Transcript of #2509 - Caleb Hammer New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

All day. Good to see you, sir.

You too, nice to meet you.

Very nice to meet you too. I enjoy your content. Thank you. You're a very sensible person and you deal with a lot of very unsensible people. How do you fucking keep your shit together when you talk to these people? We tell everybody you're a finance guy and did you start out in debt and then figured out how to get your shit together?

Yeah, exactly. I was in college doing all the stupid American things, right? So you got that unlimited student loan debt for a bullshit degree. I was going for music composition, so complete bullshit degree. Maxing out every credit card. One of the first pieces of financial advice I got at 18 from the parents: max out a credit card to get the piano I wanted. So that's smart.

Your parents gave you that advice?

Yeah, it's just the average American experience. You just max out a credit card.

I don't know if your parents taught you anything about personal finances, but most don't.

It's bad. So I was just maxing out every credit card like everyone that comes on the show, like every American out there. We got $1.6 trillion in credit card debt in this country, by the way. Woo! Crazy amount. Crazy amount. Defaults are to like 7%, which is insane. 7% of credit cards defaulting.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

And that is really nuts. Almost 1 out of 10 default.

Yeah, it's absolutely insane. But we have more auto loan debt in this country than credit cards, too. Really? Which is even crazier, because Americans, you know, they're big pickup trucks and everything. But either way, I was doing that. Got my Nissan Altima and, you know, thinking I was sick driving around and going into debt for that. Family debt, everything. It was brutal, but it was the average American life. That's what people are going through every single day. And I finally got a wake-up call. I just, I, I was sitting in my shitty apartment that I could barely afford, and I realized the life I wanted to live just could not be sustained this way. I wanted to be a homeowner. It's the American dream. Pick a fence, all that shit. Yeah, but there's no way to do it with maxed-out credit cards, private student loans, public student loans, everything. It was a mess, so Got a sales job, just started grinding it out, paying off the debt, fully funded emergency fund. That's what I try to teach people now, but you know, again, the average American is kind of an idiot with money, which is fair.

Well, they're not informed, you know, which is one of the things I think your content really helps because a lot of people don't know what to do. Like, you're in debt, like, how the fuck do I get out of this? And a lot of people, they know we're in debt, so they don't have good advice. They're not gonna get from their parents, right? So we're They have to turn to somebody. A lot of times, financial people online are very stiff, and they're not enjoyable to listen to. But you talk shit, and you're very vocal. It's like, "Huh, OK, I get this guy. I can relate to him. Tell me what to do." So there's a lot of folks out there that connect with you because of that, I think.

Yeah, they call us the Jerry Springer of finance. Which I like. I take it. I take the ownership. They meant it as a dig at first, But I take it because it's fun. Yeah, people, people don't go into financial topics because it's boring. Why are you clicking on a video of a dude just like sitting at the camera just like, you know, IRAs or this? No one's going to get into that, right? Personal finance class, like 40% of states, which is almost 40 states out of the 50 states require a personal finance class now, which is big progress over the last decade. But I mean, I was a piece of shit in high school. I'm sleeping through that class, right? I'm not gonna listen to things there. I, I couldn't— I could barely pass math. School is boring, so people still aren't gonna pick it up there. They want something a little more interesting to get into, and we give them that with the roasts, the dramas, the relationships of couples. Episodes are my favorite because there's always financial financial stresses in relationships. And I don't know if that actually gets people into personal finances.

That's the best. That's the best because we get millions of views per episode on all platforms.

It's kind of a crime that they're not explaining to people when they're young and in high school how this could be a problem. They're trying to set you up for life, but they're not setting you up for one of the biggest problems that most people face. Credit card debt, and the big one, student loan debt, because that's the one you can't get away from. Mm-hmm. And there's a lot of people that are just going, well, I guess I have to go to college. And look, higher education is great. It's good to be educated. It's good to get an education. Yeah. But if you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education that you aren't going to use at all, that might not be the best thing for you. And when you're fucking 18, you really don't know, you know? Yeah. You don't know what you want to do.

Your parents don't know anything either.

No, they might be retarded. You might have idiot parents.

Well, We all know the average parent in America is go to any college to get any degree and borrow whatever it takes.

Yeah.

Because college is the answer to all.

Because it used to be.

Yeah.

It used to be the way that you got a good paying job. You get out of college and hey, you've got a degree. Oh, you got your master's. Well, you're cool. Oh, where are you going to live? Where are you going to buy a house? Like, you're going to be set. What they don't tell you is that you are going to be saddled down with insane amounts of debt and then that debt compounds. It keeps going. I was reading this thing, maybe you can tell me about what the actual numbers are, but they were talking about the average actual debt that you owed, but what you wind up paying, what you actually wind up paying over the 20 years that it takes you to pay it off. Yeah. It's fucking crazy.

Yeah.

It's substantially higher than the initial loan.

Part of it is laziness too. People get on like that 20-year payment plan or 40-year payment plan because they want to spend a little bit "just a little bit less right now." It makes sense. You get out of college. You want to get an apartment. You want to live it up. You want to go on nice dates and trips, all that good stuff. So, you do the little minimum monthly payment. But, think about it. I assume you have a mortgage, right? Do you have a mortgage? Yeah. OK. If you took that 30-year mortgage, but you're like, "OK, I want to pay a smaller amount now, so let's stretch it to 60 years," the interest and overall payment you're going to do is insane. Student loan, a public student loan, it's actually a 10-year payment. That's the standard. It's a 10-year payment. You'll be done in 10, but people stretch it to 20 years. The repayment assistance under Trump, the RAP plan, that can be as little as 1% of your income on a monthly basis. That'll never be paid off. Never. Those people will have it forever. Forever. It'll be forgiven in 40 years, it says.

We'll see, because, you know, it's new. Well, when people are doing that, they're gonna have it forever. It's gonna balloon, and then they're gonna complain about it when they chose not to just take the standard 10-year plan.

I saw an article about people with Social Security, so they're, they're retired, and their money, their Social Security money is getting docked. Mm-hmm. It's getting docked because they're taking money out of that to pay for your student loans.

Yeah, I mean, I'm—

that obviously didn't work out for you because you're literally in debt from that student loan while you're retired from life. Yeah, which is fucking wild.

It is, but I'll be candid, I'm starting to not have sympathy for the boomers. I'm really not. Best job market ever, best stock market in the history of the world. Every single boomer, Gen X, whatever, that's been on my show, they lived it up and spent all their money to live the lifestyle what they wanted, and they didn't even set 10% aside a month. 10% aside. They had the best housing market. College, jobs. They were set up for everything. If they just put 5-10% a month aside in the stock market that they had, that they had, they would be multimillionaires. Most of them would be multimillionaires. But instead, we're in a situation where, "I want a new BMW!" Yeah, they can't pay their student loans, Social Security 2033, That's when the funds dry. So payments get cut by 25%.

Yeah. 2033 is when the funds dry up for Social Security?

Yeah, the actual fund that's sitting there. So every dollar that goes out is money that's coming in. That's projected 2033.

Well, we have to pay for transgender migrants.

Sehr gut, sehr gut, sehr gut. Sehr gut? Wieso? Steuer ist sehr gut. Das sagen ganz viele. Cool. Wer sagt das? Stiftung Warentest, Computerbild, Focus Money, Chip, Finanztip. Such dir was aus. Mega. Aber das ist doch bestimmt kompliziert.

Nö.

Einfach Foto von der Lohnsteuerbescheinigung Reinigung machen und fertig. Klingt sehr gut. Ist sehr gut. Hol dir dein Geld zurück mit WISO Steuer. Kaffee in seiner besten Form mit der neuen Qubo One Kapselmaschine von Chibo. In jeder Qubo-Kapsel steckt Spitzenkaffee aus besonderen Anbaugebieten. Für Espresso, Kaffee-Crema oder Kaffee-Grande auf Knopfdruck. Die neue Qubo One überzeugt mit Premium-Design, kompakter Größe und kleinem Einstiegspreis ab 29 €. Dank innovativer PressBrew-Technologie wird jede Tasse besonders aromatisch mitsamtiger Crema. Entdecke jetzt die Qubo Kapselmaschinen in deiner Tchibo Filiale und auf tchibo.de.

Really important. Some of them have back pain. They need to be on Social Security forever.

Yeah, we just had a clip go viral 2 days ago. Transgender woman, Colorado.

I saw the video.

Yeah, taxpayer-funded boobs. That's nice.

The way you explained it, or the way she explained it, was hilarious. You know, like something about how her body's priceless. So like, how much do they cost? They're free.

Yeah, I can't blame her though. I mean, the program's there, right?

Of course.

So I'd take it if I wanted some new tits. Of course. But it's crazy that we are. And of course, when we filmed it was like 2 days after I wrote a $4 million, you know, income tax check, whatever, to the federal government. Right.

And you're thinking about this, like, where's that money go?

It's going to tits, not funding proper Social Security.

Well, we were talking before about how Gavin Newsom wouldn't do your podcast. Yes. But It's probably because, like, that kind of debt, when you think about like California's debt and California spending and the waste and potential fraud, I look at it like a garbage dump. Like someone saying, hey, go look into that garbage dump and clean it up. Like, oh, it's too much. And I think that's how most people look at it. They look at it like, what, $24 billion missing for the homeless? How much money went to that rail? That fucking high-speed rail, like billions of dollars later, there's nothing done. Like, what are you doing?

Which is insane because America, the leader of the world, should have incredible high-speed rail. Yeah, I want it. I want to go to Dallas, Houston in a couple hours on a high-speed rail. Maybe Texas could do it, but just give California anything and they'll find a way to mess it up and lose all the money.

Well, this is like— the rail one is crazy because like nothing's been— how much have they spent on the high-speed rail so far? It's something bonkers.

It's billions.

Some insane amount of money and nothing's been done. And there's this guy on YouTube. Do you remember the guy on YouTube, Jamie? He's on Instagram rather. The guy who's on Instagram who says in the same amount of time that it took California to not do that, this is what China's done. And it just over and over and over again, all the miles of high-speed rail they put in, all of this, all of that, like for the same amount of money that California spent, this is what could have been done.

It's crazy.

Fucking nuts.

Brightline's private.

Spent an order of mid-teens of billions. Mid-teens so far on the high-speed rail, roughly around $14 to $16 billion as of the mid-2020s. How much of it is done, Jamie? How much of that rail's done?

Well, some of it is actually getting close to done.

Oh my God, amazing. So what, Bakersfield to Yeah, how much is completed? 14 feet. Very little. 119 miles are under active construction. Oh, 119 miles. Madera near Bakersfield are under active construction. What a great way to spend $14 billion. I bet the homeless people are pissed. You could have spent that money on us.

And then once it's done, You'll get on the train, you'll have fare evaders, people that just jumped over that are doing drugs on the train.

Check this out, I asked a question. If you were 25 in 1990 and made an average US salary for 40 years, saving 5 to 10% per month in the S&P 500, how much would they have now? They would have around $2 to $5 million depending on exact assumptions.

Starting with $21,000 salary.

Holy shit. That's insane. Like, this is hard for me to— And they— we have the best disposable income in the history of the world.

This is how crazy inflation is. The average salary in 1990 was $21,000. That's crazy. Isn't that nuts? Imagine if someone told you you had to live off $21,000 today. You'd be like, ah, fuck.

And yet even still they could retire multimillionaires. Even still, even with that. It's beautiful.

That is nuts if you know how to do it. But how would someone start doing something like that?

Honestly, low-cost index funds. I'm sure you've got a money guy, but for the average American, there's these target-date retirement funds. Fidelity or whatever you want to use, they have— essentially, you just pick within the 5 years that you think you're going to retire. You just buy into that and it balances it for you. It goes more aggressive now and more conservative by the time you retire. It's so easy. There's no reason most people like aren't doing it even in their 401 where it's free money matches and everything. It doesn't really make sense.

So did you have to teach yourself all this stuff?

I mean, I'll be honest, pretty much any personal finance book or just like not even a class, just watch like a couple of YouTubers, the dry YouTubers that maybe no one's watching. And I mean, you'll get it like this. It's super simple, that kind of stuff. It gets a little harder if you're thinking like, what kind of perfect insurances do I need? You know, if you're trying to individually stock trade, You know what scares me, though? People in our position right now, people under 30, 60%, 60% of them are doing their portfolio trades based on the podcasters they're listening to. That's what's scary to me.

What, really?

Yeah, 60%.

Which podcasts are giving them advice?

Any personal finance, any personal finance. No, even on like Kick or Twitch, there's streamers. I'll log on in the morning, just see who's streaming. And some of the top viewed people are day traders. Really? With like 25,000 concurrent viewers that are getting hundreds of thousands of views a day.

So the Kickstreamers that are doing finance, are they just essentially letting people know what they're trading and what to trade?

Exactly.

It's crazy. So they're following along. So you can basically just mirror them. Mm-hmm. So you can say, "Okay, buy BlackRock." Whatever you want to buy, whatever they're doing, you'll do. Sort of like the Pelosi stock trader.

Yes, which I bought into the Pelosi fund.

Yeah?

It's doing really well. I bet it is. Yeah, I only put $1,000 in there. I was a little scared, but it's doing really well. It's beating my own money, guys.

So, I mean, it's kind of hilarious.

She knows what she's doing or people knows what she's doing.

Yeah.

Yeah. Someone knows something. Yeah. They know something. It's just, it's crazy that it's legal. It's crazy that you could know, oh, we're going to do this big deal with AI chips. And so Nvidia makes AI chips. I'm just going to buy a shit ton. Of Nvidia stock, and then boom, we passed this thing. Hey, look at that, 500% increase. Whee!

I think my 1,000's up like 20 or 30% in just a couple months. Ah, it's crazy. It's crazy. S&P 500, what he searched up, averages 10% a year. So it's crazy.

It is, it is nuts. What, you know, and like, what are the laws? It's like, you could clearly follow her, but what are the laws in terms of like what she's allowed to do? Like how much information is she allowed to have?

