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

Caleb Hammer is a personal finance YouTuber. Are we in a financial crisis or spending our way into one? Rising prices, growing debt, and shrinking savings are putting every generation under pressure. But what’s really to blame? A broken economy, bad money habits, or both? The answer could determine whether we’re headed for disaster, or still have time to turn things around. Expect to learn if it is actually harder to make and manage money than ever before, what the hidden costs of bankruptcy are that nobody wants to talk about, why Gen Z is in more debt than any other generation, if most financial problems are psychological in nature, if lifestyle inflation has become a bigger problem than inflation itself, what the biggest financial red flags are when dating and much more… - Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Does Caleb Really Get Death Threats? 5:44 Does Gen Z Actually Have It Harder Financially? 18:03 The Hidden Costs of Bankruptcy 21:04 Why People Fall Into Debt 24:14 The Personality Traits Behind Financial Success 25:37 How Debt Impacts Your Identity 27:29 The Trap of Lifestyle Inflation 36:15 The Best Way to Handle Anxious Guests 39:23 Knowledge vs Discomfort: What Makes the Biggest Impact? 44:26 Why Behaviour Is the Real Fix for Money Problems 49:25 What Financial Milestone Makes People Happiest? 52:14 UK vs US: Who’s Better Off Financially? 01:07:37 What Real Financial Education Should Look Like 01:16:39 The Dangerous Consequences of the Gender Wars 01:21:32 The Economic Risks of a Declining Population 01:26:38 Should a Trillionaire Exist? 01:31:37 The Biggest Financial Red Flags in Dating 01:34:19 How Money Problems End Relationships 01:36:53 How Mental Health Shapes Spending Habits 01:40:19 The Dumb Purchases That Make People Broke 01:42:40 How Damaging is Financial Over-Optimisation? 01:44:56 Is Property Still a Smart Investment? 01:53:43 Is Raising Kids Cheaper Than You Think? 01:55:53 Where to Find Caleb - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  How do you describe what you do for work?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Depends the viewer. If I'm talking to the nice little church lady, I'd tell her I'm helping, helping young folks and some old folks with their money. I'm just talking to a random person on the street. I'd say I'm yelling at a bunch of retards who suck with money and roasting them along the way. And having a lot of fun doing it.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna ask why you get death threats, but you've kind of precluded that.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't understand. Like, okay, if you come on Financial Audit, you would come through a multi-week onboarding process and give me all these things like,

• 0:39Speaker 01

  let's pretend you didn't want me to make fun of your curly hair. For whatever reason, you would tell me that. You would tell the producers that because we ask you.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  Veto it in advance.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we don't bring it up. So and then I get consent to make fun of anything else.

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  Sensitivity about my curly hair.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. So why get death threats for making fun of things that someone gave me explicit permission to make fun of? Makes no sense. It's the being offended on behalf of someone who's not offended. I will never get it. I'm not the person. I've never been that person. I don't understand it.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  The white knighting?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yes. The moral hero, the, you're on your moral horse and I don't know, you want your TikTok community to raise you up, I guess. It makes you feel good. You get views.

• 1:23Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the, my least favorite categories of people are those that their morality stands on the shoulders of other people that they're saying are worse than them. But don't look at how good I am because I don't want that scrutiny on me. Just look at how bad they are and implicitly that makes me feel like a person that's of higher moral standing. It's pretty.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. We had, when we were filming this episode, we had a guest on, on our episode that uploaded yesterday. And I brought in one of my coworkers, employees, also friends, Tyler, black dude, big black dude, very intimidating, could beat the shit out of anyone. And like the guy where you were sitting is a piece of shit racist, like an actual racist. He was like.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  Did you do this on purpose?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Cast him?

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  You brought a black person in with somebody that you knew would be racist?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  So the guy was sitting where you sat and he said, you know, I'm one of those people that says things that need to be said. And I was like, okay, pause. Brought in the guy that he would actually have a consequence.

• 2:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, right. Yep.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he was like, uh, yeah, N word. So I just said that, but you know what? He consented to it. Obviously I wouldn't have my friend go through a situation he didn't like. He even reacted to it on his own stream later that day. He loved it. No.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  Just loves being called the N word. Gets off on it.

• 2:38Speaker 01

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

• 3:04Chris Williamson?

  Kind of blows my mind that people want to step into that environment because it's very intense. It's not opposite someone. Originally it's one-on-one and then it's one-on-two, but there's also maybe someone behind the scenes and you know that there's all of these people on the internet that are going to see you do this thing. The psychology of someone that's prepared to go on a show like that and go head-to-head with someone on their home turf and be an asshole. It's kind of impressive. It is, it is, it is almost impressive. I don't think that I would be very good at, if I was an asshole, doing that and being on this side. It's like, if you are an asshole by design, you're usually trying to keep it quiet. So people don't realize. People aren't advertising their assholery upfront.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  But that's what makes it fun though, is that anyone who's seen our show, or anyone who comes on the show has seen the show. So they already know I'm an asshole. Then they watch two onboarding videos, one they get sent to them, one they have to watch in the green room. And I'm like, hey, I'm an asshole. I'm going to make fun of you. I'm going to yell at you telling me what you don't want to do. So honestly, besides that piece of shit racist, because I actually don't like someone who's actually racist. Every other guest that has come on the show practically, other than a few here and there, I respect the fuck out of. Cause yeah, that's crazy showing up to a show that a lot of people are going to see, that you're going to get goofed on. But they also do get resources and the vast majority do change their lives to the better afterwards. That is the fun effect of it.

• 4:27Speaker 01

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

• 4:51Chris Williamson?

  What is the process of getting access to somebody's financials and how do you know that they haven't kept something super secret behind the scenes that they haven't shown you?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Right. Well, it would be difficult for like a checking or savings account, but we do get them to send us their credit karma with, you know, important things bleeped out.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Their credit karma. Oh, credit karma. Well, it basically shows your credit report for the most part. I mean, it's kind of simulated. It's not perfect. You're not getting your, like requesting your three free credit reports every single year or whatnot, but it's the app that many people use to actually see what's going on and the impact to their new debts they're opening, their hard inquiries, everything like that. But if we get them to send their screenshots, that way we can see if there's debts that they don't even know about, because oftentimes there are debts that they don't know about, collections that they don't know about. So we're able to hold their feet to the fire that way.

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it's genuinely harder for young people today or are expectations the problem?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  It's harder to do certain things. I mean, you're not going to be able to do the single income household thing. Like that's going to be, this is going to be harder things, right? That's going to be harder. Buying your first home is going to be harder. You know, getting your first car might be harder. It depends, you know, how you do it. That one's definitely a hit or miss for sure.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  That, that's going to be harder, but being independent in terms of groceries or rent or getting a comfy office job that is relatively decent paying, like we've never had it better than ever before. Now you can take a snapshot in time. This year, this period in exact time, yeah, for college graduates, it's objectively shit. That's just an economic situation, not a general generational situation. Cause five years ago, college graduates had it great. They were entering the best job market in the history of humanity, essentially. When that pandemic money was just flowing from tech companies, anyone could get a job. But now it's objectively not, but that's a period in time, not a generational thing. So the cost of practically every category of life spending as a percentage of income

• 6:56Speaker 01

  has dramatically dropped since the 1950s, besides a few things that are very important. Buying a house, healthcare and borrowing for school. Borrowing for school, do you have to do that? You know, there's different paths. We can talk community college. We can talk apprenticeships, trade schools. Okay. So there's flexibility there. House, you don't have to buy a house when, you know, if you're a young person right now, you don't have to. And even if you do, that actually might be a worse use of your money than in just investing in the S and P 500. Healthcare, yeah, that one's fucked. Can't really control that one. That's a mess. So if something bad happens to you.

• 7:29Chris Williamson?

  What's happened to the cost of healthcare over time?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Oh, it's just endlessly, the premiums and if an emergency happens. Healthcare is one of those issues that's actually really interesting when it comes up on the show because I get very invested in trying to learn as much as I can about the personal finance categories across the board. But for healthcare, for some reason I've just missed it. Cause this is one of those things that was never my passion. So I never fully dove into the reason, the why and how. I just make sure, you know, I have the general necessity, the, the things that someone would need to make sure they're getting a halfway decent plan through their job and whatnot. Making sure their premiums aren't completely out of control, that they can afford their co-pays, that they have their highest deductible taken care of in the case of an emergency.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  But speaking on the cost of healthcare, you know, this is, it's definitely out of all things in the financial world, not my expertise. And I said, I said that on another podcast that hasn't come out yet. And now that it's come up in two podcasts in a row, in a row, I'm just, you know, I need to educate the fuck out of myself on healthcare. Cause it's very curious. Cause housing, we could talk about housing all day. Cost of college and school, I could talk about that all day, but not healthcare.

• 8:38Chris Williamson?

  It's one of the big three.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  One of the big three.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Housing, healthcare, school. You know a lot about the first, the first and the last, but the middle one is one.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Cause it's a lot more that you can control. So I'm interested in the things you can control. It's very difficult for people to be able to control their actual healthcare situation, whether or not they have a pre-diagnosis or there's only a few plans offering that at work.

• 8:58Chris Williamson?

  Going to an accident.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But school and housing, there's a lot more control and financial audit is more about what things you can control.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that you said as a percentage of earnings, the cost of living in almost all areas.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Including fun.

• 9:15Chris Williamson?

  Has become more affordable.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  Except for three that are fucking massive.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Massive.

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  And those three have done so much damage that they've managed to basically net detract from all of the gains that were made in everything else.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's pretty brutal, but again, with the two that I can speak on a little better, house, you don't have to buy a house. So you have more choices there. You don't have to buy a house fresh out of college. You don't have to go, when it comes to the cost of school, there's so many different paths that include going to school. And that's local four years, that's community college, that's not going to private institutions or going to your dream school because it has the sports team. You're like, it's also has to do with if cost of college is high, you need to make sure you're getting a degree that has an appropriate return on investment. So there's lots of choices there. So those three categories are pretty brutal, but of two of them, you still have choice in it.

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  Gen Z borrowers are carrying more credit card debt than millennials did at the same age, despite growing up with more financial information than any generation before them.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:16Chris Williamson?

  Ninety-eight percent of Gen Z say credit is important, but only 53% believe they have adequate access to it. And more than half of Americans have used buy now, pay later services. Fifty-nine percent of those use this with Gen Z.

• 10:30Speaker 01

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

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me like a. A big part of it is people being so unsure about the future and feeling like things are not going to get better that well, fuck it. It's almost like the end of days. You know, there's this interesting story about during the blitz in World War II in London. The amount of casual sex that people were having went through the roof, but lingerie sales stayed the same. And it was just, people thought, look, I might die tomorrow. It doesn't really matter about how sexy I look in bed. Let's just get down to it. And it's kind of the financial equivalent of that. I'm just going to dump it all, which is this weird sort of recursive system. It's this self reinforcing mechanism that if you have negative information about the economy and about the quality of life for young people and about how hard you've got

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  it and the fact that it's never going to get better, that encourages people to behave in a way that makes the thing true.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 11:57Chris Williamson?

  Kind of wild.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And it's reality.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  It's a self fulfilling prophecy that kind of gets not made out of nowhere. There are real material changes, but it's certainly worsened.

• 12:08Speaker 01

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

• 12:33Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Well, we are stuck in those algorithms. You make money on negativity. Like even, I have a documentary channel, more of a passion project, not much of a moneymaker called.

• 12:43Chris Williamson?

  It's cool. I like it.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks. Called Front Page. Still getting the feel of it, but either way, I mean, the reality is the, the topics that are interesting to talk about are the more negative ones. Super positive content isn't as interesting to talk about. For whatever reason, I'm not interested in learning about super positive, not interested in talking about super positive.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  So it doesn't feel urgent.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  No, exactly. So that's the information that's getting out there and it's the information that catches people's attention, keeps them in the algorithm. So I'm not surprised at all. I mean, nightly news, other than one fluff piece is usually just negative, negative, negative. Even about the heat outside, it's like the apocalypse. It's, it's always just negative. So it's not surprising. That's what drives our attention. So it drives the algorithm. So consumer sentiment will of course be lower.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  Right. And that is impacting people's behavior, which actually brings that reality, brings that imagination into reality or brings the news feed into your finances. Pretty interesting.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, even though consumer spending is actually relatively healthy overall, like this isn't the best year in our economy, but it's also not even close to the worst year. Things are relatively healthy. There's some bad things like I called out, there's the new graduates, bad job market for new graduates. And there's a lot of things at play there. There are a lot of things at play there. There's the nervousness of AI. There was the over hiring during the tech boom during COVID. They've cut back there. And if there's, if there's no people leaving their jobs voluntarily, there's no jobs opening and the people that are leaving their jobs in Texas are the one getting laid off and they're not rehiring someone who's getting laid off. So those job openings that were there during the pandemic aren't there. So there's actual negative things happening right now, but it's not the overall economic

• 14:23Speaker 01

  situation. We're still having okay GDP growth, post inflation.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  The war in Iran, done allegedly. We'll see.

