Hey, guys. It's Chelsea from
The Financial Diet and this week's video is
brought to you by my own class. So I'm sponsoring my own video
today because it's my house and I can do what I want. So for those of you
who don't know, at TFD we do tons of
workshops and events and conferences and
things like that. And we do every so often these
longer four-week deep dive classes. We have one on investing. We have one on building
financial foundations. Those come around
every couple of months. And we have a really qualified
credentialed people who teach those and they're awesome. But when I was thinking about--
because I wanted to do a class myself-- the subjects that
I feel qualified to teach a four-week
master class on, the only thing I could really
think that I am truly qualified to teach is building a real
and sustainable business on YouTube. There are a lot of classes
and courses and videos out there about how to go viral
and get a lot of subscribers. And those things
are good, but I also know from my nearly
seven years on YouTube that even consistently going
viral or having a lot of subs does not translate into having
a real, sustainable business. And as you guys probably know,
I'm also very, very passionate about operating that
business in a way that is ethical and equitable to
its staff and genuinely working to build something that
you're actually proud of. So this class is for
people who have a channel or are starting a channel
that they are looking to build into a real,
sustainable, profitable business, whether that's
just supporting them as an individual or supporting
a staff like we do here at TFD. It's a four-week class
starting on April 19th and if you can't
make classes live, there will be recordings
available of everything. I also have office hours
where I work with my students and answer all of
their questions. There's going to
be live critiques and feedback for real channels
of people in the class. There's going to be take-home
activities and tools and resources for
every single class to really help
build your channel, diversify the revenue
of your channel, and learn how to
change just making videos that are cool into
a business that works. Tickets for this class
are normally $199, but you can get yours for just
$150, is $49 off using the code MasterClass49Off at the
link in our description. I am incredibly
excited to be teaching my own four-week class. It's the first of its kind. And I hope you'll be
there starting April 19th. Anyway, today we
are here to talk about the people and
the cultural figures and the phenomena that
have really messed up our relationship to money. This is actually
the longest script I've ever written, so first
of all, buckle up, baby. But second of all, I wanted to
go along on it because I really do feel that these
people and things deserve our individual attention
and understanding. Ultimately, the way we look
at personal finance and money, what we aspire to, what we
expect from our government, all of these things do
not exist in a vacuum and they don't
come from nowhere. The lessons that
we get about money, both on the personal level and
on the macroeconomic level, are ideas that come from
various cultural forces that we may be impacted by
without even realizing it. And it's not to say that
these people and things have no redeeming
qualities or can't be sources of good advice. In fact, many people
who follow TFD and align with a lot of our views on
sociopolitical and economic issues have been hugely
helped by some of this stuff and there's no shame in that. I think when it comes to money
and life and career advice, it should be very a la carte. You can get good advice
from imperfect sources. And as much as I'm
loathe to admit it, I myself I'm an
imperfect source. I know. It's hard to believe. And even some of this
stuff on this list, like my beloved Shark Tank, has
provided some great insights for me over the years while
still being overall quite problematique. And the point of
this video is not to universally throw the
baby out with its bathwater, but to be very conscientious
about where these ideas are coming from, what
we consider normal, what we consider
aspirational, and what we consider sound advice
when it comes to money, especially when it comes to
things like political climates. These things change. So it's important to be
critical about the frameworks through which we're analyzing
all of these things. So without further
ado, let's break down the six key figures
who lowkey torpedoed our relationship with money. Also fun fact, it was
initially supposed to be seven figures
and Kris Jenner was one of them and the whole
Kardashian-Jenner consumer panopticon, but the
video was already so long that I had to move
them to their own video. That will be coming out soon. So we're starting our
list of cultural figures who destroyed our
relationship with money. We got to take it all the
way back to the early 1980s. We got to hear a big round
of applause for that big dog, the OG, the Don of
drizzle down economics, the bootstrap big boy,
the Hollywood Insider, Margaret Thatcher's
friend with no benefits, the artist formerly
known as The Gipper. That is right. For those keeping
score at home, I am talking about our 40th
President, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Now it is really
difficult to think of a president who
did more damage to our overall economic
climate as well as our personal relationship to
finance than Ronald Reagan did. In fact, his own former Director
of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman,
wrote an entire op-ed in the New York Times