Yeah, well, that's what's hard to track, right? The insider trading is hard to track. They're getting into that shit with Calci now, right? You know, some of the people that were in the operation for Maduro in Venezuela, they're getting in trouble. George Santos, you know George— did you ever have George Santos?

No, but he's hilarious.

Yes, he's hilarious. But big investigation just opened up yesterday or today.

Oh, he just got a pardon for something else.

He bet on— he went on Instagram or something, and he was like, "Hey guys, I'm going to 100% be at the State of the Union. 100%, I'm going to be there. Here's my seat." And then he immediately bet that he will not be at the State of the Union. Oh! Yeah. So, 4 people close to him have been working with the FTC on that.

Oh my God, he's retarded. Yeah. That's so dumb.

After a pardon and everything.

That's so dumb, bro. You got free and you're fun. You should just do a podcast.

That guy should—

Yes. He could make millions doing a podcast.

Yeah, he's been on other podcasts. He's good.

He would be great.

He's a sassy gay. He's perfect for the camera.

Sassy, fun, smart, talks a lot of shit. He would be great as a host of a podcast. Don't fucking do scams like that.

Yeah, insider trading. So I guess that's his future now.

We had a— there was a— was it Polymarket? What was it where they had odds on things that we do, what we're gonna say, what guests we're gonna have on?

Probably both of them.

Probably both of them. We looked, I said, Jamie, shut that fucking laptop and do not open that website ever again. Because like, you could do it. Like, we could—

I kinda want to.

But anybody could.

I'm not going to, but I kinda wanna bet that I would be on here.

Right, like, what are the odds? Like, you could probably bet a substantial amount of money through some fucking offshore account.

Yeah.

This episode is brought to you by SimpliSafe. One thing you probably don't think about when you're planning the perfect summer getaway is protecting your home. But if disaster strikes, you want to be prepared. Even better if it can be stopped before it happens. So check out SimpliSafe. They're the smarter option when it comes to home security because their systems help prevent and stop crime in real time before it starts. There's also no long-term contracts and no technician appointments. You can get a custom system and set it up in one afternoon by yourself, or even sooner. It's one of many reasons why millions of people continue to trust and use SimpliSafe. Everyone deserves to have peace of mind, which is why I'm happy to partner with SimpliSafe again and offer an exclusive discount. Right now you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplisafe.com/rogan. That's half off at simplisafe.com/rogan. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.

Both Pelosi— who knows, I mean, other people in Congress, they wanna, they wanna pass something where they can only invest in large-cap index funds like the S&P 500. They're not passing it.

They don't care. They don't care. It's also completely bipartisan. Nancy Pelosi is the scapegoat. She's the one that everybody beats on. But if you look at it, it's red, blue, across the line. They're all doing it.

Yes.

They're all trading. They're all making shit tons of money. They all go into Congress broke. They all come out rich as fuck. Yes. And they get $100,000 a year. Fuck off. Fuck off. It's crazy. What is— pull up the Santos case, find out what's happening. I'm fascinated by that.

I mean, honestly, he— today's the 2nd, I guess it was yesterday. He was contacted by NPR.

He was contacted by NPR?

He was like, it's news to me.

He said it's news to him?

There you go. Reached by NPR.

Well, that's news to me. When asked about the insider trading probe underway, his activity on Calci, Santos said, I'm not saying yes, I'm not saying no. When the NPR questioned whether he had a Calci account, he went on to say the co-founder of Calci, Luana Lopes Lara, is a fellow Brazilian whom he personally knows. He said he would call her to get to the bottom whether an investigation had been launched. Santos promised to update NPR on how the call went. He did not respond to NPR's follow-up messages. The thing is, like, he had some crazy background discrepancies that, you know, they deviated from the truth slightly, right? There was some other stuff. It wasn't just this. Like, that's what the guy does. Yeah. But meanwhile, he's in this amazing position. He's got a name, he's famous, people like him, he's fun, and he got a fucking pardon from the president. Like, bro, straight and narrow. Yeah. Get yourself a podcast, get yourself a YouTube show. You'd make some real money. He would make some real money.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's going on with that guy, man. I really don't. I think he's just trying to get that— get rich quick.

Let's see, Jamie put it into perplexity. It says he built much of his public persona on false claims about his biography, finances, and identity, and later also faced criminal charges tied to deception and fraud. Damn. He falsely claimed degrees from Baruch— is that how you say it? Baruch College in New York and NYU, even though— even saying he graduated summa cum laude, although he has no college degree. He said he worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Both firms reported no record of him as an employee. Finance and career— Santos portrayed himself as a seasoned Wall Street financier and successful businessman, reporting a rapid jump in income and large loans to his campaign, while journalists found big gaps and unclear sources of wealth. He claimed Jewish heritage and that his grandparents were Holocaust refugees. Later backing off, saying he was Jew-ish after his maternal family background. Not actually Jewish. He also made disputed statements about being a landlord with a family real estate portfolio and about his mother's death being related to 9/11, although she died in 2016.

That's crazy. Crazy. What a king. I love you.

There's a bunch more animal rescue claims. He said he founded a nonprofit that rescued 2,500 cats and dogs, but reporters found no records. Of such an organization. Cultural and lifestyle claims: Brazilian drag performer shared photos of Santos in drag. He initially denied ever doing drag and later minimized it as just dressing up for a festival when he was young. That's a funny dude. That's a— he's a funny dude.

Back to jail.

Yeah, he's fucked. He was sentenced to 87 months in prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft with officials describing his conduct as a mountain of lies, theft, and fraud. His short House tenure ended with expulsion after an ethics report detailed misuse of campaign funds, including personal luxury spending. Fucking dude, you could have been in jail for 87 months, and you got out, and you blew it all on a bet? Like, how much did he make off the bet?

Uh, I don't—

It's very fresh, this story. I heard it on the news this morning.

Homie, I don't think it said specifically how much because it was more about what he did. So I don't think they tracked his account. I don't think they've announced like how much he bet on it.

And that is hard to trace, which is why I think he did it, right? I mean, those platforms are hard to trace. I think Polymarket, I think they're specifically like even just in crypto on the backend, if I'm not mistaken, or in those similar kind of exchanges. So, it's hard to track. It's a good place to insider trade, and he made some money. I listened to the news this morning, and it said 4 people close to him reported him, though.

Bleh! Well, when you're that kind of a fraudster, allegedly, and that kind of a liar, allegedly, you tend to not have close friends that you could trust. You probably fucked those guys over too. Yeah, they're turning them in, allegedly. I think it's funny though, because it's like, it's really unfortunate. Is you— he had a real opportunity, like he became a public person.

He still does. Maybe he'll get another pardon.

No, you know, I doubt it. I doubt he'll give him a pardon.

I don't know why he got the first one.

He'd probably be so mad if Trump got a phone call from him. Yeah, asking for a second pardon.

Why'd he get the first one?

Do you know? I have no idea. Let's find out. Let's ask.

Why he got—

yeah, why did he get pardoned? There's a lot of people that got pardoned where you're like, wait, what? Yeah, the Biden thing was nuts where they pardoned more people than ever, ever, any president ever. And how many of it— how much of it was done with the auto pen? So he's literally like barely there, right? We all agree at this point. I mean, there used to be dispute—

oh yeah, he was a stutterer.

We all now say he was barely there. So someone else was doing that. So what's the legality of that? What is the legality of selling pardons?

And the preemptive pardons too.

Oh, those are nuts. Yeah. Those— how about for crimes that just don't exist?

Yeah.

There's no— you haven't been accused of anything. What'd you do? He did not receive a pardon. His prison sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump, which let him out of prison early but left his convictions in place. Interesting. On October 25th, uh, October of 2025 rather, um, Trump signed a commutation with, uh, for former Representative George Santos, ordering his immediate release from federal prison where he was serving a roughly 7-year sentence for fraud and identity theft. Commutation shortens or eliminates the punishment but does not erase the conviction or declare the person innocent, unlike a full pardon. Trump said Santos had been horribly mistreated and had spent long periods in solitary confinement, which Trump framed as too harsh for a rogue politician compared with others. Commentators widely interpret the move as fitting Trump's pattern of granting clemency to political allies and loyalists rather than based on traditional justice system criteria. I mean, look, it's a weird thing that you could do. The fact that you're the president and you could just say, what did you do, you robbed a bank? Eh, you're sorry, get free. Meanwhile, if you don't know the president, you're in the bank forever.

Like, that is a crazy loophole that still exists that makes no logical sense whatsoever.

Yeah, you just help people around you or your kids, whatever it is, or a friend of a friend.

Yeah, donation. Yeah, somebody hooks you up and you know them and their cousin needs a thing and there's a guy and maybe he did it, maybe he didn't. You can get them out.

I mean, I'd pardon a lot of people.

I would pardon a fuckload of people.

I get it.

Well, we've on this show, we've done a lot of work with my friend Josh Dubin, who used to work with the Innocent Project, and now he works with the Ike Pearlmetter Center for Legal Justice and/or criminal justice. So it's all people that are wrongly convicted, and there's a shit ton of them. And you find out that there's these rogue politicians, or rather prosecutors, these rogue prosecutors and rogue DAs and rogue cops that just have fucking dozens and dozens of bullshit convictions where they fucking hid evidence. They absolutely knew the person that they arrested was the wrong person. They don't care. They just want a conviction. They just— they don't care. They lose their ability to give a fuck whether or not the person that's in jail is actually guilty of that crime. And they justify it in their head. Well, he was a drug dealer or he was a this or he was a that and he fucked off his whole life. We're better off with him being in jail. Let me go to Morton's and have a steak.

You take that and then you compare it with like every violent crime that has happened in Austin this year are people that have been repeat criminals just let loose. Oh yeah. Yeah, okay. So locking up people that don't deserve it, and then a guy, a guy off of 360 here in Austin killed his family and he was let out a couple times before.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. That's a different thing. So you got both things, right? You have these very liberal DAs who are letting people go if they think that they're from a protected class or if they think they've experienced racism or they've experienced some sort of an unjust situation as a youth and they need a second chance and the system is racist and so you let them loose. You've got people that, you know, like the guy that pushed someone in front of the train in New York City had been arrested over a dozen times. Like, the fuck are you doing? And there's some kind of crazy statistic, particularly about New York City, that something like 50% of all the crimes are by a very small number of people. Oh yeah, a very small number of repeat people. And if those people were in jail, literally crime, you could half violent crime, half robberies.

Half.

Yeah, 50%.

It's crazy. I, I saw some people do an analysis of like the kind of content and news we were getting in 2015 by people that I watched and liked, like the Vlogbrothers and stuff on YouTube, where everything was about the prison industrial complex, which I'm not saying is not a thing. It's certainly— there's definitely issues for sure, but it was about how, you know, we have the highest prison population and stuff. And again, these aren't untrue things, but it started putting out all this unchallenged information information about how we are too critical in this country and too punishing. And then what you started to see after that was the politicians like the DA here, the DA in San Francisco coming around the 2020 stuff after the George Floyd situation and everything, where all of a sudden it was beyond soft on crime, like beyond where they could do any amount of property damage that they wanted in San Francisco and just no challenges. So the DA in Chicago that raised I think the theft for felony threshold from like $50 to $500 or something. It was something crazy. So all that information—

I think it was $900.

Crazy. All that information that we were all consuming was just unchallenged. All you had was like a boomer on Fox News just yelling. That was like the only challenge to that kind of information that was coming around 2015. And I was a fan of that information. I ate it alive. And then now we're facing the consequences of it. Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

Well, it's also— you find out that there's, there's sort of a dark element to it all, and there's people like George Soros and the Open Society Foundation, and what they do is they, they invest their money in politicians, they invest their money in DAs, and they get like the most liberal, the most, you know, progressive, the one who's gonna do the most damage to the city in terms of crime, and then he funds the next guy to compete against him who's further left, and they just go further and further and further until you've got people like the guy they got rid of in Los Angeles that was just violent crimes. This guy pulled a knife on a sheriff, was trying to attack a sheriff with a knife, and then they let him out, and then he hacked up some guy with his kids with a fucking machete in Malibu or in Santa Monica, wherever it was. It's like you hear these stories and you're like, this is fucking insane. When someone's a violent criminal and they commit violent crimes, they need to go to jail. And if you don't do that, you're going to encourage people to do violent crimes.

So why are these prosecutors doing this? Why are these DAs doing this? Are they doing it because they want to? Do they want society to fail? Well, some of them do. Some of them actually do. They would like our civilization to fall. They think America is evil.

Interesting. That's interesting.

Elon's deep into it, man. I've had conversations with him about it and explains the way Soros does it, and that it's actually— it's a great investment because like to invest in politicians in terms of like to spend money on a campaign for the president, it's a lot of money. Spend money on a campaign for becoming the governor, that's a lot of money. But a local DA, not that much money. And for a great return on your investment, you can fucking tank a city by having one insane DA. Like, who's the guy in LA they got rid of? Was it Garza? Was that his name? This guy was fucking out there. I mean, he was releasing all kinds of crazy criminals, and you're like, why would you do that? And there was a video— there was a podcast that I was listening to where there was a former gang leader who was leaving Los Angeles because he was saying it's getting too dangerous, and they're about to release thousands of people from prison because the prisons are overcrowded. So they're releasing thousands and thousands of violent offenders, and he was sounding the alarm for it. For a gang leader, he's like, uh, this is too hot, we gotta get outta here.

That's the primary reason I'm against the things like all the funding for the train in California, specifically, because I actually really like, I'm a big advocate for public infrastructure, and even like dense living, like I love, when you visit a place that is like dense, and really cool, lots of community, I love that. We can't do that because we have these people that just let the violent criminals out. They let people hop fares in San Francisco and smoke meth on the train. I want trains. I want— so I wish Austin had an incredible subway system. We can't if we keep letting out these horrible people that will be everywhere. These people with mental health issues that we won't put in a place that is more humane than letting them sleep on the street. We'll let them crash anytime me and my girl, we drive past a bus stop, and we're just like, we would never ride a bus here. Right. Because just every— I've seen people light up a meth pipe on South Lamar at a bus stop, and there's just people that are just sleeping there, and you can't even wait for a bus.