• 14:33Chris Williamson?

  Is it?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  He signed the idea of peace or something yesterday and so did Iran, the leader of Iran.

• 14:39Chris Williamson?

  That's like a guy with erectile dysfunction saying, I've signed the idea of erection today. Signed the idea of a penis. I want to get you to react to a financial case here. Can we pull up that TikTok?

• 14:49Speaker 02

  I've had such a bad financial burden the last couple of years. So after meeting with attorney and doing lots of research, I realized that filing bankruptcy really isn't as bad as it's made out to be. And it was truly going to be my best bet. I decided to file chapter seven and yeah, truthfully, my consumer debt really is not that bad. A lot of people have it a lot worse financially, but for me, $91,000 was just too much. It was uncomfortable and I just wanted to get a fresh start. I moved to Texas directly after high school and I made a lot of very irresponsible decisions financially and really dug myself into a big hole of debt. I decided, let's go ahead and file bankruptcy. Let's give myself a clean slate. That way I can stop stressing and I can actually do better. Okay. Just to give you a little breakdown of the debt that I do have that totals up to the $91,300.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  I owe about $51,000 on the vehicle that I have. We did try selling that, trading it in, all that good stuff, but I have way too much negative equity to come out on top. I bought a motorcycle back in 2022. Thought that was a great idea.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Fucking Americans.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Tried selling it, not able to get what we owe out of it. And I do own a camper and I owe about $13,400 on that.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  She's retarded.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  However, I live out of that camper because I can't afford a house. And so I am keeping that since I do live in it. I have $2,200 worth of medical bills that I had no idea were in collections. And then I have $12,000 worth of student loans. However, those do not get forgiven with bankruptcy, so I will still continue that payment. And then I have about $7,700 worth of credit card debt, all coming into a grand total of $91,300.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  First of all, okay, yes, it is harder to get into a home now. Yes, a large sum payment is difficult to get to. Interest is not great on our house. How in the world does she think she's possibly, possibly, go ahead, sorry, I'm going to scream at you. You're not a guest on my show. Why does she think, in, in what world does she think she is ever going to get to homeownership if she's getting camper motorcycle and a $50,000 car? $50,000 car when she's moving to a brand new state? This is, this is so American. We are so debt brain broken. And she's actually right. I mean, bankruptcy is actually not that hard, not that brutal, a little expensive, but it's really not the worst. It fucks your credit for a bit and it's not a good learning lesson. People usually end up in the same situation they are without changing their behavior

• 17:06Speaker 01

  before going through bankruptcy. So, but she is right on that. But how did she ever expect? She can't get sympathy of not buying a house if she's getting a camper motorcycle and car, of which minimum two payments on the camper, on the motorcycle and car are likely over a thousand dollars together. Like a thousand dollars going against anyone's income, unless you're like in the top 1% is going to aggressively prevent you from saving anything. Remember, she can get an FHA loan on her first house. She can get, what is that as low as 1.5%? Something like that down on your first house?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  How, how would she, how would she surprise? You can't get anywhere. And that also is really stupid, getting their trailer instead of renting an apartment because she's, she's getting debt on a depreciating asset. It's almost even worse because an expense could pop up, have to get new tires. She has to pay rent anyway, likely to park somewhere and get the utilities plugged in.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  No. She's America summed up.

• 18:03Chris Williamson?

  What are the hidden costs of bankruptcy that no one wants to talk about?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  I mean, usually it costs, it costs a couple of thousand bucks to go through it, go through the process and get a lawyer on your side, some court filings. There is the credit impact. There is the credit impact, seven to 10 years depending. And with that, that could really make it more expensive to get into an apartment. Cause that's usually instead of just a security deposit, you might have to do first month, last month.

• 18:30Chris Williamson?

  That includes, that includes rent, not just buying.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, just rent. Instead of just doing a security deposit, like someone with a decent credit score, you might have to do first month, last month as well, which makes it very burdensome to get into an apartment, but you're in a risk, you're a riskier person. You have bankruptcy and a lot of people have apartment collections. So it's not surprising they would request that. You'd have to get into a predatory car loan. If your car breaks down, you don't have money. You have to get a 25% interest rate car. Just a horrible like eight year term. And it's probably some piece of shit car that you buy for 20 is worth 15 before it's even driven off. Then the credit cards you get, you're not getting the, the good intro 0% cards.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  You're like, you're getting credit one cards at 29% with monthly fees, even if you pay on time. So you just get access to the worst services in the world of debts. You're not getting approved for decent personal loans. And again, like I said, the most important thing, bankruptcy doesn't actually fix anything unless you fix your behavior. Cause just like consolidating your debt or transferring to another credit card or even letting things go to collections and negotiating them, just like, just like all those bankruptcy. If you do not change the, your behavior that got you into that situation in the first place, you will literally end up right back there again in a few years. We've had, we've had quite a few upper aged people on our show that have been through

• 19:55Speaker 01

  bankruptcy multiple times and now they're heading there again. Cause it changes nothing.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where function comes in, gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged and you get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym more or you need to play Creed louder in your car, function will tell you exactly where your testosterone and everything else stands. Normally this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with function, it's $365 a year.

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom, using the code modern wisdom at checkout. What's the biggest misconception people have about why humans end up in debt?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Um, well, a lot of it, and it's not necessarily misconception, but it's the wrong way to look at it is because of an emergency. Like, yeah, if you have zero dollars, something happens, you would have to probably go into debt for that. But people don't look at what happened before then. They were living their life, spending whatever they wanted on fun. They never saved up even a one month emergency fund or highest deductible coverage. They didn't save up anything. So of course, when an emergency happens, you're gonna go into debt. But it wasn't the emergency that did that. It was you living your life, not saving up even a three month emergency fund, which I would recommend six, by the way. But it's not saving that got you into that emergency debt, not the emergency itself. It was your behavior before that emergency.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. It, I don't know. It seems to me like a lot of financial success. It has a knowledge component of understanding the physics of the system, but a huge part of it is emotional regulation. What's the relative amount of knowledge versus emotional regulation when it comes to being good with money?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Depends where someone comes from. I mean, so I'm in a place of privilege now, you could say. I have information and yet I look like this. I know what it takes to lose this. This is now, this is, this is, I have the knowledge. This is all behavior at this point. I got the tits. I got the tits because I'm choosing that.

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  Some people pay for them.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Some people do. I would pay to lose them. Yes. I pay to lose them, but instead I'm just not doing the work that would be required to lose it. I have the knowledge, don't have the behavior. So there are people in those financial situations. There are gonna be the people that come from a very different life, incredibly low income, no opportunity in their neighborhoods. No people to look up to, maybe even bad internet. So they don't even get to watch the same podcasts as us. Don't have a good library to go read a good personal finance book. Um, and I don't wanna just victimize someone or infantilize someone, but there are harder situations to come from. Doesn't mean they can't get out of it. It just might be a little more difficult and you need to surround yourself with the right people.

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  Do you find it difficult when somebody comes in front of you and a lot of the time it is because of decisions that someone has made and this illustrious.

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  Like tailwinds that you've had of all of these people that have made bad decisions. And then somebody comes in front of you who has come from a situation which has put them so far on the back foot financially. Do you sometimes find it hard to change gears with them as opposed to sort of pointing the finger too much to actually be like, oh, I see you. I see you in this problem that you're going through and that you've been, you've been put into.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we really only allow people on the show where it's their fault because it's a personal behavior show. So anyone that complains about the people on our show saying that, well, they can't control that. No, everyone that comes on our show, they can control. If someone applies and it's something out of their control, something like an incredible medical diagnosis. That's where we send them like a page of resources and like, if we can connect you with anyone, let us know, but it doesn't make sense for financial audit. Because financial audit is about personal change. So we just, we just don't have those people because that's not the conversation.

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's, going back to personality traits, what do you think of the personality traits that predict financial success?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  That predict the financial success, certainly being disciplined. I mean, discipline comes down to everything.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Everything in the world of budgeting comes from, or money comes from budgeting. And budgeting is all about discipline. So you know, that's why we created Dollar Wise, that personal finance app, that budgeting app. That is made for the everyman, not just like the, you know, super financial nerds who wanna use things like YNAB, things like that, that are incredibly difficult to use. They have the discipline to actually log into that app, connect their accounts to their banks, see where things are going and take the actions. On the advice that's given to them based on their actual financial information that's plugged in. Without the discipline, even a tool like Dollar Wise that is incredibly useful to changing people's lives, you got nothing.

• 25:09Chris Williamson?

  Like you could be tracking all of your calories using macro factor or something, but if you're not gonna change what you're eating, it doesn't make a difference.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's discipline. If you know, people, people are excited when they leave financial audit or they watch financial audit. And even me like a diet, even me like a diet. If you did a fitness audit on me, I might be excited for a couple of weeks. Then, you know, if you don't have the discipline, sometimes you fall back. It's easy to have a fire under your ass for a couple of weeks. If you don't have that discipline for the long term, it's difficult. It really is.

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  What does debt do to someone's identity?

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Well, unfortunately, it turns a lot of people into victims that they're really not.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  A lot of people have more control than they're really willing to admit. What does it do to their identity? That's interesting. Some people use debt to improve their identity more than anything, you know, pulling up, you really care what the person next to you at the stoplight thinks about your car. I don't know why people care about that. I've never cared about that.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  A lot of people use debt to get the clothes that make them look good, the jewelry that makes them look good. Unfortunately, actually that quality tends to come from lower income communities. Anyway, it's kind of crazy how that works, but.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  People use that to change their identity, but then people also use their identity of debt to put themselves in a place of victimhood and like. Oh, I'm in debt. I can't, I can't do anything. I may as well just spend the money. I already have the credit card debt. Let me just put it on a credit card again. What's an extra $10 gonna do to $5,000? And the answer is not much, but it's a death of a thousand cuts. They just think that over and over again.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a very strange sort of death debt spiral where the sunk cost fallacy of this is already bad. What does it matter if it's a bit worse? And also if you're stressed with finances, you probably want something that makes you feel a bit less shitty. That could be food. I'm gonna sedate myself from my financial troubles by further ingraining myself into my financial troubles, which also becomes a spiral of itself.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that was totally me in college, you know, when I had a lot of bad debt. Car debt, student loans, private student loans, multiple credit cards and family debt. I absolutely went to McDonald's, swiped the Chase Freedom card, getting it close to maxing out constantly and because it felt good. What did it matter? It's basically maxed out anyway. What's an actual maxed out credit card gonna do?

• 27:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you think lifestyle inflation has become a bigger problem than inflation itself?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Oh, bigger problem. I wouldn't say, oh, it's a good question. You're a professional podcast host. That's nice. Damn, um, I would say inflation is worse overall. I'd say worse overall because that impacts everyone. That's not your choice, right? It's not your choice, but I'd say on a, on a personal level, yeah. No, that's bad. That's bad. That's gonna, that's gonna fuck you over when someone gets the 20%. No, no one gets a 20% raise. Okay. When someone gets a 5% raise, but increases their spending 6%. You know, that, that is very common on our show. You know, what's interesting? The people on financial audit that are doing worse are the highest income earning episodes.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  People often, um, you know, you open the show with, uh, getting death threats and stuff. That's, and it's kind of minimal, but we do get lots of complaints and stuff about the show. One of our biggest complaints is, you know, I'm yelling and making fun of poor people. Those are actually the people I usually make fun of and yell at the least. It is the high income earners that if they just fix a couple of things, they can get out of debt pretty quickly. But they also get into worse debt because they have a higher income. So they get approved for more debt. They're always the worst off. They lifestyle inflate. I swear, the closer they get from 100 to 200 to even a half a million dollars a year. The worse debt, the more credit cards, the more time shares, the more cars, the more bullshit they have. It's, it's impressive. It's so bad.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  It feels, I think probably incredible to a lot of people that you could earn half a million a year. And have a bad financial situation.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Which I wouldn't be surprised if the majority in the United States did. Who make that much?

