Modern Wisdom - Why Everyone Is Drowning In Debt (and how to get out) - Caleb Hammer - #1123

Starting point is 00:00:00 How do you describe what you do for work? Depends the viewer. If I'm talking to the nice little church lady, I'd tell her I'm helping young folks and some old folks with their money. I'm just talking to just random person on the street. I'd say I'm yelling at a bunch of retards who suck with money and roasting them along the way. And having a lot of fun doing it. I was going to ask why you get death threats, but you've kind of precluded that. I mean, I don't understand.

Starting point is 00:00:28 And like, okay, if you come on financial audit, you would come through a multi-week onboarding process and give me all these things like, let's pretend you didn't want me to make fun of your curly hair for whatever reason. You would tell me that. You would tell the producers that because we ask you what you don't want. Yeah. So we don't bring it up. So, and then I get consent to make fun of anything else. Exactly. So why get death threats from making fun of things that someone gave me explicit permission to make fun?

Starting point is 00:00:58 to make fun of makes no sense. It's the being offended on behalf of someone who's not offended. I will never get it. I'm not the person. I've never been that person. I don't understand it. The white knighting? Yes.

Starting point is 00:01:11 The moral hero. You're on your moral horse and I don't know. You want your TikTok community to raise you up, I guess. It makes you feel good. You get views. It's one of my least favorite categories of people are those that their morality stands on the shoulders of other people that they're saying are worse than them.

Starting point is 00:01:31 But don't look at how good I am because I don't want that scrutiny on me. Just look at how bad they are and implicitly that makes me feel like a person that's of higher moral standing. It's pretty easy. Yeah, when we were filming this episode, we had a guest on our episode

Starting point is 00:01:47 that uploaded yesterday and I brought in one of my co-workers, employees, also friends, Tyler, black dude, big black dude, very intimidating. I could beat the shit out of anyone. one and like the guy where you were sitting is a piece of shit racist like an actual racist he was like did you do this on purpose a cast him you brought a black person in with somebody that you knew would

Starting point is 00:02:10 be racist so the guy was sitting where you said and he said you know I'm one of those people that says things that need to be said and I was like okay pause brought in the guy that he would actually have a consequence oh right yep yeah and he was like uh yeah end word so I just said that but you know what he consented to it. Obviously, I wouldn't have my friend go through a situation he didn't like. He even reacted to it on his own stream later that day. He loved it. He just loves being called the N-word.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Gets off on it. No black, we scoured the internet. No black person was like offended anywhere. But there's a lot of white women that were super offended on his behalf saying that he should sue the show for having to go through that. That's workplace harassment and all this stuff. When he's friends, I'm friends with him, we're literally just having fun together, making fun of the dude that was a piece of shit in front of us. He and I were on the same team, having a good time.

Starting point is 00:03:02 And it was just white ladies upset on the internet. Kind of blows my mind that people want to step into that environment. Because it's very intense. It's not opposite to someone. Originally it's one on one, and then it's one on two. But there's also maybe someone behind the scenes. And you know that there's all of these people on the internet that are going to see you do this thing. The psychology of someone that's prepared to go on a show like that

Starting point is 00:03:23 and go head to head with someone on their home turf and be an asses. it's kind of impressive. It is almost impressive. I don't think that I would be very good at if I was an asshole doing that and being on this side. So it's like if you are an asshole by design, you're usually trying to keep it quiet

Starting point is 00:03:42 so people don't realize. People aren't advertising their assholery up front. But that's what makes it fun though, is that anyone who's seen our show or anyone who comes on the show has seen the show, so they already know I'm an asshole. Then they watch two on Borny videos. It's when they get sent to them, when they have to watch in the green room.

Starting point is 00:03:59 And I'm like, hey, I'm an asshole. I'm going to make funny of you. I'm going to yell at you telling me what you don't want to do. So, honestly, besides that piece of shit racist, because I actually don't like someone who's actually racist, every other other than a few here and there, I respect the fuck out of. Because, yeah, that's crazy showing up to a show that a lot of people are going to see, that you're going to get goofed on. But they also do get resources, and the vast majority do change their lives to the better afterwards.

Starting point is 00:04:25 that is the fun effect of it, they get to go through the whole cycle with us. And I think it would be crazier for them to sign up if everything, no matter their say, was on display. Since they get to say what they don't want to talk about, it gives them more control, which if there is something that actually would impact their life or their job or their family, they can call that out and not have that in the episode. So they do have that level of control, but they're still very brave. And I have a huge amount of respect for them.

Starting point is 00:04:51 What is the process of getting access to somebody's financials and how do you know that they haven't kept something super secret behind the scenes that they haven't shown you. Right. Well, it would be difficult for like a checking or savings account, but we do get them to send us their credit karma with, you know, important things bleeped out. What's that? Their credit karma. Oh, credit karma? Well, it basically shows your credit report for the most part. I mean, it's kind of simulated. It's not perfect. You're not getting your like requesting your three free credit reports every single year or whatnot. But it's the, um, it's the, that many people use to actually see what's going on and the impact of their new debts.

Starting point is 00:05:30 They're opening their hard inquiries, everything like that. But if we get them to send their screenshots, that way we can see if there's debts that they don't even know about, because oftentimes there are deaths that they don't know about, collections that they don't know about. So we're able to hold their feet to the fire that way. Do you think it's genuinely harder for young people today or our expectations the problem? It's harder to do certain things. I mean, you're not going to be able to do the single income household thing.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Like, that's going to be harder things, right? That's going to be harder. Buying your first home is going to be harder. You know, getting your first car might be harder. It depends, you know, how you do it. That one's definitely a hit or miss for sure. That's going to be harder. But being independent in terms of groceries or rent or getting a comfy office job that is

Starting point is 00:06:20 relatively decent pain. Like, we've never had it. it better than ever before. Now, you can take a snapshot in time. This year, this period in exact time, yeah, for college graduates, it's objectively shit. That's just an economic situation, not a general generational situation, because five years ago, college graduates had a great. They're entering the best job market in the history of humanity, essentially. When that pandemic money was just flowing from tech companies, anyone could get a job. But now it's objectively not, but that's a period in time, not a generational thing. So the cost of practically every

Starting point is 00:06:53 category of life spending as a percentage of income has dramatically dropped since the 1950s, besides a few things that are very important. Buying a house, health care, and borrowing for school. Barring for school, do you have to do that? You know, there's different paths. We can talk community college. We can talk apprenticeship, trade schools. Okay, so there's flexibility there. House, you don't have to buy a house. When, you know, if you're a young person right now, you don't have to. And even if you do, that actually might be a worse use of your money than just investing in the S&P 500. Healthcare, yeah, that one's fucked.

Starting point is 00:07:24 Can't really control that one. That's a mess. So if something bad happens to you, what's happened to the cost of healthcare over time? Oh, just endlessly. There are premiums and if an emergency happens. Healthcare is one of those issues that's actually really interesting when it comes up on the show because I get very invested

Starting point is 00:07:42 in trying to learn as much as I can about the personal finance categories across the board. But for healthcare, for some reason, I've just missed it. Because this is one of those things that was never my passion. So I never fully dove into the reason, the why, and how I just make sure, you know, I have the general necessity, the things that someone would need to make sure they're getting a halfway decent plan through their job and whatnot, making sure their premiums aren't completely out of control, that they can afford their co-pays, that they have their highest deductible taken care of in the case of an emergency. But speaking on the cost of health care, you know, this is definitely out of all things in the financial world, not my expertise. And I said that on another podcast that hasn't come out yet. And now that it's come up in two podcasts in a row, I'm just, you know, I need to educate the fuck on myself on health care.

Starting point is 00:08:32 Because it's very curious, because housing, you can talk about housing all day. Cost of college and school, I could talk about that all day, but not health care. It's one of the big three. One of the big three. Housing, healthcare, school. You know a lot about the first and the last, but the middle one is the one. Because it's a lot more that you can control. So I'm interested in the things you can control.

Starting point is 00:08:50 It's very difficult for people to be able to control. their actual healthcare situation, whether or not they have a pre-diagnosis, or there's only a few plans offering them at work. Exactly. But school and housing, there's a lot more control and financial audit's more about what things you can control. It's interesting that you said, as a percentage of earnings, the cost of living in almost all areas has become more affordable.

Starting point is 00:09:17 Yeah. Except for three that are fucking massive. Massive. And those three have done so much. much damage that they've managed to basically net, detract from all of the games that were made and everything else? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty brutal. But again, with the two that I can speak on a little better, house, you don't have to buy a house.

Starting point is 00:09:36 So you have more choices there. You don't have to buy a house fresh out of college. You don't have to go. When it comes to the cost of school, there's so many different paths that include going to school. And that's local four years. That's community college. That's not going to private institutions or going to your,

Starting point is 00:09:52 dream school because it has the sports team you're like. It also has to do with if cost of college is high, you need to make sure you're getting a degree that has an appropriate return on investment. So there's lots of choices there. So those three categories are pretty brutal, but of two of them, you still have choice in it. Gen Z borrowers are carrying more credit card debt than millennials did at the same age, despite growing up with more financial information than any generation before them. Yeah. 98% of Gen Z say credit is important, but only 53% believe they have adequate access to it. And more than half of Americans have used by now, pay later services. 59% of those users were Gen Z. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Paying for Klarna, everything,

Starting point is 00:10:33 it's a very Gen Z thing. Tap to pay. Super easy to use those. They're at every checkout for any concert you go to, pretty much anything you want to do. So that's not surprising. There is, I'm not, I'm forgetting to turn off the top of my head, but it's something like doom loop or something that a lot of Gen Z is kind of getting into where mostly because of the information out there and the algorithms they find themselves in, they think everything's going to be so bad forever, why not just spend the money? Why not just put it on the credit card?

Starting point is 00:11:04 So it makes sense. It seems to me like a big part of it is people being so unsure about the future and feeling like things are not going to get better that, well, fuck it. It's almost like the end of days. You know, there's this interesting story about during the Blitz in World War II and London, the amount of casual sex that people were having went through the roof, but lingerie sales stayed the same. And it was just people thought, look, I might die tomorrow. It doesn't really matter about how sexy I look in bed, let's just get down to it. And it's kind of the financial

Starting point is 00:11:36 equivalent of that. I'm just going to dump it all, which is this weird sort of a recursive system. It's this self-reinforcing mechanism that if you have negative information about the economy and about the quality of life for young people and about how hard you've got it and the fact that it's never going to get better, that encourages people to behave in a way that makes the thing true. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of wild. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that kind of gets not made out of nowhere. There are real material changes, but it's certainly worsened.

Starting point is 00:12:08 And it's tracked. The University of Michigan does consumer sentiment survey. And I think they've done it since the 1980s. And right now it was one of the three lowest we've ever had. I think it was right when COVID kicked off, the Great Recession, and now. But now's not even near great recession in any other indicator anywhere. It's not right when COVID kicked off when everything shut down and no one knew what was going to happen. But consumer sentiment is basically at an all-time low.

Starting point is 00:12:33 What do you think is going on? Well, we are stuck in those algorithms. You make money on negativity. Like even I have a documentary channel, more of a passion project, not much of a moneymaker called. It's cool. I like it. Oh, thanks. Called front page.

Starting point is 00:12:46 Still getting the feel of it. But either way, I mean, the reality is, the, the, topics that are interesting to talk about are the more negative ones. Super positive content isn't as interesting to talk about for whatever reason. I'm not interested in learning about super positive. I'm not interested in talking about super positive. It doesn't feel urgent. No, exactly. So that's the information that's getting out there. And it's the information that catches people's attention, keeps them in the algorithm. So I'm not surprised at all. I mean, nightly news, other than one fluff piece is usually just negative, negative, negative, even about

Starting point is 00:13:17 the heat outside. It's like the apocalypse. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it. It's, it's, it's, It's always just negative. So it's not surprising. That's what drives our attention. It's what drives the algorithm. So consumer sentiment will, of course, be lower. Right. And that is impacting people's behavior, which actually brings that reality, brings that imagination into reality or brings the news feed into your finances. Pretty interesting. Yeah, even though consumer spending is actually relatively healthy, overall. Like, this isn't the best year in our economy, but it's also not even close to the worst year. Things are relatively healthy. There's some bad things like a called out. There's the new graduates, bad job market for new graduates. And there's a lot of things that play there. There are a lot of things that play there. There's the nervousness of AI. There was the overhiring during the tech boom during COVID.

