David Equalizer

Dave Foley was ordered to pay his ex-wife $17,700 a month in child support. That was five times what he actually earned. If he set foot in Canada, he would be arrested at the border. When he asked the judge how he’d feed his daughter from his second marriage, he says the court’s answer was simple: “They can rot in hell.” In 1997, Foley was starring on NBC’s NewsRadio and making about $1 million a year. That year, he separated from his first wife, Tabatha Southey. An Ontario judge set his payments at $17,700 a month, or $212,400 a year after taxes, based on his sitcom salary. Two years later, NBC canceled the show. His income dropped by nearly 80%. He went back to court to lower the payments. The judge said no. The court ruled he had made $1 million once, so he should keep paying like he still did. His ex-wife lived in a $2.5 million house on a park in Toronto. Foley rented a small loft in downtown LA. By 2011, he owed more than $500,000 in back payments. Ontario threatened to pull his passport and issued a warrant for his arrest if he came home. In the video below, Foley explains the math: “I’m paying about five times my income every month in child support, based on a show that hasn’t been on for 12 years.” He couldn’t work in Canada again until he landed a new sitcom in 2014 and had his paychecks garnished at the source. The case for the court: a parent shouldn’t get to slash support just because their career slows down. The case for Dave: locking a canceled actor into 1990s sitcom money under threat of prison is extortion. Should child support be tied to what you earn today, or the best year you ever had?

A retired eye doctor sued Gwyneth Paltrow for $3.1 million over a ski crash. She asked the jury for $1. She won the $1 and never got her legal fees back.January 2019: he sued for more than $3.1 million. That claim was dismissed, and by trial he was asking for $300,000. When his lawyer brought up her "very expensive vacation," Paltrow answered: "Well, I lost half a day of skiing." February 26, 2016: Paltrow and Terry Sanderson collided on a beginner run at Deer Valley in Utah. Each said the other hit them from behind. He said he broke four ribs and got a concussion that changed his life. In the video below, his lawyer presses her on the $1 under oath. Paltrow says: "It's an actual dollar that I'm asking for." March 30, 2023: after less than three hours, the jury found him 100% at fault and gave her $1. April 2023: both sides dropped the fight over her legal fees, and he agreed not to appeal. Sanderson's side: a 76-year-old with four broken ribs walked away with nothing. Paltrow's side: she said giving in to "a false claim compromised my integrity." So did Paltrow win by asking for $1, or did a $3.1 million lawsuit cost her far more than that?

Jennifer Aniston was earning $1,000,000 per episode of Friends. Her own mother sold her story against her wishes, wasn’t invited to her wedding to Brad Pitt, and never said sorry. In the video below, Aniston reveals the one simple sentence her mother never said to her. Her mother, Nancy, was a model who raised Jennifer alone after her father walked out. Jennifer says her mom used to point out that her eyes were too close together and her nose was too big. Still, for years they were inseparable. Then Friends made Jennifer one of the most famous women in the world. In the mid-90s, her mother gave an interview about her to a tabloid TV show. In 1999, she published a whole book about raising her famous daughter. Jennifer cut her off. She refused to read the book. When she married Brad Pitt in 2000, her father was there. Her mother was not invited and never even met her son-in-law. Even then, Jennifer still called her mother warm, loving and the one who told her to keep going when her career got rough. All she wanted to hear from her was simple: “I’m sorry, I get it.” They didn’t speak for almost 10 years. Would you cut off your own mother for selling your story, or is family worth forgiving no matter what?

Quentin Tarantino earned over 100 million dollars and never gave his mother a single dollar. In the video below Quentin Tarantino talks about his mother. Connie McHugh was a teenager when she gave birth to Quentin in Knoxville Tennessee in 1963. His father Tony Tarantino had already left. She moved to Los Angeles alone with the baby and worked as a nurse. When he was 12 his mother mocked the screenplays he was writing in class. She said, with finger quotes, this little ‘writing career’ is over. Quentin stood there and made himself a vow. If he ever became a successful writer, she would see no house, no vacation, no Cadillac. He dropped out of high school at 15 and worked at a video store in Manhattan Beach. In the early 1990s he sold the True Romance script for about 50 thousand dollars. In 1994 Pulp Fiction grossed 213 million dollars and made him an Oscar winner at 31. He is worth approximately 120 million dollars in 2026. In a 2021 podcast interview Tarantino said he had kept the vow for 50 years. The most he ever did was help his mother with one IRS issue. He said he never bought her a house. He never took her on a vacation. He never bought her an Elvis Cadillac. No house for you. No vacation for you. No Elvis Cadillac for mommy. The screenplay she called a hobby financed every film he ever made. Would you forgive a parent who tried to kill the thing that made you?