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  You have a half a million. Go get yourself the nice house. Go get yourself the nice car, the nice clothes. Why not? You worked hard, deserve it. It's in our culture. We want, we're consumers.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that, uh, the things that richer people waste money on, different to the things that poorer people waste money on?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm trying to get over my fear of flights and I guess I'm rich now. So that's nice. I'm knock on wood with all that.

• 29:41Chris Williamson?

  Does that help you get over your fear of flights?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  I rented a PJ. Tell me. So that's always the money.

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  Easier or, easier or harder?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  So it's a control thing for me. I don't like being stuck in a situation that I can't control.

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how to fly the PJ?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  No, but I can say, let's land. I can't do that with a commercial jet.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, you can, you could make a big enough fuss that you would land, but it would be a real headache.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  And bad for my career too. So.

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  That would be a real headache.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, um, so.

• 30:09Chris Williamson?

  I mean, pause.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

  What was the first time with your travel anxiety getting on a PJ like?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Um, it was for, oh, the PJ itself. It was actually really bad. And we filmed it too.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  We filmed it, it's on the internet. I burst down in tears. It's really bad.

• 30:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm sorry, man.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Oh, it was, it was anxiety. Like, it's not.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't think that you should dismiss it like that, so.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Ah, but it's not like something bad happened to me, right? Like anxieties make believe. It's like, it's not real. My brain thinks it's real, but it's not. So I was crying. I was sad, but you know what was actually making me more sad and crying? A lot of people thought it was out of pure terror. It was remembering a lot of the things that I haven't done, a lot of the family I haven't visited because of my fear of travel.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  Grief, as much grief as it was anxiety.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:56Chris Williamson?

  So interesting point here, there's a guy called Vinnie Shorman, who's a hypnotist in the UK. I have a friend. My friend's name is Sky King. Sky King, right? This guy lived in Hawaii while he was a kid, flies all around the world, loves Asia, been to Japan a bunch of times. Out of nowhere, just developed travel anxiety, bad travel anxiety, tried to get on a plane, couldn't. Bailed out, tried to get on a plane, couldn't bail. I think this happened maybe six, eight, maybe 10 times. And I put him in touch with Vinnie. Now, some people have better results with hypnotism, some people have worse. In a single session, Vinnie fixes travel anxiety.

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  And I don't know what the full story is, but I know that the Simpsons theme tune is an integral part of the anchoring for how he gets over his travel anxiety.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 31:49Chris Williamson?

  And that was real interesting. That was like, it's a fucking cool gift to give somebody to unlock that. But I, I know what you mean. There is nothing wrong. Rationally, in terms of the utilitarian approach view of the universe, there is nothing happening. But your felt experience of, I'm getting on this jet that I've paid money for, that's kind of a momentous occasion for me. It's this landmark as a person who talks about money, doing something that's kind of canonical in everybody that has money's life. And my experience of that has been tarnished by the fact that I've got this thing that isn't me that I don't want in me and is kind of like behind the steering wheel a little bit. I think that's, I think that makes sense.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  But it was nice because I was working with a panic therapist at the time and just started working with him again. Thank goodness, because I need to get over this thing. He didn't let me get off. Like.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  Was he with you?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Of course, I, yes. So I brought him.

• 32:41Chris Williamson?

  How, you brought your panic therapist on the jet with you?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  It was our plan, you know, we kind of.

• 32:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it wasn't like an intervention or something?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Well, actually technically I heard in the day before, so we already decided. But yeah. Um, so we brought him with us. He's really cool and I'm working with him now again and we have, we have a game plan to get over it. But, um, yeah, it was, it was, it was really simple. It was Austin to San Antonio. So it was nothing. I just, I wanted to get on a plane again because I was just preventing myself from getting on a plane. So that's a very quick flight.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  How long had it been since you were on a plane?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  The decade at least. Yeah. So mostly road trips places, but even that still gives me kind of anxiety.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Which is just, I hate it. Um, but you know, we have a game plan. We're doing some things. Want to go be on some more shows?

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  I mean, dude, if some people's exposure therapy is, we just need to get a spider and put it in the corner of the room. Your exposure therapy requires a private jet.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:36Chris Williamson?

  It's a slightly higher bar. It's just as well that you're rich, because if you weren't, you'd be fucked with this thing.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. What really sucks is the same exact model of private jet I was in just crashed in the Laredo, Texas yesterday. And a CEO in Austin, Texas died on it. So that's like, kind of fucking with me.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  That plus Oliver Tree, there aren't many forms of air transport that are feeling pretty safe right now.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  The next one's a commercial. We're doing a commercial next. We're doing some long road trips to.

• 34:07Chris Williamson?

  I would buck, if I was you, I would try and get maybe your row and then one behind one in front.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  I was thinking that.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  Just in case there's a, you know, one of those.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I just didn't want to be around people, but yeah.

• 34:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's also nice. That's also nice. Uh, so you've got some anxious, panicky tendencies.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, really just that one thing.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  You built, you built a show which is essentially high stakes, live confrontation, right? With strangers about their most shameful secrets.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  You're someone who has panic attacks. You run a show that gives other people panic attacks.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that a coincidence or is this just like the most elaborate exposure therapy ever?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  It's great. I mean, that's what people have to go through. They have to go through it. What's actually nice is because of mine and I'm, uh, you know, working with my guy for a while now. Like I can actually work through them pretty well. And now if someone actually does have a legitimate panic attack on the show, I can help them through, which is pretty nice.

• 35:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, cool.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  We just pause the cameras and do that real quick and then.

• 35:04Chris Williamson?

  This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my Whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because Whoop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day, your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps. And over time, you get to see what's working and what isn't. And the Whoop 5.0 is the best version yet. It's 7% smaller. You get more than two weeks of battery life from a single charge. It's got health span tracking to see how your daily habits affect your pace of aging. It's even got hormonal insights for the women that are listening. I'm a huge fan. This thing rules. It's been a huge part of my health journey and it's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, you can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap. And you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below. We're heading to join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. That's join dot whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. What is your process? Somebody is sitting opposite you. You're pushing, you're pushing, you're pushing. They're realizing how, but you actually just explain to me what you think is happening inside of them, inside of their mind. Somebody's got a lot of debt. Maybe they've been hiding from it.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  Like what's their emotion before? What do they get to? And then I'm interested in what you do to

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  bring them back into land as well.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Usually I can tell they kind of just go flat faced in that moment, like they, they disengage their eyes is kind of go blank and maybe even like a little bluish. Um, and I'm like, oh shit. Okay. So we just literally pause. I'm like, hey, you okay? You know, I go from the crazy voice to like just down to like, hey, you okay? Remember, you know, it's like, of course they know it's like real and everything, but I'm like, yeah, we can take a pause, you know, you can take a break. And then I help them do, if they're like actually having anxiety attack, I'll do like a breathing exercise real quick. It's like three in, six out. And, um, that's pretty rare these days, but, uh, and we definitely have people that need to do like a lap around the building. A producer will take them or they need to go outside and hit a vape.

• 37:17Chris Williamson?

  Is that rare? Yeah, hit a vape. That's good. That's why, Jared, I need a fucking e-pipe. For the people that are listening, I require, I want to be able to come up with, I want to be able to pontificate. But I want to be able to do it with nicotine. So if anyone can find me a pipe that looks legitimate like this, but I can have some nicotine in that would be good.

• 37:38Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether part of the reason that you're not inducing as many panic attacks is because you're getting soft in your old age.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 37:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I wonder whether it's because you've taken your foot off the gas.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I just threw something at someone the other day.

• 37:54Chris Williamson?

  You'd be fucked here. There's so many projectiles, so many potential projectiles. Some of them are heavy as well.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Well, honestly, I am proud of it. I think our, our onboarding process is so thorough. We've had people that have, uh, come to work with us or people that interviewed with us that have worked for like Dr. Phil and a lot of other type shows. Dr. Phil's close in Dallas, so that's why, him specifically, but they go through our process and they're like, this is crazy. I've never seen an onboarding process, like, process like this at all. Cause usually for like, I'm not speaking Dr. Phil at all, don't sue me, but many shows like that daytime TV, they don't give a fuck about their guests, but we actually really care because one, they're members of our audience. So a little selfish there. Okay. A little selfish. I want members of our audience to do well.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  You're going to reduce the audience size.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And I want them to do well, whether that's, you know, you could look at it from two perspectives. Pretend like you hate me and I'm the selfless most piece of shit ever. Fine. Take that. Obviously I want them to do well because it proves the show works.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  In spite of me or do it because of me?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  It shows that it works. It shows that the show works. So selfishly that helps me.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  How, what the mechanism is, can be because you don't like me, I'm an asshole, you want to prove me wrong, saying that I don't think that you're going to be able to turn it around. Or because you love me and you think that my advice is worth listening to, how do you turn it around?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, or there's the second option where it's, and that's the real option that I actually really do care about how they succeed. So I really want them to do well and the average guest pays off. It's just over like $20,000 in 12 months of debt after coming on Financial Audit. That's our most recent annual report. We do one every December.

• 39:23Chris Williamson?

  How much of that impact that you have on people's debt do you think is because of the knowledge that you give to them? And how much do you think is because of the intensity of the emotional discomfort that you put them through?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a mixture of both. There is the, that tough love, crazy and fun approach of it. Like I think oftentimes 90% of the time they're having a good time too. Like they know the craziness of the show. So, but they have fun and, uh, it's not for everyone, but don't come on the show if it's not for you. So it's like a show I would actually personally go on. When I was in debt, it would have worked for me. Someone screaming at me, that works for me. It worked for me when I played sports, you know, it's whatever. It works for me. Um, and then we set them up with lots of tools afterwards. They get Dollar Wise for free forever, no matter what. They get all of our personal finance courses. They get a certification through Course Careers to help with their jobs.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  They get access, any kind of resource that we're working with, third party, they get access to. So we try to give them everything and then we check in with them. I don't remember the exact dates, but it's like the day their episode goes live, a week after that, a month after that, and then three months after that. And we do two updates a week with former guests on our, in our Hammer Elite membership. And we're endlessly checking in with them with surveys and we tell them to reach out anytime they want. So there's the mixture of the show and that lights a fire under their ass and the post filming support is.

• 40:45Chris Williamson?

  Post-coital care process.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  I did Love Island 11 years ago and famously the UK series, I don't know whether it's happened in America yet, but the UK series of Love Island has killed more people than any other TV show. Two past stars took their own lives, one of whom was a really good friend of mine.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Then the fucking host took her on live.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  What was going on there?

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  Caroline Flack. Yeah. I just, I'd, once, uh, that's strange, twice, you're like, uh, three times, including the host, you're like, there's a fucking pattern here. Uh, but one of the issues, and this was something that I saw, especially, I think Love Island broke the app store when it came out. It was the number one app in the world, above Chat GPT, above fucking Claude. And like there was shutdowns on servers and shit, like 300,000 concurrent downloads at a moment, like downloading the app to watch. I don't know what, I don't know what you do, voting on it or something maybe. And, um, the post show care routine thing. Cause I did the first, I was the first person through the doors of the first ever episode.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  Right? Of the first season. So. They were, we were the, the guinea pig. We were the first child where you make all of the mistakes. You drink when you're pregnant, you smoke in, like you fucking forget to feed it for 12 hours, like all of that stuff. And um, once you finish up, you should have a support system as you get thrust back out into the world. Now, the first season that I did was like way smaller. It was 10 times smaller than season two, which was 10 times smaller than season three, which it really sort of took off on that exponential. But had it have been even a bit more exposed, there was the least amount of post-show support. Uh, even though it was that much smaller, the post-show support was basically non-existent.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  And then each time that one of those incidents occurred, you could tell that ITV, which is the, the company in the UK that was, but it's channel three in the UK. Right. They have channel three and channel seven. And um, every single time that one of these horrible, horrible situations happened, everybody got an email just reminding you that you have access to the safety and care team, whatever. I'm like, dude, fucking too late, man. You know, like something about the horse bolting and the door being closed, but.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Well, you also probably didn't get the opportunity when walking out of the island to be like, hey, if I do this, make sure it's not in the episode. So it's like you, you were like, no matter what happened. Exactly.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  You do not control the edit. And the entire universe is watching you and commenting on you. And then what matters, you come out because it's recorded and published live, but you only enter back into the world once it's happened. You have no idea what's made the edit. You have no idea what people think of you. You could come out and be the hero or the most hated person in your country. It's fucking crazy.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Should I get into that? Everyone's doing that. Everyone's doing these pouches. Uh, like would I be like so locked in? Dude, no, that's scary. I'm asking for advice first before I go full.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  Those are mine. So those ones are, that's just caffeine. That's just 50, 50 milligrams of caffeine. These, these are very healthy for, better for you nicotine. Those are knickknacks. So that's like.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Everyone in the world is doing pouches right now. Like how locked in would I be?

