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

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

Modern Wisdom

July 13, 2026

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?
Speakers: Chris Williamson, Caleb Hammer, Kevin O'Leary
**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How do you describe what you do for work?

**Caleb Hammer** (0:03)
Depends the viewer. If I'm talking to the nice little church lady, I'd tell her I'm helping young folks and some old folks with their money. I'm just talking to 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.

**Chris Williamson** (0:23)
I was going to ask why you get death threats, but you've kind of precluded that.

**Caleb Hammer** (0:27)
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, let's pretend you didn't want me to make fun of your curly hair for whatever reason. You would tell me that. You would tell the producers that because we ask you what you don't want.

**Chris Williamson** (0:46)
Look, VTOLI in advance.

**Caleb Hammer** (0:46)
Yeah. So we don't bring it up. And then I get consent to make fun of anything else.

**Chris Williamson** (0:50)
I get sensitivity about my TOLI, yeah.

**Caleb Hammer** (0:51)
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.

**Chris Williamson** (1:09)
The white knighting?

**Caleb Hammer** (1:10)
Yes.
The moral hero, you're on your moral horse and I don't know, you want your TikTok community to raise you up, I guess. It makes you feel good. You get views.

**Chris Williamson** (1:23)
It's one of my least favorite categories of people, 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 easy.

**Caleb Hammer** (1:41)
Yeah. When we were filming this episode, we had a guest on our episode that I uploaded yesterday.
I brought in one of my co-workers, employees, also friends, Tyler, black dude, big black dude, very intimidating, could beat the shit out of anyone. The guy where you were sitting is a piece of shit racist, an actual racist. He was like-

**Chris Williamson** (2:04)
Did you do this on purpose?

**Caleb Hammer** (2:06)
Cast him?

**Chris Williamson** (2:07)
You brought a black person in with somebody that you knew would be racist?

**Caleb Hammer** (2:11)
So the guy was sitting where you said, and he said, I'm one of those people that says things that need to be said. I was like, okay, pause. Brought in the guy that he would actually have a consequence.

**Chris Williamson** (2:21)
Oh, right.

**Caleb Hammer** (2:21)
Yeah. Yeah. He was like, 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.

**Chris Williamson** (2:35)
Just loves being called the N-word. Gets off on it.

**Caleb Hammer** (2:38)
No black. We scoured the Internet. No black person was 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. Workplace harassment and all this stuff. When he's friends, I'm friends with him, we're literally just having fun together, making fun of the dude that was a piece of shit in front of us. He and I were on the same team, having a good time, and it was just white ladies upset on the Internet.

**Chris Williamson** (3:05)
Blows my mind that people want to step into that environment because it's very intense. It's not opposite to someone. Originally, it's one-on-one and then it's one-on-two, but there's also maybe someone behind the scenes and you know that there's all of these people on the Internet that are going to see you do this thing. The psychology of someone that's prepared to go on a show like that and go head-to-head with someone on their home turf and be an asshole, it's kind of impressive.
It is almost impressive. I don't think that I would be very good 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.

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