on how his version of the GOP and their
disastrous policies quote, "destroyed the US economy." And while it would take its
own video to truly break down all of the damage that
Ronald Reagan did, the overall picture is
a very fundamental shift both in terms of what we
think of as prosperity and who we think is
entitled to that prosperity. So Reagan's Club Sandwich
of Fiscal Catastrophe that is historic financial
deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies
and welfare for corporations, starving public works, and the
hard emphasis on a bootstrap mentality which demonizes
any public assistance for the poor while
practically throwing it at the wealthy and
big business combined to create a new paradigm
in our economy, which swiftly and mercilessly
eroded the middle class over the subsequent decades. And to be clear, this is not
to say that economic policies which dramatically favor
corporations and the wealthy, or which allow Wall
Street to run roughshod over the average citizen-- Clinton and Obama both did
quite a bit in their own ways in this regard-- Reaganomics were
definitely a new era in American life both in
terms of the actual economic consequences and the
perception shifts that may have felt
subtle at the time, but which have culminated
in a profoundly different relationship to what we feel
society and the government owes its citizens,
and vise versa. For example, robust
government programs that helped Americans get
jobs, buy homes, secure affordable education and
training and have families used to be not just the norm, as
it is in most of the developed world, but a demand in
exchange for everything that Americans
contribute both in terms of taxes and productivity,
which has steadily been increasing since more
or less the industrial era. This was a kind of
social contract, which especially after
World War II was embedded in the idea of what
it meant to be an American. Americans worked
hard and America, through robust public programs,
gave working and middle class Americans an ability to create
a better life for themselves and their children. But Reagan did an incredible
and unprecedented job in undermining that
social contract and in eroding the
trust of Americans have towards the value
of these programs. For example, his powerful
welfare queen narrative which, despite having been thoroughly
and frequently debunked in the years since-- which we'll
link you guys to down below-- continues to this
day to color how we feel about people who use
social programs, despite most of those people statistically
working a job of some kind. Meanwhile, during that
same propaganda campaign about average citizens
using public services, the financial services
industry, big business, and the ultra-wealthy
in this country were seeing a level
of government support and favoritism that had
previously been unheard of. In short, Reagan,
through both his policies and his fantastic ability to
communicate terrible ideas, completely shifted our
idea of who the government fundamentally was there
to help as well as who should expect
to benefit from it. And it is something
that our economy has never truly recovered
from nor, incidentally, has the middle class. Number two is my baby,
Shark Tank as a show and also all of
the shows like it. And this one really does hurt
me because I love Shark Tank, I mean, to the extent
that I can no longer say "and for that
reason" without saying it like my beloved Lori Greiner. And as I mentioned in
the intro, I actually do believe that I've learned
quite a bit from Shark Tank mostly in the form of
what not to do, but also in some ways about how
important it is to diversify your business for
sustainability and growth because doing one
thing well isn't going to be enough to make a
business survive long term. (WHISPERS) We cover
that in my class. But it is undeniable that
the massive popularity of this show and the narratives
that it pushes, aside from launching a somewhat
credible political campaign for noted thumb Kevin
O'Leary, has instilled an idea of entrepreneurship,
business owning, and the American Dream, which is
basically diametrically opposed to how all of those
things have been trending over the past
decades in this country. It is no secret if you
watch this channel-- and why wouldn't you? You're so chic--
that for as resilient as the American mythos actually
is in terms of our rags to riches story, we actually
have incredibly low class mobility for a
developed economy. And aside from the
actual amount of people who manage to ascend class
strata through hard work and grit, the broader idea
is that the generation which follows you will do
better than your own and that this is the
aspirational life promise of having children,
giving them a better life than the one you knew. And to be fair,
for many years this was more or less
true in America. Generations gained in
wealth and opportunity and class mobility
was competitive with comparable economies. But as many of us might know,
the millennial generation kind of put an end to all of
that Don Draper-style class reinvention and left us poorer
and with fewer opportunities than our parents'
generation enjoyed. And Gen Z so far appears
to have it even worse. But the continued success
of shows like Shark Tank doesn't just
contradict this reality by pushing the narrative
in a passive way by its own popularity
and the fact that some of the
entrepreneurs on the show really do have rags to
riches stories, especially products launched by,
again, my beloved Lori Greiner, the show
also reinforces these narratives explicitly