Starting point is 00:14:03 They've cut back there. And if there's, if there's no people leaving their jobs voluntarily, there's no jobs opening. And the people that are leaving their jobs in Texas are the one getting laid off. And they're not rehiring someone who's getting laid off. So those job openings that were there during the pandemic aren't there. So there's actual negative things happening right now. but it's not the overall economic situation. We're still having OK GDP growth post-inflation.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Warren Iran, done, allegedly. We'll see. Is it? He signed the idea of peace or something yesterday, and so did Iran, the leader of Iran. Fuck me. That's like a guy with erectile dysfunction saying, I've signed the idea of erection today. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:44 Signed the idea of a penis. I want to get you to react to a financial case here. Can we pull up that TikTok? I've had such a bad financial burden the last couple years. So after meeting with attorney and doing lots of research, I realized that finally bankruptcy really isn't as bad as it's made out to be and it was truly going to be my best bet. I decided to file chapter 7 and truthfully, my consumer debt really is not that bad. A lot of people have it a lot worse financially, but for me, $91,000 was just too much. It was uncomfortable and I just wanted to get a fresh start. I moved to Texas directly after high school and I made a lot of very irresponsible. decisions financially and really dug myself into a big hole of debt. I decided let's go ahead and file bankruptcy. Let's get myself a clean slate. That way I can stop stressing and I can actually do better. Okay, just to give you a little breakdown of the debt that I do have that tolls up to the

Starting point is 00:15:32 $91,300. I owe about $51,000 on the vehicle that I have. We did try selling that, trading it in, all that good stuff, but I have way too much negative equity to come out on top. I bought a motorcycle back in 2020. Thought that was a great idea. Um, I know if I thought about a thousand dollars on that same thing, tried selling it, not able to get what we owe out of it. I do own a camper, and I owe about $13,400 on that. She's retarded. I live out of that camper because I can't afford a house. So I am keeping that since I do live in it.

Starting point is 00:16:04 I have $2,200 worth of medical bills that I had no idea were in collections. And then I have $12,000 worth of student loans. However, those do not get forgiven with bankruptcy, so I will still continue that payment. and then I have about $7,700 worth of credit card debt, all coming into a grand total of $91,300. First of all, okay, yes, it is harder to get into a home now. Yes, a large sum payment is difficult to get to. Interest is not great on our house.

Starting point is 00:16:29 How in the world does she think she's possibly? Possibly. Sorry, I don't mean to scream. You're not a guess on my show. Why does she think in what world does she think she is ever going to get to home ownership if she's getting camper motorcycle in a $50,000 hour car, $50,000 car when she's moving

Starting point is 00:16:47 to a brand new state. This is so American. We are so debt brainbroken. And she's actually right. I mean, bankruptcy is actually not that hard, not that brutal. A little expensive, but it's really not the worse. It fucks your credit for a bit, and it's not a good learning lesson. People usually end up in the same situation they are

Starting point is 00:17:05 without changing their behavior before going through bankruptcy. But she was right on that. But how did she ever expect? She can't get sick. sympathy of not buying a house if she's getting a camper, motorcycle, and car, of which minimum the payments on the camper, uh, on the motorcycle and car are likely over a thousand dollars together. Like a thousand dollars going against anyone's income unless you're like in the top 1% is going to aggressively prevent you from saving anything. Remember, she can get an FHA loan on our first house.

Starting point is 00:17:32 She can get, what is that as low as 1.5%? Something like that down on your first house. Um, how, how would she, how was she surprised? You can't get anywhere. And that also is really stupid getting their trailer instead of renting an apartment because she's getting debt on a depreciating asset. It's almost even worse because an expense could pop up, have to get new tires. She has to pay rent anyway, likely to park somewhere and get the utilities plugged in. No. She's America summed up. What are the hidden cost of bankruptcy that no one wants to talk about?

Starting point is 00:18:08 I mean, usually it costs a couple thousand bucks to go through it, go through the process, and get a lot. lawyer on your side, some court filings. There is the credit impact. There is the credit impact, seven to ten years, depending. And with that, that could really make it more expensive to get into an apartment, because that's usually, instead of just a security deposit, you might have to do first month last month because you're a riskier. That includes rent, not just buying. Yeah. Yeah, just rent. Instead of just doing a security deposit, like someone with a decent credit score, you might have to do first month last month as well, which makes it very burdensome to get into an apartment, but you're a risk, you're a riskier person. You have bankruptcy. And a lot of people

Starting point is 00:18:44 have apartment collections, so it's not surprising they would request that. Um, you'd have to get into a predatory car loan. If your car breaks down, you don't have money. You have to get a 25% interest rate car. It's just on a horrible, like, eight year term. And it's probably some piece of shit car that you buy for 20 is worth 15 before it's even driven off. Uh, then the credit cards you get, you're not getting the good intro 0% cards. You're like, you're getting credit 1 cards at 29% with monthly fees, even if you pay on time. So you just get access to worst services in the world of dads. You're not getting approved for decent personal loans.

Starting point is 00:19:25 And again, like I said, the most important thing, bankruptcy doesn't actually fix anything unless you fix your behavior. Because just like consolidating your debt or transferring to another credit card or even letting things go to collections and negotiating them, just like all those bankruptcy, if you do not change your behavior that got you into that situation in the first place, you will literally end up right back there again in a few years. We've had quite a few upper-aged people on our show that have been through bankruptcy multiple times and now they're heading there again. Because it changes nothing. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T-fascarant.

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Starting point is 00:20:48 you can get $25 off, bringing it down to $340. So get the exact same blood panels that I do, and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code, modern wisdom, a checkout. What's the biggest misconception people have about why humans end up in debt? Well, a lot of it, it's not necessarily a misconception, but it's the wrong way to look at it, is because of an emergency. Like, yeah, if you have zero dollars, something happens, you would have to probably go into debt for that.

Starting point is 00:21:23 But people don't look at what happened before then. They were living their life, spending whatever they wanted on fun. They never saved up even a one-month emergency fund or highest deductible coverage. They didn't save up anything. So, of course, when an emergency happens, you're going to go into debt. But it wasn't the emergency that did that. It was you live in your life, not saving up even a three-month emergency fund, which I would recommend six, by the way. But it's not saving that got you into that emergency debt, not the emergency itself.

Starting point is 00:21:53 It was your behavior before that emergency. Yeah. I don't know. It seems to me like a lot of financial success, it has a knowledge component of understanding the physics of the system. But a huge part of it is emotional regulation. What's the relative amount of knowledge versus emotional regulation when it comes to being good with money? Depends where someone comes from. I mean, so I'm in a place of privilege now you could say.

Starting point is 00:22:19 I have information. And yet, I look like this. I know what it takes to lose this. This is now, this is, I have the knowledge. This is all behavior at this point. I got the tits. I got the tits because I'm choosing that. Some people pay for them.

Starting point is 00:22:32 Some people do. I would pay to lose them. Yes. I pay to lose them, but instead I'm just not doing the work that would be required to lose it. I have the knowledge, don't have the behavior. Yes. So there are people in those financial situations. There are going to be the people that come from a very different life, incredibly low income, no opportunity in their neighborhoods, no people to look up to, maybe even bad internet so they don't even get to watch the same podcast as us, don't have a good library to go read a good personal finance book. and I don't want to just victimize someone or infantilize someone, but there are harder situations to come from. It doesn't mean they can't get out of it. It just might be a little more difficult,

Starting point is 00:23:12 and you need to surround yourself with the right people. Do you find it difficult when somebody comes in front of you, and a lot of the time it is because of decisions that someone has made and there's illustrious, like, tailwind that you've had of all of these people that have made bad decisions, and then somebody comes in front of you who has come from a sense, situation, which has put them so far on the back foot financially, do you sometimes find it hard to change gears with them as opposed to sort of pointing the finger too much to actually be like,

Starting point is 00:23:41 oh, I see you. I see you in this problem that you're going through and that you've been put into. Yeah, I mean, we really only allow people on the show where it's their fault because it's a personal behavior show. So anyone that complains about the people on our show saying that, well, they can't control that. No, everyone that comes on our show, they can control. If someone applies and it's something out of their control, something like an incredible medical diagnosis, that's where we send them like a page of resources and like if we can connect you with anyone let us know but it doesn't make sense for financial audit because financial audit is about personal change so we just we just don't have those people because that's not the conversation yeah what's going back to personality trades

Starting point is 00:24:16 what do you think of the personality trades that predict financial success that predict financial success certainly being discipline i mean discipline comes down to everything um everything in the world of budgeting comes from or money comes from budgeting and budgeting's all about discipline. So, you know, that's why we created dollar-wise, that personal finance app, that budgeting app that is made for the everyman, not just like the, you know, super financial nerds who want to use things like YNAB, things like that that are incredibly difficult to use. They have the discipline to actually log into that app, connect their accounts to their banks, see where things are going, and take the actions on the advice that's given to them based

Starting point is 00:24:58 on their actual financial information that's plugged in. Without the discipline, even a tool like Dollar Wise that is incredibly useful to changing people's lives, you got nothing. It's like you could be tracking all of your calories using macro factor or something, but if you're not going to change what you're eating, it doesn't make a difference.

Starting point is 00:25:14 Yeah, it's discipline. People are excited when they leave financial audit or they watch financial audit, and even me like a diet. Even me like a diet, if you did a fitness audit on me, I might be excited for a couple weeks. Then, you know, if you don't have the discipline, and sometimes you fall back.

Starting point is 00:25:29 It's easy to have a fire under your ass for a couple weeks. If you don't have that discipline for the long term, it's difficult. It really is. What does debt do to someone's identity? Well, unfortunately, it turns a lot of people into victims that they're really not. A lot of people have more controlled and they're really willing to admit, what does it do to their identity? That's interesting.

Starting point is 00:25:52 Some people use debt to improve their identity more than anything, you know, pulling up, you really care. what the person next to you at the stoplight thinks about your car. I don't know why people care about that. I've never cared about that. A lot of people use debt to get the clothes that make them look good, the jewelry that makes them look good. Unfortunately, actually, that quality tends to come from lower income communities anyway.

Starting point is 00:26:15 It's kind of crazy how that works. But people use debt to change their identity. But then people also use their identity of debt to put themselves in a place of victimhood. And like, oh, I'm in debt. I can't do anything. I may as well just spend the money. I already have the credit card debt. Let me just put it out of credit card again.

Starting point is 00:26:35 What's an extra $10 going to do to $5,000? And the answer is not much, but it's a death of a thousand cuts. They just think that over and over again. Yeah, it's a very strange sort of death, debt spiral where the sunk cost fallacy, if this is already bad, what does it matter if it's a bit worse? Yeah. And also, if you're stressed with finances, you probably want something that makes you feel a bit less shitty. That could be food. I'm going to sedate myself from my financial troubles by

Starting point is 00:27:02 further ingraining myself into my financial troubles, which also becomes a spiral of itself. Yeah, and that was totally me in college. You know, when I had a lot of bad debt, car debt, student loans, private student loans, multiple credit cards, and family debt, absolutely. Went to McDonald's, swiped the Chase Freedom card, getting it close to maxing out constantly. And because it felt good. What did it matter? It was basically maxed in any way. actual max out credit card going to do. Do you think lifestyle inflation's become a bigger problem than inflation itself? Oh, bigger problem.

Starting point is 00:27:34 I wouldn't say, oh, it's a good question. Your professional podcast, so that's nice. Damn. I would say inflation is worse overall. I'd say worse overall because that impacts everyone. That's not your choice, right? Such a choice. But I'd say on a personal level, yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:55 No, that's bad. That's bad. That's going to fuck you over when someone gets the 20% – no, no one gets a 20% raise. Okay. When someone gets a 5% raise but increases their spending, 6%. You know, that is very common on our show. You know, what's interesting, people on financial audit that are doing worse are the highest income earning episodes. People often, you know, you open the show with getting death threats and stuff. Death threats and it's kind of minimal, but we do get lots of complaints and stuff about the show. One of our biggest complaints is, you know, I'm yelling and making fun. of poor people.

Starting point is 00:28:27 Those are actually the people I usually make fun of and yell at the least. It is the high income earners that if they just fix a couple things, they can get out of debt pretty quickly, but they also get into worse debt because they have a higher income, so they get approved for more debt. They're always the worst off. They lifestyle inflate. I swear, the closer they get from 100 to 200 to even a half a million dollars a year, the worst debt, the more credit cards, the more time shares, the more cars, the more bullshit they

Starting point is 00:28:54 have. It's impressive. It's so bad. It feels, I think, probably incredible to a lot of people that you could earn half a million a year and have a bad financial situation. Which I wouldn't be surprised if the majority in the United States didn't. Who make that much? Why? Have a half a million. Go get yourself the nice house. Go get yourself the nice car, the nice clothes. Why not? You worked hard. Deserve it. It's in our culture. We want. We're consumers. Do you think that are the things that richer people waste money on, different to the things that poorer people waste money on?

