s this capital and here’s some wisdom that comes with that.” But again, that’s me, not you.

Ticks are taking over the United States. Due to climate change, changing land use, and an explosion in the deer population, ticks have been expanding their territory and infecting more people than ever. They carry pathogens that cause everything from Lyme disease to the red meat allergy-inducing Alpha gal syndrome. In some cases, tick bites can be fatal.

Ticks usually lurk in the tall grass in wooded areas. That means going on a hike or even just hanging out in your backyard or a park can expose you to a tick bite. In many parts, of the country fear of ticks is changing how people live their lives, including the way they dress, how they enjoy their hobbies, or even whether they spend much outdoors at all. 

The tick surge is catching public health officials off guard. Emergency room visits due to tick bites are the highest they’ve been since 2017. In spite of the uptick, most public health departments still focus on lowering the population of mosquitos in their areas over ticks. 

Climate reporter Jonthan Mingle says we can fix this problem. As Mingle explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, encouraging the public to do tick checks and use bug spray is a part of the solution, but we’re leaving a bunch of larger interventions on the table. Mingle joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to explain why ticks are expanding their range and what we can do about it. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

We covered Lyme disease and tick bites on this show back in 2018 because the tick situation was getting out of hand. How much more out of hand has it become since then?

You know some experts I talked to used the word exponential. So what’s happening is that some of these tick species are spreading into areas where people aren’t familiar with them, doctors aren’t familiar with them. Thanks to warmer winters, ticks are expanding their hunting season. You may have a day that’s like 40 degrees in January, ticks are out looking for you, waiting for you to walk by and grab on and grab a meal. 

In 2024, a pilot named Brian Weitzel, father of three in northern New Jersey, had a hamburger, at a barbecue, went home to mow his lawn, and a few hours later was unresponsive on the floor and he died that night. His family was left in shock, of course, trying to figure out why he had died. And it turned out that he had likely been bitten by the lone star tick and had developed an allergy to red meat. This is referred to as Alpha-gal syndrome, which is just the latest entrant into the files of all the many ways in which tick bites can make us sick. The most familiar one, of course, is Lyme disease. Each year, about half a million people are treated for Lyme disease. It’s the fastest growing vector-borne disease in the US. Cases have more than doubled over the past decade, and those cases are mostly as a result of getting bitten by the black-legged tick or the deer tick. The thing is both of these ticks — and many other ticks that are also marching northward and westward and expanding their empires rapidly across North America — they can deliver all kinds of pathogens.

They’re claiming more and more of the map, and they’re claiming more and more of our psychic map right? I tell people I’m not a tick expert, although I’ve talked to a bunch of them, but I’ve become a tick expert in the sense that I am very familiar with tick paranoia and how it can keep you from venturing out into the places you love: hiking paths or picnic grounds or parks. And so that was part of the story I wanted to write about, too — Why are we letting the ticks keep us, if not out of these places that we need and love, why aren’t we fighting back?

And why is it? Are we not fighting back against the ticks?

Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

90 percent?

Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city, county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, deploying new approaches to controlling ticks.

Even though people are dying?

We’re just kind of taking for granted that, ‘Oh, well, what can you do? You just tuck your pants in and spray some insecticide on your boots and that’s all you can do.’ It’s like, well, actually we have a long history of going to war with mosquitoes. Before there was tick control, there was mosquito control. The CDC was founded with the sole mandate in 1946 of wiping out malaria and fighting mosquitoes. 

It feels like they lost that fight because in my neighborhood you can’t go out between the hours of seven and nine o’clock.

The mosquitoes haven’t gone away, but malaria did for the most part. You know, in talking to experts today, including folks at the CDC, they told me that there’s a suite of tools we could be using if we wanted to get serious about fighting ticks. As one veteran tick expert at the CDC told me, if you want to make a dent in this problem, you have to get to the deer. The deer are the engine driving a lot of these tick species spreading, and we just have way more deer than we did decades ago, especially in the eastern US and suburban parts of America. So how do you get to the deer? I had people in the comments section of my piece saying the clear answer is just we should all be hunting deer. But in talking to the experts, they’ll tell you it’s not really a feasible solution. You would have to knock deer populations way down to make a dent in the tick populations. 

What is more promising is a combined approach of stuff like vaccines. There are people developing vaccines that you could deliver to deer or to rodents, which are another important host for these ticks so that when the tick bites them, they’ll die. That, I learned from talking to folks who do this kind of research for a living, is a more promising avenue for controlling ticks than all of us picking up crossbows and becoming deer hunters.