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  I have a bit of an oral fixation, which I'm sure that the, uh, people that think I'm gay on the internet are gonna love to hear me say. Um, have we got any toothpicks? JB, can you get, if you're outside, Jonathan, can you bring some toothpicks in from the cupboard, please? I want to show those. Just something to fucking dick about with while you're working, I think is very important.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  You've got a pen or whatever. Sometimes you try, I could get the pipe thing.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  I bite my fingernose. That's my thing.

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  That'll do you. Um, what, what income level do people's financial problems fundamentally change?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not saying it's behavior. It's fully behavior. Again, like I said, um, the worst situations I've seen in the entire show are high income earners. Absolutely horrible. So I, I'd say never. It gives you more opportunity to get out of a bad situation. But I wouldn't say the income levels, everyone thinks when they make the next $10,000 in their income, their entire life's gonna change. Their spending changes, but if their behavior is the same, if their inclinations are the same, their lack of discipline is the same. They're actually just gonna be in a worse situation. So I would actually argue that if behavior doesn't change, at the more income level, your situation might actually get worse.

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  Because you now are playing with bigger chips on the table.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  And if you're fucking it up, you've got more access. I did never thought about that. It's such a good point that you've got more access to credit. People think, uh, uh, banks, credit cards think that you are a safer bet because of that, you can fuck yourself harder.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I guess I'll put an asterisk on my statement. There is like, you gotta hit a base, basic minimum level, right? Like if you can't pay for like the cheapest rent in the area, put food on the table, utilities, then obviously anyone that's not making up to that point. Yeah, that's a threshold where it's like game changer, because you're just like surviving. But if you can't even hit the survival, like that's not even in the conversation. But typically we don't really allow for that that much in this country and Western society. And you'll see it, but you know, we have lots of, uh, uh, child support services for low income, uh, food support, um, housing support. It's not perfect. No one's gonna argue it's perfect, but we do have a lot of, a lot of social programs to help those people that are in those lower.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  A friend of the show, Ice Coffee Owl Boys, had Kevin O'Leary on and he gave some insight about where he thinks different levels of income impacts your lifestyle. Can you pull that up for me, Jared? Look at this.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  What would you say are the main four tiers of wealth where if you hit a certain amount of life? Well, I tell everybody this, you should strive very hard if you're an entrepreneur to have $5 million in T-bills. Not in anything else, just T-bills, making 3.82% this morning. You know, you've made it and you've safeguarded your family for the rest of your life. If you can get $5 million liquid in T-bills. Most people that consider themselves very successful entrepreneurs do not have $5 million liquid in T-bills. They don't. But what net worth should you be at to, to justify 5 million in T-bills? Well, you should be, the first thing you should do is get to 5 million liquid, be worth $5 million liquid.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  That's far more valuable than anything else. Liquidity with wealth is actually a superpower. Most people say I'm very wealthy, but they couldn't raise a million dollars by two o'clock in the afternoon if they tried. It's tied up in all kinds of things they think are worth a lot until the shit hits the fan. The plan is, if you're an entrepreneur, the hardest thing is to make the first million really hard. And when you make the first million, put it in T-bills. Just as hard, but not as hard is to get to 2 million. Two to three is actually quite easy because you've figured something out. But where you get undisciplined is you start buying shit you don't need because your man is get to 5 million liquid. I, you have to have 5 million liquid to call yourself a successful entrepreneur.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  And, and I don't care who, who disagrees with me. They're wrong.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  I guess I'll be wrong. I mean, no, I, I agree. One of, one of the first goals I had was to get to 5 million as quick as I could. And, and but invest it in the stock market. I don't really understand, get your first million, put it in low indexing, uh, T-bills.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  What's a T-bill?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Like treasury. So I'm not really understanding like putting it in bonds or something. It just makes sense. If, if you make your first million and you're young, let it grow in the marketplace at an average of eight to 10%. That makes more sense. I mean, I, I guess if you're approaching like 60 and you make your first million off of a business being successful, yeah, put it in something more conservative. But if you have time on your side, unless America collapses, like the stock market's gonna do.

• 48:38Chris Williamson?

  Over a long enough time horizon, you'll weather any of the little wobbles.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, um, but I do agree with that 5 million mark because that 5 million mark, if you do the 4% rules, 4% of 5 million, I think, what is that, $60,000 a year? Something like that. So you live a good middle-class income off of that using the 4% rule. So that works. So that was one of my first big goals. It's, I don't like the idea of taking the first million you make and then literally just not letting it grow past inflation. That doesn't make any sense. If, if you're getting your first million, you should let it work. Have it work for you in the stock market. I'm not saying reinvest it immediately into the business. And certainly he's correct where people start getting money and they start blowing it. He's a hundred percent correct on that. It's just weird to take the first million and put it into something low index, especially if you're young.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Is there a financial milestone that creates the most happiness for people?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, a lot of the happiness that can be achieved through wealth, like you can't buy friends, you can't buy family. So a lot of the happiness that can actually be achieved through wealth, I'd say if you can cover,

• 49:44Speaker 01

  if you can weather practically any emergency, including like a cancer diagnosis, something really bad. If you can.

• 49:51Chris Williamson?

  How much money is that?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, honestly, I think that 5 million is a good marker. That 5 million is a good marker. You can really start pulling into it for, you know, a few years if it's like really aggressive, really bad. You want to go to the best in the world. Um. So with that, you know, you can weather anything and you can, even if you blow through the five, hopefully you make it to the other side and you can start bouncing back. But that gives you unlimited flexibility. You don't get to do the crazy things that are super fun. You don't get to do the, you can't buy a PJ. I can't buy a PJ and I can rent a short little trip, but um, I don't think that's what drives happiness. It's a fun thing. Moment of happiness, but I think the true happiness that you actually can buy is security and 5 million is a really good number to get.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like a massive number for people to feel financially secure.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, you can weather literally practically anything. That's the question. Like you can weather almost everything. Uh, with a few hundred thousand hours set aside, you can, you know, take a while to find a new job if you have a few hundred thousand. But I'm saying, if I'm really thinking like you can weather anything, 5 million is a great number to have.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I, I totally didn't think about the fact that you can afford to invest in specifically the S and P, any kind of tracker.

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  If you're younger, because there's going to be some movements, there's going to be periods of downturn, but over a long enough time horizon. And I mean, if the S and P goes to fucking zero, there's much bigger problems than what you're doing with your money.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll be killing each other.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangey nectar. And I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulates your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they offer free shipping in the US. Right now you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  We're going to the link in the description below. Heading to drink L M N T dot com slash modern wisdom. That's drink L M N T dot com slash modern wisdom. How much shame surrounds debt? And do you think that shame hurts people or helps people change?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  I think it's pretty damaging that in our culture, talking about money is shameful in general. And in debt, I mean, I think it's good to have a good laugh on a TikTok short, things like that. That's fine. But I think if we have a whole system where people feel shameful to even bring up their close friends, their family, or even their therapist, that they're in a bad financial situation. They're not going to get that emotional support. They're not going to get that encouragement that they actually need to change because they'll just be weathering it themselves. That's a very difficult thing. You don't want to, again, going back to even just the cancer thing. You don't want to be going through that yourself. It's almost impossible. You need support. Anything you go through, any kind of support system is good. And if we have a massive level of shame around it, which I would say in our

• 53:04Speaker 01

  country, in our society, we definitely have, people aren't even willing to say what they make.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  You know, they're like embarrassed or they're afraid of thinking too much and people look down on them for like, you'll be jealous, you know? So there's a lot of shame around personal finances in our society. And I think that's pretty damaging.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting as a British person, we have shame, but in the opposite direction. We have shame about talking about how much we make. If we make a good wage.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  So everyone's poor there?

• 53:29Chris Williamson?

  Because there is such a strong tall poppy syndrome that if you're seen to be too big for your boots or doing too well, that can often cause way more ire. It's like an interesting, I understand why people would feel personal shame around talking about being in a bad position financially. What does this say about me as a human? What does this say about my habits? Maybe people are going to think less of me. But there is a

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  a pro-social fuck, that person's down bad. Hey, man, like, I really want to help you as opposed to, dude, I just got this new job and I got a, I got a 30% pay increase. I can't believe it. I've been working so hard for this for a long time. If that's not someone that's got your best interests at heart, that triggers in them not pity, which is not an emotion that people want to feel, but it induces envy, which is way more active. You know, that's the sort of thing that can get you ostracized from a friend group. And again, this isn't everybody, I've got amazing friends in the UK, but I met a million people running nightclubs. I was had one of the biggest events companies in the UK for a long time. Met a million people, right? In person with a tight pair of jeans on, holding a clipboard, giving out wristbands and free champagne.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  I had a handful of close friends that I could talk to openly about everything that was going on, successes, failures, all the rest of it.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  That's not a great friend exposure to conversion funnel, right? A million people, handful of friends.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:58Chris Williamson?

  And that's why.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  At least you had them though, you know?

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  That's no.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  A lot of people don't.

• 55:03Chris Williamson?

  That's true. Yeah. And as an only child, that was like, fuck, like I've got some people that have got me and that's cool. Just the UK is a very inhospitable environment for people that are trying to do things financially. I've got this line, I wonder, whether you agree with it. The UK is a great country to be poor in and a terrible country to be rich in. And America is a terrible country to be poor in and a great country to be rich in.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of poor people move to and stay in the UK. A lot of wealthy people leave. I'd say the analytics just follow that in general.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  Bingo, fucking nailed it, dude. Forget the pithy Mac Sims, I just dialed the entire financial industry. I, there's, there's a safety net in the UK, which moving to America to me feels like quite brutal, quite like.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Why leave the council estate? It's comfy.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  It is. National Health Service, I've got this stat. Britain spends more on working age welfare every year than it collects in income tax.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:09Chris Williamson?

  Working age welfare and the difference gets borrowed every single year.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's insane. And all the productive people that would actually contribute to the tax base are leaving. The, the wealth drain, the brain drain in the United Kingdom is, I feel bad for your country. That's honestly, it's a place where, I mean, the majority of my life, I wouldn't have considered moving there. But there was a part where I was like, oh, this would be the best place to go living because you get the cool walkability of Europe and like the nice, you know, okay, winter and nice.

• 56:38Chris Williamson?

  It's your language.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  And it's your language, exactly. So I wanted to kind of go there for a bit. It's gone. I don't, if the UK comes back, it'll be the biggest comeback story in the history of civilization.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we're like nine zero down at the moment in a game of football.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  There are, you know, I mean, there is the conversation where it's like, yeah, GDP per capita, there'd be 51 state. Did you see that?

• 57:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  I got a lot of shit for putting that.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's true, but there also are.

• 57:07Chris Williamson?

  I've got a lot of shit from Americans.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Well, Americans are retarded. I don't know. Americans are rich and retarded, but there are some other true things. The UK, when it comes to safety and a lot of things, you know, it ranks higher. So there's not just like, it's not all shit. Yeah, it's not all shit, but like, no, it is true. I mean, unfortunately, it's going in the same direction as Spain or Southern Italy. One of those places where it's people go there or are born there, get educated there and then leave to somewhere where they can make double the income. And why wouldn't they? We're such a mobile world.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  Dude, if you're inhospitable, and this is the thing that I understand some of my lefty leaning friends, Jimmy the Giant is one of them. And he thinks that taxing the rich, he means like the ultra rich. He means like a hundred millions plus of liquid or whatever of held asset wealth. But that, that is something that's justified. That's something that would help to raise up the, the underclass and, and people that are unemployed and need that. But I think the bottom 55% of the population in both the UK and the US are net withdrawers from benefits as opposed to net contributors.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:22Chris Williamson?

