**We’re Not Buying Your CRAP Anymore — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/not-buying-crap-anymore/ Gabe Bult exposes how the modern economy traps Americans in debt through buy now, pay later, subscriptions, and planned obsolescence. ## Key Takeaways - The economy is structured to keep consumers financially dependent through debt and subscriptions. - Buy now, pay later is a disguised payday loan that encourages overspending. - Planned obsolescence reduces product lifespan, increasing consumer costs over time. - Subscription models replace ownership, creating endless payment cycles. - Stopping unnecessary purchases and paying upfront can help regain financial control. ## What the video covers - 78% of Americans can't survive a week without their paycheck, including many high earners. - The economic system is designed to extract more money from consumers while giving less value in return. - Buy now, pay later schemes manipulate consumers into spending more by focusing on affordable payments rather than total cost. - Subscriptions have replaced ownership, leading to perpetual payments and increased financial fragility. - Products are intentionally designed to break quickly, forcing repeated purchases. - Appliance lifespans have drastically decreased over recent decades, reflecting planned obsolescence. - Consumers are trapped in a cycle of labor to pay for depreciating goods and ongoing fees. - There is a growing movement encouraging people to stop buying unnecessary products and avoid deferred payments. - The system normalizes financial fragility and consumer dependence through marketing and product design. - Freedom and financial stability require rejecting these economic traps and making conscious purchasing choices. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 The Fragility of American Finances 2. 01:10 The Problem with Buy Now, Pay Later 3. 02:24 The Normalization of Payment Plans 4. 03:18 The Subscription Economy 5. 04:18 The Buy Nothing Movement 6. 05:19 Planned Obsolescence and Product Lifespan 7. 06:31 The Difficulty of Repair and Consumer Traps 8. 08:37 The Broader Economic System and Consumer Control Answers ## Questions about this video Why can't many Americans survive a week without their paycheck? Because the economic system encourages spending through debt, subscriptions, and planned obsolescence, many Americans live paycheck to paycheck regardless of income. How does buy now, pay later affect consumer spending? It tricks consumers into focusing on affordable monthly payments rather than total cost, leading to overspending and increased debt. What is planned obsolescence and how does it impact consumers? Planned obsolescence is the design of products to break or become obsolete quickly, forcing consumers to replace items more frequently and spend more money. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A 78% of Americans say that they wouldn't make it through one week if their paycheck got delayed. And this isn't people on minimum wage. This is people with degrees, with houses, with cars. 00:11 Speaker A This is people making $200,000 a year. A third of them, by the way. This is people making six figures a year. And the obvious question is the one that nobody talks about out loud: why is this happening? How does a 00:22 Speaker A country that is this wealthy with paychecks this big end up so fragile? How is the math so broken for a majority of Americans, no matter what income they're at? Now, I've been pulling on this string all month, honestly, and 00:35 Speaker A it's not a single answer. It's an entire system that is built this way. And to be honest, the more I looked at it, it's a pretty well-designed system. It's not always just that people are bad with money. There are some actual deeper 00:45 Speaker A causes to this. It's a whole economy that has been designed over the past 20 or so years to take more and more of money from you and give you less and less in return. It's the subscriptions instead of products that you actually 00:57 Speaker A own. It's people using loans now to pay for groceries. It's appliances literally designed to die. Recycling that doesn't recycle. And it's a story that is told over and over that the problem is you. 01:10 Speaker A But that's not the whole truth. In fact, the main thing that you can do right now to take action on this is to just stop buying their crap. Before we get into the weeds, I want to start with the most 01:19 Speaker A obvious one. It is buy now, pay later. This used to be a niche thing, you know, products, couches. It got into TVs and we're like, wow, that's, you know, it's a bit much. And now it's pretty much a 01:27 Speaker A default at every checkout ever where you're buying a toothbrush over the next 36 months. Around half of Americans are now using buy now, pay later on something. And almost half of those people have been late on a payment for 01:41 Speaker A something that they're paying for later. And one in three people say that they use it just as a bridge to get them to their next paycheck. So, it's not even actually financing. It's like a disguised payday loan with just like 01:53 Speaker A better marketing. But here's the point that is going to sound dramatic even though it's not. Splitting a $40 t-shirt into separate payments of $10 each is not a feature for you. They're not doing this to benefit you in any way. It is to 02:08 Speaker A trick you and manipulate you. There's actually studies on this that people spend significantly more money on cheap purchases when they're broken down into installments of four. The brain stops registering the total, reacts differently, and it just looks at the 02:24 Speaker A monthly payment. Says, I can afford that. And this has become slowly normalized over a really long time. It started with just a house. Okay, I can't afford the house, but I can afford the payments. Oh, then it's the car. I can't 02:33 Speaker A afford the car, but I can afford the payments. And then we'll just work our way down to a refrigerator. And then we'll work our way down to a t-shirt. 02:39 Speaker A And then our Starbucks. Yeah, I can't actually afford Starbucks because I'm one of the 78% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, but I got a credit card, but I got a buy now, pay later. It's worked its way down to little things, and our 02:50 Speaker A monthly payments are going up and up and up. They've tricked us from asking the question, can I actually afford this, to the question, can I afford the payment? 02:57 Speaker A But these shouldn't be the same questions. But that second question is the reason why people have $500 a month in micro payments due and are literally becoming slaves, right? You have to go to a job that you don't like to pay for 03:09 Speaker A the things that you own, or someone will come and take away the things that you own. They'll take away your house and your car and all your stuff. So, you are forced now to be a laborer because of 03:18 Speaker A the crap that you own. Now, the buy now, pay later is just one of the heads of the hydra. I want to look at another one here that's subscriptions. The average American is now spending between 200 and 273 dollars on subscriptions every 03:30 Speaker A single month. And yes, that used to be a car payment. But this is going on forever. It used to be that you want to watch a movie, you go rent a DVD for one week, or you buy a DVD. You wanted a 03:39 Speaker A piece of software, you went and paid for it. You listen to music, you wanted a song, you bought it on iTunes, and now everything is a subscription. And the second you stop paying, you can't listen to music without ads every 30 seconds. 