I want these nice things. We can have these nice things, but we can't if we just let people overrun them.

So what do you think, if you had to put on your tinfoil hat and really try to make an assessment of like why this is happening, like why are they allowing this? Why hasn't no one done what is the sensible thing, protect the peaceful, taxpaying, kind and compassionate people of the city from violent criminals? Why are you allowing these people to continually be released? Why are you so soft on crime? What are you doing?

Yeah, well, honestly, definitely not as deep as Musk is on this, but for me, I really think it's this political capture. When you get in those ecosystems now online, you can get on TikTok and it'll immediately figure out within 3 minutes what group to put you in. And then you hear no other perspective.

Right.

And we know young generations, especially young women, they've moved more politically extreme than any other generation in the history of the United United States, and they've moved to the left, you know, left, right, I don't care, but they've moved to the extreme version. And when you're politically captured, you then vote for the people that are more politically captured on that left. And there is a lot of that moral masturbation that comes with it. It sounds good. We had all that information around 2015, 2020, that any— that anyone that's going to prison is, you know, just for having weed or anything like that. We're just evil as a society. Right. And when you get that and you start moral masturbating about everything, it sounds right. Like things like rent control, it sounds good. Right. It sounds like the moral thing to do. Not letting many— not just putting people in prison for a long time sounds nice. Sounds nice. Not kicking people off the street when they're homeless, it sounds nice. Not doing those sweeps, it sounds nice. Yeah. And people that are politically captured online, especially in our algorithms, it's just so brutal. And they just vote for that on repeat because they hear no alternative perspective.

And even still, it's so politically captured now where it's like, if you disagree with 1%, you're a Nazi and you're, you know, get out of here, you're not one of us. It's pretty brutal. I always considered myself like pretty left of center, actually. I'm probably more centrist now. Economically, I've moved a little to the right over the past few years, but But compared to the people surrounding me in college that were definitely like far left, because, you know, music school and all that stuff, but they were still algorithmically captured. I was borderline like a Nazi because I just didn't agree with everything. Yeah, you know, maybe the taxes shouldn't fund tits, right? I'm sorry if I'm a Nazi for that. Like, we have too much bloat.

I think you're absolutely correct about the political capture, but I think it's also manipulated. And that still doesn't account for who's funding the DA campaigns and the fact that Soros does get involved in these kind of things, and not just him, but others as well.

Do you think he truly believes in it though? Like, this is the right thing, like, we have a prison issue.

No, no, I don't think so. I think he banks on it. I think, I mean, he's made money off of collapsing societies. It's like he's of interesting character. He seems like completely immune to the consequences, like spiritually, of what he does.

Fair enough. Yeah, it's a flaw of mine, I guess. I just assume the worst until I see the best. So I just—

that's not a flaw. That's, uh, you're a good person.

Well, it's fucked me over a lot of times, but like, I mean, I, I just assume that even if I disagree with them politically, they think it actually has a positive outcome. Yeah, I want to think that.

I used to. I think now more they want to pretend that they think it's going to have a positive outcome because it justifies what they're doing. And then it also, I think with politicians, it's really a self-serving thing. They just know that people are politically captured, so they say the things that the politicians— like, listen, Gavin Newsom in any other world could easily be a Republican, OK? If we were living in the 1990s, he might have been. Like, this is nonsense. Like, his perspectives on things is about personal gain. It's about his campaign and his image. And that's why when he addresses any of the issues with California, he always goes into this pre-planned speech about, "We're the biggest tech sector, we're number 4 in the world, the world economy," starts moving his hands around. He's got a little fucking voodoo dance he does, because it's not really about addressing the situation, it's about framing it in a very positive way so that he looks good, so that he moves forward. That's what he wants to do.

And you're starting to see him come closer to center now, being opposed to the billionaire tax and other things like that in California.

Well, the girls are fucking leaving.

They're leaving, but a lot of the— everyone running for governor on the left was OK with the billionaire tax, but since he's going to be eyeing for president, he needs to be a little more sane. And I mean, pretty much every independent report says yes, it will capture tens of billions quickly, but it will lose hundreds of billions over the long term because the wealth that you tax on a yearly basis is just leaving.

It's not just that. It's a slippery slope. It might start with billionaires. It will work its way down. It will work its way down to thousandaires.

Yeah, taxes typically have. They always do.

So they have the ability to change the goalposts once the bill gets passed. The bill gets passed, they don't have to have you vote on who gets taxed more, and we can just decide. Like Bernie Sanders used to rally against— he used to rail against billionaires. It always used to be millionaires. All these millionaires, that's the problem. They're not paying their fair share. And now it's billionaires. Why? Because Bernie's a millionaire now. It's adorable. It's adorable in its transparency. But like, these fucking kids don't understand. Like, there's a giant number of kids today that come out of the university system that think that communism is the solution. Oh yeah, genuinely believe in it. Yeah, it's very scary because you're literally saying, first of all, how does that get enforced? How do you think it gets enforced? How does it work? Who tells the people that they have to give up their money and their property? The fucking government. Then who's holding the military and the property? The government. Oh, so the people with the guns Oh, so you want a military dictatorship essentially to be able to control all the finances, who owns a home, who owns a farm, where the food comes from.

You think that's a good idea?

It's never worked, I don't know why they're for it. Ever!

There's not even a mildly decent version of it out there that you can go, "Well, they're not as good as us, but it's not too bad." I'll give them some credit.

I'll give them a little bit of grace. Sure, I think they're a little retarded, but I'll give them some grace. A lot of times when you ask them, those people that come out of college, what communism is, they think it's like Scandinavia. Okay. And socialism. That's how they define it. Not like very literal. And those aren't socialist countries anyway. All their programs are funded on capitalism. It's taxed through the income that's earned on capitalism. So I'll give them that grace. But no, it is true that many people are viewing communism in general as more favorable. Yeah. And we know college is also very politically captured. It's very politically captured.

That's the danger. The danger is children are getting a very distorted perception of what the reality of the world is, like, right out of school by people who don't live in the world. That's what's so fucked. Like, these people that are teaching, they've essentially gone from being a student to working in a university to being a professor. That's their entire life, and they're telling you about the outside world. They're literally prisoners who are telling you about things that are going on in places where they never go and never visit. Like, you're not living in the real world. Like, your concepts about socialism and communism that you're teaching these kids— like, you don't live in the real world. You didn't start a business. You don't— you don't get fired by one company and hired by another, and you try to build your own small business. You're not doing that.

Mm-hmm.

You're just teaching concepts and ideas which most people that have done those things, that have jobs, that have started business, think are fucking ridiculous and don't work and have never worked anywhere in human history. And yet that's how you're employed to shape young minds. That's crazy.

They've looked at some universities and they look at the political identification or doing pollings on different departments, and they've had like sociology departments where it's had like 300 Democrats and 1 registered Republican. Which again, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a left-wing position or viewpoint. I'm not saying that at all. Again, I agree with a lot on the left, but when something where you're spending 4 years has that ratio, it's going to get overwhelming in terms of the information you get without any alternative perspective. Right. I was in college again in music school, and this was the amount of craziness that I was around, even though I'm slight, you know, have those left-wing social positions, I'm vehemently against that woke shit because when I was there, we had a visiting professor talking about music. She played a piece of music and she was like, "Okay, give me your feedback. I just want honest feedback on this." And I was, you know, I didn't really like it. I was like, "You know, to me, I can't really describe it, but it's a little weird." Then I had to listen to a 10-minute lecture about how the word weird has been used for colonialism and slavery and imprisoning people in murdering people of color and people who have transitioned and stuff, 'cause I said the word weird.

Uh.

It's politically captured. Yeah. And there was no one would speak up against that. It's a cult. No one would speak up against that. I don't know if there were other normal people around me, other professors that didn't believe what she was saying, but no one was willing to 'cause you'd be ostracized. Right. You'd be fucked. You wouldn't have friends there.

Exactly.

So when the ratio is something like 500 to 1 in certain departments, you're never gonna get an alternative viewpoint. So it makes sense that he gets more extreme. It doesn't even have to be 50/50, but 500 to 1 is crazy. 200 to 1 is crazy. Even 50 to 1.

Yeah, for sure. Well, it's something. You need to have alternative perspectives from respected people. They need to be able to communicate with each other. That's what the real diversity is all about. It's not just like where your fucking ancestors came from. It's also diversity of thought, and which is crazy that the people that are really into diversity reject completely diversity of thought. This idea that no one who is more to the right of you could possibly have a point is insane. Now, I'm with you socially. I'm very liberal. Financially, I agree with you. I'm more— I tend to swing more to the right because I believe in human nature. My problem with the concept of socialism, it goes against human nature. People If you're gonna punish people who are ambitious and reward people who are not, that's not good. That's just not good for human nature. It rewards laziness. It rewards people that feel entitled. It rewards this idea that the government, that they should pay, that these rich people should pay because they've done well. Well, why aren't you doing well is a question that doesn't get asked to these people.

Well, the question of taxes is getting completely turned on its head anyway. I've never been opposed to paying more in taxes if it went to something good. Right, but people are no longer proposing it for to go to good things. When you see it advocated online now, it's that person has a lot of money, let's take some.

What's— yes, exactly. And it's also very abstract, like they should pay their fair share. Shouldn't we figure out where the fucking money's going first? When you have thousands and thousands of NGOs, you have all these billions moving around in very mysterious ways, you're not concerned with that? But instead you want to take money from this guy who's got this giant penthouse, like that Ken Griffin thing where Mom Donny's standing in front of it like, yes, crazy, this guy has a $250 million—

you're doxxing his fucking house, crazy, which is stupid because now he's just going to take all the wealth from New York and go down to Miami.

I know, but it's a weird thing where some of these, you know, Democrat socialist mayors, they, they don't seem to think that that's a problem, like that lady in Seattle. It's like, well, if they leave, goodbye.

Okay. I actually like Ben Domi as a person. I really dislike the lady in Seattle as a person. She seems like a bad person, just laughing at people leaving, laughing at wealth leaving, laughing at jobs leaving. They're not even leaving Washington. They're going to Bellevue. They're going across the river where Microsoft and everyone's building new campuses. They're leaving Seattle and she's laughing at it. They have the second highest highest downtown office vacancy in the country, and she's laughing at it. That's not a good person.

Well, she's also never had a job, which is crazy. Imagine your first job, you're the head of a fucking city.

Yeah, yeah. Well, then you end up with that, and now people are leaving.

And the Modafani thing is also interesting because one of the things he said recently is that they— if they have bad landlords, they might take the house. Have you seen that? Yeah. Which is like, okay, communism. You're gonna capture real estate. The farm is spending too— it's too much money for a tomato. We're gonna take over the farm. Like, this is North Korea. This is how it started. Give us your farm. We'll feed everybody. Oh, great.

I'd love to see that survive the courts, but it's a crazy idea that we're even there. And of course, those bad landlords that we're talking about They're usually like rent-controlled units where they can't bring in enough money to even maintain the units, right? So then the units fall. I mean, the, the percentage of units— I don't know, you can look up the exact number— but that are just sitting empty because there's not enough money to put into them just to bring them up to date is crazy. This is the most populated city in the country. People need places to live, and we have a system right now where people can't even bring units to rent up to date for people to live in. So there's like 10% of rent-controlled units or something that are— or not rent-controlled, but, uh, but it's brutal. It's an absolute brutal system. It's performative.

And there's also this weird thing that goes on in New York City with really expensive apartments where people buy them and never live in them because it's just a place to put your money.

Which we do too. We do that overseas in Europe. Oh, do we? Yeah, yeah, American billionaires. I mean, billionaires all over the world do that because real estate's just a good protective assets, a good way to preserve. But no, I mean, it makes sense. And places like Texas have banned people from China doing that. But it makes sense from a wealth preservation standpoint, but it's shitty for the residents of the city. So I mean, I think, I think it would be fair for them to outlaw that if they wanted to. Kevin O'Leary's counter perspective though, have you heard his? No. So on that, and I don't know if I agree with it, but it's worth considering, is that okay, but they're there They buy it, they don't go there, so they're not using any public services, but they pay the property taxes into the public services, so they're just a net contributor.

That does make sense.

Yeah, but it is also a place that someone could live that no one is living, so.

Right, but when you're talking about these $100 million apartments, like the Ken Griffin spot, like, guess what? You're never gonna live there.

Yeah, and they wouldn't have built it if they couldn't sell it to people like him anyway.

Exactly. It's the whole reason why they invested in the property in the first place. There's that one that I was looking at. They built this kooky fucking tower that's like a popsicle stick. Have you ever seen that one? And it's waving in the wind now, and it makes weird noises, and no one wants to live in it.

Uh-huh. I think some glass falls from it too, right? Yeah, really? I think so. The one right off Central Park.

Glass falls?

I don't know. It's happened a few times.

I don't know. I watched a video on it. The video was essentially talking about like the engineering that was involved in making sure this thing anchors to the ground. And you would think you have to worry about this big thing that's really— and then you would worry about sinking, right? Well, actually, they worry about it lifting because the wind is slowly rocking it back and forth, so it's fucking coming out of the ground.

And then the people just buy there, not even live there. Wealth preservation. Well, so it works.

I don't think— I think they're having a hard time selling spots because I think people were probably— I would look at that, I go, I'm not gonna be able to sell this. Yeah, like, so if you do buy into it, you might be stuck with it.

No, absolutely. I'm again down to pay more in taxes, but like you said, there is the fear of like, where's the money going? What scares me, I want to have Mr. Marco Rubio, if he ever sees this and runs for president, on my show. The Pentagon hasn't passed an audit in years. Even that alone, they're working on it. They're working on it for years, for going on to a decade.