with many of the hosts, even Mark Cuban, who
everyone does love, talking about this
unique opportunity to build something better
for yourself and your family, being what makes
America so great. The data just
doesn't support this. But as far as a PR
campaign for keeping the long-discredited myth
of the American Dream alive, Shark Tank is actually
pretty effective. And as much as some of
the individual stories can be powerful to
watch in a vacuum, it's extremely
important to remember that on aggregate, this is
not the story of what it means to work hard in America,
(SARCASTIC TONE) not even compared to
some of those dreaded socialist regimes in Europe. Because for as much
as the show stresses that the secret to success
for these contestants is their hard work
and determination, it has been years that things
like productivity or hours spent at work are totally
decoupled from how much a person can expect
to earn, particularly in a gig-based
economy where working multiple jobs to survive
because your main job doesn't pay a living wage
anymore is reframed as being your own boss. But I guess just
not like the bosses that they feature on Shark Tank. Number three is Dave Ramsey. Here we are. Hey, who would have thought? Not me. We're finally talking about
this dude on the channel without me referring
to him as beep beep. We have been operating TFD since
2015 and despite our frequent but thinly veiled allusions
to our many issues with the Dave Ramsey
industrial complex, I've been extremely personally
reticent to make a video that talks about
this stuff directly, particularly as it pertains
to his toxic influence on the culture or,
allegedly, his own staff, which I do a deep dive
into on our bonus video, but more on that later. And the Ramsey Empire
has actually in the past reached out to me personally
about possibly collaborating on some stuff and
it is something that I would never even consider
doing, despite the huge boon it could possibly be to
our business because of their undeniable
massive reach as a company. But, and again. As I will get into more
in the bonus video. I've been pretty reticent
to talk about this stuff because not only has the man
sort of notoriously been quite litigious, the fandom
that follows him can also be quite aggressive themselves. And frankly, I'm just not
trying to start a flame war with a bunch of evangelical
Christians in my comments. But also also, because
this is the one where I need to be most clear, that
if you have benefited from some of Dave Ramsey's
advice over the years or have followed some
of his instructions to your own personal financial
empowerment, that is fine. I don't think there's any one
right or wrong way in which to improve your finances
and many people who are big fans of this channel
and don't like the dude personally have gotten some
value out of some of his tips. That's OK. But at the end of the day,
this man and his empire are massively popular
and have influenced the culture in many ways
beyond just the few people who may have actually,
for example, been able to pay off
100% of their debt and yelled about it on his show. And that's what we actually
need to talk about, the pervasive and negative
impact that Dave Ramsey has had on the financial culture. Because if you've
taken even a passing interest in personal
finance, you have definitely been exposed to at least one
of his sizzling fajita [MUTED] hot takes on the subject. So it's important to
understand that in addition to some of the actual tenets
of his financial advice being a bit shaky, there's
also a general tone of incredible shame, judgment,
and moralization of poverty as a cornerstone of his
brand and, in some ways, I think his success. As far as the shakiness
goes, his repeated claim of 12% average market
returns on investments has been thoroughly debunked
by people more qualified than myself, which
we'll link you to below. But basically, even though
investing in the market is important and basically
essential for most people to retire comfortably,
the average returns are way less than that
and over-promising is part of what can lead
people to get fed up with the slow and steady
route to wealth building and try to find back doors
to making money quickly. And similarly, his overall
framing as Debt As Holy Enemy leads to a framework in which
if you are a person in debt-- and there is debate here
about the nuances of which kind of debt are acceptable--
you basically should be living the life of a medieval serf
until you have crawled out of the hole into which
your sinful and indulgent choices have led you, with
Dave even going so far as to famously say on
Twitter, "if you're working on paying off
debt, the only time you should see the
inside of a restaurant is if you're working there." And in fact, his
relationship to debt is so extreme that he recommends
people only have an emergency fund of $1,000
until they are out of debt, for which
many Americans could be literal decades. So I guess even though that
is well under the recommended amount to buffer people
from unexpected financial catastrophe, generally three to
six months of living expenses, it is enough to keep someone
in a life of absolute penance and precarity in order
to erase the debts that our societal paradigms
all but forced people to enter. See student debt. There's also the
hypocrisy of it all, with Dave staunchly opposing
government aid for individuals even during times
like, for example, the height of the
pandemic while happily taking millions in
government incentives for his own business. Link to all that stuff and