Starting point is 00:29:34 Absolutely. I'm trying to get over my fear of flights, and I guess I'm rich now, so that's nice. I'm knock on wood with all that. Does that help you get over your fear of flights? I rented a PJ, tell me. That's a waste of money. Is that easier or harder? So it's a control thing for me.

Starting point is 00:29:49 I don't like being stuck in a situation that I can't control. Do you know how to fly the PJ? No, but I can say, let's land. I can't do that with a commercial. Well, you can. You could make a big enough fuss that you would like, but it would be a real headache. And bad for my career, too. That would be a real headache.

Starting point is 00:30:05 Yeah, but like, so it gave me. Pause. Yeah. What was the first time with your travel anxiety getting on a PJ like? It was for, oh, the PJ itself. It was actually really bad when we filmed it too. We filmed that it's on the internet. I burst down in tears.

Starting point is 00:30:26 It's really bad. I'm sorry, one. Oh, it was anxiety. Like, it's not... I don't think that you should dismiss it like that, so... But it's not like something bad happened to me, right? Like, anxieties make belief. It's like, it's not real.

Starting point is 00:30:39 My brain thinks it's real, but it's not. So I was crying. I was sad. But, you know, what was actually making me more sad and crying? A lot of people thought it was out of pure terror. It was remembering a lot of the things that I haven't done. A lot of the family I haven't visited because of my fear of. of travel.

Starting point is 00:30:54 It was grief, as much grief as it was anxiety. Yeah. So interesting point here. There's a guy called Vinnie Shawman, who's a hypnotist in the UK. I have a friend. My friend's name is Sky King. Sky King, right? This guy lived in Hawaii while he was a kid, flies all around the world, loves Asia,

Starting point is 00:31:11 been to Japan a bunch of times. Out of nowhere, just develop travel anxiety. Bad, travel anxiety. Tried to get on a plane, couldn't bailed out. Tried to get on a plane. Couldn't bail. I think this happened maybe six, eight, maybe ten. times and I put him in touch with Vinny. Now, some people have better results with hypnotism.

Starting point is 00:31:29 Some people have worse. In a single session, Vinny fixed his travel anxiety. And I don't know what the full story is, but I know that the Simpsons theme tune is an integral part of the anchoring for how he gets over his travel anxiety. Interesting. And that was real interesting. That was like, it's a fucking cool gift to give somebody to unlock that. But I know what you mean. There is nothing wrong. Rationally, in terms of the utilitarian approach view of the universe, there is nothing happening. But your felt experience of, I'm getting on this jet that I've paid money for, that's kind of a momentous occasion for me. It's this landmark as a person who talks about money doing something that's

Starting point is 00:32:16 kind of canonical in everybody that has money's life. And my experience of that has been tarnished by the fact that I've got this thing that isn't me that I don't want in me and is kind of behind the steering wheel a little bit. I think that's, I think that makes sense. But it was nice because I was working with a panic therapist at the time and just started working with him again, thank goodness, because I need to get over this thing. He didn't let me get off. Like, like, is he with you? Of course, yes. So I brought him. How you brought your panic therapist on the jet with you? It was our plan. You know, we kind of. Oh, it wasn't like an intervention or something. Well, actually, technically, I heard him the day before. So we already decided. But yeah. Um, so. So.

Starting point is 00:32:52 So we brought him with us. He's really cool, and I'm working with him now again, and we have a game plan to get over it. But, yeah, it was really simple. It was Austin to San Antonio, so it was nothing. I just, I wanted to get on a plane again because I was just preventing myself from getting on a plane. So that's a very quick flight. How long had it been since you were on a plane? The decade, at least.

Starting point is 00:33:11 Wow. Yeah. So mostly road trips places, but even that still gives me kind of anxiety, which is just, I hate it. But, you know, we have a game plan. we're doing some things. I want to go be on some more shows. I mean, dude, if some people's exposure therapy is we just need to get a spider and put it in the corner of the room, your exposure therapy requires a private jet. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:33:36 It's a slightly higher bar. It's just as well that you're rich. Because if you won, you'd be fucked with this thing. Exactly. Exactly. What really sucks is the same exact model of private jet I was in just crashed in Laredo, Texas yesterday. and a CEO in Austin, Texas, died on it. So that's like kind of fucking with me.

Starting point is 00:33:56 That plus all of a tree. There aren't many forms of air transport that are feeling pretty safe right now. Yeah, the next one's a commercial. We're doing a commercial next. We're doing some long road trips to kind of... I would book, if I was you, I would try and get maybe your row

Starting point is 00:34:09 and then one behind one in front. I was thinking of that. Just in case there's a... You know, one of those? I just didn't want to be around people, but yeah. That's also nice. That's also nice. So you've got some anxious, panicky tendencies.

Starting point is 00:34:25 Yeah, really just that one thing. You built a show which is essentially high stakes live confrontation, right, with strangers about their most shameful secrets. Yeah. You're someone who has panic attacks. You run a show that gives other people panic attacks. Yep. Is that a coincidence or is this just like the most elaborate exposure therapy ever? It's great.

Starting point is 00:34:44 I mean, that's what people have to go through. They have to go through it. Well, it's actually nice is because of mine, and I'm, you know, working with my guy for a while now. Like, I can actually work through them pretty well. And now, if someone actually does have a legitimate panic attack on the show, I can help them through it, which is pretty nice. Oh, cool. So we just pause the cameras and do that real quick. This episode is brought to you by Whoop.

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Starting point is 00:36:24 explain to me what you think is happening inside of them, inside of their mind. Somebody's got a lot of debt. Maybe they've been hiding from it. Like, what's their emotion before? What do they get to? And then I'm interested in what you do to bring them back into land as well. Usually I can tell they kind of just go flat-faced in that moment. Like, they disengage their eyes kind of go blank and maybe even like a little bluish. And I'm like, oh, shit, okay. So we just literally pause.

Starting point is 00:36:49 I'm like, hey, you okay? You know, I go from the crazy voice to like just down, to like, hey, you okay. Remember, you know, it's like, of course they know what's like real and everything. But I'm like, yeah, we can take a pause, you know, you can take a break. And then I help them if they're like actually having anxiety attack, I'll do like a breathing exercise real quick.

Starting point is 00:37:06 It's like three and six out. And that's, um, That's pretty rare these days, but, and we definitely have people that need to do like a lap around the building or producer will take them or they need to go outside and hit a vape. Is that red? Yeah, hit a vape. That's good. That's why, Jared, I need a fucking e-pipe. For the people that are listening, I require, I want to be able to come up with, I want to be able to pontificate, but I want to be able to do it with nicotine.

Starting point is 00:37:32 So if anyone can find me a pipe that looks legitimate like this, but I can have some nicotine and that will be able to. I wonder whether part of the reason that you're not inducing as many panic attacks is because you're getting soft in your old age. You think so? Yeah, I wonder whether it's because you've taken your foot off the gas. I just threw something at someone the other day. You'd be fucked here. There's so many projectiles. There's so many potential projectors.

Starting point is 00:37:57 Some of them are heavy as well. Honestly, I am proud of it. I think our onboarding process is so thorough. We've had people that have come to work with us or people that have come to work with us or people that interviewed with us that have worked for like Dr. Phil and a lot of other type shows. Dr. Phil's close in Dallas. So that's why him specifically. But they go through our process and they're like, this is crazy. I've never seen an onboarding process like this at all. Because usually for like, I'm not speaking, Dr. Phil at all, don't sue me. But many shows like that daytime TV, they don't

Starting point is 00:38:26 give a fuck about their guests. But we actually really care because one, they're members of our audience. So a little selfish there, okay? A little selfish. I want members of our audience to do well. If you kill them, you're going to reduce the audience size. Yes, exactly. And I want them to do well, whether that's, you know, you could look at it from two perspectives. Pretend like you hate me and I'm the selfish most piece of shit ever. Fine. Take that.

Starting point is 00:38:45 Obviously, I want them to do well because it. Do it in spite of me or do it because of me. It shows that it works. It shows that the show works. I don't care about how what the mechanism is. It can be because you don't like me. I'm an asshole. You want to prove me wrong saying that I don't think that you're going to be able to turn it around.

Starting point is 00:38:58 Or because you love me and you think that my advice is worth listening to and you turn it around. Yeah. And or there's the second option where it's, and that's the real option that I actually really do care about how they succeed. So I really want them to do well. And the average gas pays off. It's just over like $20,000 and 12 months of debt after coming on financial audit. That's our most recent annual report. We do one every December. How much of that impact that you have on people's debt do you think is because of the knowledge that you give to them? And how much do you think is because of the intensity of the emotional discomfort that you put them through? Yeah, it's a mixture of both. There is that tough love, crazy, and fun approach of it. Like, I think oftentimes 90% of the time they're having a good time too. Like, they know the craziness of the show.

Starting point is 00:39:46 So, but they have fun. And that's not for everyone, but don't come on the show if it's not for you. So it's like a show I would actually personally go on. When I was in debt, it would have worked for me. Someone screaming at me, that works for me. It worked for me when I played sports. You know, it's whatever. It works for me.

Starting point is 00:40:02 And then we set them up. with lots of tools afterwards. They get dollar-wise for free forever, no matter what. They get all of our personal finance courses. They get a certification through course careers to help with their jobs. They get access. Any kind of resource that we're working with, third party, they get access to. So we try to give them everything.

Starting point is 00:40:20 And then we check in with them, I don't remember the exact dates, but it's like the day their episode goes live, a week after that, a month after that, and then three months after that. And we do two updates a week with former guests in our Hammer Elite membership. And we're endlessly checking in with them with surveys, and we tell them to reach out anytime they want. So there's the mixture of the show and that lights a fire under their ass, and the post-filming support as well.

Starting point is 00:40:45 Post-coital care process. Yeah. I did Love Island 11 years ago, and famously, the UK series, I don't know whether it's happened in America yet, but the UK series of Love Island has killed more people than any other TV show. like two past stars took their own lives, one of whom was a really good friend of mine.

Starting point is 00:41:05 That's crazy. Then the fucking host took her own life. What was going on there? Caroline Flack. Yeah, I just, I'd once, strange, twice, you're like, three times, including the host, you're like, there's a fucking pattern here.

Starting point is 00:41:21 But one of the issues, and this was something that I saw, especially, I think Love Island broke the app store when it came out. It was the number one app in the world above chat, GBT, above fucking clawed. And there was shutdowns on servers and shit Like 300,000 concurrent downloads at a moment Like downloading the app to watch I don't know what you do voting on it or something maybe

Starting point is 00:41:39 And the post show care Routine thing Because I was the first person through the doors Of the first ever episode Right? At the first season So They were

Starting point is 00:41:53 We were the guinea pig We were the first child Where you make all of the mistakes You drink when you're pregnant You smoke in And like you fucking forget to feed it for 12 hours, like all of that stuff. And once you finish up, you should have a support system as you get thrust back out into the world. Now, the first season that I did was like way smaller.

Starting point is 00:42:13 It was 10 times smaller than season two, which was 10 times smaller than season three, which it really sort of took off on that exponential. But had it have been even a bit more exposed, there was the least amount of post-show support. even though it was that much smaller, the post-show support was basically non-existent. And then each time that one of those incidents occurred, you could tell that ITV, which is the company in the UK, it's Channel 3 in the UK, right?

Starting point is 00:42:40 Channel 3 and Channel 7. And every single time that one of these horrible, horrible situations happened, everybody got an email, just reminding you that you have access to the safety and care team whenever. I'm like, dude, fucking too late, man. You know, like something about the horse bolting and the door being closed. But we also probably didn't get the opportunity when walking out of the island to be like, hey, if I do this, make sure it's not in the episode.

Starting point is 00:43:07 So it's like, you were, like, no matter what happened. Exactly. You do not control the edit. And the entire universe is watching you and commenting on you. And then what's mad is you come out because it's recorded and published live, but you only enter back into the world once it's happened. You have no idea what's made the edit. have no idea what people think of you, you could come out and be the hero or the most hated person in your country. It's fucking crazy. Yeah. Should I get into that? Everyone's doing that.