They've never passed a budget. Never pass an audit.

It's crazy. Like, that alone, I mean, that alone. And I know military is still— it's, what is it, 10 to 20% of the federal budget, so it's a smaller percentage, but the fastest-growing category of the federal budget is interest payments on our debt. That's the fastest-growing category in the federal budget. If that's the case, why are we allowing the Pentagon to not pass an audit? We're going to raise defense spending to $1 trillion a year, but it can't pass an audit. I want good defense. I want broad defense. I want a lot of benefits for our soldiers. Yeah, it has to pass an audit.

Yeah, well, this is the thing. I mean, exactly what we're talking about. Like, we're in favor of paying taxes. It'd be great if everything was nice, the schools were great, the streets were clean. But when you know that there's so much waste and there's so much fraud, and then all they're saying is we need to make people pay their share. To pay it to where? Where's it going? Who's benefiting from it? You know, when you, when you see that, like, the $24 billion that was spent on the homeless in California, it's like, you don't have any knowledge of where that money went? You can't audit it? This is bananas. That's so much fucking money. And not only has it not been effective, it's been the opposite of effective. The homelessness increased. During that time. Yeah. So you spent all that money and more people are homeless now than when you started.

It's performative. It sounds good. It sounds good. It's all performative. It's also jobs.

It's jobs. There's so many people that have jobs in nonprofits and they make an extraordinary amount of money.

Well, that's why they should look to Houston. Instead of nonprofits, it's one central city-run organization and they've actually decreased homelessness with like a 10% of the budget per homeless person than LA.. But LA has all the network for every little corner of the homeless services. It's a network of different nonprofits and organizations. So it doesn't work. The city program, one central city program did it in Houston, and it's actually been working.

How do they do it? What are they doing differently?

Well, instead of these different organizations that all have these different incentives to maintain the jobs, like you said, and not even report certain data, This is a city organization actually held responsible by the people, by the voters, by the city council. This is one place where the money goes. It's not these endless nonprofit jobs. The incentives are just misaligned across the board.

Yeah. It's interesting that there are examples of cities that have done it well and Austin had a real problem in 2020 and they did a great job in cleaning it up a little bit. It's a small city, you know, relatively.

Still pretty rough downtown though.

It gets rough. Listen, man, I have a club on 6th Street.

I know, I go there all the time and I almost get shanked.

It's scary. It's wild. I think though that once you get in, it's kind of exciting, like, woo, we made it. Adds to the show.

I was in a— I put my parents in a hotel. We went to the rooftop patio and it overlooked the alley right behind 6th Street. I don't know if it was the other side of the road or not. But the alleys are scary. Oh yeah, it's brutal. It looks something out of like a Batman movie from the '90s or '80s. Yeah, I can't believe it's actually allowed. And it's not— and they say it's sympathetic. They say it's sympathetic and nice to— I don't know how that's considered any more nice than any kind of— I gosh, forced rehabilitation seems brutal, but the mental health places, yeah, I know they weren't great before Reagan tanked that It's better than a fucking alley. Exactly, it's better than an alley.

Yeah, it's better than an alley. And there's another weird thing about 6th Street is that 6th Street is like this booming, like, bars and music and comedy. It's crazy and it's loud and everybody's drinking. One block over is a homeless shelter. Yeah, so you got all these people that are drug addicts and trying to stay clean, drinker. Like, that's the other thing, you can't do drugs and stay there, so people will just surround it. They surround the outside area and they have their tents laid out there. Not anymore, they kind of pulled the tents up, but you see those people there all the time. But imagine you're trying to stay clean and you're a block away from madness. It's crazy. It's the dumbest place to put them. Put them in the fucking country. They see squirrels and hear birds chirp. Why are you putting them right there?

That's where I park when I go to a show. When I go to a show at the Mothership, I park right next to the Ark. It's scary. It's apocalyptic. It really is. Even the police station just right down the street, they surround that as well. Yeah, and we just—

a lot—

it's a police station and they're doing drugs. Fucking kind of crazy.

It's nuts. Well, they're trying to do some things with 6th Street, and one of the things they're doing, they're investing a lot of money and trying to open up high-end places and restaurants and businesses. But you know, it's gonna be a slow slog. Yeah, try to clean it up.

I mean, I'm sympathetic. They actually— the people do need help, but when when homelessness is like at minimum 25%— this is reported from polling done via homeless people, so can't 100% trust it— but 25% mental health issues. Like, what are you gonna do? You're just gonna let them forever be wherever they want and do whatever they want, endanger themselves and others? There's a dude constantly wielding a machete down there that's always just twirling it. When I had friends visiting, other big podcasters, I took them down downtown. The first thing I saw on 6th Street was a guy spinning a machete. It's like we're just allowing that. That's the sympathetic thing to do. It doesn't make any sense to me. 25% forever. It's like, allow them.

That's a very low number.

Yes, I think so.

But being very kind by saying 25%, I would say it's probably 80%. They're— listen, if you, if you just by definition, if you're a drug addict, you have a mental health problem. Just by definition, you're in a— you have an addiction. That's a mental health issue. You know, there's a physical aspect to it, but there's clearly a mental aspect. Aspect to it. It sucks. It sucks that, you know, there's, there's so many competing philosophies on how to make a society run correctly, and a lot of them just completely ignore reality, and we deal with the consequences of it. And then you have people saying, oh, the billionaires aren't paying their fair share, that's what's wrong. Like, that's not what's wrong. What's wrong is you have a completely captured government, and there's also this weird aspect to it where there's people that are working for nonprofits to make things better that don't make anything better. They don't do a good job at all because they're not beholden to all the pressures that you would have if you were an independent business. If you're an actual private business that was assigned a task of cleaning up the homeless issue, you wouldn't make any money if you didn't do a good job.

You would lose your business. Like, if you had If homeless— cleaning up the homelessness was an actual business and you started a private business to clean up the homeless and you got all this money, nobody would invest in your company. Your company would fall apart. You— it wouldn't work. But because it's a nonprofit, you could have a $700,000 a year salary and do a fucking terrible job and have no fear whatsoever of being unemployed.

Yeah, exactly. And another difference between Houston and LA that I forgot to mention earlier, I mean A part of it is the cost of labor, cost of housing, but a shelter or a room to put a homeless person that is starting to get clean in Houston costs a few hundred thousand dollars. It costs a million or more in California. That's just— you can't compete against that. Yeah. It's impossible. Now, oftentimes, that's California's own fault. Their laws and permitting issues and red tape and environmental codes are crazy for building, and the labor unions that they use for their building contracts are very— they like to extort. So, there's a lot of issues there. Houston is able to build it on the cheap, which means more people are able to get in housing, but California is very set on the housing first, which again is the moral thing. It sounds moral, and it really started to take off a couple of decades ago where, "OK, let's get someone into housing first, and then try to get them clean, because no one is going to get clean, then housing." But Houston has been trying to— and Texas cities have been trying to do the opposite.

And it's been working where we try to get people clean first and then get into that housing and get their lives set up. Because people have been going into these places in LA that are multi-millions of dollars and trashing it. And they get like lore and stories off of them. Like a dude that was like building like chairs or something and then burned down his apartment. And he was named like Chair Guy. Like everyone knew him. It's just crazy that we allow that. People that are not getting the help and support they need because it's housing first because it sounds good, but it hasn't been working. And I don't know why. I don't know. It's the political capture again. I don't know why we're willing to do something for 5, 10, 15 years, see it doesn't work, and then just say we have to keep doing it and put more money towards it.

Well, I think again, what you're saying earlier about social media and these echo chambers is really important because in their world, this is the only thing to do. And that all just gets this feedback loop where it's the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and they come up with reasons why it's not working and then call everybody Nazis.

Yeah, and that's why also those echo chambers are why, when polled, younger people are more okay with violence against people on the other side of the political aisle from them, which is a very scary place to go. Yeah. It's very scary, especially when I see death threats all the time in my inbox and, you know, doxxing and shit like that. They call me a fascist for saying don't spend more money than you make. Okay, so I'm a fascist now. I'm afraid for my life and I have to get security and all this stuff. It's crazy.

You— so you get threats for like— what specifically do they get upset at? It's literally just saying don't spend your money.

It's, it's everything. They don't like that I do roasts. Consensual, consensual roasts. Like, I call a fat bitch a fat bitch, but I had the conversation with her before, and if she didn't want me to, I wouldn't have done that because we have a no-no list where people get to say what they don't want us to talk about, and then I just won't talk about that.

But it's very nice of you.

It is very nice. That's because we try to run, you know, a moral, consensual show, all that good stuff. But I love to roast people and just call out their features and just dumb shit like that. So people get offended by that, offended on behalf of someone who's not offended in the first place, and then they get very angry. I got a death threat on Twitter yesterday for saying Americans spend too much money on cars. He said I should, uh, that it's crazy that Caleb Hammer is still breathing air and that he should come up from San Antonio and kill me or something. I don't remember. Something like that. It's kind of crazy because Americans spend too much money on cars.

Maybe he sells cars.

Maybe, but objectively we do.

Did you check his profile? Is it a real person?

It said San Antonio. That's all I know. That's all I know. I'm sure it was like a— could be a bot— second profile. He was, he was responding to it. He was excited, you know, he got his attention.

He's a crazy person.

Yeah. Yeah, and we get emails all the time. No, people, people think I'm evil because they say I don't talk about the issues that led us here in the first place, but it's a personal responsibility show because more people have agency than they're willing to acknowledge. We're in the highest disposable income society in the history of human existence. Not everything's perfect. Cost of housing's gone up, cost of school's gone up, cost of healthcare has gone up. We can acknowledge those realities, but people have agency. People have agency. The amount of going out to eat among the Generation Z is insane compared to any other generation. And not only that, but now for 25% of their going out to eat multiple times a week is getting food delivered. And that has a 90% markup. Up 90%, and then they're complaining that they can't afford to, uh, pretty much do anything, get a nice apartment or whatnot. But if we're spending, uh, like $1,000 a month, which is very normal for a person on my show, going out to eat— you're right, you can't get an apartment of your dreams when $1,000 a month is going to McDonald's and other places.

Cooking at home's become like a burden, become a victim complex now. Well, actually, that was another thing that triggered the internet. I kind of agreed with Kevin O'Leary when he said, "Young people are broke because they spend $28 going out to eat." Well, it's not that specifically only, but it's the death of a thousand cuts. And yes, just $28, 3 times a week becomes an actual halfway decent retirement fund if you put it in the S&P 500 for a few times a week. That does put off future goals that you have. And the internet went crazy against me. They hated me for suggesting that. They shouldn't be able to get— They're like, "Well, how do we eat?" Groceries, meal prep, meal plan. This is what everyone's done since forever. We live in the best period ever for humans. Best period ever. Our jobs are better. Everything's better. Even when you think of buying the starter home in the '50s and whatever, they were like the size of this room that we're in right now, mass-produced. OK, that's still a home that's great you could buy, but you were going to a job that you hated, that you were sweating, that had no AC, where you're working with your hands all day.

And it was miserable. They didn't like the jobs. They liked that they had a good-paying job. But now people go to the office and they think they're a victim for not being able to meal prep before going to the office. The A seed office. Like, it's hard for me to sympathize with that, especially when I film 3 of them a week, all 100% real people, mostly Gen Z and millennials who are absolute victims in everything. They are victims in everything. They think, they think if they don't get a 2027 brand new car, instead of a 2025 car, that they're gonna die, that all of a sudden cars 2 years ago were the most dangerous things. They have to get a $60,000 to $70,000 car loan at a 20% interest rate or else their kids will die.

You've actually had that conversation?

Every time.

Where they think that they're gonna die?

No, because the excuses they use is that I wanted a safe car for my kids. That's fine, but it's the insinuation that 2024, 2023, 2022 cars would literally go on the highway and blow up. Like, I don't understand. They insist if they don't get a brand new car, that it is not a safe car. That is an argument every time with Americans. The $1.6 trillion or $1.5 trillion in car loan debt.

So do you think that's just a lack of education? Because like a car from 2020 is just as safe as a car from 2026. There's no difference.

Absolutely.

There's no difference in airbags, no difference in anti-lock brakes. There's very few differences in any of the technology involved. In fact, I tell people, especially people that want a nice car, one of the best investments you can get is get an electric car that's about 2 years old. The, like, electric Porsches and electric Audis in particular, fucking nobody wants them, man. Nobody wants the used ones, and they're still great. Oh yeah. And like, okay, let's look up an Audi e-tron. Look up a 2023 Audi e-tron. How much does it cost now to buy and what was it new? I think it's like less than 50%. Yeah, so there's certain cars where you buy them and they're worth as much a couple years later, like a nice BMW or a Porsche. Like, you could get an M5, a BMW M5, and then sell it a year or two later and lose very little money, if any. You get a fucking electric car and you try to sell that bitch in a couple years like an electric Porsche. Okay, look at this. 2022 Audi e-tron, $25,000. 2023 Audi e-tron, $27,000. Do you know how fucking crazy that is?

That is a 2023 amazing car. Those cars are fucking incredible. It's a technological tour de force. They're fast as shit. It's all-wheel drive. It's an SUV, a Premium Plus Quattro, $27,000. It only has 37,000 miles on it. Those things don't have engines like a combustion engine. They don't have nearly the kind of maintenance that a regular car does. You don't have to change the oil. You just plug that bitch in, you have a fucking amazing car.

Yeah, the battery range is not the longest. That's the excuse they use.

226 miles. Is plenty for you to get to work and get home. Thank you. And go out to dinner, and you can plug that bitch in. I have a Tesla, and it has like— it's a Model S. What does the Model S have? 3, 4?

I can understand this though, this argument that this person might not have anywhere then to charge it.

That's an issue.

It's so easy to get in your house now.

