#2509 - Caleb Hammer

**Caleb Hammer** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Jamie** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
Good to see you, sorry.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:13)
Good to see you too, nice to meet you.

**Caleb Hammer** (0:14)
Very nice to meet you too. I enjoy your content.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:16)
Thank you.

**Caleb Hammer** (0:16)
You're a very sensible person. And you deal with a lot of very unsensible people.
How do you keep your shit together? When you talk to these people, we used to tell everybody, you're a finance guy, and did you start out in debt and then figured out how to get your shit together?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:32)
Yeah, exactly. I was in college doing all the stupid American things, right? So you got that unlimited student loan debt for a bullshit degree. I was going for music composition, so complete bullshit degree.
Maxing out every credit card, one of the first pieces of financial advice I got at 18 from the parents, max out a credit card to get the piano I wanted. So that's smart.

**Caleb Hammer** (0:54)
Your parents gave you that advice.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:55)
Yeah, it's just the average American experience. You just max out a credit card. I don't know if your parents taught you anything about personal finances, but most don't. It's bad. So I was just maxing out every credit card, like everyone that comes on the show, like every American out there. We got $1.6 trillion in credit card debt in this country, by the way.
Crazy amount. Defaults are to like 7%, which is insane. 7% of credit cards are defaulting.

**Caleb Hammer** (1:22)
That's crazy.
That is really nuts. Almost 1 out of 10 default.

**Jamie** (1:27)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:28)
It's absolutely insane. We have more auto loan debt in this country than credit cards, too.

**Jamie** (1:32)
Really?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:32)
This is even crazier, because Americans, you know, they're big pickup trucks and everything. But either way, I was doing that. Got my Nissan Altima and, you know, thinking I was sick driving around and going into debt for that, family debt, everything. It was brutal, but it was the average American life. That's what people are going through every single day.
And I finally got a wake up call. I just, I was sitting in my shitty apartment that I could barely afford, and I realized the life I wanted to live just could not be sustained this way. I wanted to be a homeowner. It's the American dream. Pick a fence, all that shit. Yeah.
But there's no way to do it with max out credit cards, private student loans, public student loans, everything. It was a mess. So got a sales job, just started grinding it out, paying off the debt, fully funded emergency fund. That's what I try to teach people now. But again, the average American is an idiot with money, which is fair.

**Caleb Hammer** (2:35)
Well, they're not informed, which is one of the things I think your content really helps, because a lot of people don't know what to do.
You're in debt, like, how the fuck do I get out of this? And a lot of people, they know we're in debt, so they don't have good advice, they're not going to get from their parents. So they have to turn to somebody. And a lot of times, financial people online are very stiff, and they're not enjoyable to listen to. But you talk shit, and you're very vocal, and it's like, huh, okay, I get this guy, I can relate to him, tell me what to do. So there's a lot of folks out there that connect with you because of that, I think.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:10)
Yeah, they call us the Jerry Springer of finance. Which I like, I take it, I take the ownership. They meant it as a dig at first, but I take it. Because it's fun. People don't go into financial topics because it's boring. Why are you clicking out a video of a dude just like sitting at the camera, just like IRAs or this? No one's going to get into that. Personal finance class, like 40% of states, which is almost 40 states out of the 50 states, require a personal finance class now, which is big progress over the last decade. But I was a piece of shit in high school. I'm sleeping through that class. I'm not going to listen to things there.
I could barely pass math. School is just boring. So people still aren't going to pick it up there. They want something a little more interesting to get into. And we give them that with the roasts, the dramas, the relationships of couples. Episodes are my favorite. Cause there's always financial stresses in relationship. And I don't know if that actually gets people into personal finances.