more in the description. Dave's general outlook
on money can sort of be summed up as the residue
that would be left in a pot if you boiled the bootstrap
narrative overnight for like 12 hours on high heat. It is just pure, uncut
shaming and derision for people who are in poverty
with almost no understanding of the cycles that keep
people trapped in poverty even if they're making
the right decisions or the incentive structures
which all but oblige people to get into debt
in the first place, like the fact that many entry
level jobs now outright require master's degrees among
many other things. But all of this becomes
even more complicated when you understand that
the dynamics here of shame and judgment and
ostracization don't just get applied to the callers
who happen to call in for advice while committing the
cardinal sin of being A Poor, but also allegedly to his
own staff, about which there is an eye-searing amount to
learn when it comes to how not to run an ethical business. So for our members, click on the
link in our description to get and exclusive bonus
video that is just a deep dive into the alleged
insane employment practices and gender discrimination,
amongst other things, that give the Ramsey Empire
its secret blend of herbs and spices. And if you're not
a member yet, you can go ahead and click that
link or the Join button and just sign up for
our society at TFD tier. It's $4.99 a month and in
addition to these bonus videos has tons of
amazing benefits. Next up, let's all give
a big round of applause to the stage for the Blazer-- I can't. I can't do this, guys. Suze Orman is the next
person on this list. And in some ways,
it almost feels redundant to talk
about Suze Orman after we just talked
about Dave Ramsey because the Venn
diagram of their badness so often just forms
an awful circle. But Suze Orman, more than
possibly any other figure in the financial
media ecosystem, has really been
responsible for creating that sort of Avocado
Toast As Reason You're Not Able To Accrue Generational
Wealth Paradigm that has become so anchored in our discourse
that it's basically a meme at this point. And while many thoughtful
people have already gone through the
trouble of cataloging her bad, outdated, and
downright mean advice-- and we'll link you
in the description-- I think it's worth
drilling down on just how much her positioning
in the culture led to years of
otherwise smart people framing their financial
situation through the prism of to what extent they
were willing to forgo all conveniences. Or for example, accept
her new paradigm of 70 as the correct retirement age. Or, for those
happening to experience intergenerational
poverty or financial struggles, her advice
of helping to prioritize your parents through retirement
at the expense of your own. So I guess basically just to
ensure that we're now trapping every subsequent generation in
a cycle of not having enough to get by. Essentially, when you
think of the problems that many adults currently
face in our economy, being priced out of
the housing market, not being able to retire
with dignity and enough time to enjoy it, having parents
struggling to make ends meet in older age, et
cetera, the solutions that Suze consistently
proposes are almost universally about the individual choices
and often the ones that are so far into the
margins, like having occasional conveniences
like a Netflix subscription or getting a coffee at
Starbucks, that even if you were to follow this advice
to a T, mathematically there's just no way that these
incremental changes would accumulate to the
extent needed to fix the actual systemic problems. And when it comes to
terrible redirected solutions to actual societal
problems, next up, we have the sigma male grindset. Now Suze Orman may be bringing
it home for the ladies in terms of financial advice that takes
their real grievances and turns them into unsustainable and
self-punishing solutions, we've got to bring it up in the
rear for the men here and talk about the Sigma Male/ Hustle
Bro mindset that has taken over a lot of this type of
financial media and advice on the internet. There has arisen an
entire cottage industry of YouTube videos,
instructional essays, e-books, classes, et cetera around the
topic of how men can empower and enrich themselves by
becoming a vaunted sigma male or following this
hustle culture grindset. And while there doesn't seem to
be a ton of internal cohesion around who is actually
considered aspirational in the subgenre-- because
we have everyone from Jordan Belfort, usually as portrayed
by Leonardo DiCaprio, to Marvel superheroes to famous
entrepreneurs to random stock images of handsome men
in open space offices-- the overall message seems to be
that the path forward for men is to disavow the interest
in or approval of women, pursue total
self-reliance, usually through the accumulation
of substantial wealth, and escape the typical
social hierarchy by, I guess, being
extremely good at it. This is often the type of
financial, professional, and social advice being given
to men who, in many ways, do rightfully feel kind of
cut out of the normal order of things or are having
a difficult time fitting into the typical
standards of acceptance, especially when they
center around money, which famously millennial and
younger men on average don't typically have a lot of. So just as Suze Orman redirects
a feeling of, hey, this society really isn't working
out the way it's supposed to for huge numbers
of working adults into well, I guess it's my fault
for going to the movies and buying popcorn
that one time. Better not agitate for any