Starting point is 00:43:36 Everyone's doing these pouches. Uh, well. Would I be like so locked in? Dude, no, that's scary. I'm asking for advice first before I go full. Those are mine. So those ones are, that's just caffeine. That's just 50, 50 milligrams of caffeine. These, these are very healthy for you, nicotine. Those are knick-knacks. So that's like, everyone in the world is doing pouches right now. Like, how locked in would I be? I have a bit of an oral fixation, which I'm sure that the people that think I'm gay on the internet are going to love to hear me say.

Starting point is 00:44:08 Have we got any toothpicks? J.B., can you get, if you're outside, Jonathan, can you bring some toothpicks in from the cupboard, please? I want to show those. Just something to fucking dick about with while you're working, I think is very important. Oh, okay. You've got a pen or whatever. Sometimes you try.

Starting point is 00:44:22 I could get the pipe thing. Yeah, I'll do you. what what income level do people's financial problems fundamentally change? Well, I'm not saying it's behavior. It's fully behavior. Again, like I said, the worst situations I've seen in the entire show are high income earners. Absolutely horrible. So I'd say never. It gives you more opportunity to get out of a bad situation. But I wouldn't say the income levels. Everyone thinks when they make the next $10,000 in their income, their entire life's going to change. change. They're spending changes, but if their behavior is the same, if their inclinations are the same, their lack of discipline is the same, they're actually just going to be in a worse situation. So I would actually argue that if behavior doesn't change at the more income level, your situation might actually get worse. Because you now are playing with bigger chips on the

Starting point is 00:45:14 table. And if you're fucking it up, you've got more access. I never thought about that. It's such a good point that you've got more access to credit. People think, banks, credit cards think that you are a safer bet. Because of that, you can fuck yourself harder. Yeah, and I guess I'll put an asterisk on my statement. There is like you got to hit a basic minimum level, right? Like if you can't pay for like the cheapest rent in the area, put food on the table utilities, then obviously anyone that's not making up to that point. Yeah, that's a threshold where it's like game changer because you're just like surviving. But if you can't even hit the survival, like that's not even in the conversation. But typically we don't really

Starting point is 00:45:52 allowed for that that much in this country and Western society. I mean, you'll see it. But, you know, we have lots of child support services for low income, food support, housing support. It's not perfect. No one's going to argue it's perfect. But we do have a lot of social programs to help those people that are in those lower. A friend of the show, Ice Coffee Hourboys, had Kevin O'Leary on. And he gave some insight about where he thinks different levels of income impact your lifestyle. Can you pull that up for me, Jared? You get this. What would you say are the main four tiers of wealth? Where if you hit a certain amount life, well, I tell everybody this, you should strive very hard if you're an entrepreneur to have five million dollars in T-bills,

Starting point is 00:46:38 not in anything else, just T-bills, making 3.82% this morning. You know you've made it and you've safeguarded your family for the rest of your life if you can get $5 million liquid in T-bills. Most people that consider themselves very successful entrepreneurs do not have $5 million liquid in T bills. They don't. But what net worth should you be at to justify 5 million in T bills? Well, you should be it. The first thing you should do is get to 5 million liquid, be worth $5 million liquid. That's far more valuable than anything else.

Starting point is 00:47:13 Liquidity with wealth is actually a superpower. Most people say I'm very wealthy, but they couldn't raise a million dollars by 2 o'clock in the afternoon if they tried. It's tied up in all kinds of things they think are worth a lot until the shit hits the fan. The plan is, if you're an entrepreneur, the hardest thing is to make the first million really hard. And when you make the first million, put it in T bills. Just as hard, but not as hard is to get to two million. Two to three is actually quite easy because you figured something out. But where you get undisciplined is you start buying shit you don't need because your mandates get to five million liquid.

Starting point is 00:47:50 You have to have five million liquid to call yourself a successful entrepreneur. And I don't care who disagrees with me. They're wrong. I guess I'll be wrong. I mean, no, I agree. One of the first goals I had was to get to $5 million as quick as I could and invest it in the stock market. I don't really understand get your first million, put it in low indexing T-bills. Like Treasury.

Starting point is 00:48:16 Right. So I'm not really understanding, like putting it in bonds or something. it just makes sense. If you make your first million in your young, let it grow in the marketplace at an average of 8 to 10%. That makes more sense. I mean, I guess if you're approaching like 60 and you make your first million off of a business being successful, yeah, put it in something more conservative. But if you have time on your side, unless America collapses, like the stock market's going to do over a long enough time horizon, you'll weather any of the little wobbles. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:48:42 So, but I do agree with that 5 million mark because that 5 million mark, if you do the 4% rules, 4% of 5 million, I think, what is that, $60,000? a year, something like that. So you live a good middle class income off of that using the 4% rule. So that works. So that was one of my first big goals. It's, I don't like the idea of taking the first million you make and then literally just not letting it grow past inflation. That doesn't make any sense. If you're getting your first million, you should let it work, have it work for you in the stock market. I'm not saying reinvested immediately into the business. And certainly he's correct where people start getting money and they start blowing it. He's 100% correct on that.

Starting point is 00:49:21 This is weird to take the first million and put it into something low index, especially if you're young. Is there a financial milestone that creates the most happiness for people? Yeah, a lot of the happiness that can be achieved through wealth, like you can't buy friends, you can't buy family. So a lot of the happiness that can actually be achieved through wealth, I'd say if you can cover, if you can weather practically any emergency,

Starting point is 00:49:46 including like a cancer diagnosed, to something really bad. If you can... How much money is that? I mean, honestly, I think that $5 million is a good marker. That $5 million is a good marker. You can really start pulling into it for, you know, a few years. If it's like really aggressive, really bad,

Starting point is 00:50:02 and you want to go to the best in the world. So with that, you know you can weather anything. You can, even if you blow through the five, hopefully you make it to the other side and you can start bouncing back. But that gives you unlimited flexibility. You don't get to do the crazy things that are super fun. You don't get to do the crazy things that are super fun. You can't buy a PJ.

Starting point is 00:50:19 I can't buy a PJ. And I can rent a short little trip. But I don't think that's what drives happiness. It's a fun thing. Moment of happiness. But I think the true happiness that you actually can buy is security. And $5 million is a really good number to get to security. That sounds like a massive number for people to feel financially secure.

Starting point is 00:50:37 Yeah. But you know you can weather literally practically anything. That's the question. Like you can weather almost everything with a few hundred thousand hours set aside. You can, you know, take a wild little. find a new job if you have a few hundred thousand. But I'm saying if I'm really thinking like you can weather anything, five million is a great number to have. Yeah, I totally didn't think about the fact that you can afford to invest in specifically the S&P, any kind of tracker, if you're younger,

Starting point is 00:51:07 because there's going to be some movements, there's going to be periods of downturn, but over a long enough time horizon. And I mean, if the S&P goes to fucking zero, there's much bigger problems than what you're doing with your money. Yeah, we'll be killing. on each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangy nectar, and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle

Starting point is 00:51:44 cramps and fatigue helps to optimize brain health and regulate your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, there are no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to drinklmn.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. How much shame surrounds debt?

Starting point is 00:52:17 And do you think that shame hurts people or helps people change? I think it's pretty damaging that in our culture, talking about money is shameful in general and in debt. I mean, I think it's good to have a good laugh on a TikTok short, things like that. That's fine. But I think if we have a whole system where people feel shameful to even bring up their close friends, their family,

Starting point is 00:52:38 or even their therapist, that they're in a bad financial situation, they're not going to get that emotional support. they're not going to get that encouragement that they actually need to change because they'll just be weathering at themselves. That's a very difficult thing. You don't want to, again, going back to even just the cancer thing, you don't want to be going through that yourself. It's almost impossible. You need support. Anything you go through, any kind of support system is good. And if we have a massive level of shame around it, which I would say in our country, in our society, we definitely have. People aren't even willing to say what they make. Yep. You know, they're like embarrassed or they're afraid of making it too much and people look down on them for, like, it'll be. be jealous, you know. So there's a lot of shame around personal finances in our society, and I think that's pretty damaging. It's interesting. As a British person, we have shame but in the opposite

Starting point is 00:53:23 direction. We have shame about talking about how much we make. If we make a good wage. Because everyone's poor there? Because there is such a strong, tall poppy syndrome that if you're seen to be too big for your boots or doing too well, that can often cause way more ire. It's like an interesting, I understand why people would feel personal shame around talking about being in a bad position financially. What does this say about me is a human? What does this say about my habits? Maybe people are going to think less of me. But there is a pro-social, fuck, that person's down bad. Hey man, like, I really want to help you as opposed to, dude, I just got this new job and I got a 30% pay increase. I can't believe it. I've been working so hard for this for a long time. If that's not someone that's got your best interests at heart, that triggers in them not pity, which is not an emotion that people want to feel, but it induces envy, which is way more active. You know, that's the sort of thing that can get you ostracized from a friend group.

Starting point is 00:54:24 And again, this isn't everybody. I've got amazing friends in the UK, but I met a million people running nightclubs. I had one of the biggest events companies in the UK for a long time. A million people, right, in person with a tight pair of jeans. on holding a clipboard, giving out wristbands, and free champagne. I had a handful of close friends that I could talk to openly about everything that was going on, success, failures, all the rest of it. That's good.

Starting point is 00:54:50 That's not a great friend exposure to conversion funnel, right? A million people, handful of friends. Oh, yeah. And that's why. Well, you had them, though. A lot of people don't. That's true. Yeah, and as an only child, that was like, fuck, like, I've got some people that have.

Starting point is 00:55:08 got me and that's cool. The UK is a very inhospitable environment for people that are trying to do things financially. I've got this line. I wonder what do you agree with it. The UK is a great country to be poor in and a terrible country to be rich in. And America is a terrible country to be poor and a great country to be rich in. Yeah. I mean, a lot of poor people move to and stay in the UK.

Starting point is 00:55:33 A lot of wealthy people leave. I'd say the analytics just follow that in general. Go. Fucking nailed it, dude. Forget the pithy Maxims. I just dialed the entire financial industry. There's a safety net in the UK, which moving to America to me feels like quite brutal, quite like... Why leave the council estate? It's comfy.

Starting point is 00:55:58 It is. National Health Service. I've got this stat. Britain spends more on working age welfare every year than it comes. collect an income tax. Working age welfare. And the difference gets borrowed every single year. Yeah, that's insane.

Starting point is 00:56:15 And all the productive people that would actually contribute to the tax base are leaving. The wealth drain, the brain drain in the United Kingdom is. I feel bad for your country. That's honestly, it's a place where, I mean, the majority of my life I wouldn't have considered moving there. But there was a part where I was like, ooh, this would be the best place to go living. Because you get the cool walkability of Europe and like the nice, you know, okay, winter and nice summers. And it's your language. And it's your language. Exactly. So I wanted to kind

Starting point is 00:56:42 go there for a bit. It's gone. If the UK comes back, it'll be the biggest comeback story in the history of civilization. Yeah, we're like 9-0 down at the moment in a game of football. There are, you know, I mean, there is the conversation where it's like, yeah, GDP per capita. There'd be 51st state. Did you see that? Yeah. I got a lot of shit for putting that. Well, I mean, that's true. But there also are. shit from Americans. Well, Americans are retarded. I don't know. Americans are rich and retarded.

Starting point is 00:57:12 But there are some other true things. The UK, when it comes to safety and a lot of things, you know, it ranks higher. So there's not just like, it's not all shit. Yeah, it's not all shit. But like, no, it is true. I mean, unfortunately, it's going the same direction as Spain or southern Italy. One of those places where it's people go there or are born there, get educated there, and then leave to somewhere where they can make double.

Starting point is 00:57:37 the income. And why wouldn't they? We're such a mobile world. Dude, if you're inhospitable, and this is the thing that I understand some of my lefty-leaning friends, Jimmy the Giant is one of them, and he thinks that taxing the rich, he means like the ultra-rich, he means like 100 millions plus of liquid, or whatever, of held asset wealth. But that that is something that's justified. That's something that would help to raise up the underclass and people that are unemployed and need that. But I think the bottom 55% of the population in both the UK and the US are net withdrawers from benefits as opposed to net contributors. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:21 Like just that statistic. Income tax in the United States, the bottom 50% of earners contribute 1%. So 50% contribute 1%. Like, that's crazy. We're a very progressive income tax society. In the United States, United States is actually the most progressive Western major country for income tax. What we don't have is VAT tax, which usually funds like the National Health Service and whatnot. So in Americans, Americans, that's a fun thing about Americans, including especially populist Americans, either left or right.