Yeah, but if you work in an apartment, that's not easy at all. Yeah, and if you go to one of those charging stations You're very vulnerable. If I was a chick, I'd never get an electric car if I didn't have a house.

You have to do it every single day. Everything, like gas station once.

That's true. 10 days or something. And like, how long does it take to charge up one of those bitches?

30 to 45 minutes.

So you'd have 30, 40 minutes every day. Yeah, that's fair enough.

That's fair for the apartment.

Getting a fucking bitchin' car for $27 grand.

And more car— more apartment complexes are installing those charging stations anyway that you can just leave your car overnight.

I live in one in You can never actually get to the thing.

Oh, why is it? Someone's always in there, and they never move their fucking car. Oh, they keep it plugged in.

I don't know whose it is. You can't go call them and flatten their tires.

Don't do that.

I'm just kidding. But I try to think of options, right? Because there's even the options of the place you work might have one. Right outside my building, there's— where we film is multiple car charging places. Park in, you go to work.

So I'm not saying everyone can do it, but if you can do it, it's a great option.

But even so, you can get used, used gas cars for relatively similar, right? But they will defend to the death on my show, having to get a $60,000 large SUV at an insane interest rate for an 8-year loan, 8-year term. Crazy. But, you asked me, why are they doing it? It's American, baby. That's American. That's freedom. You need a car to get to your job, and you need a job to get to your car. And our culture is built around the house and car. You're a failure if you don't get a house. You're a failure if you don't get a car. It is American as That is true.

And it is true that people want a new one. They want a new one. They want— that's part of the status of owning a vehicle. You want to be able to say it's 2026.

Yeah.

Look, it has these new features.

It's fun. Apple CarPlay. And people actually care what the person next to them thinks at the stoplight for some reason. I don't know why.

That's a weird one. It's a weird one, but we do. And we especially do when we're not doing that well. So you want like every single sign that shows that you're doing well. You know, a nice watch, a nice this, a nice that, a bag, whatever it is, whatever it is that you need, like a reward for this job that sucks.

Now oftentimes the poorest people I know are the ones that have the more souped-up, nicer cars. Yeah, and then they have a shitty place to live, but they prioritize that because it's a wealth symbol. It looks good. Yeah, they get the expensive clothes, the flashy items.

That is true, but if you have money, a car is one of the few things that you put money into that you actually enjoy. You actually feel it when you drive it around in it every day. It's exciting.

Yeah, fun. I just got my Model X. It goes fast, so I'm happy.

Those are great. They stopped making them.

I know, it's really sad.

They stopped making the S too.

I was actually sad that day. Me too. That was a weird thing to get sad about, but I was actually sad that day.

Also, I was sad because I knew it was the rise of the robots because they're using it to make these fucking Optimus Prime robots, and yeah, they're gonna be flooding the streets everywhere.

Yeah, I think— I honestly think the Model X is one of the best cars ever made.

Phenomenal car thing. It dances. Tiffany Haddish has one, and she was in the parking lot of the Comedy Store, and the wings go up, you know, it starts dancing, it moves around. Like, this is crazy. Like, it actually moves to music.

Now that I have one of the last ones ever made, I honestly— fuck, man, I really don't know. I don't want another car. It's actually really sad.

Well, he told me— Elon told me it's super over-engineered. He's like, the car is incredible. It's like one of the safest cars you could ever drive.

Well, I guess it's the last one I'll ever get. It's a bummer.

So when you are explaining to these people that a car that's just a few years old is just as good as a car that's now— yeah, does anybody go, 'Yeah, you're right,' or did— is it like a natural inclination? Like, is this just this thing that they want, a status symbol that's in their head that they need a 2026?

People are very defensive on the show. I can convince them of smaller things, getting rid of a car in our culture is usually a big thing to overcome. But I'll see weeks later that they sat on it, they thought about it, then the video went uploaded and millions of people shit all over them in the comments and they're like, "OK, maybe I should get rid of this car." So, some people actually— many people do change their perspective on cars. But that's a hard one to overcome. Telling them to close a credit card is kind of easy. Car is a big one. I've told people to not get a house, and they're really close to getting a house. That's something they will not give up because that's another obsession that we have in our country.

So would you say not get a house today because of interest rates?

Not just interest rates. Um, the overall marketplace, S&P 500, it just beats real estate. Commercial real estate is good to get for tax advantages, but the American dream isn't owning a home anymore. It's the freedom of renting because you can live wherever you want. You can move for a job like that. You get in a house, you're stuck in a house. It requires a massive amount of money for a down payment. It's just a lack of flexibility in a generation and age where people want to be more flexible and travel and explore and take new jobs everywhere. But it also just doesn't make sense as an investment anymore. It doesn't. It used to be the defining trait of the middle class and one of the largest wealth-creating things for the middle class. But now, with the incredible stock market that we've had over the past 50 years or so, it beats it every time. If you rent and just put in your money into the stock market instead of that down payment on a house with a little extra for a mortgage, you'll win every time. And then you get stuck. Let's say you got the good interest rate.

Everyone with the good interest rate is stuck right now because they're not willing to trade up for a house they actually want, but with a higher interest rate.

Mm.

So homes become like these people's prisons. You can buy a home. That's great if you know you're going to stay somewhere and it's what you've ever always wanted. There's nothing wrong with doing it, but it is not that actually incredible financial thing that has defined America. That being said, Americans suck at investing. So if the only way for you to invest is put your house in a— put your money in a house that you literally cannot touch, maybe it makes sense. Because if instead you need to put an extra 20% to the market if you rent, but Americans just want to go spend that on a vacation, then maybe you're better off in a house because you need that forced investing.

Yeah. Well, a lot of people don't feel— they don't feel secure unless they own the home. They don't feel like settled. This is not really my place. I'm just renting it.

Yeah, which is true. But I mean, I just tell them to fuck off. That's your feelings. I mean, that is just their feelings, right? Like, I don't know. Math is math in the end. I own, but that's 'cause it was very affordable for me. It made sense for me. But it doesn't have to for everyone. Right. And that's okay. In renting, you don't have to do maintenance. You don't have to get a new roof. You don't have to deal with the AC going out and all this stuff. If you're renting for, especially even larger corporations, they're actually even better to rent for than a mom and pa because they'll have someone on standby that'll fix your shit overnight. Where a mom and pa landlord, it kinda sucks. It might take a couple weeks.

Right, if they're not good.

Yeah.

What do you think when you're talking to these young people that are talking about their future? What do you think about what's happening with AI and the potential for AI to displace jobs and these people that are investing their future in going to school and getting this job that might not even exist?

Yeah, totally fair. It's a big fear. So I'm going to start this part by saying I don't 100% want to listen to anyone that says they know what's going to happen because how can— there's the doom and glooms that says everyone's job's going to go away. And then there's those that say it's going to create a shit ton of new jobs. I don't listen to any of them. No one knows what's on the other side of the hill of AI, but we do know AI is coming. So there is the best things to prepare for it. Trades, very smart. They've been smart for a while, but they're very smart with AI because it's probably not coming for an electrician job. Probably not. Degrees in general, what degree you get in school, has been one of the largest and most consequential decisions that people have been messing up for the past few years. And it's actually one of the leading causes for that gender wealth divide that is always talked about when compared for the same job, same person, same experience, which is never compared in that study. It's actually 99% very similar. But what we see oftentimes, and I feel, I feel bad for the women my age with this is statistically them.

They've gone and got lower paying degrees and now degrees that are very susceptible to AI, which is going to be very damaging for a large group of people that are going to push them to become even more radical. But women have gone and borrowed a lot more money for degrees that provide a lot less return on investment, like sociology psychology, the arts, things like that, where you can't maybe even get a job. You're going to be a barista, or if you are going to get a job, it's usually a lower-paying job where men have gone— just we've fallen— this thing in our society where men have always tried to go to that higher income side and give up a job they like for it. So they'll go into engineering, the math, the sciences, even if they don't like it, or the trades, very labor-intensive. And even though AI, you know, they're susceptible to some things in tech there, It's always been higher paying, and that's what's made that gender wealth gap so heavy. That and then women post-birth is the second highest leading cause. But when it comes to AI, people are already making the mistakes in the degrees they've been getting over the last 10 years.

And now this is just going to accelerate that even further. When it comes to data entry jobs, things that are super easy, even unfortunately, who knows if we'll allow for therapists, but it's getting there pretty quick. People are willing to trust AI way more than we thought. Yeah. And these psychology degrees and whatnot, writing degrees, things that unfortunately that large sector has gotten, it's— they're much more susceptible to AI. And it's going to lead to— I think it's going to lead to a lot more political radicalization. And that's what scares me more than anything. The— was it the UN? One reputable source said 40% of global jobs are susceptible to being replaced by AI. Now, the more developed countries were a little better, it's a little easier, but we're talking about those that are doing like customer service jobs in India and things like that. That's, you know, they're going to be damaged heavily. We're going to be a little better in Europe, in the United States, in Canada, Australia, but it's scary and people need to prepare themselves by trying to borrow the least amount possible when they get their degree, go to community college if they can, and go into something that's more AI-resistant, which to me is, again, things like trades, things that need that extra creative edge where AI doesn't seem to be able to get there yet.

Maybe it'll be able to at some point. Right now, they're really good at going through numbers and stuff, but that true creative edge, actually coming up with something new, That's what I think people should be going towards in college right now.

Yeah, I completely agree. Hold that thought. I have to take a leak.

We'll be right back. Yeah, you're good.

So one question that I have for you is because you got a degree that's not really a good degree financially. I dropped out. Yeah, well—

But close, yeah.

But going to school for something that's not viable financially. Why do you think, and particularly women, why do you think so many of them get these degrees in sociology, get these degrees in gender studies, get these degrees in things that where you're just not going to be able to make a living? In what you're going to school for.

Yeah, I think you can do a lot of good in a lot of them. So, if you're doing social work like that, and nursing actually does pretty well, but in that lower-paid part of medical, you know, you're doing a lot of good. We spent a lot of decades doing— trying to really fix the percentage of college. We were having like men, men, men, men, All— it was only men going to college, and we put a lot of effort into women going to college a bit more to catch up, which is fair. That was good. I am for that. But once they got there, just, fuck, why they're doing it, it's harder to say, but they definitely do more gravitate as a cohort towards those lower-paying degrees like psychology and whatnot. And I don't know, men just go to the higher-paying degrees. I don't know if it's just something in our culture where men feel like they need to be a breadwinner or whatnot. Yeah, that's what I'm wondering.

I'm wondering if that's what it is, the need to be a provider and the thinking like, these low-paying jobs are not going to be able to give me any money.

Yeah.

How am I going to provide? How am I going to have a family? How am I going to pay the bills?

Yeah. Where now men are, men are starting to kind of fall off that platform though. Yeah. I don't know if you've been watching the trends, but now it's closer to like 60, 65% of new degree holders are women and men are just not going to college anymore. They're some of them, 5%, really. It's pretty crazy. It's like 60 or 65%. Wow. It's getting, it's getting pretty intense.

And well, what are men doing instead?

There's a lot of losers. There are a lot of losers where they're not getting any education. They're not looking for any kind of job. They're not even collecting unemployment. They're literally just sitting on their ass. That is a big cohort of people right now.

What do you think? That's what's causing that.

Um, well, fuck, uh, there is a lot of the red pill victim mentality. I don't know if I want to fully enable it, but I mean, maybe there's some justification a little bit. But they think that everything's against them, uh, they think that DEI specifically was preventing them from going to work or preventing them from going to school, that school's politically captured. There's a survey done that of people that were choosing not to go to college 30% said that it's because— 30 or 40% said it was because college is becoming too politically captured. So there is that. Then they don't have jobs, they don't have skills, they don't have experience, so it's harder to get a job. It's easier to just kind of sit at mom's home, play video games, do drugs.

Jesus, that's bleak.

It's bleak. And the gender wars are horrendous right now. I don't know if you see any of it online, but the gender wars are—

the gender wars.

Oh yeah, young women just being so anti-men and young men being so anti-women and cheering against each other. It's horrible. It is horrible.

Like uniquely new?

Like this is much more than ever before.

What do you think is causing that?

Um, a lot of it started 2016 election. They got a lot of women got very angry that Trump was elected, and they followed something that happened in South Korea as well, where the women said, "No men, no dating, no sex." There was a term for it, but they were just— they cut off everything. And there was a little, little bit of that movement after the 2016 election here in the United States as well. It didn't gain as much traction, but this is very divisive, and it goes back to the algorithm that we were talking about earlier as well. A lot of people get put in those echo chambers where, you know, you need to have a villain, and the men are the villain, or the women are the villain. The women are the reason men aren't doing well. The men are the reason women aren't doing well. The men have been holding us back forever. They've been, you know, keeping us in the kitchen and everything like that.

The 4B movement. Yes, women boycotting men. Anti-men movement. 4B movement is a radical feminist rebellion that emerged around 2015. It's named after 4 Korean terms starting with bi, meaning no. Bi hon, no heterosexual marriage. Bi cholsen, no childbirth. Bi yone, no dating men. Bi sekyu, no sexual relations with men. Okay. Participants argue this is not about misandry, but rather a drastic method to opt out of an intensely patriarchal society and protect themselves from gender-based violence such as digital sex crimes, spycams, and workplace discrimination.

So it picked up some pretty big steam here in the United States after 2016.

But I gotta think that everyone who's saying no dating men and no sexual relationships with men isn't attractive.

Probably not, but sexlessness among young people is so high compared to any other generation, right?

Very high, very high virgin rate, which is really odd. We're finding a lot of people, a lot of them like identify as Christian and that's the reason why they're saying— or Catholic, this is the reason why they're saying they're virgin. I'm like, what's happening? You don't get horny? What are you doing? Interesting. You don't like people?