Matthew Perry made $1 million an episode on Friends and spent about $9 million trying to get sober. In his last month, a doctor charged him $57,000 for 20 vials of ketamine that sold for about $15 each. In the video below, a year before he died, he describes the night doctors gave him a 2% chance to live. "Five people had an ECMO machine that night, and the other four died, and I survived." On September 30, 2023, the doctor met Perry for the first time. That day he texted a colleague: "I wonder how much this moron will pay." Then: "Let's find out." Same day, he bought $795 worth of ketamine and supplies from another doctor. Perry's assistant paid him $4,500. Over the next 12 days: 20 vials, $57,000. One shot was given in the back seat of Perry's car in a parking lot. That's about $2,850 a vial. Roughly 190 times the going price. Then the assistant found a cheaper source. He was paid $150,000 a year to manage Perry's medical care. In 11 days he bought 51 vials from a dealer prosecutors called the "Ketamine Queen." On October 27, the doctor texted that he'd been "stocking up." The next day, the assistant gave Perry at least three shots. Perry was found dead. He was 54. Then came the sentences. The dealer: 15 years. The assistant: 41 months. The doctor who called him a moron: 30 months and a $5,600 fine. The doctor who supplied him: 8 months of home detention. Netflix releases a documentary about Perry's life on Tuesday. Wednesday marks three years since he died. The doctor made $57,000 and was fined $5,600. Was 30 months enough?

Joe Ligon was 15 years old when Pennsylvania sentenced him to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He walked out 68 years later at 83. The state spent $3 million keeping him locked up. He was the oldest and longest-serving juvenile lifer in American history. The world he remembered no longer existed. When they finally offered him parole he refused. He said he'd rather stay in prison than spend his last years being supervised. He kept fighting until a federal judge set him free with zero conditions. In the video below, Ligon gives his first television interview after release - and describes walking out of prison for the first time since 1953. He was 15 years old when five Black teenagers from Philadelphia went on an alcohol-fueled night of robberies and stabbings. Two people died. All five were tried together at city hall, convicted on guilt by association, and sentenced to life without parole. His lawyer said if the case went to trial today, Ligon would likely face a manslaughter charge. Five to ten years. Maybe twenty. He got 68. In 2016 the US Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Ligon won the right to be resentenced. But he refused parole - he didn't want to spend whatever years he had left being supervised. So his lawyer kept fighting until a federal judge vacated his sentence entirely. He walked out free. No conditions. No parole officer. When asked what he did first as a free man, he said he almost cried. Then broke into a big smile. He said they locked him up. But they didn't lock his mind up. Was Joe Ligon a criminal who got what he deserved, or did Pennsylvania spend $3 million proving that the punishment had nothing to do with the crime?

Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, killed at least 13 people in Los Angeles. He still had female fans, and one of them married him on death row In 1984 and 1985 he broke into homes at night while families slept. The whole city was afraid to open a window In the video below, he talks from death row. When a reporter asked him why he killed those people, he answered with two words. “No comment.” “A serial killer comes about by circumstances, like a recipe,” he says A minute later he says something else. “I’m not gonna blame society or my race or anything.” He was caught in 1985. People on a street in East LA recognized his face from the newspaper and chased him down themselves In court he shouted “Hail Satan” and showed a pentagram drawn on his hand. He got 19 death sentences Then the letters started. Women from all over the country wrote to him. One of them, Doreen Lioy, sent him dozens of letters. In 1996 they got married inside San Quentin prison He was never executed. He died of cancer in 2013, still on death row “This is a wicked, wicked world,” he says. “And in a wicked world, wicked people are born.” Was Richard Ramirez born a killer, or did his life turn him into one?