  Like just that statistic.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Income tax in the United States, the bottom 50% of earners contribute 1%. So 50% contribute 1%. Like, that's crazy. We're a very progressive income tax society in the United States. United States is actually the most progressive Western major country for income tax. What we don't have is VAT tax, which usually funds like the National Health Service and whatnot. So in Americans, Americans, that's the fun thing about Americans, including especially populist Americans, either left or right. We want the Scandinavian social programs, but we want to do it on like a Florida tax system. Americans are not willing to pay the actual taxes required for the systems. And it's never about the wealthy people paying a lot in taxes because that doesn't fund it all.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  It's, it's all about the, the flat tax, the VAT tax, the national sales tax where everyone has to pay extra one, two, three, four, five percent or whatever it is on everything they purchase. That's what funds those social programs and the United States would never tolerate it at a national level.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen what a set of accounts for a normal limited company that has to, that's within the VAT threshold? So I think it's a hundred and $20,000 a year, a hundred and twenty, that fuck, that was very un-anglicized. A hundred and 20,000 pounds a year or above that your limited company makes. And after that point, you're VAT reg, you're registered for VAT. Have you ever seen one of the accounts submissions? Dude, it is a, as somebody that had a limited company for a decade and a half in the UK. I still do. My rental properties go through that, although they don't breach the threshold. So it doesn't matter. It is a fucking nightmare. Each individual transaction, you charge the person who is getting the service from you, an additional 20%, that's what VAT is, 20%.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  And then you claim back that VAT up to an amount from the government. So it's this fucking auroboros, this endless financially, uh, uh, uh, bureaucratically, in terms of paperwork, it's this huge overhead. And I understand what VAT is for. I understand that we have lots of services that you don't have in America. They need to be funded somehow. National insurance, that's another type of, of tax that's not seen in America.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  But if you do the math, after everything that you get free in the United Kingdom, if you, after people pay for it and the median income here, after the median taxes here, after the median paying for the private services here, we still end up with more money in our pocket in the end.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's pretty close, but it's still.

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  Even with the healthcare is one of the biggest costs, even though, uh, healthcare is the single most common reason that people go bankrupt in America as well, I think.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, which isn't surprising. And honestly, people make it sound more consequential than it is. So as we talked about earlier, bankruptcy is actually not that even big of a deal, really. It's really not. It's, it's overblown. I mean, it's not great. I don't just like, go get bankrupt. Like, that's not wonderful. But it's like, people make it sound like the scariest thing in the world when it's really not. But, um, I mean, uh, I looked into that two years ago. Maybe the numbers have changed today, but two years ago, that's what it looked like. And we still have like, out of a major nation, yes, you're going to have micro states where it's like, Switzerland, you know, much smaller, obviously their GDP per capita and everything is just going to be a lot higher. And those kinds of places are like Monaco, something like that. But as far as like a major nation, large nation, the United States like destroys when it comes to disposable income.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  The income you have after all the importance of after you get taxed and everything, we just lead. Because we just encourage, our system just encourages that. But what's interesting, when talking about the United Kingdom, and you talked about, uh, your more left wing friends that like want to raise taxes and stuff there. What's also interesting on the left, right spectrum is during the great recession, that 2008, 2009, 2007,

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  the United Kingdom went more conservative, where the United States went more liberal with their spending. We pumped a lot of money into the economy. The United Kingdom, uh, I had it in my austerity, they went austerity. And you can see what the outcomes were. We went into debt for it as a nation, but we recovered in a couple of years. The United Kingdom's GDP just recovered from 2007, I believe, like a year and a half ago.

• 1:02:30Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Two years ago. Yeah. So the, their more conservative approach of spending, uh, raising taxes, cutting spending there in the recession, it failed. It objectively failed across Europe and the United States, you know, Donald Trump, COVID pumped a lot of money into the economy. We're very liberal with our spending. Yeah, we, we chuck the money in. So it's, it's, you know, we're, we're pretty progressive. I mean, 50% of our federal spending, yes, it's mandatory spending. It's not, you know, whatever. It's still social spending. So left versus right, it's not, it's not always, you know, one side's going to always be in the right. Cause the more right wing running of their federal budget in the United Kingdom failed.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  When it came to the great recession, it just, it destroyed, it destroyed the economy, destroyed productivity, destroyed spending.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, even that now has kind of become quite squirrely. Cause when you talk about conservative spending, a lot of the time that's more pro capitalist, that are more prepared now to turn the money printer over. So it's the, like, existing archetypes of what it even means to be left and right. Pick any, pick stuff about which races you do or don't like, which cultures you do or don't like, which religions you do or don't want inside of your country. Like everything that you, the whole like tectonic plate underneath what used to be stereotypes and cliches, that's all moved.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Oh, completely. I mean, you, you do see it in race. It was the more, uh, nineties liberal, which I'm probably more aligned with on this, uh, perspective of we wanted to color blind society, you know? And it was the more right wing people that were like, well, no, we see, you know, they're different than us, you know? And that kind of stuff, like, I don't know about the nineties at that point, but even still, that was the more nineties liberal perspective. Now it's the more centrist, even right wing position, colorblind society. And people on the far left are like, no, we need black dorms, we need black graduations. We see race first, no matter what. And it's, it's very interesting how that shifted. And I don't think with bad intention, to be clear, I don't think they're evil for that. But I do think it's, um, sometimes when people get to the extremist, they horseshoe around.

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. It, the far left and far right end up looking a lot closer than you'd think.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Chris Williamson?

  That, just going back to the bottom 50% contribute 1% of the taxes. But then when you net it down in terms of what's given all different kinds of types of aid and assistance, I think it's up to the bottom 55% and net detractors.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. And with, we have systems made for that. The child tax credit is made for that. It is usually lower income people that have more kids. That's just how it is. And lower income people pay less taxes, but they get the same child tax credit. So this is more money is going to go to them in the end.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that would surprise most people to find out that the bottom 55% of the population and net detractors from the benefit system as opposed to net contributors?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, absolutely. Listen, I can, I, every time I take a political compass test, I find myself on a centrist, you know, slightly leaning right economically and then decently left socially. But I had like an extreme socialist on my show the other day, episode's not out yet. And I was talking to her and I was like, how much is the top 1% paying taxes? She says, nothing. They pay 0%. I'm like, no, it's like 30% of all income taxes. Top 10% pays like, uh, 50%, top 50% pays 99%. It blew her mind. She has no idea because we're in such misinformation, algorithmically defined places on the internet. There was a study done, uh, by some elite university, um, on the east coast where they were, researchers were going into TikTok and engaging with left wing content.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  And then a different one would do right wing content. And TikTok immediately found out in about three minutes whether you wanted, if you're anti-men or pro-left or anti-woman or pro-right. And they would just put you into that camp where all of a sudden, all the information you got, all the content you watch was the extreme version of that. And that's all you were getting. Cause you show you engage with that. And if you engage with that, they want to give you more. So you stay on their platform. It makes sense from their business perspective. So it's not surprising at all that people wouldn't be aware of that information if it goes against their worldview.

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

  I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And now they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, backed by four clinical trials. And in those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat while gone. The days of needing to buy a load of pills in the gym parking lot from some juice bro in a cyber truck.

• 1:07:15Chris Williamson?

  But if you're unsure about it, AG1's got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can try it every single day for three months. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, an AG1 flavor sampler and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Heading to drinkag1.com slash Modern Wisdom. I don't know, man. I don't know what financial education, what good financial education looks like. Because the incentives aren't necessarily aligned for somebody who feels like they're really struggling, who's comparing where they are financially to where they think their parents were at their age, where they think everybody else is at their age, what they think that they should have.

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  So past generations, other people and my idealized version of where I want to be, all of that bundled together, you saying, well, actually the top 1% of earners, they contribute 30% of the taxes. And the bottom 50%, they're actually net detractors from the, the system of the.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  That doesn't make me feel any better. Like, it's not a comfort to me to take a macro perspective when my micro experience sucks.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's why financial audits about the perspective of the individual and their responsibilities and what they can change. Cause you know, some people comment, why aren't you talking about the systems that fucked them in the first place? And I'm like, that's not what this show can change. You can go vote. Congratulations, you contributed to changing the system that you want to do. But the reality is, on that show, only one person can change what's happened in that person's life immediately. And that's that individual. So you're right, talking about the system, it doesn't help anyone on that personal level. It's the actual choices there. And there is good news. The United States is actually taking a pretty important step towards it.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  We're close to 40 states that now require a personal financial education course to graduate high school. It's close to 40 states. It wasn't even half of America just a couple of years ago. So.

• 1:09:13Chris Williamson?

  Have you had a look at the syllabus? What do you think of the syllabus?

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  I haven't looked at it, but I mean, the governor of Michigan came on the show and you know, she wanted to talk about it. And you know, uh, she's Democrat, she's probably going to run for president. And I was very impressed with how much she actually cared about making sure people needed to learn about basic personal finances before graduating high school. I think that's important and I'm glad to see that we're doing that as a country now. I don't know about you. I don't know what the grade system is like out there in the United Kingdom. But I was a fucking retard who didn't give a shit about school. I would have done whatever the minimum thing required to pass that school and I would have, or that class. And I wouldn't have learned anything if I was in school.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, other than the things I was actually interested in, which is mostly history classes and music classes at that time. I did the basic bare minimum to pass and I wouldn't have learned anything. So there is that consequence, but at least we're trying.

• 1:10:08Chris Williamson?

  If you were to put together a syllabus of principles financially to teach young people, what would be the biggest ones?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  It would start with budgeting, because if you can't budget, there's nothing else. So, um, budgeting is that. And we talked about the discipline, personal responsibility. That's a little harder to teach in school, but at least learning how to budget a household. Uh, starting with something like the 50, 30, 20 method, which is 50% on needs, 30% on wants, 20% on investing. Smallest category is investing. You get to spend 30% of your money on bullshit. Obviously that changes in places like New York, LA, San Francisco, but it's a good place to start from. So teach that concept, teach what is a good car loan to get. I enjoy the money guy rule. You put 20% down, no longer than a three-year term. And no more than 8% of your income is the monthly payment. That equals a car you can afford.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Actually teach the value of college and a degree instead of saying everyone needs to go to college and borrow as much as it takes to get whatever degree you want at any institution you want. Instead, teach, okay, a good general rule is don't get a degree of which you borrow more for. Then you'll get in your expected first year's salary. So that's a good rule.

• 1:11:17Chris Williamson?

  That's nice.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a good rule to just not borrow more than you need. What's?

• 1:11:21Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how America stacks up in terms of different courses, different universities. Can you give me some examples of low, medium and, and high and what would be expected? Cause I, there's no way. I've seen some of the fucking student debt bills.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it's bad.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  There's no way that somebody's gonna, some people wouldn't even earn that back in five years of being at work.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  If they had zero costs and all of the money went back to their student loan.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so strictly thinking college, let's get rid of trades or anything like that. Community college, you can go there for two years. You can get your basics out of the way. In fact, a lot of community college, you can get your four-year degree now at like nursing and whatnot. Uh, Austin Community College here, you can go for like a thousand bucks a semester, 2,000 bucks a semester. Super affordable, super cheap. Many people can work their way through it. And that's in Austin and it's, it's similar in other areas. Uh, from there you want to transfer, if you're going to transfer to an, uh, institution, uh, more affordable, just standard, maybe directional school like Western Texas. You know, something like that. I went to Western Michigan, um, university where it's a little more affordable and you complete your final two years there. And you take federal student loans for that.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  And the big question from, well, okay, uh, to finish your question. So the four, that more directional school, finish your four years. But beyond that, then you're talking like you're going out of state at a four-year institution, skipping community college. Out of state's like double the cost. Then you can go beyond that. Then we're talking private institution. You actually go beyond that and think, uh, uh, international, which is why people really care about rankings in the United States. Cause that gets international students, they care about rankings and they'll pay an extra premium to go to schools in the United States. So that's why they really care. Um, but I try to stay down here, try to stay in that community college for the first two years. And then transfer to the in-state institution. Federal student loan subsidized or unsubsidized, at least you have the protections with federal student loans.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Really try not to go private. The only reason you'd be going private is because your family already makes a decent amount of money. So that, that's how I would approach it. And then it's degree selection. That's the important one. You have to look at the field you're going into. A lot of the, um. Unfortunately, there is a big gender division and this isn't anti-women. I don't want to be on that fucking weird anti-women shit. But there is an actual reality that women are getting lower return on investment degrees in the United States. Tend to get more things like social services, psychology, sociology, things like that, that don't return. Where men tend to really think about the income post, I don't know if it's ingrained societally or culture or they, to be the provider or whatever.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  But for whatever reason, they tend to go, you know, more engineer, uh, things like that. And women, you know, more teachers. So. Uh, that's really important to think about the degree and the return on investment. And now honestly, a thing to probably consider is how, how AI resistant your career feels going to be. Who knows where that's going to go?