A lot of people on my show say they want to have sex but can't have sex. Mm-hmm. So I guess they haven't used that cope, the religious cope, but I don't know. But that's another example of the radicalization. So they just— they blame each other. Like, okay, Trump got elected. Many of the women in this country that lean to the left didn't like it, so they got very upset. They blamed the men for electing him. Men blame women, you know, DEI policies, which yeah, there are things to complain about. I do get it, like on both sides probably, but they've just gone so extreme. So there's a gender war right now where it's just trying to nuke the other side.

And it is this spillover into real life as much, or is this a lot of people that spend way too much time on the internet already?

Definitely more that than anything. Definitely more that. But, um, the unfortunate real-life consequences lead to that loneliness online because the real-life consequences that people are staying inside and on screens and more lonely than ever. So that's the real-life impact. You know, they're not going out and talking about the 4B movement on the corner of the street, but instead of going out like they used to and having more friends, they're sitting inside and complaining about it on Reddit. So that is the real-life consequences. It becomes online.

Yeah. It's just so strange that these people don't recognize that you have a finite time to exist and you're spending all your time like captured in these like fucking stupid echo chambers.

Feels good to be a victim though, because everyone online that is in your little ecosystem, they give you the thumbs up. They make you feel reassured.

Feels good. Complaining is exciting. People do love to complain. Yeah, it excites you. It gets you going. Fucking the fucking meh.

Whether this is accurate, I think this gives a little insight into the Korean 4B movement. This is a post on Reddit from 2 years ago, but this paragraph here is—

Oh, about Korea? Yeah. Yeah, so we're talking about a country where a woman's career can be jeopardized for something as innocuous as wearing a t-shirt that reads "girls don't need a prince" or for liking a Women's March post on Twitter, even if it was 7 years ago. I'm not exaggerating. Incidents like this have occurred, and recently, as recently as last year, we're talking about literal termination of a contract due to a heart made on a post regarding women's safety issues on Twitter dating back to 7 or more years ago due to incel gamers throwing a fit. So they have an incel problem in Korea too. A lot of— and also low replacement rate, like, worst in the world. Yeah, Korea is really bad. Is it the worst?

It's worth it?

Worst in the world.

Then Japan will collapse within a few decades. Yeah, by the end of the century. Oi. Yeah, South Korea is done. But no, it's true. And like I said, like, there, there are valid logics to it. I'm not saying like everyone's just doing it inherently to be evil, right? But if your outcome is to become radicalized into something like the 4B movement, no one should be fired from wearing a dress or liking a post, right? You know, it's crazy. But to become radicalized and start this thing where it divides the genders, because we have more political division in our low— in our— in the Gen Z gender than any other generation, more religious division. It's crazy. And to fuel that because things have been not perfect.

So when you say political division, so is it that young men are going to the right and young women are going to the left? Is that what it is?

Yeah, when you do— when they've done tracking and polling of post-election results and who how people have voted, age groups and gender groups, they've seen that men have moved to the right a little bit, but women dramatically since 2016 have moved to the pretty far left. Young women, not millennial or Gen X or boomer women especially, but Gen Z women have moved very far to the left.

I wonder what changes, if anything, in that when women have children. Because one of the things that I found is that my friends who wound up having children, my female friends, they almost all started moving to the right. They almost start all recognizing that there's like real safety issues, there's real crime issues. They're wondering where their tax money goes. They see corruption and fraud, things that they never really talked about at all when they were single and didn't have a child. But as soon as they get married, as soon as they have children, then they start going, hey, fuck this place. You know, they like so many of them wound up moving out of L.A. right after they had children. And so many of them started moving into a different sort of ideology.

But people have to get married and have kids for that to happen. And we just hit our lowest birth rate in the United States.

Is it the lowest ever replacement rate?

Yeah, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, it was before the last time we had actual replacement rate was before the Great Recession. And ever since then, this has gone off a cliff.

That's why we need immigrants.

Well, I mean, actually, yes.

Open the door, let them in. Wee!

Well, we do need some immigration. Of course. We always do. Because we need a growing population, because you don't want to be like South Korea or Japan.

Right.

You can't have a collapsing population because you use the argument— sorry, not you, but people could use the argument, they'll destroy our culture if we let in all these immigrants. And yes, of course that would happen if you just let anyone in no matter what, uncontrolled. Sure, but you also— South Korea is also gonna lose their culture because their population will not exist by the end of the century. So there's multiple ways to lose a culture, but I'm a big proponent of selective, high-skilled, good proportional immigration. And I think, honestly, I think that's the more bipartisan issue. That's where like Bill Clinton was in the '90s and whatnot. So I think that's fair. Open borders is fucking crazy. I don't know what was going on. I don't— I didn't even realize what was going on.

It's nuts. I have friends that were down there that went to the border and they say you have to come to understand it. You have to see it. It's fucking insane. Like, you see the numbers of people coming across, like, how is this real? Yeah, they just— no vetting, right into the country.

Wee! Yeah, so I'm on an economic issue because I always go back to economics. I don't get as fired up about the social stuff, but I do like some kind of immigration for sure. Some people are like completely anti-immigration, but I like some kind of immigration because we do need a growing job pool specifically to maintain an economy so that people my age can retire. If the dependency ratio of every person not working for every working person is getting close to 1 for 1 in South Korea, in the United States when we implemented Social Security, it was closer to like 60 to 1.

1.

Now the United States is like, it's like 5 or 10 to 1. It's going in the wrong direction. And if for every 1 working person you have 1 person not working, the whole system breaks. And that's what we're starting to see in places like South Korea. So we can't become that. So if people aren't fucking, people aren't making babies, you got to bring some people in, but selective, high-skilled. What gets scary is if you start fucking up an economy enough with really bad policies you get brain drain and then immigration. So you see what happens in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom. Brain drain. Yeah, educated people. They're born there typically or they even emigrate there and they become very educated. They're the ones that are going to contribute to the tax base, create jobs, do higher-skilled jobs, great doctors, everything's like that. But they look around them, the economic policies have failed, so they come to the United States.— and then there's only the immigrants that have come in that aren't able to replace that brain because they come from somewhere where, no fault of their own, is just less educated. So they aren't able to contribute to that tax base.

We're actually starting to see something similar in LA right now with the wealth flight and brain drain, though the net migration in LA is not looking the absolute worst. People that were contributing there moving away and providing to the tax base versus people that are coming in and aren't being true net contributors is becoming horrendous. And they're looking at like a billion-dollar deficit coming up pretty soon for the city of LA. It becomes very scary. So that's why I rail against performative policies, because I don't want to end up like a place like the UK, where it ranked 51st out of all 50 states, by the way, in terms of GDP per capita, which is absolutely crazy, worse than Mississippi, you know, and then if you're having immigration while that's happening, all you have left is just that, just that, and all your high-skilled people went somewhere else. Same thing is happening in Canada. They become educated in Canada and they go down to Silicon Valley for a high-paying job because they don't pay as well in Canada, but if we start reversing that with bad policies, you start looking a little more like LA, and their budget's not looking really good.

It's interesting how pragmatic financial discussions are problematic. Like, people don't like it, and they look at it and like, you're just— you're not talking really even about politics. You're just talking about pragmatic decisions in terms of like, how do you invest your money, how to save your money, how to do that? That becomes right-wing. Oh yeah, that becomes somehow or another cruel. It's like categorized in that way as heartless.

Yeah, people will clip that last moment and say I'm anti-immigrants. Like, that's gonna happen. Yeah, but it's not. It's this literal economic theory that we're seeing in the real world right now that's tracked and trackable. The Labor Party acknowledges— the left-wing Labor Party in the United Kingdom acknowledges the wealth flight and brain drain. This isn't a right-wing position. This is just reality.

It's interesting though that people like in general don't think of it that way. People in general think of it like someone who discusses finances, someone who's like very financially astute, gives pragmatic advice, that's a conservative person. That's a bad person.

They do think so. They say I'm right-wing coded. It's something I see a lot. Coded? Right-wing coded, or my vibe is off. Well, because personal responsibility.

Yeah, but what do you think— why do you think personal responsibility is thought of that way? Is it because people cherish this idea that they're a victim and they hold on to it? That's a part of their identity. And if you challenge that and say, no, some of this is your fault, then you're, you're being cruel. You're, you're being— you're a sociopath, you're a fascist.

There's a large group of people that want people like me or Dave Ramsey to just give them a hug and then complain about the systemic issues that got them there in the first place.

Right.

You can vote. That's great. Go vote for a policy change. Wonderful. But you do have a little bit of agency, and I'm not going to talk to you about what policy you should vote for because that's going to require millions of people to overdo a system that you don't like. What you do have control on right now is whether or not you swipe the card somewhere, whether or not you get a high-interest rate credit card or get a bullshit degree from a private institution out of state. You have those controls right now. And they don't like that. One of the biggest complaints that people like me and Dave Ramsey get is, "Why aren't you talking about the system that got you there?" But that's not the conversation. It isn't. It's a one-on-one personal financial conversation. Let those people fix their lives. Budget. Budget. That's why I made a budgeting app, Dollarwise, by the way, is for that kind of thing.

What is that?

I made a budgeting app called Dollarwise with my team.

It's called Dollarwise?

Dollarwise. Dollarwise, yeah. So the average person can actually budget and take some personal responsibility instead of just falling on the victim mindset.

So this app, what do you do? You put in your income, you put in your bills?

Yeah, yeah. It's that automatic account connections through multiple different services. So you get your accounts connected and you get to immediately insights that show where your money's going, what you can do to actually improve your life, and the steps you need to take. It fully guides you in that process.

So were you motivated to do this just based on these conversations you've had with people that don't know what the fuck to do?

That, and to make a shit ton of money. But both, both have worked pretty well.

But yes, which is funny, you're making a shit ton of money by people that can't figure out how to save money.

Yeah, but if, hey, if they make more money because they save money and I make more money, that's capitalism.

It's a value.

Value. Yeah, exactly.

You're providing a value.

No, I mean, that's the point. Like, I used— did you ever use Mint? No. You remember Mint? Okay, so it was a big budgeting app a long time ago, but for some reason the service that bought it shut it down, and that's what everyone was using. But even then, I remember stopped using it. Like many people, most people fall off of budgeting apps because they're just burdensome. It takes a long time to figure out the systems, and they're just over-engineered for a personal finance nerd that loves every little detail. So the average person doesn't do it. So we just built something simple that just shows people immediately where their money is going and what they need to do to change. So that's what we focused on when we, you know, engineered this thing.

And so when you're having all these conversations with all these different people that have like these terrible budgets, doing a terrible job of taking care of themselves, do you ever get this feeling like that you're not helping? Like this is like an insurmountable problem, you're sticking your finger in a dam and there's a fucking million leaks and this is not going to work?

To a certain extent, yes. Luckily, in the United States, we have some tools that help. So if someone's in that situation where the dam's about to burst, everything's about to just blow up, they can go through bankruptcy. But bankruptcy does not make sense. And this is what a lot of people mess up. Bankruptcy doesn't make sense unless you actually change the behavior that got you there in the first place. Because we've had people that have come on my show that have been through bankruptcy twice and now we're there again. It makes no sense. You can get rid of the damn— you can get rid of it by bankruptcy, but you're going to build up that thing to explode again if you don't actually fix the behavior. So people take shortcuts through credit card consolidation, debt consolidation, personal loans, all that good stuff. Those are good tools. But if people don't actually fix their behavior first, they're going to fuck it up. So Dave Ramsey is vehemently against against debt consolidation for a reason that is fair. I don't like being anti-something 100% because personal finances is personal. But this is his argument, and it's kind of fair.

You build up this much in credit card debt from here to here, and then you can consolidate it into this new debt. So this is one new debt that consolidated this down to zero. But now what happens is the credit card limit is still all the way up there. So people now have this debt, and then without changing their behavior, they build the credit cards back to here. So now you have double Mm-hmm. That's the issue with debt consolidations and not changing the behavior. So his philosophy is correct. But what we try to teach people on my show is that change the behavior that got you in that first stack in the first place. And if you can prove that you can follow a budget for a few months, then you can take that shortcut by consolidating and then probably just close those cards so you can't use them. But the same thing applies for bankruptcy. So that's why our show is simple stuff. You just fix the spending. You get it under control. You'll live in— even Elizabeth Warren's 50/30/20. She's the one that pioneered 50/30/20, which is 50% on needs, 30% on wants, 20% on savings.

That's Elizabeth Warren's rule, and she's relatively correct on that. Doesn't apply to everywhere like LA, New York, of course, but if you can follow that and prove you do it for a few months, then you can go through bankruptcy. You can use a personal loan, and that solves the damn issue. It solves the bigger issue.

Yeah, the changing your behavior thing is very hard for people.

It is.

And it's also very hard for people when that spending of the money is the only reward you get for a job you hate.

Yeah, it is. And I'm the one talking to them, and I'm a fat fuck. So like, I get it. Like, I haven't, you know, fully taken control of my health behaviors and eating behaviors. So So I know that it's hard to fix it. But oftentimes the people on my show, I've been in the exact same situation. I was when I was 20, 21. And I've seen what it's like on the other side. Just like many people in your position have seen what it's like on the health— the health on the other side. You know how good it is. So you want other people to do it. And since I've been through that personal finance side and gone through the work, I can at least help hold people's hands and show them what it's like to go to the other side of that tunnel, to put in the work, the temporary sacrifice of a few years, and really live the rest of your life in such a better way.

Yeah, it's just changing behavior requires a change in perspective, and it requires something. And for some people, they have to hit rock bottom, or they have to have some, you know, they have a birth of a child, like something rocks them into reality, and they go, I— whatever the fuck I'm doing right now, it's not the right path. Mouth. But it's just so hard for people when they're playing this blame game and they're looking at successful wealthy people as being the problem. Look at Jeff Bezos and his fucking yacht. Like, that's nothing to do with you. Yeah, it's not why you're broke. And you should look at him and go, how the fuck did he do that? How can I do that? I want a yacht. Fuck it, let's go. But no one's doing that. They're instead deciding that they're a victim, deciding that the game is rigged, deciding that there's a cap on their ability. But meanwhile, this is— if there's any place on earth where you have the ability to rise from the bottom to the top, this is it. This is the spot. There's no place better. You could say it's not fair, but it— what does that mean?

