Caleb Hammer’s Humiliation Economy

Hammer’s financial philosophy is consistent no matter whom he’s speaking with: stop spending more than you earn, eliminate debt, budget aggressively. His teachings are similar in substance to those of the radio host Dave Ramsey, who established a reputation as a financial guru in the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands by preaching a seven-step program for achieving financial stability. Rather than promising to make people rich through high-risk investments, Ramsey promotes a simple system of paying off debt, building an emergency fund, and investing for retirement. His approach to personal finance is much like how he talks: slow and slightly monotone, with a droopy Southern drawl to add a bit of flavor to the otherwise dry discussions. Hammer tends to deliver equally sensible advice, only in a more flamboyant and revved-up package. He shrieks, he screams, he spews insults and slurs with impunity; he’s taken to wearing a chain over his T-shirt, à la Mark Zuckerberg, which lends his nerdiness a Hypebeast edge. He’s also less of a stickler for the rules than Ramsey is, and far more fascinated by the psychological pitfalls of his interviewees. A large portion of his show is devoted to discovering just how, exactly, his guests have detonated their credit scores and amassed potentially unrepayable debts. He frequently moralizes on their failings, lecturing them on right and wrong and how to be a functional person. If a person is reckless with money, it is because she did not learn the necessary tools in school or at home; if, after a session with Hammer, she still struggles to implement these basic budgeting techniques, it’s because she has not taken the requisite personal responsibility needed to turn her life around.

The notion of personal responsibility is crucial to Hammer’s origin story. He was born to teen-age parents in a low-income household, telling Business Insider that, as a child, he was unable to “do the nice things other kids could.” After graduating high school, Hammer took out student loans to enter a music-composition program at Western Michigan University—a “bullshit degree,” he’s since lamented—and, on the suggestion of his parents, maxed out a credit card to buy an electric piano. Hammer soon found himself saddled with crippling loan payments and credit-card debt, balances that eventually ballooned to more than a hundred thousand dollars. What sickened him most, however, was how common this experience was—it was an “average American life,” as he’s called it, one where financially illiterate people, like him, fall victim to the trappings of consumerism and the fantasy of getting a college degree. Sick of his sorry existence, he dropped out of school and moved to Austin, Texas, where he took a sales job and began teaching himself how to manage his money and get a handle on his debts. Now when he uses his enormous YouTube and social-media audience to market his “Financial Fundamentals” online course, or to promote his budgeting app, Dollarwise—endeavors that have netted him millions of dollars—he presents himself as knowing precisely how to climb out of financial ruin. “This isn’t some finance bro in a corner office telling you to just stop buying coffee,” he says in a promotional video for one of his courses. “This is real advice from someone who’s been broke and figured it out the hard way.” He may have been dealt a tough hand, but, look: he took control of his life and became a millionaire. What was preventing others from doing the same?

Hammer is not insensitive to the structural injustices of poverty, but he has little patience for what he sees as entitlement in the face of hardship. “The world isn’t fair—now what?” he told Rogan during their recent chat, amid a larger discussion about populist resentment toward billionaires. “If they’re getting the bullshit degree and borrowed a shit ton of money for it, that’s not my fault. I didn’t do that. Bezos didn’t do that either. They say, ‘Well, sociology and stuff should pay more.’ Well, the markets determined it didn’t.” The “bullshit degrees” that Hammer likes to rag on—basically just every humanities major—are so insidious to him because they cost money to earn and don’t generate money for the people who earn them, making a college education, in his view, a scam. Instead, he advises his viewers to start a business and study the market, to understand how capital works so that they can master it, dominate it, and become one with it.

Hammer presents these economic theories as stone-cold truths without acknowledging the rather obvious ideological agenda underpinning his thinking. To kneel at the altar of the market, to pray to the gods of the ultra-wealthy—these are not categorical values bestowed upon humanity, tenets beamed down to us from the cosmos. Just because the crypto-capitalists and techno-futurists don’t value something doesn’t mean it is devoid of value, or unworthy of study and attention. Hammer hates being called a right-winger—and fans and critics alike are increasingly pegging him as such—but his personal-responsibility politics and vague plutocratic leanings fuel criticism that behind his sensible personal-finance strategies resides a more odious, cynical character, a straight-talking salesman who exploits and profits off of impoverished and mentally ill people under the guise of education and entertainment.