• 1:14:10Chris Williamson?

  I think unfortunately women are going to be hit hardest by that. So there is, uh, it's referred to as the lanyard class.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  You're looking at your responses to tweets? Who cares if people are getting mad?

• 1:14:40Chris Williamson?

  I go on that once every two days and I see what fewer has occurred within the last 48 hours.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  They don't matter.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  I post and ghost, but it's just interesting to see what the sentiment is.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:51Chris Williamson?

  How close to a third rail or beyond the Oberton window is this thing?

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  The internet is not real life. So it's just so hard to take in account what is said.

• 1:14:58Chris Williamson?

  Very true.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  This last election and midterms, I swear, it all went opposite of what you saw on Twitter. Like you were gonna think all these like out, uh, outsiders were gonna win because they're so big on Twitter. It was nothing. It was nothing. Don't look at your response.

• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  The sexy campaign on social media is not middle America who are voting and actually have the time and the, uh, preparedness to be able to go out and have registered and are fucking ready to go.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, I said, uh, uh, we've just got ourselves now, we've, we've overshot it a little bit. I think women out earn men up to the age of now about 32, 33. It's about 1,111 pounds more to 29. I don't know what it is after that. And only then does it, but that has grown. It was up to 29, now it's up to 32, 33, I think for women out earning men.

• 1:15:47Chris Williamson?

  Given that you've just about reached young people, gender parity between men and women in terms of earning. You are now about to see that what probably to women feels like we finally arrived economically.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Majority of degrees.

• 1:16:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree by 2030, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Master's degrees even more.

• 1:16:12Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Uh, PhDs also more, but not more, more.

• 1:16:18Chris Williamson?

  That situation of parity is maybe going to be at risk. And I think a lot of fingers are going to be pointed that, um, we just arrived and now robots built by men. Have just taken our opportunity that is still so fucking green that we haven't settled into it away from us. That I think is going to be one of the biggest stories of the next decade. I mean, there's going to be many. But one of the ones that people are going to feel the most is more war between the sexes.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Oh yes, the gender wars are so extreme.

• 1:16:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  The political division right now in the most recent, uh, federal election. The gender divide in the generation Z is further than any other generation in American history. It's, it's, it's, it's scary. I'm actually scared and it, it's impacting more things than this, that. Uh, it's impacting reproduction numbers, which impacts the overall economy. It impacts retirees, the retiree to worker ratio if people aren't fucking. And people aren't fucking, people hate each other. Now they have, um, you're swiping based on political affiliation on the dating apps, you know? Uh, so it, it is very scary and it's sad to see. And unfortunately, again, it is usually like the white women that are calling me fascist online. For personal responsibility, finances.

• 1:17:33Chris Williamson?

  You're in, you're in very good company with regards to that here.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like, uh, it's a, it's really weird because I really just want the best. And we're talking about statistics or anything isn't sexist. It's not.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, uh, this was from my newsletter this week. Asian women now earn more on average than white men in the U.S. A finding that adds a wrinkle to common narratives about patriarchy and white supremacy. Asian women are winning.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sure. Of course. And like, I understand there's the history, right? So you gotta put. Many people feel burdened by history. I get it. Victimhood is easier to have than, you know, saying like, ah, we're doing okay now. I think, I think it's, it's very, there's two, there's two sides on that more. Uh, I guess if you have to put it in a camp, right wing perspective is like, you know, oh, everything's good now. So, you know, we don't even need to think about what came before, right? It's like, okay, but there is an actual history. And then on the left wing side, that's just as bad is like, they don't even recognize that there has been progress. It's all victimhood. It's all bad. Women are oppressed, all this stuff. It makes no sense. Have to acknowledge the realities of history and you have to also recognize when we're trying to change society,

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  that we actually have changed society and people are doing better than before.

• 1:19:18Chris Williamson?

  The thing that's kind of an unseen cost of always looking with a historical context that forgets the present. Is that it actually denies people who are in a good situation from ever feeling like they're in a good situation.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  You go, hey, hey, you fucking arrived. I get it. Burdens from the past, uh, uh, things that need to be remembered. So we don't fall back there. The main fear is if we, if we don't keep talking about it, maybe we'll go back there, right?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:19:48Chris Williamson?

  That keep a weather eye on that. Make sure that that's happening. But if you make progress in the present always muted by what, where it came from in the past, you never actually give people the gift of feeling the opportunity for celebration.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Couldn't agree more, but you're evil for saying that. So.

• 1:20:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm aware. It's fine. I've been called a lot. Uh, people aren't fucking. Caleb Hammer, like that's the, I did, I did a four hour debate about the birth rate decline. Uh, I could have just.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Who?

• 1:20:18Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it was, uh, Stephen J. Shaw, who did the birth gap documentary, uh, Simone Collins.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Did they say people are fucking because they're not?

• 1:20:25Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, it was a demographer, a pronatalist and a statistician. Uh, it was broadly, broadly in agreement, although the reasons were what was being debated. It was kind of, I've been deep down this rabbit hole for a while.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Which if anyone knew the actual reasons, we would be able to fix it, right? And every country has tried to.

• 1:20:45Chris Williamson?

  Throw a lot of money at it.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Things and it's, it worked in Hungary for a year and then it fell back. So.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  Correct. There's, there is a number. So Lyman Stone would be an interesting one for you to talk to from a like economic implication. He's like Institute for Family Studies, which you may have referenced at some point. He's the man when it comes to these, like tip of the fucking spear. There is a number that you can pay people to fix the birth rate and it's not that much. But it's fucking loads compared with what we spend. It's like 10% of GDP.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  It's a lot. I mean, it might be required at some point, right? Cause that's like collapse of human civilization at some point. I don't think, you know, luckily the United States were like generally pro-immigration. People want to move here. So we'll be fine. But places like, uh, South Korea are done.

• 1:21:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. For every hundred South Koreans will be four great grandchildren.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Chris Williamson?

  96% gone within a century.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  What's this saying?

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  So have you looked at, um, the economic implications, sort of macroeconomic implications of a, a declining population?

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm more focused on the retirement. When we were, um, uh, these numbers, I'm going to have to be a little fuzzy on, because it's hard to remember exactly. But when we first started a so, a social program called social security that has good intent, not an evil program, mismanaged, not smart in the end. You know, we had like a worker to retire ratio of like a hundred to one. What are we at now? We're like, uh, it's cost like 10 to one or something. You could have these numbers. But the, the closer and closer we get, the more burden it is on the individual. And if you have social systems that are solely reliant on a growing population, growing tax base, it doesn't work. They fail. So all the social programs are starting to fail. You're seeing them starting to buckle.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Social Security is going to have a mandatory 25% cut in 2032 is what's projected.

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  So when there were more workers, we were contributing more money than was going out. So that money was starting to build.

• 1:22:34Chris Williamson?

  Because old people don't work, but they do need caring for.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which makes sense. And the, that social security, uh, fund was starting to build. But where was it? Like around early 2000s or something? We started to take more out of it than was going in as the baby boomers started to retire. And also there's just less people replacing them. And by 2032, unless the retirement age changes, unless the cap on social security tax changes, unless we.

• 1:22:59Chris Williamson?

  Reduced. The cap on social security would be brought down.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  Or, or we also cut benefits to those who are already high incoming, you know? All controversial for different reasons, whatever. That's not the point, but unless something changes, the fund goes to zero. And then the only money that goes out is the money coming in. And that's projected to be a 25 ish percent cut by 2032.

• 1:23:19Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me, that's going to be unpopular.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Oh, it's good. Whoever's president is going to get killed. I mean, it's going to be bad. We'll probably just, honestly, the probably right of law will borrow the difference and our debt will just go even further. Probably what's going to happen. The last time we made a compromise was during the Reagan administration, if I'm not mistaken, where they barely wage, raised the retirement. You have to remember the average lifespan for.

• 1:23:38Chris Williamson?

  What is it now? 65?

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, right around there. And we raised like two years. The average lifespan for when we started social security was like, if you actually make social security, you're going to live for another two or three years. Now you're going to live a couple of decades. So it just doesn't, it doesn't make sense anymore. It, even though it's super unpopular among the highest voting base, the boomers, social security retirement age, for what it was actually intended to when FDR signed it into law, should have been raised almost like 70 by now. Which sounds evil.

• 1:24:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Does anybody like the idea of working and working and working? This is, I've still not been able to thread this needle properly. I've done four hour fucking discussion with the best on the planet as far as I could find to talk about this stuff. Endless episodes with Steve and I've had Lyman on before. I've had Simone's husband on, people that are skeptical, critical, all this stuff. I'm like, dude, like, if you care about the quality of life of people, more people are going to be old in the future than ever before. We're going to have more old people than ever before. And where do you think the money to support them comes from? Like, do you want grandma? And nobody, I've said this gazillion times, nobody should have kids that doesn't want to have kids. Nobody should have kids that doesn't want to have kids. There is a more extreme position than that, which is it's your duty to have kids to feed the economic engine.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  I don't subscribe to that view, but like, just the fact that birth rate decline is not a problem is kind. We, we shouldn't, we shouldn't consider it, especially from a left leaning perspective. We shouldn't consider it because it's good for the environment. Like.

• 1:25:11Chris Williamson?

  I, I've really, I've really struggled to thread this needle like properly.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  It's a hard one. The thing that disappoints me is, you know, before I was even born, right around when I was born in the nineties, they considered taking that social security fund and having it, having that money get put into something like the S and P 500. Which at this point it would be insanely large and we would have enough money to do whatever we want. We would have like a Norway level, uh, sovereign wealth fund. It'd be incredible. Cause Norway is actually capitalistic and smart with their money, apparently via the government. But we said, no, let's tie it to the low T bills like Mr. O'Leary was talking about. Which is another reason why I'm against like low T bills. Cause guess what? Didn't grow. Now it's being drained.

• 1:25:51Chris Williamson?

  I saw some stats around, uh, Sam Bankman Fried's investments with FTX. Anthropic was one of them. I think SpaceX was another one. And because during administration bankruptcy, whatever the fuck it's called. What's it called? Liquidation? Like when we sell it all, sell everything, get the value of it right now and just give people the pennies on the dollar to what it is that they're owed by this bank that goes under, that was run by a guy that played League of Legends while he was on Skype calls.

• 1:26:21Chris Williamson?

  If they'd held to now, everybody would have got their money back. I mean, you could have paid people probably double, triple, quadruple. Their investment in Anthropic is worth like a fucking insane amount of money. The same thing goes with SpaceX IPO that just occurred. That's a question. What do you make of having the world's first trillionaire in existence right now?

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of people are very angry about it. Um.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of, I'm happy that you can get rewarded in this country for the things you do. We're getting internet beamed from space. I love my Tesla. The self-driving is insane. If people haven't been in a recently updated self-driving Tesla, like you can read, eat, drink coffee, scroll on TikTok, and the car will get you somewhere perfectly fine without looking at the road. It's one of the crazy, that's technology no one would have even dreamed of 20 years ago. The things that we're doing, the private space, like, I think you should be rewarded for it. Trillions a lot. It's crazy. But even if the argument is you're against someone being a trillionaire, what's then the action? The action is you're forcing him to sell a position of his own company. You're saying, we're taking a gun and we're saying,

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  you must sell a position of your company to pay tax on it. I'm against that as a philosophy. That doesn't make sense. Should a trillionaire exist? I don't know. But if you decide the answer is no, the actual action that comes from it is worlds worse than whether or not a trillionaire should exist. Forcing people to sell their companies, crazy.

• 1:27:52Chris Williamson?