Starting point is 00:58:52 We want the Scandinavian social programs, but we want to do it on like a Florida tax system. Americans are not willing to pay the actual tax is required for the systems, and it's never about the wealthy people paying a lot in taxes. that doesn't fund it all. It's all about the flat tax, the VAT tax, the national sales tax, where everyone has to pay an extra 1, 2, 3, 4, 5% or whatever it is on everything they purchase. That's what funds those social programs. And the United States would never tolerate it at a national level. Have you ever seen what a set of accounts for a normal limited company that has to, within the VAT threshold? So I think it's $120,000 a year. $120,000, fuck, that was very unanglicized, $120,000 a year or above that your limited company

Starting point is 00:59:34 makes and after that point you're registered for that. Have you ever seen one of the accounts submissions? Dude, it is a somebody that had a limited company for a decade and a half in the UK. I still do. My rental properties go through that although they don't breach the threshold so it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:59:52 It is a fucking nightmare. Each individual transaction you charge the person who is getting the service from you an additional 20%. That's what VAT is. 20%. and then you claim back that VAT up to an amount from the government. So it's this fucking Ouroboros, this endless financially, bureaucratically, in terms of paperwork.

Starting point is 01:00:18 It's this huge overhead. And I understand what VAT is for. I understand that we have lots of services that you don't have in America. They need to be funded somehow. National insurance. That's another type of tax that's not seen in America. But if you do the math, after everything that you get free in the United Kingdom, if you, after people pay for it and the median income here, after the median tax is here, after the median paying for the private services here, we still end up with more money in our pocket in the end. No way.

Starting point is 01:00:48 Yeah. It's pretty close, but it's still. Even with the health care is one of the biggest costs, even though health care is the single most common reason that people go bankrupt in America as well, I think. Yeah, which isn't surprising. and honestly, people make it sound more consequential than it is. So as we talked about earlier, bankruptcy is actually not that even big of a deal, really. It's really not. It's overblown. I mean, it's not great.

Starting point is 01:01:10 I don't just, like, go get bankrupt. Like, that's not wonderful. But it's like people make it sound like the scariest thing in the world when it's really not. But, I mean, I looked into that two years ago. Maybe the numbers have changed today. But two years ago, that's what it looked like. And we still have, like, out of a major nation, yes, you're going to have microstates where it's like, Switzerland, you know, much smaller.

Starting point is 01:01:28 Obviously, there are GDP per capita and everything. is going to be a lot higher in those kind of places or like Monaco, something like that. But as far as like a major nation, large nation, the United States like destroys when it comes to disposable income. The income you have after all the important stuff after you get tax and everything, we just lead because we just encourage, our system just encourages that. But what's interesting when talking about the United Kingdom and you talked about your more left-wing friends that like want to raise taxes and stuff there, what's also interesting on the left-right spectrum. is during the Great Recession that 2008, 2009, 2007, the United Kingdom went more conservative, where the United States went more liberal with their spending. We pumped a lot of money into the economy.

Starting point is 01:02:14 The United Kingdom, I had it in my austerity. They went austerity. And you can see what the outcomes were. We went into debt for it as a nation, but we recovered in a couple years. The United Kingdom's GDP just recovered from 2007, I believe, like a year and a half ago. No way. Two years ago. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:32 So the, they're more conservative approach of spending, raising taxes, cutting spending there in the recession. It failed. It objectively failed across Europe. And the United States, you know, Donald Trump. COVID pumped a lot of money into the economy. We're very liberal with our spending. Yeah, we chucked the money in.

Starting point is 01:02:49 So it's, it's, you know, we're pretty progressive. I mean, 50% of our federal spending. Yes, it's mandatory spending. It's not, you know, whatever. It's still social spending. So left versus right. It's not always, you know, one side's going to always be in the right, because the more right wing running of their federal budget in the United Kingdom failed when it came to the grave recession. It just destroyed, it destroyed the economy, destroyed productivity, destroyed spending.

Starting point is 01:03:17 Well, even that now has kind of become quite squirrely because when you talk about conservative spending, a lot of the time that's more pro-capitalist, that more prepared now to turn the money printer over. So it's the like existing archetypes of what it even means to be left and right. Pick any, pick stuff about which races you do or don't like, which cultures you do or don't like, which religions you do or don't want inside of your country. Like everything that the whole like tectonic plate underneath what used to be stereotypes and cliches, that's all moved. Oh, completely. I mean, you do see it in race. It was the more 90s liberal, which I'm probably more aligned with on this perspective of we wanted to color blinds

Starting point is 01:03:56 society, you know, and it was the more right-wing people that were like, well, no, we see, you know, they're different than us, you know, and that kind of stuff. Like, I don't know about the 90s at that point, but even still, that was the more 90s liberal perspective. Now it's the more centrist, even right-wing position, colorblind society. And people on the far left are like, no, we need black dorms, we need black graduations. We see race first, no matter what. And it's very interesting how that shifted. And I don't think with bad intention to be clear, I don't think they're evil for that. But I do think it's, um, sometimes when people get to the extremist, they horseshoe around. Correct. Yeah. It did, far left and far right end up looking a lot

Starting point is 01:04:34 closer than you'd think. Yeah. That, just going back to the bottom 50% contribute one percent of the taxes, but then when you net it down in terms of what's given all different types of aid and assistance, I think it's up to the bottom 55% and net detractors. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. And we have systems made for that. The child tax credit is made for that. It is usually lower income people that have more kids. This is how it is. And lower income people pay less taxes, but they get the same child tax credit.

Starting point is 01:05:05 So this is more money is going to go to them in the end. Do you think that would surprise most people to find out that the bottom 55% of the population and net detractors from the benefit system as opposed to net contributors? Oh, of course. Absolutely. Listen, every time I take a political compass test, I find myself an eccentric, you know, slightly leaning right. economically and then decently left socially, but I had like an extreme socialist on my show the other day. Episode's not out yet. And I was talking to her and I was like, how much is the top 1% paying

Starting point is 01:05:31 taxes? She says, nothing. They pay zero percent. I'm like, no, it's like 30% of all income taxes. Top 10% pays like 50% top 50% pays 99%. It blew her mind. She has no idea because we're in such misinformation algorithmically defined places on the internet. There was a study done by some elite university on the East Coast where they were, researchers were going into TikTok and engaging with left-wing content and then a different one would do right-wing content. And TikTok immediately found out in about three minutes, whether you wanted, if you're anti-men or pro-left or anti-woman or pro-right, and they would just put you into that camp where all of a sudden, all the information you got, all the content you watch was the extreme version of that. And that's all you were getting.

Starting point is 01:06:21 because you show you engage with that and if you engage with that they want to give you more so you stay on their platform it makes sense from their business perspective so it's not surprising at all that people wouldn't be aware of that information

Starting point is 01:06:31 if it goes against their worldview I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine the more consistent you'll be it's like golf right you want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills you want the eye of the tiger

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Starting point is 01:07:41 because the incentives aren't necessarily aligned for somebody who feels like they're really struggling, who is comparing where they are financially to where they think their parents were, at their age, where they think everybody else is at their age, what they think that they should have. So past generations, other people, and my idealized version of where I want to be, all of that bundled together, you saying, well, actually, the top 1% of earners, they contribute 30% of the taxes, and the bottom 50%, they're actually net detractors from the system of the... That doesn't make me feel any better. Like, it's not a comfort to me to take a macro perspective when my micro experience sucks.

Starting point is 01:08:23 Yeah. I mean, that's why financial audits about the perspective of the individual and their responsibilities and what they can change. Because, you know, some people comment, why aren't you talking about the systems that fuck them in the first place?

Starting point is 01:08:34 And I'm like, that's not what the show can change. You can go vote. Congratulations. You contributed to changing the system that you want to do. But the reality is, on that show, only one person can change what's happening in that person's

Starting point is 01:08:49 life immediately, and that's that individual. So you're right. Talking about the system, it doesn't help anyone on that personal level. It's the actual choices. And there is good news. The United States is actually taking a pretty important step towards it. We're close to 40 states that now require a personal financial education course to graduate high school. It's close to 40 states. It wasn't even half of America just a couple years ago. So they're really getting on. What do you think of the syllabus? I haven't looked at it. But I mean, the government of Michigan came on the show and, you know, she wanted to talk about it. and you know, she's Democrat, she's probably going to run for president.

Starting point is 01:09:23 And I was very impressed with how much she actually cared about making sure people needed to learn about basic personal finances before graduating high school. I think that's important. And I'm glad to see that we're doing that as a country. Now, I don't know about you. I don't know what the grade system is like out there in the United Kingdom. But I was a fucking retard who didn't give a shit about school. I would have done whatever the minimum thing required to pass that school or that class, and I wouldn't have learned anything if I was in school.

Starting point is 01:09:54 I don't know. Other than the things I was actually interested in, which is mostly history classes and music classes at that time, I did the basic bare minimum to pass and I wouldn't have learned anything. So there is that consequence, but at least we're trying. If you were to put together a syllabus of principles financially to teach young people, what would be the biggest ones? It would start with budgeting because if you can't budget, there's nothing else.

Starting point is 01:10:17 So budgeting is that, you know, we talked about the discipline person responsibility. That's a little harder to teach in school, but at least learning how to budget a household. Starting with something like the 50, 30, 30, 20, 20, 20% on needs, 30% on wants, 20% on investing. Smallest categories investing. You get to spend 30% of your money on bullshit. Obviously, that changes in places like New York, L.A., San Francisco, but that's a good place to start from. So teach that concept. Teach what is a good car loan to get.

Starting point is 01:10:46 I enjoy the money guy. rule. You put 20% down, no longer than a three-year term, and no more than 8% of your income is the monthly payment. That equals a car you can afford. Actually teach the value of college in a degree instead of saying everyone needs to go to college and borrow as much as it takes to get whatever degree you want at any institution you want. Instead, teach, okay, a good general rule is don't get a degree of which you borrow more for than you'll get in your expected first year's salary. So that's a good rule. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's a good rule to just not borrow more than you need. What's, I don't know how America stacks up in terms of different courses at different universities.

Starting point is 01:11:27 Can you give me some examples of low, medium, and high and what would be expected? Because there's no way. I've seen some of the fucking student debt bills. Oh, yeah, that's better. There's no way that somebody's going to, some people wouldn't even earn that back in five years of being at war. Of course. If they had zero costs and all of the money went back to their student loan. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, strictly thinking college, let's get rid of trades or anything like that, community college. You can go there for two years. You can get your basics out of the way. In fact, a lot of community college, you can get your four-year degree now at like nursing and whatnot. Austin Community College here, you can go for like a thousand bucks a semester, two thousand bucks

Starting point is 01:12:01 a semester, super affordable, super cheap. Many people can work their way through it. And that's in Austin and it's similar in other areas. From there, you want to transfer, if you're going to transfer to an institution, more affordable, just stand. maybe directional school like Western Texas, you know, something like that. I went to Western Michigan. University where it's a little more affordable and you complete your final two years there and you take federal student loans for that. And the big question from, well, okay, to finish your question. So for that more directional school, finish your four years. But beyond that, then you're talking like you're going out of state at a four year institution skipping community

Starting point is 01:12:40 college. Out of state's like double the cost. Then you can go beyond that. Then we're talking private institution. You actually go beyond that and think international, which is why people really care about rankings in the United States, because that gets international students. They care about rankings, and they'll pay an extra premium to go to schools in the United States. So that's why they really care. But I try to stay down here. Try to stay in that community college for the first two years and then transfer to the in-state institution. Federal student loans subsidized or unsubsidized at least you have the protections with federal student loans. Really try not to go private. The only reason you'd be going private is because your family already makes a decent amount of money.

Starting point is 01:13:19 So that's how I would approach it. And then it's degree selection. That's the important one. You have to look at the fields you're going into. A lot of the, unfortunately, there is a big gender division, and this isn't anti-women. I don't want to be on that fucking weird anti-women shit, but there is an actual reality that women are getting lower return on investment degrees in the United States. They tend to get more things like social services, psychology, sociology, things like that,

Starting point is 01:13:44 that don't return, where men tend to really think about the income post, I don't know if it's ingrained societally or culture or they to be the provider or whatever, but for whatever reason, they tend to go, you know, more engineer, things like that. And women, you know, more teachers. So that's really important to think about the degree and the return on investment. And now, honestly, a thing to probably consider is how AI resistant your career feels going to be. Who knows where that's going to go? I think, unfortunately, women are going to be hit hardest by that. So there is, uh, it's referred to is the lanyard class. Okay.