Aaron Carter sold 1,000,000 albums before he turned 10. When he turned 18, he says the IRS hit him with $7.8 million in taxes his parents never paid. In the video below, he explains what happened to the money he made as a child. He was the little brother of a Backstreet Boy, opened for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, and had hits like “I Want Candy” and “Aaron’s Party.” His second album sold more than 3 million copies in the U.S. California’s Coogan law exists to protect child stars, so parents can’t spend their kids’ earnings. Carter says his parents found a way around it. “When I turned 18 years old, I got hit with 7.8 million dollars of taxes that they didn’t pay when I was 11 and 12 years old.” He admits he blew the rest himself on cars, shoes and stuff he calls “stupid.” The kid who sold millions of records ended up doing 500 straight off-Broadway shows for $654 a week, because it was the only place that would hire him. The IRS garnished his wages. In 2013, he filed for bankruptcy. His court filing showed just over $8,000 in assets and more than $2 million in debts, including a $1.3 million tax lien. Then came the moment he never forgot. He says the judge gave him a choice: he could send his parents to prison for 10 years each. “I will never let you put my parents in prison, no matter how dirty they’ve been to me.” He died in 2022. He was 34. The case for his parents: he was a child, someone had to manage the money, and he blew plenty of it himself. The case for Aaron: it was his money, and they left him with the bill. If you were Aaron, would you have sent them to prison, or did they not deserve it?

Charlie Munger thought McDonald's did a better job educating people than Harvard. He wasn't joking. In 2010, sitting next to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting, Munger explained why he considered McDonald's one of America's most underrated educational institutions. His argument had almost nothing to do with hamburgers. McDonald's takes people at the very beginning of their working lives. For many of them, it's their first real job. And before they move on, it teaches them things that are surprisingly difficult to teach in a classroom: show up on time, follow a system, deal with customers, take responsibility and do the job you're being paid to do. Munger had once made the same argument while speaking at a major university. He told the room: “I thought McDonald's succeeded better as an educator than the people in the university did.” His point wasn't that people stayed at McDonald's forever. It was almost the opposite. Many started there, learned how to function in a real workplace, and eventually moved on to much bigger jobs. Munger believed McDonald's deserved far more credit for that than it received. Then Buffett jumped in — and agreed. He said some of the most important lessons of his own life came when he was just 13 or 14 years old, working for a newspaper boss named Charlie Peterson. Long before Berkshire Hathaway. Long before he became one of the richest men in the world. Buffett was just a kid learning lessons from his first boss that he still remembered decades later. Munger and Buffett were making the same point from opposite ends of extraordinary careers: sometimes the place that teaches you how to work isn't a university. It's the place expecting you to show up on time tomorrow morning.

In 1985, Carl Sagan sat in front of the United States Senate and described the weather of 2026. Not as prediction. As physics. Sitting across from him was a junior senator named Al Gore — who would later win the Nobel Prize, the Oscar, and build a climate investment fund worth over $36 billion repeating almost word for word what Sagan said that afternoon. Sagan opened with Venus. 470°C surface temperature. 900°F. Hot enough to melt lead. "Not because it's closer to the sun," he told the senators. "Venus actually reflects more light than Earth. It should be cooler." The reason it wasn't: carbon dioxide. A runaway greenhouse effect that turned a planet nearly identical to Earth into a furnace. Then he looked at the committee and said: we're running the same experiment here. The senators nodded politely. Then they went back to approving fossil fuel subsidies. What Sagan told Congress in 1985: Global average temperature will rise several degrees by mid-to-late next century. Local climates will redistribute. Glaciers will melt. Sea levels will rise. And the problem cannot be solved by any single nation — not even if the US and Soviet Union agreed on everything — without China. China, he said, had the world's largest coal reserves and was about to industrialize. Every sentence was correct. He also said something that got almost no coverage at the time: "The initial stages of global temperature increase — one region might benefit while another suffers." That is the sentence that explains the last 20 years of geopolitics. Canada's growing season expanding while Pakistan floods. Russia opening Arctic shipping lanes while Bangladesh disappears. The politics of climate was never going to be clean because the physics wasn't distributed evenly. Sagan mapped all of it from first principles, in a Senate hearing room, 41 years ago. The part nobody quotes He didn't say stop burning fossil fuels immediately. He said: "That has such severe economic consequences that no one will take it seriously." So he proposed something else — remove government subsidies from fossil fuels, accelerate solar, develop safe nuclear fission, and begin building international frameworks before the crisis made them impossible. That's not an environmentalist's speech. That's an economist's. Carl Sagan wrote 20 books. Cosmos was watched by 500 million people across 60 countries. He won the Pulitzer. The ideas in this testimony became the scientific foundation for a carbon market now valued at over $800 billion annually. He said one line at the end that nobody remembers. "We are all in this greenhouse together." In 1985, that was poetic. Now it's a weather report. The full testimony is free on YouTube. 17 minutes. Almost nobody outside of climate policy circles has watched it as a complete predictive model — laid out in plain language before any of it happened.