  It's a really interesting argument. I understand inequality is one of the craziest distorters of human behavior. So, one example from Candace Blake, who's out in Australia, she looked at levels of self-sexualization and beautification of women and correlated posts on Instagram and Twitter at the time with the geolocation it came from and looked at the wealth inequality in that area. Women that were in higher wealth inequality ecologies posted more sexy selfies, did more self-beautification and more self-sexualization. The reason for that, her theory, was when you see both how high you could climb and how low you could fall, if you pick the right or wrong mate, that on average will be at least contributing

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  to the household or maybe the breadwinner and the primary provider for you and your future family, you start to turn on the taps in terms of the way that you work. And that's one example in one very small niche of one very small study, when globally, everybody is now aware that there is a guy on the planet right now that could lose a trillion dollars and still be the richest man on the planet, that you and me and everybody is closest to the second richest man in the world than the second richest man in the world is to the first richest man in the world. That is deranging. It's deranging to the way that people see their place in society.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  It is. I just try to put it in perspective. And if the thing, the thing is, I do well. And I'm okay with paying more in taxes if that's the argument. I'm not okay with it if we're not even able to investigate fraud, if we're not able, blah, blah, blah. You know, there's a lot of things. The bureaucracy is insane, fucking. So, I'd rather not pay more in taxes until we actually get our shit figured out. But even still, I would be okay with paying taxes if we say it's going to fund something that's going to help people. But the conversation's gone away from that to saying that man has a lot of money, that's evil, let's take it. That's no longer the conversation. I want to fund something that's actually good if we're going to raise taxes. So, it's, they've lost me at that conversation. And also, they think like, where does him being a trillionaire affect you? For me, I

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  think what actually affects someone's personal life is they have to call a cashier to unlock a toothbrush at a corner shop. That's actually impacting you on a daily life. Zoning laws is impacting you because it's preventing houses and higher rises being built, which impacts your housing costs. Student loans being tied basically to hiring more administrators, that impacts you. There's so many more things impacting you than someone whose companies that he owns, you know, large stakes and went public and they're being valued high, which made his net worth go exponential. There's so many more things to address first than freaking out about that. But something in the human nature, especially of the more extremists, I will say, and more populous, is like, that person has a lot of money, I don't, let's take it. But even if they took all of his money, I think everyone gets like,

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  what is it, like a thousand or two thousand bucks? It's something, it's something that would actually be really nice. And for a lot of people, could be life-changing, but that's one time. It would drive inflation extreme and it would actually just be damaging in the end because then we don't have life-changing technology.

• 1:30:57Chris Williamson?

  Why would it drive inflation extreme? Speak to me as if I'm five.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 1:31:02Chris Williamson?

  Talking to you like you're a fucking LLM here. Can you imagine if you had a Caleb LLM? Just shouting and screaming at you all the whole time?

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  A rapid supply of 350 million Americans spending a couple thousand bucks just out of the gate, like a trillion dollars just pumped into the economy like that. I mean, that'd be brutal. Just look what we did during the pandemic pumping hundreds of billions. So, it'd be pretty brutal.

• 1:31:24Chris Williamson?

  Whilst also sounding like the sort of thing that we would want, but not.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  You need people to spend money.

• 1:31:29Chris Williamson?

  Want in the macro, but not in the macro.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not so much that it drives insane hiring sprees that pushes everyone's incomes to insane levels that pushes inflation higher.

• 1:31:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are the biggest financial red flags in dating?

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Uh, high car debt would be absolutely horrible if I pull up to that TikTok girl we saw earlier and $50,000 car. Financing a $50,000 debt on a car, like, we'll hook up, but we're not staying for a second.

• 1:32:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  It's a big red flag.

• 1:32:01Chris Williamson?

  High car debt. What else?

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Um, I think it's nice for people to off, offer like splitting the bill on a first day. You know, I like being, I guess, the man and like paying for it. But I think it's actually, it's a green flag when people, you know, if they expect you to pay for it, I think is a bit of a red flag. You know, if they're thinking like they're that special thing.

• 1:32:21Chris Williamson?

  And that's why entitlements?

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. It just kind of turns me off specifically. If, when people have that main character syndrome and it gets tied into the financial situation of like expecting things, you know, that's kind of gross to me. Bullshit degree. I mean, less, less.

• 1:32:37Chris Williamson?

  Bullshit degree, just toss that out to the side.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Chris Williamson?

  What did you degree in? Yeah, no, sorry.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  I dropped out.

• 1:32:43Chris Williamson?

  This is not going to work. No, you meet me on an imaginary, imaginary.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Would you date me? I dropped out.

• 1:32:47Chris Williamson?

  Uh, how much debt you got?

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  Uh, 25,000.

• 1:32:53Chris Williamson?

  That's all right. I'd date you.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Nice tits.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:33:00Chris Williamson?

  Um, car payment? Bullshit degree?

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, and that entitlement of like expectation around spending on them.

• 1:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Anything else? What, what, what a.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  Low ambition. I know that's kind of tied to finances in general, but if someone's that ambitious, I don't need someone to be ambitious to want to go make a million bucks a year. But if someone isn't driven in their career or even just hobbies, if they're not driven, what a turnoff.

• 1:33:26Chris Williamson?

  I think going, uh, low ambition, high materialism is the perfect cocktail. It's like, hey, you're allowed to be materialistic, as long as you've got the conscientiousness to know where the limit is and to be able to keep the front of the funnel pouring in.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Yes. You've described a gold digger and we've had lots of them on the show. They're the, oh, I love a couple with a gold digger. I can just, I can just verbally punch all day.

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  So much fun. It's just so much fun. Cause I see the person, the typically, unfortunately, a man, but I've actually had the reverse a few times. But usually the man's actually working, making a lot of money, and she's over there feeling entitled. And I see all the spending in their own statements. I see proof in front of me of her just spending all this money and feeling like they should do all this. Well, this guy over here is struggling, working two jobs. It is just, it is a brutal thing. And the nice thing, the thing that I love about it is seeing that light bulb go off in his head when he notices this person's just using me.

• 1:34:19Chris Williamson?

  How many couples have broken up because of what you've revealed financially?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Uh, very rare on the show. We've, we've had a couple. I had one divorce. It wasn't from the show and it was a couple of years ago, which is a bad marriage, but it's actually pretty rare for people to break up.

• 1:34:33Chris Williamson?

  Should couples merge finances?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  At some point, it's nice to have a joint account that incomes go in and then bills come out of, and then we can send, uh, fun money to our own accounts from there. I think after marriage makes a little more sense, at least common law marriage, because then you have some, uh, some of those protections in the case of death or whatnot. But, um, yeah, I mean, it's fine. It's fine if people want to keep it separate as long as they can actually budget the household. People just usually fail at that without getting insight on the full thing.

• 1:35:00Chris Williamson?

  What's your perspective on prenups?

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fine. If there's like a big wealth divide. Yeah, a big wealth divide to make sense. I think if you're both making a hundred, it's a bit weird.

• 1:35:09Chris Williamson?

  Do you often see financial infidelity, like hiding purchases or debt or accounts?

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  So common. And most people don't think it's actually much of anything, but the other person feels really hurt in the end. They just don't realize it because spending is just one of those things where it's not, it's not viewed as extremist cheating. It's not as extremist cheating, but it does impact the other person that they're hiding it from more than they think. And the moment it's exposed on the show, you can see the pain in their face.

• 1:35:32Chris Williamson?

  It's still trust.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's trust. It's exactly. Trust not talking to the person. It's a lot of things and it hurts them personally.

• 1:35:39Chris Williamson?

  If you're not being honest with me about this, how can I be certain that you're being honest with me about anything else?

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

• 1:35:49Chris Williamson?

  It's a vicious cycle with that stuff. What a.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  Is there a like sex difference in what men and women go broke doing?

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Hmm. Honestly, no, not really. I mean, I'll get a little.

• 1:36:01Chris Williamson?

  Able to be equally retarded in similar directions.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Retarded. I mean, they, everyone loves collectibles. They just get like different. I got little boobas on the women and I got Pokemon cards on the men.

• 1:36:09Chris Williamson?

  Everyone loves collectibles.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, but like, you know, it's like split down the genders, like, like both genders love it. Does everyone love it?

• 1:36:16Chris Williamson?

  One's obsessed with Warhammer forty K and others obsessed with Beanie Babies.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, I mean, you'll get some more frivolous spending. Maybe a guy will put some more into his car. A girl will get more extensions, but it's similar levels of bullshit. What's actually interesting is, you know, talk about young men gambling issues, but the, it's actually pretty similar in terms of percentage, young men and young women.

• 1:36:35Chris Williamson?

  No way. No way.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Men is higher, but it's pretty close. It's pretty close.

• 1:36:39Chris Williamson?

  What do you think of prediction markets? What's your?

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  It's fun. Just like drinking, just like smoking weed. Um, anything like that. I think it's cool. If you can control it, if you know you have an addiction or an addictive personality, you need to keep yourself away from shit like that.

• 1:36:52Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. Mental health issues impacting spending. Is that true? Like shopping addictions and stuff?

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or if you're depressed, it feels good to get that dopamine spike of a quick purchase. Absolutely. Um. Yeah. Mental health affects everything in the end. It's kind of that, that discipline thing, right? Everything stems from the discipline when it comes to personal finances. If your mental health's bad, usually your discipline's going to be bad.

• 1:37:15Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember where it was I read this. I think it might've been the UBI test study. There was two that were done twenty twenty four. And, uh, one of the points there was if you're poor, you can only really get small doses of pleasure from small things. But that means that you're more likely to spend frivolously because you need to relieve the stress. It's that point that we made before, like, if you have not that much pleasure in your life and you're burdened with worry and you don't know what the future has in store for you. Yeah, you're gonna go and buy cigarettes because the cigarettes alleviate your suffering.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:51Chris Williamson?

  It's, there's certain things. I remember there was this example from Sam Harris fucking years ago. It was during the, some of the more crazy race conversations around mid twenty twenty. And I was struggling to see, uh, philosophically consistent arguments about, um, white privilege. And he came up with one that I thought was so fucking cool. And he said, if I've ever gone through TSA and I've had my bag pulled, I've never once thought that it's because of my race.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:38:26Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that an interesting kind of white privilege? I've never once thought that. Like, I, I fucked up. Like, I left water in the water bottle. Or it's a random check by TSA because they've got to do it. Like, this is what they do.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Chris Williamson?

  That is not true if you're of a different race.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Chris Williamson?

  It's just straight up not true. And the same thing, the same thing to a degree is also true when it comes to being poor, that there are these sort of secret psychological loops that people go through about what their financial position means to their identity. How they then cope with that identity with their behavior, which feeds back into the financial position.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Chris Williamson?

  That seems to be the, one of the very unseen death spirals and it's too, it's too complex to put on a billboard. It doesn't sound sexy. Like, what, what fucking intervention are you going to have as a politician or as a, a potential president going? And we are going to teach people how to intervene in their conscientiousness when they begin the downward death spiral of sedating themselves from feeling bad about their financial position, doing things that makes a financial position worse.

• 1:39:30Chris Williamson?

  No, it's, it's way too complex, despite the fact that it might be one of the key driving forces. Okay. How can we, how can we give people? I mean, we do. We give people fucking social media, which is some of the freest dopamine that you can get on the planet. But I think all that that really does is raise the waterline of minimum dopamine that you now need an even bigger dose to be able to break out the top of it. I wonder whether we would be in better financial positions without social media.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  Oh, probably. I mean, we see things, we see the lifestyles that people pretend they have all the time. We like to chase lifestyles. We're jealous. We're jealous people, jealous species. It makes sense. I think that's one of the drivers of lifestyle inflation.

• 1:40:12Chris Williamson?

  And unfortunately, poor people will go broke trying to look rich.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The car especially. Absolutely.

• 1:40:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that, what's the dumbest purchase category that people constantly overspend on?

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Constantly in America, it's certainly the car. Well, and it, it's baked into our infrastructure. You have to drive. You have to drive to have a job to have to drive. Like, that is the reality, but people will over justify how much car they need, needing the new car because of the new safety rating. Like cars would literally kill you five years ago or something. Like, I don't really get that. Um. If fuel efficiency, like you can make some arguments and stuff, especially in times like now where gas is up. But people would justify the heck, again, like her, out of getting a fifty thousand dollar car loan for a car that you do not need.

• 1:40:56Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What is the rough rule of how to work out what price of car you're able to afford?

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  It comes down to the monthly payment. If you get a debt, as long as you put twenty percent down, it is a three-year term. The minimum monthly payment should be no more than eight percent of your income. If it is, then you're getting a car that's likely too much out of your affordability range.

• 1:41:19Chris Williamson?

  Seems like a pretty simple formula.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's easy. And it gets most people that a pretty good car.

• 1:41:24Chris Williamson?

  What does that get an average owner making fifty grand a year?

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Oh, God. I don't know. Should we do the math? I can do the math.

• 1:41:31Chris Williamson?