You— it's possible. Like, you could do it. People have done it. You just have to figure it out. And like, you have to spend less time playing video games less time smoking weed, less time doing nonsense, and more time plotting your fucking future. Figure out what it is. I think there's also a problem in a lot of people have something that they really want to do that they're not doing, and they, they're not pursuing that. And so then they're even more bitter because they're spending time doing this job that they hate, which sucks. They think it's taking away from their ability to do this other thing, which sucks. And then they come up with all sorts of rationalizations for why they're not doing it.

It. Yeah, but what you said is 100% correct, but let me, let me phrase it back. Yeah, it's not fair. The world isn't fair. Now what?

Right, it is what it is.

Like, it is. Okay, so accept that. Are you gonna sit on it and cry? Like, that's the only option, right? It's that or do something.

You're denying people's feelings, Caleb. I am denying people's feelings, and that's very right-coded.

Yeah, that is right.

That's the argument.

It is, it is. Like, I don't know, man.

Um, write code is fun.

If people just— if they're getting the bullshit degree and they borrowed a shit ton of money for it, that's not my fault. I didn't do that. Yeah, this isn't— Bezos didn't do that either. They say, well, sociology and stuff should pay more. Okay, the market's determined it didn't, so now what? You still get to choose what you do. What business you start. You might fail 1,000 times, but you have so much more agency than people right now are willing to accept. And that's all I really care about telling people in the end. That's all. You have agency. Take some personal responsibility. You are not the disabled person that actually does not have agency, right? Because there are people that don't, right? You're not that, right?

Yeah, it's so important to say. And I think, you know, as much as it's probably frustrating you know, when I brought it up that you're putting your finger in this dam and there's 100 holes. Mm-hmm. I really do think that you have a positive impact because I really do think there's a lot of people— I mean, you get millions of views. There's a lot of people that are watching these conversations and it resonates and they go, this is me, he's talking to me, and he's right. Fuck, what do I do? And at least it puts them in this mindset that a change needs to take place.

Yeah, exactly.

And then you give them tools. You give them— like, you, you explain to them what the steps that they can take, you know. And that's— they're the cra— the fucking crazy thing is they're not getting this from school. School's not teaching you how to organize your future, which is fucking a critical skill, a critical piece of knowledge. Like, having a path that you can actually follow.

I think it's a lot of the time it's the student counselors there because I remember being in school, in high school, and the student counselor, I met with her once a year, and the only conversation is, "What do you want to study in college?" That was it. That's all they cared about. Right. And it's fair for most people. College does still have like a 60% premium on those without a degree on average, but that's the only conversation, and it is becoming less and less valuable as every year goes on. And if that's all school cares about, they don't care to even show you how to— okay, I mean, full admission here, and I'm gonna look like the most beta pussy in the world, but I don't know how to do a fucking oil change. I don't. Why didn't school teach me that? Why? Why wasn't there any life skills? Now, I have the personal responsibility. I can go teach myself that right now, but I have a Tesla, so I don't need to. But why wasn't there anything, right, about actual life? The only thing there was to do was go to college, nothing else.

That was the only conversation.

When I went to high school, we had auto shop. Yeah, so I did learn.

I think they got rid of it the year before I went. Really? Yeah.

Oh my god, when I went to high school, I went to Newton South High School, and there was this guy who ran the auto shop that was a Mustang enthusiast. That's what he loved, old Mustangs, and he would like fix them, and he would take his cars and teach kids how to fix his old Mustangs. He had like 1960s, early '60s, like '65, '66. He liked the small Mustangs. It was a fucking very interesting guy, and he would explain to you like how spark plugs work. Like, this is your carburetor, this is why it's jammed, this is, you know, this is how the internal combustion engine works. He'd explain it to you, like teach you things, teach you like general maintenance stuff on cars, and it was very valuable. Teach you how to jack up a car, to like how to do it safely. Where's the jacking point? Where's the lift points on the bottom of a frame.

Yeah, and home ec classes too. Yeah, used to be a big thing. Teach you how to cook. It's falling away. And now, of course, now that we don't teach people how to cook, they're complaining about not eating out.

So disappearance of traditional shop classes did not happen overnight. It happened in distinct phases. '70s and '80s budget cuts, major tax revolts such as California's Proposition 13 in 1978 decimated public school budgets because maintaining workshops, buying heavy machinery, and securing liability insurance were expensive. Shop programs became easy targets for elimination. 1990s college prep push. High schools shifted their focus to standardized testing and 4-year university preparation, marginalizing vocational training. Which, meanwhile— which is really crazy what you're saying earlier today, or earlier on the show— was very important. It's like trades might be the only secure pathway. Becoming a carpenter, becoming an electrician, you know, heating and ventilation, like people are gonna have to have those systems installed and maintained, and we're gonna need people for that. Like, that's— and that's a job. You start your own HVAC company, like, you can make some real fucking money.

Yeah, absolutely. And even things like apprenticeships— if you get an apprenticeship, you have a 90% chance of being retained to a full-time position. Get into apprenticeships. Yeah, like, I know I'm just like a little fat dude with some soft hands, but It's okay to do, you know, those are good jobs. They're good-paying jobs. They're good career position jobs.

They are. And if you want a good job, and it's also, it's like, there's a weird thing with degrees. Like, degrees means your value as an intellect, as a person who can think. You're a smart person. You went to school and you got a degree. But if you have a degree and you're fucking poor, and you know what I'm saying? And you're depressed, and this guy is a tradesman, and he's wealthy, and he's making money. People with degrees still will look down at this— oh, he's a plumber? What the fuck does he know about how this country works?

And I'm sorry, some of the wealthiest people in our country that have built the largest companies are college dropouts. It's true. Bill Gates. I can't just fully respect the college degree only. Especially when you can get the most bullshit degrees now, and especially where the average GPA and passing tests have gone substantially higher because our standards are so much lower in universities now. It's pathetic. It's becoming harder and harder to respect the degree. There's good degrees, there really are, but it's getting harder and harder to just respect it as a blanket statement. It's—

yeah, no, you're absolutely making sense. And it's also education is so readily available. If you want to educate yourself there, there's just YouTube alone. You could kind of learn anything. You can learn anything about anything. And if you're really interested in actually doing the work and actually trying to absorb the information, you can get a high-quality education without ever stepping into a university. Yeah, just with audiobooks, just with YouTube, just with— I mean, it's— there's so much knowledge, much more than any other time in human history. So the idea that the only way to get an education is to go to these socially captured, these politically captured environments and be force-fed this indoctrination of horseshit by communists who have never had a real job is— and also be in debt an insane amount of money because you're spending more money for that education than you're gonna spend on anything else when you're fucking 18 years old. There's nothing even remotely close to a year and a university degree unless you're buying a new car every year. Like, what the fuck are you spending that kind of— what is— how much— like, let's— what's Harvard a year right now?

How much per year is Harvard? Was it $50,000, $60,000? Way more than that.

Depends if you're in state or out of state too. I don't think it's a state school.

But student loan balances people borrow on average ranges from $25,000 $35,000 to $40,000 for just an 18-year-old to sign away. Nuts. Well, through their 4-year degree. It's crazy. It's crazy. And it's all administrative bloat now too. Yeah. It's not even going to anything.

It's also subsidized. Like the whole thing is gross.

$62,000 for undergrad.

$62,000 a year. What else are you spending $62,000 a year on? That's what I'm talking about. Now imagine, what's that, Jimmy?

That's without fees.

Including housing, health fees, and student services. I'll tell you, 80, so including housing, health fees, and student services, coming to approximately $86,000 to $95,000 before financial aid. So with housing, health fees, and human services, it could get to $95,000 a year. That's fucking crazy. And if you go through that and you get a degree in gender studies, yes, that's wild.

Now, for a fact, there's a $62,000 car out there but for a fact they will not lend that car amount to an 18-year-old. I don't know why they would do it for a college degree.

So it is kind of—

New York Times, 1983, about— it's titled "1980s Grads: Baby Boom to Job Bust." This sounds a lot like right now, but doesn't mention anything about debt or AI.

Yeah, so more than 900,000 of them in the 1980s have discovered that They must put aside college daydreams and settle for jobs that do not require a degree if they want to work at all. So this was when?

1983.

Whoa.

Yeah, they're all going in for jobs and none of the jobs that they want are available.

Yeah, you know, go back to that. It says, yeah, the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has long predicted that the number of college graduates would exceed the number of technical, managerial, and professional jobs available to them. Them, a result in part of a decade-and-a-half-long influx of well-educated baby boom generation into the labor market. Yeah, the problem is like young kids, if you ask kids, the vast majority of them, what they want to do, I think— I know this is in California, they— it was like overwhelmingly they wanted to be famous.

Yeah, I mean, we're in the world of influencers, it makes sense.

Everyone's trying to be a TikToker Well, everyone's also wanting to do what you're doing. Yeah. You're an entertainer now. You're giving financial advice, but you're also an entertainer.

Yeah, it's very cool, and I wish everyone could do it. Most of us aren't lucky. I got lucky. I don't know. I mean, this is not a realistic thing, right? We got to be realistic.

But what does that mean? If someone can do it, you can do it. It's— the numbers aren't good in terms of like the amount of people that are going to make it, but what are those factors that are keeping people from figuring out how to do it.

Well, you know what though? I wasn't— I wasn't fucking retarded about it. I had a full-time job, and I only allowed myself to go full-time on this thing once I proved I had enough income to replace it for a few months consistent.

Mm.

Most people, they're like, let me just quit my job, borrow some money, and start recording some videos. Like, you're a moron. You're gonna fail at that. Yeah, I was strategic. If I didn't work, or if this didn't work for me, I would still have that job because I didn't quit that job.

What were you doing?

I was a product manager at a tech company. Did you hate it? Um, kind of, actually. Yeah, that's why I started applying for other jobs, and a YouTuber almost hired me. Then he didn't, so I did it myself. It was kind of the path.

So what was the job that you were gonna get hired for? The YouTuber?

Do you know Tyler Oliveira? No. Oh, you've probably seen his clips. He runs around and like records like like, "Oh, look at all these Indians in Frisco," that kind of stuff. Either way, I was going to be like a production manager for him. Good guy, but I just didn't get the job, so yeah, but I wanted to be on TV. So you decided, "I'm going to just go and do it myself." Yeah, I just recorded, ordered a bunch of equipment and set up something and started recording Financial Audit, because it was a show I wanted to see, but it didn't exist yet, so I decided to make it myself.

Really? So no background at all in entertainment?

Nothing? No, I was like making stuff, like making music. That's why I went to college, making YouTube videos with friends in high school.

But in an ideal world, would you be making music?

No, I'm way richer then.

But is that what you like better than the actual music?

No, this is so much more fun because it impacts more people's lives. It really does. Like, that's fucking cool. I mean there's a lot of YouTubers, but being able to leave a legacy and actually say that you've helped tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people actually fix their lives, that's actually something special. Yeah, that's something special that not a lot of people get to say. So I don't want to give that up.

That is cool. But do you still do music at all?

Not really. It was like concert band composition. And I'll be honest, I don't think they would let me into the world because I'm right-wing coded. And I, like, I— it sounds like a joke, but it's actually real. Like, they're— if you go on the music side of Facebook where they all are different band directors and different things like that, they're all very, very woke, which is cool. I'm down, I'm down to hang out with them, grab a beer with them, but they, they kick you out. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty toxic, but But no, I mean, for fun I write a little on the side, but my passion is this thing.

Do you perform music or you just write it?

I used to play trombone, but it was mostly writing it. That was the passion. But my passion is building my business now. I have 40 people that work for me here in Austin.

It's really cool. You have 40 employees?

Yeah, we're doing a lot of different things. We have over 100,000 people to our paid membership on YouTube. YouTube, so that's an entire business on its own. It's crazy huge.

So what is the paid membership? What's the difference between the paid membership and the free membership?

It's $10 a month, and they get access to— we put on 3 premium shows that me and my production staff make daily. So we have a whole, almost like, network for them to consume behind the paywall.

And what are these shows about?

It's a variety of things. It's breaking down financial audit episodes. We have a show called Fat and Fatter, where me and one of my talent people or whatever. We test food from different restaurants and rank them based on finances. They're all finance-based shows. So there's just these really cool fun things that engage with the community and they, they love supporting it. So almost 110,000 people a month subscribe to that, which is really cool.

That's amazing.

Yeah, and then the budgeting app Dollarwise that we're building, Financial Audit, and then we have these personal services on our own website as well, so people can apply for personal loans and things like that. So we're trying to really scale something, and that's much more of a passion than writing music ever was. So it's, it's much more fun.

That's very interesting. So you're doing that, you got the Dollarwise app, you have this YouTube thing where people can subscribe. So, but you seem like you've got some plans to build out and to take this even further.

Oh yeah, we want to scale this budgeting app like a lot. We want to really make it one of the top dogs out there and really provide a value that isn't being met in the marketplace. I'd love to build up some other YouTubers at some point. I, you know, we have figured out the algorithm, we figured out what people like, and I want to help other people that want to create different finance content. Finance content is boring, like you said.

Yeah.

And we found a way to make it interesting and entertaining. I'd love to help some other people launch their stuff. And then like the personal financial tools, similar to like what Ramsey has, Dave Ramsey, they have— they connect people with mortgages and stuff. We want to make sure we can provide that, but in a way that isn't so limited and stringent to a strict ideology. So there's a lot in the market that's not being met that I really want to build out.

And for young people, like, to have a resource like that where there's someone who doesn't have a boring, stale sort of perspective that could teach you how to budget yourself and how to like take your money and invest it. And then I'm sure there's a ton of online platforms that show you how to cook. They can show you how to shop, how to, you know, how you can save money by going to grocery store and what's cost-effective and getting your nutrition in, but also saving some money. Yeah.