So why is it that we’re not doing anything?

What I heard from experts is that we’re not even funding this research in a serious way. We do this stuff for mosquitoes. People don’t realize it, but your local county health agency, they go out and they find where the mosquito breeding grounds are and stagnant pools the water and they treat it. It takes this sustained quiet effort. 

We saw the consequences of not doing that recently. This is a bit tangential, but screwworm. Screwworm was this flesh eating larval pest that devastates cattle herds that it was eradicated in the US in 1966, and it was kept at bay by the vigilance of people at USDA and USAID who ran these programs to release millions of sterile screwworm males out of airplanes. It created this wall that kept the screwworm from coming into the southern US. And probably if we stopped doing the mosquito control at a local scale, we’d see more cases of dengue fever, West Nile virus, and all these other rare but serious illnesses that climate change is making more of a threat here in the US.

Could you just practically help people understand how they can protect themselves in the absence of, I don’t know, a functional government?

Doing tick checks. And we do it in my household pretty much daily when you come home, do a thorough tick check, throw your clothes in the dryer. Ticks hate heat. And some people like to use permethrin spray, which is this insecticide that’s designed to kill ticks on your boots or your pants when you go out for a hike. Researchers have known these things are really effective if you keep doing them, if you stay vigilant. And all it takes is that one time, that one time you go out for a hike and you come back and you forget to do the tick check. 

So we need those kinds of personal measures of vigilance and protection, but we still need to kind of push for a bigger public health response to this. The ticks are going to keep spreading into the calendar, too, in the sense that as winters get warmer, more and more days of the year when you’re outdoors, you’re going to encounter ticks who are hungry, and they’re looking for you. 

The Democratic Socialists of America have notched some impressive primary wins over the past couple of weeks. In New York, two DSA members beat Democratic establishment candidates — including the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — in House primaries. In Colorado, Melat Kiros beat out a 30-year incumbent in another House primary. All of that is on top of the ascendancy of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s looking like a Democratic kingmaker after his endorsed candidates triumphed last month. 

It’s been a long journey for the DSA, which began its current rise a decade ago with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the party has slowly amassed popularity with the left wing of the Democratic Party, building a brand as “fighters” with a populist economic message. 

Megan Romer is a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down what the DSA stands for and how it got here — plus, some of the controversies surrounding its candidates. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The DSA has had big primary wins in New York; in Colorado; in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing so well in elections right now?

I think there’s the kind of rage that people have about seeing any remnants of our social safety net be dismantled. I think they see their wages stagnating while inflation continues to go up and cost of living continues to go up, and I think that has people really on edge. 

I also think that they’re looking for answers, and for solutions, and for things that are actually going to change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding child care for all, or Medicare for all — child care debt, and medical debt, those are very real issues to real people. So I think they’re excited to see someone not just saying, “Well, the other [option is] worse,” but really saying, “Look, we’re going to rethink some of these things and come up with solutions together.”

Your economic message seems to have caught fire for Americans who really do feel like life is too expensive, but the DSA’s positions on some domestic issues like borders, like policing, open you up to claims that the DSA is just too extreme for regular Americans. I know that you’re aware of this charge. How do you respond to that?

A lot of the charges come from documents or, sometimes, panels where they’re clipping people talking about this long-term view, because we’re not just trying to fix little problems. We’re trying to really get to the root of these societal problems and think about what life could look like and what society could look like if we change them. 

Things like abolishing the carceral state as we know it — people say, “So you’re just going to fire all the police?” Well, no, the goal is free child care, free health care, free college, these sort of things that will actually make there be less crime. We know crime is inextricably linked to poverty. We’re not saying, “Yes, let murderers run free in the streets.” We’re saying, “If we have eliminated, in this long-term vision, a lot of these crimes of poverty, crimes of desperation, what can the system look like?” And it will have to be different. 

Even in a much better world, people will still murder other people. This is an unfortunate fact. And voters hear “abolish the carceral state,” whether it’s next week or 50 years from now, and they sense that you are not where they are.

Working class voters in the last election moved toward President Donald Trump, in part because, as we understand it from polling, many people felt like the Democrats had gotten too pie-in-the-sky. Right? They were too extreme on cultural issues. And so, I wonder whether the DSA considers that while the economic platform is very appealing, abolishing the carceral state simply isn’t. 

We think it’s important to connect those two things. The reason you do something matters too. [If] they say, “Well, you want to abolish the police,” it’s like, well, we are not doing that right now, but we have invested in “Care not Cops” programs, because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for crimes of poverty. It’s not to make you less safe; it’s to make you more safe. Because, right now, the system as it works does not make us more safe.