Starting point is 01:14:16 People that wear lanyards to work. It's middle management. It's marketing. It's HR. And that is a big chunk. That sort of white-collar lanyard people, that is going to be a big chunk of what AI comes for first, supposedly. And that is going to, I tweeted this and I got, people got very mad at me about it.

Starting point is 01:14:36 You're looking at your responses to tweets? Who cares if people are getting mad? I go on that once every two days. And I see what fewer or has occurred. within the last 48 hours. They don't matter. I post and ghost, but it's just interesting

Starting point is 01:14:49 to see what the sentiment is. Sure. How close to a third rail or beyond the Oberton window is this thing that I just said. The internet is not real life. So it's just so hard to take an account what it's said.

Starting point is 01:14:58 Very true. Like this last election in midterms, I swear, it all went opposite of what you saw on Twitter. You were going to think all these like outsiders were going to win because they're so big on Twitter. It was nothing. It was nothing.

Starting point is 01:15:11 Don't look as you should respond. The sexy campaign on social media is not middle America who are voting and actually have the time and the preparedness to be able to go out and have registered and are fucking ready to go. Anyway, I said

Starting point is 01:15:24 we've just got ourselves now. We've overshot it a little bit. I think women out-earned men up to the age of now about 32, 33. It's about 1,111 pounds more to 29. I don't know what it is after that. And only then does it. But that has grown.

Starting point is 01:15:42 It was up to 29. Now it's up to 32. 33, I think, for women out-earning men. Given that you've just about reached young people, gender parity between men and women in terms of earning, you are now about to see that what probably two women feels like we finally arrived economically. Okay. Majority of degrees. Yep. Two women for every one man completing a four year U.S. college degree by 2030, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 01:16:10 Master's degrees even more. Correct. PhDs also more but not more more. That situation of parity is maybe going to be at risk. And I think a lot of fingers are going to be pointed that we just arrived and now robots built by men have just taken our opportunity that is still so fucking green that we haven't settled into it away from us. That I think is going to be one of the biggest stories of the next. decade. I mean, there's going to be many, but one of the ones that people are going to feel the most is more war between the sexes. Oh, yes. The gender wars are so extreme. The political division right now in the most recent federal election, the gender divide in the generation Z is further than any other generation in American history. It's scary. I'm actually scared. And it's impacting more things than this, that. It's impacting reproduction numbers, which impacts the overall economy.

Starting point is 01:17:12 It impacts retirees, the retiree to worker ratio if people aren't fucking. And people aren't fucking. People hate each other. Now they have your swiping based on political affiliation on the dating apps, you know. So it is very scary and it's sad to see. And unfortunately, again, it is usually like the white women that are calling me fascists online for personal responsibility. You're in very good company with regards to that yet. Yeah, but it's like, it's a, it's really weird because I really just.

Starting point is 01:17:40 just want the best and talking about statistics or anything isn't sexes. It's not right now, you know, I didn't even say it earlier because it shouldn't be about the sexes. But when we talked about people struggling post-college degrees and not get a job, it's actually not women. They're, they're getting jobs at the same rate as new degree holders as traditional. It's men that have fallen off the cliff. But I didn't want to focus on that because this shouldn't be a big gender war. But the gender wars among Gen Z right now is insane. And we're going to have massive consequences down the road just as we've seen in South Korea, in Japan, and I'm terrified for that as a hopeful future retiree.

Starting point is 01:18:18 Yeah, this was from my newsletter this week. Asian women now earn more on average than white men in the U.S. finding that adds a wrinkle to common narratives about patriarchy and white supremacy. Asian women are winning. Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course. And like I understand, there's the history, right? So you got to put many people feel burdened by history.

Starting point is 01:18:39 I get it. Victimhood's easier to have than, you know, saying like, oh, we're doing okay now. I think it's very, there's two sides on that more, I guess, if you have to put it in a camp, right-wing perspective is like, you know, oh, everything's good now, so, you know, we don't even need to think about what came before, right?

Starting point is 01:18:59 It's like, okay, but there is an actual history. And then on the left-wing side, that's just as bad, is like they don't even recognize that there has been progress. It's all victimhood. It's all bad. Women are oppressed, all this stuff. It makes no sense. have to acknowledge the realities of history,

Starting point is 01:19:11 and you have to also recognize when we're trying to change society that we actually have changed society and people are doing better than before. The thing that's kind of an unseen cost of always looking with a historical context that forgets the present, is that it actually denies people

Starting point is 01:19:31 who are in a good situation from ever feeling like they're in a good situation. Yeah, absolutely. You go, hey, hey, you fucking arrived. I get it. burdens from the past, things that need to be remembered, so we don't fall back there. The main fear is if we don't keep talking about it, maybe we'll go back there, right? Sure.

Starting point is 01:19:48 Keep a weather eye on that, make sure that that's happening. But if you make progress in the present always neutered by where it came from in the past, you never actually give people the gift of feeling the opportunity for celebration. Couldn't agree more, but you're evil for saying that, so. I'm aware. It's fine. I've been called it a lot. People aren't fucking.

Starting point is 01:20:11 Yes. Caleb Hammer. Like, that's the, I did a four-hour debate about the birth rate decline. I could have just, who? It was Stephen Jay Shaw, who did the birth gap documentary, Simone Collins. Did they say people are fucking because they're not? No, no, no, no. It was a demographer, a pronate list, and a statistician.

Starting point is 01:20:31 It was broadly in agreement, although the reasons were what was being debated. It was kind of, I've been deep down this rabbit hole for a while. Which if anyone knew the actual reasons, we would be able to fix it, right? And every country has tried to ride for a lot of money. And it's, it worked in Hungary for a year and then it fell back. Correct. There is a number. So Lyman Stone would be an interesting one for you to talk to from an economic implication.

Starting point is 01:20:55 He's like Institute for Family Studies, which you may have referenced at some place. He's the man when it comes to. He's like tip of the fucking spear. There is a number that you can pay people to fix the birth rate. And it's not that much. But it's fucking loads compared with what we spend. It's like 10% of GDP. It's a lot.

Starting point is 01:21:12 I mean, it might be required at some point, right? Because that's like collapse to a human civilization at some point. I don't think, you know, luckily in the United States where like generally pro-immigration, people want to move here, so we'll be fine. But places like South Korea are done. Yeah. For every hundred South Koreans, there'll be four great-grandchildren. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:30 96% gone within a century. What's the same? So have you looked at the economic implications, sort of macroeconomic implications, of a declining population? Yeah, I mean, I'm more focused on the retirement. When we were, these numbers, I'm going to have to be a little fuzzy on because it's hard to remember exactly. But when we first started a social program called Social Security that has good intent, not an evil program, mismanaged, not smart in the end. You know, we had like a worker to retiree ratio of like 100 to 1.

Starting point is 01:22:00 What are we at now? We're like, it's close to like 10 to 1 or something? You could have these numbers. But the closer and closer we get, the more burden it is on the individual. And if you have social systems that are solely reliant on a growing population, growing tax base, it doesn't work. They fail. So all the social programs are starting to failure. You're seeing them starting to buckle.

Starting point is 01:22:21 Social Security is going to have a mandatory 25% cut in 2032 is what's projected. Why? So when there were more workers, we were contributing more money than was going out. So that money was starting to build. Because old people don't work, but they do need caring for. Yeah, which makes sense. And that social security fund was starting to build. But where was it?

Starting point is 01:22:44 Like around early 2000s or something, we started to take more out of it than it was going. And as the baby boomer started to retire, and also there's just less people replacing them. And by 2032, unless the retirement age changes, unless the cap on social security tax changes, unless we... Reduced. The cap on social security would be brought down. Or we also come. cut benefits to those who are already high-income, you know, all controversial for different reasons, whatever.

Starting point is 01:23:09 That's not the point. But unless something changes, the fund goes to zero. And then the only money that goes out is the money coming in. And that's projected to be a 25-ish percent cut by 2032. Fuck me, that's going to be unpopular. Oh, it's good. Whoever's president is going to get killed. I mean, it's going to be bad.

Starting point is 01:23:25 We'll probably just, honestly, the property law will borrow the difference and our debt will just go even further. Probably what's going to happen. The last time we made a compromise was during the Reagan administration, if I'm not mistaken, where they barely raised the retirement. You have to remember, the average lifespan for... What is it, not 65? Yeah, right around there.

Starting point is 01:23:41 And we raised like two years. The average lifespan for when we started Social Security was like, if you actually make Social Security, you're going to live for another two or three years. Now you're going to live a couple decades. So it just doesn't make sense anymore. Even though it was super unpopular among the highest voting base, the boomers, Social Security retirement age,

Starting point is 01:24:01 for what it was actually intended to when FDR signed it into law, should have been raised almost like 70 by now. Which sounds evil. Yeah, does anybody like the idea of working and working and working? This is... I've still not been able to thread this needle properly. I've done four-hour fucking discussion with the best on the planet, as far as I could find to talk about this stuff.

Starting point is 01:24:22 Endless episodes with Steve, and I've had Lyman on before. I've had Simone's husband on. People that are skeptical, critical, all this stuff. I'm like, dude, like, if you care about the quality of life of people, more people are going to be old in the future than ever before. We're going to have more old people than ever before. And where do you think the money to support them comes from? Like, do you want grandma? And nobody, I've said this a gazillion times, nobody should have kids. It doesn't want to have kids. Nobody should have kids. It doesn't want to have kids. There is a more extreme position than that, which is it's your duty to have kids to feed the economic engine. I don't subscribe to that view. But like, just the fact that birth rate decline is not a problem is kind of. We shouldn't consider it, especially from a left-leaning perspective. We shouldn't consider it because it's good for the environment.

Starting point is 01:25:11 I've really struggled to thread this needle properly. That's a hard one. The thing that disappoints me is, you know, before I was even born or right around when I was born in the 90s, they considered taking that Social Security fund and having that money get put into something like the S&P 500. But at this point, it would be insanely large and we would have enough money to do whatever We would have like a Norway level sovereign wealth fund.

Starting point is 01:25:36 It would be incredible because Norway's actually capitalistic and smart with their money apparently via the government. But we said no, let's tie it to the low T bills like Mr. O'Leary was talking about. There's another reason why I'm against like low T bills because guess what? Didn't grow. Now it's being trained.

Starting point is 01:25:51 I saw some stats around Sambackman-Fried's investments with FTX. Anthropic was one of them. I think SpaceX was another one. and because during administration, bankruptcy, whatever the fuck it's called, what's it called, liquidation. Like when we sell it all, sell everything, get the value of it right now and just give people the pennies on the dollar to what it is at the road by this bank that goes under that was run by a guy that played League of Legends while he was on Skype calls. If they'd held to now, everybody would have got their money back. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:26:26 I mean, you could have paid people probably double, triple quadru. Their investment in Anthropic is worth like a fucking insane amount of money. The same thing goes with SpaceX IPO that just occurred. That's a question. What do you make of having the world's first trillionaire in existence right now? Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of people are very angry about it. You know, a lot of things, I'm happy that you can get rewarded in this country for the things you

Starting point is 01:26:56 We're getting the internet beamed from space. I love my Tesla. The self-driving's insane. If people haven't been in a recently updated self-driving Tesla, like you can read, eat, drink coffee, scroll on TikTok, and the car will get you somewhere perfectly fine without looking at the road. It's one of the crazy. That's technology no one would have even dreamed of 20 years ago,

Starting point is 01:27:16 the things that we're doing, the private space. Like, I think it should be rewarded for it. Trillions a lot. It's crazy. But even if the argument is near again, someone, being a trillionaire, what's then the action? The action is you're forcing him to sell a position of his own company. You're saying we're taking a gun and we're saying you must sell a position of your company to pay tax on it. I'm against that as a philosophy. That doesn't make sense.

Starting point is 01:27:40 Should a trillionaire exist? I don't know. But if you decide the answer is no, the actual action that comes from it is world's worst than whether or not a trillionaire should exist. Forcing people to sell their company is crazy. It's a really interesting argument. I understand. Inequality is one of the craziest distortors of human behavior. So one example from Candice Blake, who's out in Australia, she looked at levels of self-sexualization and beautification of women and correlated posts on Instagram and Twitter at the time with the geolocation it came from and looked at the wealth inequality in that area. Women that were in higher wealth inequality ecologies posted more sexy selfies, did more self-beautification and more self-sexualization. The reason for that,

Starting point is 01:28:25 her theory was when you see both how high you could climb and how low you could fall if you pick the right or wrong mate that on average will be at least contributing to the household or maybe the breadwinner and the primary provider for you and your future family you start to turn on the taps in terms of the way that you look and that's one example in one very small niche of one very small study when globally everybody is now aware that there is a guy on the planet right now that could lose a trillion dollars and still be the richest man on the planet, that you and me and everybody is closest to the second richest man in the world than the second richest man in the world is to the first richest man in the world.

