Caleb Hammer’s Humiliation Economy

When Caleb Hammer, a thirty-one-year-old personal-finance YouTuber, gets particularly exasperated, his voice enters a shrill upper register. He wrenches the eyeglasses from his face and rubs the bridge of his nose with a pair of pinched fingers, unable to disguise his disgust. Hunching over a microphone, he calls the person sitting across from him any number of derogatory epithets: “retarded,” usually, but also “moron” and “twinkie.” These fits of annoyance occur with some regularity on “Financial Audit,” the interview show he hosts on YouTube, where his episodes routinely receive millions of views.

Imagine Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” crossed with “The Jerry Springer Show,” and the result is “Financial Audit,” in which Hammer interrogates some of the more fiscally suicidal people one could ever hope to meet. His guests are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and on a bullet train to rock bottom, desperate enough to hand their financial records over to an online content creator for a public lashing. Hammer, who is stocky and square-headed, inspects these documents the way a stepfather might look at a teen-ager’s detention slip; he lampoons his guests’ spending habits and instructs them to make more restrained choices. Hammer has framed his goals as noble, recently explaining on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that his show’s humiliation rituals and hysterics are an elaborate ruse to make his viewers more financially literate, with his down-and-out interviewees serving as extreme test cases for what not to do. “People don’t go into financial topics because it’s boring,” he told Rogan. “Why are you clicking on a video of a dude just, like, sitting at the camera, just like, you know, I.R.A.s? No one’s going to get into that.” (In fact, many of those straightforward explainer videos have millions of views.) Audiences craved content that was “a little more interesting to get into,” Hammer argued, which meant spicing up the mundanity “with the roasts, the dramas, the relationships.” He continued, “If that actually gets people into personal finances—that’s the best.”

The most alluring feature of “Financial Audit” is indeed the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how those who are truly down bad live. Take the airplane mechanic with more than a hundred thousand dollars of debt who lost his job for not performing proper safety inspections (“The Most UNHINGED Financial Audit,” the thumbnail title reads) or the guy with sixty-seven bucks in his bank account who’d been arrested for threatening to eat Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s heart (“Immature CHILD”). There’s the young woman who said that she dropped out of school to avoid an arrest warrant (“She Deserves Jail”), and the mother of two who cheated on her husband more than a dozen times, including with an unhoused man in a church (“I F*cking Hate Them”). Mostly, Hammer interviews people who can’t hold down a job and have few promising career prospects. Maybe they’re addicted to booze or to OnlyFans or to shopping; maybe they’re naïve to the devastation that they’re wreaking on themselves and those around them. Many seem to struggle with undiagnosed mental-health issues and some appear to be trapped in dangerous and possibly criminal situations. When checks do come in, it’s often from low-barrier-to-entry gig work such as DoorDash and UberEats. Budgeting and savings are the least of these people’s concerns—many of the guests who come on Hammer’s show appear to be living inside a catastrophe they can no longer see the confines or contours of. You may wonder why anyone, even those blinded by suffering, would agree to be so roundly mocked for more than an hour by a stranger, one who seems to delight in their pain. Watch enough episodes of “Financial Audit,” however, and an eerie trend starts to emerge: for many guests, appearing on Hammer’s show seems to be a sort of get-rich-quick scheme, a last-ditch attempt to strike gold before shit finally hits the fan.

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.

Hammer’s been leaning into the Jerry Springer comparisons lately, and who can blame him? Springer became a global star off a crackpot talk show in which, it could be argued, he exploited the vulnerable and unwell. But the stage that Springer cultivated was a gleeful one, a tacky spectacle of shock and depravity, an ungodly home for the freaks who knew just what to do when the lights came on. As Doreen St. Félix wrote after Springer’s death in 2023, in a postscript for The New Yorker, his show’s “surface was its underbelly”: it didn’t need to pretend to be anything other than the chaotic maelstrom it clearly was. Hammer’s insistence that his show uses its guests as educational proxies to teach its viewers what not to do, and how not to live, feels far more suspect than Springer’s goofy raison d’être, and way less fun. I watched a lot of episodes of “Financial Audit” while writing this piece, and rarely did I laugh, or learn anything beyond how not to completely throw my life away. Instead, I watched Hammer mock and ridicule his guests and pretend to care about their best interests. I watched him call them losers and idiots, and watched them nod along, because they knew it to be true. ♦

Source link