There are real concerns about some candidates who are affiliated with the DSA. Darializa Avila Chevalier just won a big election in New York City. She said in posts on X at one point that she wiped her dirty hands on an American flag, because she didn’t have napkins. She suggested that white people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships. There’s a lot more. She has apologized and, independently, she deleted her X account. She told my colleague Astead Herndon that she finds it better to not spend too much time online. 

But, I wonder: If you are working with anti-establishment candidates, there is a level of vetting that it just isn’t going to be the same as with establishment candidates. Do you think you’re going to have difficulty finding candidates who are strong on your economic message, but don’t have to issue these embarrassing apologies?

That is an interesting spot we’re in. We’re not forming our candidates in a lab, right? We’re not raising perfect Model UN children and sending them to—

Oh, come on. Perfect model UN children? White people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships? 

No, I agree. No, that is way out there. What I’m saying is: We are dealing with imperfect, messy people, for sure. And I don’t know why she tweeted that. I am imagining she had a bad breakup and was just tweeting too close to the sun or some terrible thing. 

That’s a bad tweet. She apologized for it. Trump did bad tweets this morning, right? That is going to be the reality of running candidates who did not come into adult life thinking they were ever going to be a candidate.

I want to ask you about an issue that’s become very sensitive over the past few years. The DSA’s focus on Israel strikes some people as obsessive, possibly even tipping into antisemitic. 

Let me give you a couple of examples that I see cited frequently. On October 7, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine. It did condemn the killing of all civilians, but it added, “This was not unprovoked.” Mayor Mamdani recently set some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as “monsters.” He said he was quoting the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. A DSA candidate in Colorado who had a big win last night, Melat Kiros, was recently asked by a reporter whether a firebombing attack on a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of antisemitism. And she said, “I don’t know what’s in the perpetrator’s heart.” 

Now, there’s an argument that these types of things taken together illustrate that there is antisemitism within the DSA. There’s also a more nuanced argument that says the DSA isn’t antisemitic, but you’re fostering a culture that allows your members to talk in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way that DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond taking issue with foreign policy and into something darker?

That is something that we think a lot about, but what we see is that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. People are mad and should be mad. It’s a genocide. We don’t equivocate on that definition or on that understanding of the events. We see an apartheid state. We see people being in an open-air concentration camp, essentially, in the Gaza Strip. 

People are mad. And sometimes, yeah, people are mad and they’re going to not nuance their words as much as they should. I do think it’s very important, obviously, that we stand against antisemitism in all its forms, but I do not see the state of Israel as something that we should be defending on any grounds. It’s a genocidal apartheid state, and I am not apologizing for that.

In 2024, the DSA rescinded an endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a fierce critic of Israel — after she attended a panel with Jewish leaders on antisemitism. A lot of people looked at that and said, you have a fierce critic of Israel who votes as a fierce critic of Israel, who attended a panel on antisemitism, and the DSA rescinded their endorsement of her. You can see the math here. You can sort of see where the brain goes from here. Why did the DSA rescind its endorsement of AOC?

That was actually a complicated process. We didn’t actually rescind our endorsement of AOC in that way. What we did was we made an endorsement that came with some strings attached, which was the first time we’d ever done that. 

We said, we want you to pledge to not fund Israeli military anything — not defense, not offense, no weapons for Israel. We want you to not sign on to any of that. I think she voted present on the Iron Dome. We want her in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib, who is one of the most fearless defenders of Palestine and the Palestinian people in Congress. So AOC had voted present on some, and she had equivocated on some. And so we said, okay, you can’t do that anymore. AOC has since pledged to vote no on all funding of any kind for the Israeli military.

So ultimately, she came around to your point of view? The pressure worked?

Yeah, yeah.

The DSA, we are told, and you can confirm it, wants to run a presidential primary candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions.

The Bernie Sanders campaign changed the face of the American left a bit. He was the first person who went out there on stage and said, “I am a democratic socialist.” And it felt like it gave a lot of people permission to say it out loud. It broke the dam a little bit on using that big scary S-word. So if we run a presidential candidate, we can at least make sure that there was a voice in the primary holding people to account. 

When Bernie was in the primary, standing strong for Medicare For All, got a bunch of the other candidates to sign a Medicare For All pledge — those things are good. And so, we would love to win the presidency. We would also, at the very least, love to move the needle by having an actual democratic socialist voice in the debates — fighting for working families, fighting for labor unions, fighting for healthcare for everybody, and fighting against the military-industrial complex.