Starting point is 01:29:10 That is deranging. It's deranging to the way that people see their place in society. It is. I just try to put it in perspective. And if the thing is, I do well. And I'm okay with paying more in taxes if that's, the argument. I'm not okay with it if we're not even able to investigate fraud, if we're not not able to blah, blah, blah, you know, there's a lot of things. The bureaucracy is insane.

Starting point is 01:29:31 Fucking, so I would rather not pay more in taxes until we actually get our shit figured out. But even still, I would be okay with paying taxes if we say it's going to fund something that's going to help people. But the conversation's gone away from that to saying that man has a lot of money, that's evil, let's take it. That's no longer the conversation. I want to fund something that's actually good if we're going to raise taxes. So it's, they've lost me at that conversation. And And also, they think, like, where does him being a trillionaire affect you? For me, I think what actually affects someone's personal life is they have to call a cashier to unlock a toothbrush at a corner shop.

Starting point is 01:30:05 That's actually impacting you on a daily life. Zoning laws is impacted you because it's preventing houses and higher rises being built, which impacts your housing costs. Student loans being tied basically to hiring more administrators. That impacts you. There's so many more things impacting you than someone whose company. that he owns, you know, large stakes and went public and they're being valued high, which made his net worth go exponential. There's so many more things to address first than freaking out about that,

Starting point is 01:30:33 but something in the human nature, especially of the more extremists, I will say, and more populous, is like, that person has a lot of money. I don't, let's take it. But even if they took all of his money, I think everyone gets like, what is it, like $1,000 or $2,000. It's something that, it would actually be really nice. And for a lot of people, could be life-changing, but that's one time. it would drive inflation extreme and it would actually just be damaging in the end because then we don't have life-changing technology. Why would it drive inflation extreme speak to me as if I'm five? Well, you know, when...

Starting point is 01:31:02 Talking to you like you're a fucking LLM here. Do you imagine if you had a Caleb LLM? It's just shouting and screaming at you all the whole time? A rapid supply of 350 million Americans spending a couple thousand bucks just out of the gate, like a trillion dollars just pumped into the economy like that. I mean, that'd be brutal. Just look what we did during the pandemic pumping. hundreds of billions. So it'd be pretty brutal.

Starting point is 01:31:24 Whilst also sounding like the sort of thing that we would want, but not. You need people to spend money. Want in the micro, but not in the macro. Yeah. Not so much that it drives insane hiring sprees that pushes everyone's incomes to insane levels that pushes inflation higher. What are the biggest financial red flags in dating? High car debt would be absolutely horrible if I pull up to that TikTok girl we saw earlier in $50,000 a car financing a $50,000.

Starting point is 01:31:50 a dollar debt on a car like we'll hook up but we're not staying for a second a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Okay, it's a big red flag. Hi, call debt. What else? Um, I think it's nice for people to off, offer like splitting the bill on a first day. You know, I like being, I guess, the man and like paying for it. But I think it's actually, it's a green flag when people, you know, if they expect you to pay for it, I think is a bit of a red flag. You know, if they're thinking like they're that special thing. And that's why entitlements?

Starting point is 01:32:23 I don't know. It just kind of turns me off specifically. When people have that main character syndrome and it gets tied into the financial situation of like expecting things, you know, that's kind of gross to me. A bullshit degree. I mean, less, less. Bullshed degree. Just toss that out to the side.

Starting point is 01:32:39 Yeah. What did you degree in? Yeah. No, sorry. I dropped out. This is not going to work. No, no, me on an imaginary day. Would you date me?

Starting point is 01:32:46 I dropped out. How much debt you got? 25,000. That's all right. I'd date you. Okay. Yeah. Nice tits.

Starting point is 01:32:56 Thank you. Car payment. Bullshit degree. Yeah. And that entitlement of like expectation around spending. Okay. Anything else? What a...

Starting point is 01:33:11 Low ambition. I know that's kind of tied to finances in general. But if someone's that ambitious, I don't need someone to be ambitious to want to go make a million bucks a year. But if someone isn't driven in their career or even just hobbies, if they're not driven, what a turnoff. I think going a low ambition, high materialism is the perfect cocktail. It's like, hey, you're allowed to be materialistic as long as you've got the conscientiousness to know where the limit is and to be able to keep the front of the funnel pouring in. Yes, you've described a gold digger and we've had lots of them on the show. They're the, oh, I love a couple with a gold digger. I can just

Starting point is 01:33:48 I can just verbally punch all day. Why? So much fun. It's just so much fun because I see the person, the typically, unfortunately, a man, but I've actually had the reverse a few times, but usually the man's actually working, making a lot of money, and she's over there feeling entitled, and I see all the spending and their own statements. I see proof in front of me of her just spending all this money and feeling like they should do all this. Well, this guy over here is struggling, working two jobs.

Starting point is 01:34:11 It is just, it is a brutal thing. And the nice thing, the thing that I love about it is seeing that light ball go off in his head when he notices this person is using me. How many couples have broken up because of what you've revealed financially? Very rare on the show. We've had a couple. I had one divorce. It wasn't from the show. And it was a couple years ago, which is a bad marriage. But it's actually pretty rare for people to break up. Should couples merge finances? At some point, it's nice to have a joint account that incomes go in and then bills come out of. And then we can send fund money to our own accounts from there. I think after marriage makes a little more sense, at least common law marriage, because then you have some

Starting point is 01:34:48 Some of those protections in the case of death or whatnot. But, yeah, I mean, it's fine. It's fine if people want to keep it separate as long as they can actually budge at the household. People just usually fail at that without getting insight on the full thing. What's your perspective on pre-ups? Yeah, it's fine. If there's like a big wealth divide. Yeah, a big wealth divide, it makes sense.

Starting point is 01:35:07 I think if you're both making 100, it's a bit weird. Do you often see financial infidelity, like hiding purchases or debt or accounts? All the time. So common. And most people don't think it's actually much of anything. but the other person feels really hurt in the end. They just don't realize it because spending is just one of those things. Or it's not viewed as extreme as cheating. It's not as extreme as cheating.

Starting point is 01:35:25 But it does impact the other person that they're hiding it from more than they think. And the moment it's exposed on the show, you can see the pain in their face. It's still trust. Right. Yeah, it's trust. It's exactly. Trust not talking to the person. It's a lot of things.

Starting point is 01:35:38 And it hurts them personally. If you're not being honest with me about this, how can I be certain that you're being honest with me about anything else? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It's a vicious cycle with that stuff. What a... Is there a, like, sex difference in what men and women go broke doing? Honestly, no.

Starting point is 01:35:59 Not really. I mean, I'll get a little... You're able to be equally retarded in similar directions. Equally retarded. I mean, everyone loves collectibles. They just get, like, different. I got looboos on the women and I got poking my cards on the men. Everyone loves collectibles.

Starting point is 01:36:11 No, no, no. But, like, you know, it's like split down the genders. Like, like, both genders love it. Does everyone love it know? One's obsessed with Warhammer 40K and others obsessed with beanie babies. Exactly. So, I mean, you'll get some more frivolous spending. Maybe a guy will put some more into his car.

Starting point is 01:36:24 A girl will get more extensions. But it's similar levels of bullshit. What's actually interesting is, you know, talk about young men gambling issues. But it's actually pretty similar in terms of percentage young men and young women. No way. No way. Men is higher, but it's pretty close. It's pretty close.

Starting point is 01:36:39 What do you think of prediction markets? What's your... It's fun. Just like drinking, just like smoking weed. Anything like that. think it's cool if you can control it. If you know you have an addiction or an addictive personality, you need to keep yourself away from shit like that. Yeah, mental health issues impacting spending. Is that true? Like shopping addictions and stuff? Yeah. Or if you're depressed,

Starting point is 01:37:00 it feels good to get that dopamine spike of a quick purchase. Absolutely. Um, yeah, mental health affects everything in the end. It's kind of that, that discipline thing, right? Everything stems from the discipline when it comes to personal finances. If your mental health is bad, usually your discipline's going to be bad. I can't remember where it was I read this. I think it might have been the UBI test study. There was two that were done 2024. And one of the points there was if you're poor, you can only really get small doses of pleasure from small things. But that means that you're more likely to spend frivolously because you need to relieve the stress. It's that point that we made before. Like if you have not that much pleasure in your life and you're burdened with worry,

Starting point is 01:37:44 and you don't know what the future has in store for you, yeah, you're going to go and buy cigarettes. Because the cigarettes alleviate your suffering. There's certain things. I remember there's this example from Sam Harris fucking years ago. It was during some of the more crazy race conversations around mid-2020. And I was struggling to see philosophically consistent arguments about white privilege. And he came up with one that I thought was so fucking cool.

Starting point is 01:38:17 And he said, if I've ever gone through TSA and I've had my bag pulled, I've never once thought that it's because of my race. Interesting. And not an interesting kind of white privilege. I've never once thought that. I'm like, oh, I've fucked up. Like I left water in the water model or it's a random check by TSA because they've got to do it. Like this is what they do.

Starting point is 01:38:36 Yeah. That is not true if you're of a different race. Yeah. Just straight up not true. And the same thing, the same thing. the same thing to a degree is also true when it comes to being poor, that there are these sort of secret psychological loops that people go through about what their financial position means to their identity, how they then cope with that identity with their behavior, which feeds back into the

Starting point is 01:39:01 financial position. Yeah. That seems to be one of the very unseen death spirals, and it's too, it's too complex to put on a billboard. It doesn't sound sexy. Like, what? What fucking intervention are you going to have as a politician or as a potential president going? And we are going to teach people how to intervene in their conscientiousness when they begin the downward death spiral of sedating themselves from feeling bad about their financial position, doing things that makes a financial position was, no. It's way too complex, despite the fact that it might be one of the key driving forces. Okay.

Starting point is 01:39:35 How can we give people, I mean, we do. We give people fucking social media, which is some of the freest open. that you can get on the planet. But I think all that that really does is raise the waterline of minimum dopamine that you now need an even bigger dose to be able to break out the top of it. I wonder whether we would be in better financial positions without social media. Oh, probably. I mean, we see things, we see the lifestyles that people pretend they have all the time. We like to chase lifestyles. We're jealous. We're jealous people, jealous species. It makes sense. I think that's one of the drivers of lifestyle inflation.

Starting point is 01:40:12 And unfortunately, poor people will go broke trying to look rich. Oh, yeah, the car, especially, absolutely. Is that, what's the dumbest purchase category that people constantly overspend on? Constantly in America, it's certainly the car. Well, and it's based into our infrastructure. You have to drive. You have to drive to have a job to have to drive. Like, that is the reality.

Starting point is 01:40:33 But people will over justify how much car they need, needing the new car because of the new safety rating. Like, cars would literally kill you five years ago or something. I don't really get that. A fuel efficiency, like you can make some arguments and stuff, especially in times like now where gas is up. But people will justify, the heck, again, like her, out of getting a $50,000 car loan for a car that you do not need. What is the rough rule of how to work out what price of car you were able to afford?

Starting point is 01:41:04 It comes down to the monthly payment if you get a debt. As long as you put 20% down, it is a three-year term. the minimum monthly payment should be no more than 8% of your income. If it is, then you're getting a car that's likely too much out of your affordability range. Seems like a pretty simple formula. Yeah, it's easy. It gets most people a pretty good car. What does that get an average owner making $50,000 a year?

Starting point is 01:41:28 Oh, God. I don't know. Should we do the math? I can do the math. Do the math. Okay. Well, shit, then I have to like understand what 20% down would be. So it would have to be post 20%. Okay, okay, okay, $50,000, because it is gross income.

Starting point is 01:41:42 So talking eight, so that's $40,000. You can do $40,000, and divide that by 12. So, I mean, that's pretty chunky. Um, no, no, no, sorry, that's not eighth. I did 80%. Okay, so $4,000. $1,000 by $12. It's $33, but you have to come.

Starting point is 01:42:01 So as long as you put $20% down, it's a three-year, your car payment, $33. You can probably get a good bit of call for that money. Decent. I mean, interest rates. Depends under credit score. You might have to go a little higher. Then you just need to pay it down quicker. And I'm okay with that. You just got to put extra towards it.