  Do the math.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Uh, okay. Um, well, shit, then I have to like understand what twenty percent down would be. So it'd have to be post twenty percent. Okay, okay, okay. Fifty thousand dollars because it is gross income. So talking eight, so it's forty thousand. You can do forty thousand, divide that by twelve. So, I mean, that's pretty chunky. Um. No, no, no. Sorry. That's not eighth. I did eighty percent. Okay, so four thousand dollars. I'll write twelve. It's three hundred thirty-three dollars, but you have to come, so as long as you put twenty percent down, it's a three-year, your car payment, three hundred thirty-three dollars.

• 1:42:07Chris Williamson?

  You can probably get a good bit of car for that money.

• 1:42:08Speaker 01

  Decent, decent. I mean, interest rates depends on your credit score. You might have to go a little higher. Then you just need to pay it down quicker and I'm okay with that. You just got to put extra towards it. You just don't have to freak out about it if you're doing that, if you're following that rule.

• 1:42:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I guess a lot of people need credit to build a financial future whilst also struggling to build credit to qualify for it because they lack credit history.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's credit builders now. There's charge cards now where, you know, you put the money on there to spend, but it's building credit. Uh, so there's a lot more resources today than before if people are just willing to look.

• 1:42:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Can someone become obsessed with financial optimization to the point where they make their life worse?

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  I mean, our friend, our friend Graham Stephan, I think a little, right? I mean, I don't know. Is, uh, I don't think he needs to, I love the dude. I love the dude, but everything you see on camera is actually what you get in reality. And he will micro freak out about just a little penny he's gonna spend on lunch or something. And he'd make more money if you use that mental effort on producing a piece of content.

• 1:43:05Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that a hidden cost? It's strange kind of hidden cost of obsessing over finances too much.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  But you know what? He has fun with it. So it's actually probably not making his life worse.

• 1:43:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, because his enjoyment from scrutinizing and saving is greater than the enjoyment he would get from the spending.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Chris Williamson?

  It's this weird, I mean, he was built to be a saving engine.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:26Chris Williamson?

  He's like the fucking LeBron James of saving money.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  But I think for some people, if you get to that way and it's not actually your passion and it's more coming from like, let's say, I don't want to overuse the word trauma, but trauma of like growing up poor. So now you're just freaking out about it constantly. I think that could, you know, hurt your lifestyle.

• 1:43:42Chris Williamson?

  Interesting archetypes of people that grew up without money. I, I grew up without money and, uh, some people grow up to,

• 1:43:50Chris Williamson?

  I've never had this before, fuck it, we ball. Or I've never had this before, it might be taken away. I'm not going to spend it.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  That's us. Yeah.

• 1:43:58Chris Williamson?

  You read Die with Zero by Bill Perkins? Oh, dude.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  I know, but I haven't read it.

• 1:44:02Chris Williamson?

  Really fun. It's three hour read or listen or whatever. And, um, he's just got some interesting ideas that I would be, I know you're doing financial audit. Are you sitting down with other people that are Morgan Howells of the world, the Bill Perkins of the world? Have you got any desire to do that? Because I would love for you to scrutinize financial philosophies from people that have got popular financial books.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  It'd be, it'd be fun, but I also have to acknowledge, even though there's some topics that I'm interested in learning from X was from. I'm no different from just a dude off the street. I'm not a fucking expert. Like, I'll listen to people, but it's hard for me to like push back against a true expert in their position. That's why I like keep into what I do. It's basic. Personal finances is so basic until you get to the crazy shit. So basic until you get to the top zero point one percent. It's this budgeting, control, discipline, low index funds, low cost index funds, target date retirement funds, emergency fund. That, that's the shit I'm into. Bread and butter.

• 1:44:56Chris Williamson?

  You've exited all of your rental properties.

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  Exiting. Yeah.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Um, better return on investment in the stock market all day, every day. No hassle either. I mean, I'm not the one fielding the calls when something breaks, but you know, it's just, every month is up and down depending on what needs to be repaired. And just even if nothing needed to be repaired, the only thing you're taking advantage of is some leverage there, which can be nice, especially if the market booms, but in general, real estate has lost now to the S and P five hundred just consistently. I, I'd love to own a piece of commercial like you do. That's great. You know, you get some, some, uh, quick depreciations on there, which is really nice. Uh, so that's something I'd be willing to get into at some point.

• 1:45:36Chris Williamson?

  I'm unwinding all of the houses I have in the UK except for the one that I, I still live in. That's like, that's still my, my place of.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's a collapsing country, so.

• 1:45:45Chris Williamson?

  That's true. That is, that is true. But I mean, There was a period, and this was sort of what I grew up with. I was very fortunate that when I started doing business, the guy that was my partner was five years older than me and in the exact same industry, very, very financially responsible. And I only child, so didn't have anybody that was entrepreneurial, understanding the UK system and working in the same industry with the kind of cash flow and the sort of pacing that we would get. So I just followed the same path that he was on. And his was every time that you get to about thirty thousand pounds of spare cash, deposit on a buy to let, student property between two and five bedrooms in a good student area, hand it off to a management company, they'll

• 1:46:28Chris Williamson?

  take between ten and twenty percent and away you just rinse and repeat. I managed to negotiate to twelve, but rinse and repeat. Okay, that's, that's pretty good. And let's say, I never talk about money. This is my Britishism, but I've got you here. So let's say, the best purchase that I made was a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, a five bed student property in Heaton in Newcastle, and I would have put twenty five percent down. So I think, I think all in with stamp duty and fees and all the rest of the stuff, I think I put somewhere in the region of like fifty grand down. And that would make, after everything, eighteen

• 1:47:13Chris Williamson?

  hundred pounds a month. And then there would be maybe some repairs that we needed on top. So let's say fifteen hundred, so that's like eighteen grand, eighteen grand a year, great cash vehicle. But what you were really doing it for was to tie, because it's an interest only mortgage. So you were just tiding over, hoping that everything would be kept in. Maybe it would spew out a little bit of cash and that would be lovely. But you were waiting for the capital gains. That was what you wanted. I'm going to hold this for ten years and it's going to go from one fifty to two hundred to two fifty. And then it's going to be, and I'm unwinding all of these properties and like the future that I promised myself has not come to fruition. They've all appreciated, hooray, but Keir Starmer's changed the capital

• 1:47:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:48:37Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  No, which is kind of interesting. I mean, I got shit from the landlord thing too. I mean, I don't really care because it's usually coming from people that have no impact on anything in society. But a couple of the places I bought were basically unlivable. And I brought them up to be a place for people to live in. And people, like literally, they were on the market. People were not buying them to bring it up to live in because it was in the student area of Western Michigan University. No one was going to live in the student section. No one was buying a house to live there. So it was places that just weren't being lived in, that I made livable and actually benefited.

• 1:49:40Chris Williamson?

  There was a period in the UK, and I came in after this, which is, it does make sense. One of the big criticisms, you took a two bed or three bed, classic family home, and you rejig all of the walls and the construction to turn it into five or six or seven bed student properties. There's no fucking family in Newcastle that needs a seven bed house in Heaton. That is basically locked in for the rest of time, that this is going to be a student property. And now, if you ever stop, it's called an HMO, it's a house of multiple occupancy. If you ever take it out of that, you can never get the license back. So they're now trying to reverse that back to try and encourage families to buy these

• 1:50:23Chris Williamson?

  houses. But the problem is, I'm never going to sell one of my houses. Well, that's not, I would sell it to whoever wants to pay the price, but no family is going to pay the price that I can get from somebody that wants it as an investment property. Because they are going to have to knock all of these fucking walls down and turn it back into what it was before it was turned into a student house, which I didn't do.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Governments will do any rule, regulation, tax, whatever, to think they're trying to encourage something, other than literally just make zoning laws better for people to just build what people are demanding. I will never understand it. That's why, that's why I love this town. I love Austin, because we let people build more houses on units now, on lots. We let people build higher houses. We got rid of parking minimums with the government force to have a certain amount of parking spots. It's so stupid. They'll do every policy besides just letting developers build what the market demands.

• 1:51:15Chris Williamson?

  Dude, there is a, a lot near Zilka that I drive past sometimes. And it used to have one old style ranch house that probably had two beds, was up on sticks, walk up a little set of wooden stairs to get to it, classic wooden ranchy house. And it had a trailer thing that was for some, for pancakes. It must have been a business that the person had started at some point. And there was a bit of a yard outside or whatever. And then one day, no house, no trailer, just flattened, like there'd been a miniature atomic bomb that went off. There are now three ground floor, first floor, second store, story houses built on this one fucking plot of land. And they look nice. They've, I mean, it's still

• 1:51:59Chris Williamson?

  all green and insulation and wooden shit at the moment, but.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  And that's nice. That's due to literally Texas and the city of Austin just a couple of years ago, like passing those kind of reforms.

• 1:52:09Chris Williamson?

  I heard that the housing problem in America would be fixed if the zoning laws were changed, that there's enough demand and enough capital to be able to make the houses. The only issue is that the NIMBY problem.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the NIMBYs. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, if you're thinking about your own interest in California and LA, you want the cost of your house to continue going up forever. That's usually where the majority of your wealth is. You can borrow against that. So of course, you don't want more development coming in, housing prices to fall, it's economically against you. And you're usually a big voting block, you're a big, important part of local elections, and you can be a loud voice at the city council meeting. So it makes sense that people are against it. But I don't know, I'm NIMBY all the way. Build with the market demands. I think a couple of restrictions make sense. I don't want it like a, you shouldn't be drilling for oil in someone's backyard, you know, I don't know. I, I'm overall pro data centers because the information around it is a lot of misinformation. But do I want a data center in my exact backyard? No, build them in the middle of fucking nowhere. That's

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  what I like. So it's just like, yeah, there's some restrictions make sense. But let the market build with the market demands.

• 1:53:15Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how many people are, eat the rich, they're taking the money that young people need in order to be able to buy houses whilst also being, I don't want any houses built near me.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Usually the biggest NIMBYs are the ones that say, in this neighborhood, you know, the signs, what is it, in this neighborhood, we accept.

• 1:53:32Chris Williamson?

  Science is real, women are women, women are people, black people are, I know the exact sign that you mean.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Usually the NIMBYs.

• 1:53:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. How much money do you need to raise a kid?

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Well, definitely less than people think for sure. Because I mean, forever throughout human existence, you know, we're just having kids and it was fine. It is a little harder today, but going through public school, getting them on your insurance, all that good stuff. If you're not thinking about having to get parent plus loans, like you could, you can do it on just a normal middle class salary for sure. You can have quite a few kids, but an exact number. I don't have that.

• 1:54:12Chris Williamson?

  I think people believe that it's more expensive than it actually might be. But again, a lot of that is, what do I think I need? And what do I think that my kid would need versus what, what is actually needed? This is an interesting part of that birth rate debate that we had, where in order to have the kid realistically, assuming that you don't have some huge windfall of money, the total pie of money that you have to spend is not going to change all that much. In fact, it might go down as one partner needs to take time off work in order to raise them. And then childcare costs and all the rest of it. That means that your lifestyle needs to take a hit. You need to, I'm not going to be able to go out for dinner as much. I'm not going to be able to upgrade the car

• 1:54:57Chris Williamson?

  as frequently. And that feels like, that feels like getting poorer.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  Where what you've done is you've just reportioned the money from what would have been car to now what now is child.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  Which I empathize with, it makes sense. So if you don't want to have kids, don't have kids. That's kind of what you said earlier, right? You know, we shouldn't force people to have kids. But we also shouldn't be doing misinformation of people thinking they need to have an endless supply of money to have kids. Like, we're richer than ever before. And people have had kids when we were poorer than ever before. Like, you do need money. You need school supplies. You do need to make sure they can be on your health insurance. Like, there are a lot of things you need money for, but we over emphasize it, for sure.

• 1:55:41Chris Williamson?

  Forcing people to have kids is horrendous. But scaring people out of not having kids when they could, because of misinformation is also something that never gets spoken about.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Caleb Hammer, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you. I think what you do is great. Where should people go to check out all of the shit you've got going on?

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Caleb Hammer on YouTube, and I recommend everyone download DollarWise, change their lives.

• 1:56:03Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Until next time, man. Appreciate you.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:56:06Chris Williamson?

  Goodbye, my beauties.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  Dude. That was fun.

• 1:56:10Speaker 04

  When you shop pickup at Kroger, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries selected just for you. Our associates are committed to getting every detail right, carefully handpicking your items, checking for quality and freshness, and packing your order with care. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy twenty dollars off your first online order of seventy five dollars or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger, fresh for everyone.