What's the question?

I'm sorry. No, so it's like, it's a beautiful time for young people if they access these things. I'm just saying that like for young people that are listening to you and like, I don't know what to do. Oh, you're right. Oh, I do spend like, let me look at the amount of money I spend just getting DoorDash. Holy shit. That's actually a large percentage of my check. And how much would it be if I just went to the grocery store once a week and I got all my food for the week? Jesus Christ, I'd save $300.

Here's the reality. You don't get to have fun if you don't have a fully funded emergency fund. Fund. That's a basic reality. Only 60% of Americans can cover a $400 emergency, meaning 40% can't. That's $400.

So what do you— when you say emergency fund, like, what do you consider an emergency fund?

So there's a debate between 3 months to 6 months of everything you need to live for a month. I'm on that 6-month side because, you know, things like the pandemic and shutdowns, we're in that kind of world now. So we may as well go that full way, get a 6-month emergency fund. That protects you in case of layoffs or just losing money or a medical emergency, whatever it may be. You got a lifeline. But that's basic. Like, that is so critical to life for like a sick pet or a broken car that if you don't have that, I don't want to see you in a drive-thru. That can't be acceptable. Going on a vacation is not acceptable if you can't protect you and your family at the basic level. I'll give you a little bit of grace if you're not fully investing. OK, but this is like basic survival shit. It needs to be just as critical as having like a first aid kit in the house because it's that serious. And that's what causes Americans to just fuck up their houses financially. An emergency happens, a layoff happens, and they're not ready. It's scary and people are not ready.

I know, it's like that— the problem is hearing that with young people, it's like, that's boring.

It is.

I know they don't want to think that way. They just want to go have fun. They want to play video games. They want to go to the bar.

Which is fair! But a 6-month emergency fund isn't that crazy. It's not saving millions for retirement. Do that, then have some fun. Get to 3 months, then have a little bit of fun while you're saving to 6. Just that. Or at least, at a minimum, be able to cover your highest insurance deductible. Or like a 1-month emergency fund. Have something. The fact that 40% don't have $400— set aside, not for a rainy day, for an actual emergency, is terrifying.

Yeah. So now, what are your thoughts on crypto?

I like crypto. I have a small amount of Bitcoin in my portfolio. It's pretty good. 10% of Americans use it as an investment tool. So it's still pretty small for the overall American public. But I mean, I, I like it in general. Have we hit the full bubble and pullback? I wonder.

Well, it's the crypto outside of Bitcoin gets very odd, like meme coins. And you know, I'm heavily invested in Melania coin.

I don't know about you. No, not personally. I'm kidding. Not in my portfolio.

But there's like things like that where like, what's going on? Like, who, who's putting their money into the Hok Tua coin?

Yes.

You know what I mean? It's like, this is— it's a very weird gambling thing we're doing.

Mm-hmm.

It's like a legal pyramid scheme.

Yes, exactly. And it's mostly just used by people for a get-rich-quick. Real quick. I don't even know if she made money.

I think she got fucked. I think she got fucked and her reputation got destroyed. Like, people hated her. They're angry at her afterwards.

And yeah, she gets like 5,000 views a video now. It's pretty brutal.

I think she got sucked into this idea, you know, somehow or another that was gonna be okay. And they're like the people that got sucked into the NFT thing. I mean, man, how many conversations did we have about NFTs where I was trying to get someone to explain it to me? Like, no one can explain this to me in a way that makes sense. Why I can get that same picture and put it on my phone and it's free, but you have that picture on your phone and you own it.

Yeah. And then it died in 6 months. Right.

So, but that was one where I was like, what are they trying to sell and how are so many people buying it?

Yeah, where you—

if you can't explain to me what you're selling, but yet millions of dollars. I know a guy who made over a million dollars in art NFTs.

Yeah, no, it's an actual thing. And I think what every single person that gets in every pump and dump thinks they're gonna do is get the pump but not dump. Yeah, I think they're gonna be that exception. They're not gonna be. It's like day trading. Day trading is even better, and that's still only 85 or 15% win. Only 15% win day trading, which is higher than you'd think.

Yeah, wait a minute, so 85% lose at day trading?

Yes, actual like day trading, like intraday trading. It's brutal. Holy shit, those pump-and-dumps are even worse. But everyone's a special little snowflake. They think they're gonna be the one, they're gonna beat the system. Yeah, it doesn't work. But I think there's some good value in like Ethereum or Bitcoin. It's actually being utilized—

Aren't these meme coins also a good way to launder money?

Oh, well, launder, actually, that's interesting. I bet. I wouldn't be surprised.

So certainly distribute money to people. Sure. Like if you made a Caleb coin.

Yeah.

And I said, yeah, what do you think? I got an idea. Why don't you and I collaborate? I'll finance your Caleb coin and you dump out early and you get all this money from it and fuck all these other people that thought they were gonna make money and they're not going to anyway. And now you've got that money, and now we're gonna work together to do something else.

And yeah, no, it's crazy.

It's a way to move money around in a way that's not directly financially compensating someone, but yet you are.

And there's entire websites dedicated to the pump funds. I think it's like pump.fun. Really? Pump.fun, something like that. You can make a coin, you can invest in one. It's all for pumps, but they just— everyone thinks they're gonna be a part of the pump, not the dump. It's crazy.

But it's— this is the Wild West of unregulated currency. Yeah. And my fear is people are going to eventually wind up being stuck in a centralized digital currency that the government controls. It's attached to a social credit score system, and you know, okay, that's scary. That's a scary thought.

Further down a scary path.

Well, people have actually proposed that, saying that we need this to compete with China. China. I've heard this. Really? Yeah, I've heard this being proposed by politicians. It's quite terrifying because if they can turn your money off or on, if they have it, and turn your ability off or on to buy things, whether you can buy plane tickets or if you're not— if you're problematic, you've done something— that's crazy. But that's where all this control goes to. Sure. It definitely goes to like, what's the best way to control people? Completely eliminate their ability to spend money.

Lock their money up. Well, they'll still let people smoke meth on the trains.

You know, we have a racist system, Caleb, and a lot of these people have been victimized from the time they're young. True. Yeah. It's, you know, I've always said that if you want to make America great, really what you got to do is have less losers. So figure out what's going on, like why there's so many people that are homeless, why there's so many people that are locked into these crime-infested neighborhoods and gang-infested neighborhoods.— and this cycle completes itself over and over again, decade after decade. Like, invest money in that. You want to make the world a better place? Fix all that. But there's no effort to do that whatsoever, and no politicians ever bring it up. It's never a discussion.

Yeah, and it's good to set up incentives, incentives in the system as well. So California is moral on a right— on a lot of things with their social programs, but because a lot of their social programs and everything they've set up and safety net That's their 49th in unemployment. Like, it's not great. The incentive isn't there for people to go out and—

Is that really what they are, 49th?

I think they were 50th until recently.

Oh, God.

Yeah. No, it's not great. But an incredible tech boom and whatnot. But when the incentives are, you know, easy to manipulate and take advantage of—

What percentage of people in California are unemployed?

I don't know.

Let's find that out. It's 48 now.

48.

Moving up. California's moving on up. 5.3%. But that's also 5.3% of people that are actively looking for jobs. Exactly. They drop off as soon as they stop looking for a job.

Which many of the young men are not. They're not doing anything.

And how are they making money?

I don't know. Parents. I don't know. It's pretty pathetic, I'll be honest.

Whew. You imagine if you're a fucking parent and you're in your 60s and your 40-year-old son is living at home with you?

No, I was pulling up some nerd stats before coming on here, and I was reading through Bureau of Labor Statistics or Gallup poll that 40% of people aged 18 to 29 regularly receive help from family and relatives.

Wow.

Which is an incredible percentage of that age group. That's scary.

Yeah.

Again, the incentive is like, I don't know, I don't know. When I was 18, I'm not even that old, I'm 31, but when I was 18, I was so excited to go out there and be independent and be on my own. That was everything. I was so excited to make my way in this world, right? I wouldn't want to leech. I wouldn't want to leech on any system. I'd want to, but maybe that's why I'm successful. I don't know. Maybe I am.

That definitely has a fact. It's a part of of it. It's a factor.

But there's a lot of people that just do nothing and they're not looking for anything else. And it's— I don't think we should— we should support those who need help. I'm for robust social safety systems. People that become unemployed, people that need help getting food on the table for their family, that stuff is important. But if we are enabling bad behavior, it doesn't work. And then we have a failed society because people aren't going and creating things. Luckily, we're not there yet, but I just don't want to head there.

Yeah. And the recognition of human nature is not cruelty. It's just you, you really can't help people all the time. They have to be able to help themselves. And one of the best motivating factors for helping yourself is desperation. Yeah. That, you know, people don't like to hear that, but that's, that's true. If you, if you bail people out every time, they're never going to bail themselves out. And that's just a fact. Yeah. You know, this doesn't mean that like a family that's on hard times, it's down on their luck, shouldn't get social safety nets. Of course they should. That's a big part of a community. A community should help its vulnerable people. It's a part of it. But you also have to teach people how to not be vulnerable. You know, I think that, that's a great part of what you provide.

How does this make any sense?

What does it say?

Just, I mean, it's a—

California holds contrasting unemployment rankings depending on the metric. It ties for the highest unemployment rate in the nation but places second overall for the best states to work due to strong wage policies and worker rights. But that's also probably why a lot of people are unemployed.

Yeah, it means those that get a job have it great. I mean, same thing happens in places like France where they have aggressive unemployment, but if you get a job there with the vacation policies and worker rights, it's like the best thing in the world. Mm, it's incredible. Like, even in Poland, which is one of the more capitalistic countries in the EU, if you get fired, they still got to let you work for them for a month or two. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah, like you have to let the employee you fired work for you for a couple months still. It's pretty brutal.

So they have to still show up?

Yeah, they still have to show up.

So when you get fired, you have a 2-month grace period?

Basically, basically. Wow.

Imagine how bad that guy's gonna perform when he has to get paid and he's there for 2 months. You have to deal with this disgruntled asshole kicking around the office.

Yeah, so that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about performative policies. It's nice. It sounds good. I don't morally disagree with most of anything California does. All I care about is outcomes. But politicians don't get elected based on outcomes. They get elected based on what sounds good in an election cycle. Yeah. What they can promise, the performative things they promise. Outcomes are never tracked. They're not what matters. That outcome is 48th in unemployment. That's the actual outcome. You were a little anti-California when I see clips, and you didn't even know it was 48th.

Faith.

Like, that is crazy. Yeah, like, we should know that. But outcomes is not what's tracked here. We don't track that. It's not in our nature. It's not in the politician's nature either.

Well, it's just such a problem with people that finance, and, and talking about money and talking about jobs is just not sexy. They just don't enjoy it.

Yeah, for sure.

You know, and it's part of the reason why so many people are on these bad paths is that they don't have these thoughts in their head. They don't really understand. And I think that's one one of the more important things about these conversations that you're having is that people do need to hear what the consequences are for fucking up, what the consequences— and that there's a path forward, that you can actually fix your fucking situation.

Everyone— we are so lenient in this country with our bankruptcy protection laws, it's crazy. We are— if there is a place to escape a bad financial situation you're in, the United States is pretty damn good.

Except for student loans.

Except for student loans. 11% of current federal student loans are under default. That's the biggest of any kind of debt category in the country. It's bad, and people don't understand the consequences. And you know what's so stupid? This is what pisses me off, because I have people talk to me about it all the time. They say the student loan system is fucked, and relatively it is, but they get why wrong. They say this is too expensive, I can't pay it, and if I don't pay it, then they're gonna garnish my wages because I went into default.

Default.

Brother, Republican Donald Trump signed in the big beautiful bill the Repayment Assistance Program, which is different than the previous program, but that allows as little as 1% of your income, depending on your income situation, to qualify as the minimum monthly payment. 1%. You won't default. Do 1%. But they're complaining that it's too expensive. They're just not willing to look into the actual reality and just say, hey, give me only repayment assistance program. They just want to be victims, say it's all bad, it's all evil. It's not perfect, but they don't understand why. They complain about the wrong thing. What's wrong is we'll let you borrow whatever you want to get whatever bullshit degree at whatever college you want to go to. That's what's wrong. Every time we raise how much you can borrow for school, schools conveniently raise how much it costs to go to school. When it was cheap to go to school, when everyone's like, back in my day it was cheap to go to school, It didn't— you couldn't borrow money to go to school. It's set in line, right?

Right.

Why wouldn't they charge more for administrative bloat in creating, like, Southern schools have, I think, in Alabama, frickin' lazy river on their campus. It's a recruitment tool. They do that. If you can borrow more money, they will charge more money.

What does it say, Jimmy?

You can You can technically get your student loans discharged via bankruptcy. There's just a few different ways to do it.

But it's not automatic and takes extra steps and proof of undue hardship. Uh, what is that? How do they define undue hardship?

Well, you gotta go to a judge.

So like maybe if you got paralyzed?

Honestly, it's gonna be case by case, but I just— I've looked it up a couple times and you can't— it's not—

It's just difficult. Yeah, it's just impossible. A trudge.

It's pretty rare as far as I know.

Yeah, as far as I know as well. Listen, Caleb, I think what you provide is very valuable. I really do.

And I like—

and then you've found like this new avenue where you're entertaining, but you're talking about finances and giving people like really good advice, like sound advice. And if you don't follow your advice, like, people are gonna continue down the same fucking shitty road and their life will be ruined. Ruined. And I, I think it's awesome that you do that, and it's awesome that you figured out a way to do it and make it entertaining and fun.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

So my pleasure. Thank you, and thanks for being here. And, uh, one more time, your app, tell everybody. Dollarwise, download Dollarwise from the App Store, Android as well, so everything. And, uh, your YouTube channel is Caleb Hammer, just straight up. And then Instagram, all that stuff. All right, thank you, sir. That's fine. Bye, everybody.