Starting point is 01:42:16 You just don't have to freak out about it if you're doing that, if you're following that rule. I guess a lot of people need credit to build a financial future whilst also struggling to build credit to qualify for it because they lack credit history. Yeah, but there's credit builders now. There's charge cards now where, you know, you put the money on there to spend, but it's building credit. So there's a lot more resources today than before. if people are just willing to look. Can someone become obsessed with financial optimization to the point where they make their life was?

Starting point is 01:42:45 I mean, our friend, our friend Graham-Steffin, I think a little, right? I mean, I don't know. I don't think he needs to. I love the dude, I love the dude, but everything you see on camera is actually what you get in reality. And he will micro-freak out about just a little penny he's going to spend on lunch or something, and he'd make more money if you use that mental effort

Starting point is 01:43:03 on producing a piece of content. Isn't that a hidden cost? A strange kind of hidden cost of obsessing over finance is too much. But you know what? He has fun with this. So it's actually probably not making his life worse. Well, yeah, because his enjoyment from scrutinizing and saving is greater than the enjoyment he would get from the spending. Yes.

Starting point is 01:43:22 It's this weird. I mean, he was built to be a saving engine. Yes. He's like the fucking LeBron James of saving money. But I think for some people, if you get to that way and it's not actually your passion and it's more coming from like, let's say, I don't want to overuse the word trauma, but trauma. of like growing up poor. So now you're just freaking out about it constantly.

Starting point is 01:43:39 I think that could, you know, hurt your lifestyle. Interesting archetypes of people that grew up without money. I grew up without money. And some people grow up to, I've never had this before. Fuck it, we ball.

Starting point is 01:43:53 Or I've never had this before. It might be taken away. I'm not going to spend it. That's us. Yeah. You read Die With Zero by Bill Perkins? No. Oh, dude.

Starting point is 01:44:01 I know, but I haven't read it. Really fun. It's three-hour read or listen or whatever. And he's just got some interesting. ideas that I would be, I know you're doing financial audit. Are you sitting down with other people that are Morgan Housels of the world, the Bill Perkins of the world? Have you got any desire to do that? Because I would love for you to scrutinize financial philosophies from people that have got popular financial books. It'd be fun, but I also have to acknowledge, even though there's some

Starting point is 01:44:27 topics that I'm interested in learning from X-Fs-Fram, I'm no different from just a dude off the street. I'm not a fucking expert. Like, I'll listen to people, but it's hard for me to like push back against a shoot expert in their position. That's why I like keep into what I do. It's basic. Personal finances is so basic until you get to the crazy shit. It's so basic until you get to the top 0.1%. Is this budgeting, control, discipline, low index funds, low cost index funds, target date retirement funds, emergency fund. That's the shit I'm into, bread and butter. You've exited all of your rental properties. Exceeding, yeah. Why? Um, better return on investment in the stock market all day, every day. No hassle either. I mean, I'm not the one field in the call.

Starting point is 01:45:06 when something breaks. But, you know, it's just every month is up and down depending on what needs to be repaired. And just even if nothing needed to be repaired, the only thing you take advantage of is some leverage there, which can be nice, especially if the market booms. But in general, real estate has lost now to the S&P 500, just consistently. I'd love to own a piece of commercial like you do. That's great. You know, you get some quick depreciations on there, which is really nice.

Starting point is 01:45:34 So that's something I'd be willing to get into. some point. I'm unwinding all of the houses I have in the UK except for the one that I still live in. That's like there's still my place of... Well, that's a collapsing country, so... That's true. That is that is true. But I mean, there was a period and this was sort of what I grew up with. I was very fortunate that when I started doing business, the guy that was my partner was five years older than me in the exact same industry. I'm very, very financially responsible. And I only child, so didn't have anybody that was entrepreneurial, understanding the UK system,

Starting point is 01:46:10 and working in the same industry with the kind of cash flow and the sort of pacing that we would get. So I just followed the same path that he was on. And his was every time that you get to about 30,000 pounds of spare cash, deposit on a buy-to-let student property between two and five bedrooms in a good student area,

Starting point is 01:46:27 hand it off to a management company. They'll take between 10 and 20% and a weight you just... 20% to rinse and repeat. I managed to negotiate it to 12, but rinse and repeat. Okay, that's pretty good. And let's say, I never talk about money. This is my Britishism, but I've got you here. So let's say, the best purchase that I made was 150,000 pounds, a five-bed student property in Heaton in Newcastle. And I would have put 25% down. So I think I think all in with Stamp Duty in. fees and all the rest of this stuff. I think I put somewhere in the region of like 50 grand down. And that would make, after everything, 1,800 pounds a month. And then there would be maybe some

Starting point is 01:47:18 repairs that we needed on top. So let's say 1500. So that's like 18 grand. 18 grand. A year. Great cash vehicle. Yeah. But what you were really doing it for was to tie, because it's an interest-only mortgage. So you were just hiding over hoping that everything would be kept in. Maybe it would spew out a little bit of cash and that would be lovely. But you were waiting for the capital gains. That was what you wanted. I'm going to hold this for 10 years and it's going to go from 150 to 200 to 250 and then it's going to be. And I'm unwinding all of these properties and like the future that I promised myself has not come to fruition. They've all appreciated. Hooray. But Kea Stahmer's changed the capital gains tax. I'm getting fist fucked off that. And the gains that I

Starting point is 01:47:59 thought that I was going to make didn't occur. And I'm in the exact same position as you. I also now, this is my fault, I have to pull the fucking money across from pounds to USD. So I'm going to get fist-fucked on the exchange and I'm going to have to do something creative in order to be able to. It's company to company. So it's relatively linear to do limited company in the UK to an LLC over here. But like, I was thinking this is going to be, you know, retirement fund stuff. And maybe if I'd held it for the rest of time and I never left the UK, that would have been it. but it when I started and I was behind Dave business partner that was sort of laying this

Starting point is 01:48:35 groundwork for hey this is how you get to a financial level of a real comfortability. That that route is is not the same anymore at all. And everybody fucking hates landlords. So like something that used to be, hey, you're holding on to this property. You're making sure that it's kept to a high standard. You're making sure that we're well looked after. you're a good landlord, even if there's a management company in between you and us. There's no prestige really associated with it now in the same way.

Starting point is 01:49:07 No. It's just kind of interesting. I mean, I got shared from the landlord thing too. I mean, I don't really care because it's usually coming from people that have no impact on anything in society. But a couple of the places I bought were basically unlivable, and I brought them up to be a place for people to live in. And people, like, literally, they were on the market. People were not buying them to bring it up to live in because it was in. the student area of Western Michigan University.

Starting point is 01:49:31 No one was going to live in the student section. No one was buying a house to live there. So it was places that just weren't being lived in that I made livable and actually benefited. There was a period in the UK and I came in after this, which is, it does make sense. One of the big criticisms, you took a two-bed or three-bed classic family home and you re-jig all of the walls and the construction to turn it into five or six or seven-bed student. properties. There's no fucking family in Newcastle that needs a seven-bed house in Heaton. That is basically locked in for the rest of time that this is going to be a student property. And now,

Starting point is 01:50:09 if you ever stop, it's called an HMO, it's a house of multiple occupancy. If you ever take it out of that, you can never get the license back. So they're now trying to reverse that back to try and encourage families to buy these houses. But the problem is, I'm never going to sell one of my houses, well, that's not, I would sell it to whoever wants to pay the price, but no family is going to pay the price that I can get from somebody that wants it as an investment property because they are going to have to knock all of these fucking walls down and turn it back into what it was before it was turned into a student house, which I didn't do. Governments will do any rule, regulation, tax, whatever, to think they're trying to encourage something other

Starting point is 01:50:49 than literally just make zoning laws better for people to just build what people are demanding. I will never understand it. That's why I love this town. I love Austin because we let people build more houses on units now, on lots. We let people build higher houses. We got rid of parking minimums with a government force you to have a certain amount of parking spots. It's so stupid. They'll do every policy besides just letting developers build with the market demands.

Starting point is 01:51:15 Dude, there is a lot near Zilka that I drive past sometimes. And it used to have one old-style ranch house that probably has. had two beds, was up on sticks, walk up a little set of wooden stairs to get to it, classic wooden ranchy house. And it had a trailer thing

Starting point is 01:51:33 that was for some, for pancakes. It must have been a business that the person had started at some point. And there was a bit of a yard outside or whatever. And then one day,

Starting point is 01:51:42 no house, no trailer, just flattened. Like there'd been a miniature atomic bomb that went off. There are now three ground floor, first floor,

Starting point is 01:51:51 second store story houses built on this one fucking plot of land. Yeah. And they look nice. I mean, it's still all green and insulation and wooden shit at the moment. And that's nice. That's due to literally Texas and the city of Austin just a couple years ago, like passing those kind of reforms.

Starting point is 01:52:09 I heard that the housing problem in America would be fixed if the zoning laws were changed. That there's enough demand and enough capital to be able to make the houses. The only issue is the NIMBY problem. Yeah, it's the NIMBY's, yeah, which makes sense. I mean, if you're thinking about your own interest in California and L.A., you want the cost of your house to continue going up forever. That's usually where the majority of your wealth is. You can borrow against that.

Starting point is 01:52:33 So, of course, you don't want more development coming in, housing prices to fall. It's economically against you. And you're usually a big voting block. You're a big, uh, important part of local elections. And you can be a loud voice at the city council meeting. So it makes sense that people are against it. But I don't know. I'm M&B all the way.

Starting point is 01:52:49 Build with the market demands. I think a couple of restrictions make sense. I don't want it like a, you shouldn't be drilling for oil in someone's his backyard, you know, I don't know. I'm overall pro data centers because the information around is a lot of misinformation, but do I want a data center in my exact backyard? No, build them in the middle of fucking nowhere. That's what I like. So it's just like, yeah, there's some restrictions make sense, but let the market build with the market demands.

Starting point is 01:53:14 I wonder how many people are, eat the rich, they're taking the money that young people need in order to be able to buy houses whilst also being, I don't want any houses built near me. Oh, yeah. Usually the biggest NIMBYs are the ones that say, in this neighborhood, you know, the signs, what is it, in this neighborhood, we accept. Science is real, women are women.

Starting point is 01:53:34 Yes, yes. Women are people. Black people are, I know the exact sign that you mean. Usually the NIMBs. Yeah, yeah, interesting. How much money do you need to raise a kid? Well, definitely less than people think, for sure, because, I mean, forever throughout human existence, you know, we're just having kids and it was fine.

Starting point is 01:53:55 It is a little harder today, but going through public school, getting them on your insurance, all that good stuff. If you're not thinking about having to get parent plus loans, like, you could do it on it, just a normal middle class salary for sure. You can have quite a few kids, but an exact number, I don't have that. I think people believe that it's more expensive than it actually might be. but again, a lot of that is what do I think I need and what do I think that my kid would need versus what is actually needed. This is an interesting part of that birth rate debate that we had where in order to have the kid realistically,

Starting point is 01:54:36 assuming that you don't have some huge windfall of money, the total pie of money that you have to spend is not going to change all that much. In fact, it might go down as one partner needs to take time off work in order to raise them. and then child care costs and all the rest of it, that means that your lifestyle needs to take a hit. You need to, I'm not going to be able to go for dinner as much. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:54:56 I'm not going to be able to upgrade the car as frequently. And that feels like, that feels like getting poorer. Yeah. Where what you've done is you've just reportioned the money from what would have been car to know what now is child. Which I empathize with. It makes sense. So if you don't want to have kids, don't have kids.

Starting point is 01:55:15 That's kind of what you said earlier, right? You know, we shouldn't force people to have kids. But we also shouldn't be doing misinformation of people thinking they need to have an endless supply of money to have kids. Like, we're richer than ever before and people have had kids when we were poorer than ever before. Like, you do need money. You need school supplies. You do need to make sure they can be on your health insurance. Like, there are a lot of things you need money for, but we overemphasize it, for sure.

Starting point is 01:55:41 Forcing people to have kids is horrendous, but scaring people out of not having kids when they, could because of misinformation is also something that never gets spoken about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Caleb Hammer, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you. I think what you do is great.

Starting point is 01:55:57 Where should people go to check out all of the shit you've got going on? Caleb Hammer on YouTube, and I recommend everyone download Dallowize. Change their lives. Unreal. Until next time, man. Appreciate you. Thank you. Goodbye, my beauties.

Starting point is 01:56:07 Dude. That was fun. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading List. It is 100 books that you should read before you. you die, the most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I liked them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.

Modern Wisdom - Why Everyone Is Drowning In Debt (and how to get out) - Caleb Hammer - #1123

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