kind of systemic change. The grindset
accounts-- again, often with literally
millions of followers. See my recent video with Big
Joel on YouTube channel Alux-- funnels a general feeling of
young, disenfranchised men being left out of
a social order that used to be much better
at supporting them through material
benefits like accessible education, job training,
family subsidies, affordable housing
markets, et cetera, into a sense that they're
better off aspiring to wear expensive watches and model
their lives after men who went to prison for securities fraud. It also, as a lot of these
particular phenomena are want to do, places a heavy
amount of the blame on women because I guess we're just not
attracted to them because we're just petty, vapid, hypergamous,
superficial succubi. And beyond that,
because it's probably a lot easier to think that
than to buy into the idea that we are being
materially shut out of a sociopolitical and economic
order which consistently favors the already wealthy and
large corporations to leave the working and middle classes
to fight each other for scraps of status or a vague chance
at a dignified retirement. But that's probably
a conspiracy. Lastly, we're keeping it fresh. We're keeping it relevant. We're keeping it very 2022 in
here with the Winklevoss twins, henceforth referred
to as the Winklevii, who are in this case being
used as a bit of a stand-in for the broader crypto crew. But as I'll explain,
I feel are profoundly emblematic of a
particular aspect of the entire phenomenon. So I should say upfront here
that while the Winklevoss twins are not the biggest
players in the crypto space nor the most foundational
nor the most important by any number of
metrics, they do typify a very specific aspect
of the crypto world that is very much
worth unpacking. So I'm not going
to waste time here talking about my
negative opinions on the world of
cryptocurrencies, decentralized/deregulated
financial markets, speculative assets,
NFTs, et cetera, but I will say that what makes
the Winklevii so particularly interesting in this
world is something that NFT Slayer and YouTuber Dan
Olson said in his seminal video The Problem with NFTs, a
video for which we recently interviewed him on an episode
of The Financial Confessions-- please go watch both. They're both in the
description-- but basically, he argues that a huge driver
in the world of Web3 is that people who know that the
previous systems did not make them the winners/oligarchs,
whether that means the traditional financial system
or the big emergent winners of Web2 like Facebook, Amazon,
et cetera, Web3 is a concept-- and it's a dubious
concept to begin with-- and the wild west financial
system it entails, offers an opportunity
for a new class of people to become the winners. And while a sane person might
argue that the Winklevii walked away from Web2 as big
winners themselves, securing a $65 million
settlement from Mark Zuckerberg for copying some of their
social network ideas, enough to live on comfortably
for two lifetimes and then some, they clearly felt
incredibly slighted by what was perceived to
be their owed glory in the era of social networking
and massive platforms. So they were not comfortable
just stopping there. And their most successful
venture post-Facebook fracas has been their crypto empire
Gemini, which recently raised $400 million to
build a metaverse, which heavily leverages and
features cryptocurrencies, of course, and has seen
them become billionaires in their own right
in part through their incredible bullishness
on Bitcoin, of which they reportedly own so
much that at one point they held 1% of all
Bitcoin in circulation. In many ways, their
hyper-aggression as it pertains to making decentralized
and financially deregulated technology the
territory of the future has seemed specifically
targeted at seeing the end of juggernauts like
their former nemesis Mark Zuckerberg, whom they frequently
criticize in the press and specifically position
their ventures against, like their metaverse project,
which is specifically being built to exist outside of and
eventually hopefully render obsolete platforms
like Facebook. We love it when the
girls are fighting. Get each other. And at the end of the day,
if you believe like I do, or like the
aforementioned Dan does, that this new and
even more dangerous version of the intersection
of technology and finance represents an existential
threat to both worlds as well as all of
the naive consumers who will be churned
through this mercilessly to prop up pump and dump schemes
for people like the Winklevii, you will see why
their epic quest to slay the moist
dragon that is Mark Zuckerberg and his Web2 victory
they've clearly never gotten over is so particularly toxic
to our current tech predicament. Also sorry, Winklevii, no
matter how hard you try, you're never going to
have cakes like this. Anyway, when it comes to
figures that have seriously harmed our
relationship to money, I could go on for
another several hours because there are many. But for different reasons
and in different ways, these are six of the biggest. And again, it doesn't
mean there's never been a piece of good
advice or a useful tool out of any of this stuff. It just means we need to be a
lot more critical about where our ideas are coming from and
how we might be perpetuating them without realizing it. As always, guys,
thank you for watching and don't forget to hit the
Subscribe and Join buttons and to come back every
Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday for new and awesome videos. Bye-bye.