03:50 Speaker A You can't watch shows, your 22-minute show gets turned into 45 minutes, you're practically forced to pay for all of these subscriptions. It used to be that you would buy a product, and now you pretty much just lease everything in 04:02 Speaker A your life. And the lease never ends, which is why this whole idea of buy now, pay later is so funny to me, because it used to kind of be like that. 04:10 Speaker A You buy now and you get to use it, and then you can pay for it later, even though you can't afford to own it. But now you're just like it's turned into a subscription to be alive, which is why 04:18 Speaker A there is this movement of people fighting back and saying, "You know what? I'm going to buy nothing, and I'm going to pay never. How about that?" The only things I'm going to buy I'm actually going to pay for right now, not 04:28 Speaker A later. Can't afford it. It's like basic humanity, except for everywhere in America, apparently. And it's not even just that they're trying to turn everything into a subscription and make the prices of everything secretly go up, because, you know, there's a percentage 04:40 Speaker A of interest tied onto literally every single thing that you buy ever. Regardless, they've also started to turn everything into junk and like design it to break. Over the past three years, I have bought three separate dishwashers. 04:51 Speaker A They've all died at some point, except for the most recent one, which I bought like a month ago. And I even had like a repairman come to look at the last one, because the pump went or something, and it 04:59 Speaker A was going to be like $600 to fix the dishwasher, or I could buy a new one for $900. So, it was like you're almost forced to just buy a new one at that point, because who knows what's going to 05:07 Speaker A break again? And they kind of say like, "You know, things aren't built like they used to." They're literally not built like they used to be. They are built and designed to break, [music] to look nice on the shelf and to not last. And that 05:19 Speaker A keeps us buying more and more of them. But that got me thinking about the question of like, why is this normal? 05:24 Speaker A Why do people just not expect appliances, clothes, electronics, anything to last anymore? Like I know my parents had a dishwasher for like 20-something years, and I would be stunned if anything I bought anywhere in my house would last that long now. But it used to just be 05:39 Speaker A normal. But how did they normalize everything breaking way faster with better technology to everybody in the country? This is ridiculous. But I was looking into this, I realized that I'm not just paranoid and crazy. Well, slightly. Regardless, there's like 05:51 Speaker A research on this. Like a study in Norway actually tracked household appliances' lifespans across the decades. And like washing machine lifespans dropped from 19 years down to 11. That's a 45% drop. Ovens dropped from 24 years down to 14, a 39% drop. And both of those 06:10 Speaker A happened from the 1990s to the 2000s. On a side note, my oven has not worked in nine months. We've had a repairman here four times, but because of all the high-tech technology in there, they literally can't fix it and it's under warranty and 06:22 Speaker A I'm very mad about that. We literally haven't had an oven since we've lived in this house. But it's fancy and expensive and got all kinds of tech in it. Doesn't do the main thing you want an oven to do, which is work. 06:31 Speaker A But this is part of the problem. With your car, with your dishwasher, with everything. It used to be simple to just service this. You used to be able to fix your car and now you actually mostly can't anymore. 06:42 Speaker A computers and monitors and I don't know how to fix my car. Whatever tools you need, you need that now. You can't just do things yourself because they've added more and more technology into it, which makes it less time, more expensive to 06:53 Speaker A own, more expensive to repair. And yet they tell you it's better for you, better for the planet, better for something. It's new, so it must be good. 06:58 Speaker A And there is a name for this. It's called planned obsolescence. Goes back almost to 100 years, the 1920s, where pretty much they nerfed light bulbs from like 2500 hours down to about 1000 hours. And then they told you it was 07:10 Speaker A better for you and they made a lot more money. And since then everybody started to make crappier stuff and charge more money for it. Like it's just fact, you can literally look this up. And once you see this pattern of purposely making 07:20 Speaker A things hard to repair, you see it everywhere. Like you can't replace your phone battery anymore. They glued that bad boy in. Can't tell you the problems that I've had with printers and the ink cartridges, laptops with soldered RAM, 07:30 Speaker A earbuds that you can't open. Again, cars that you literally can't even diagnose yourself. It's not your imagination, it's not bad luck that all these things are just breaking constantly. This is by design. Because you are not a customer 07:45 Speaker A to these companies anymore. They don't want you to just buy one thing and be happy for the next 20 years. They want you to be a subscriber. They want you to buy three dishwashers from them, not one dishwasher that is actually good because 07:58 Speaker A then they get three times the money from you. They want to force you into a family where if you buy one Apple product, you have to buy all the other Apple products. Otherwise, people hate you in group chats cuz your bubbles are 08:07 Speaker A different color and like that's even a whole thing. Regardless, they have successfully turned one-time purchases into subscriptions and it's happened so slowly and to literally everything that most people don't even notice this. 08:19 Speaker A Before we get into some of the deeper stuff here, if this video is connecting with you at all and you kind of want to help out this Buy Nothing Rebellion movement, feel free to drop a like, comment, subscribe on this video. Pretty 08:29 Speaker A much each time you do, means that this video is going to reach at least probably 10 more people. So, every time you interact, it does make a significant difference and I don't have any sponsorships or anything on this video. 08:37 Speaker A So, this is the fun and kind of disgusting part. the World Economic Forum published a short essay by a Danish politician and the headline read, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better." It was framed as 08:55 Speaker A a thought experiment. A future where everyone has [music] a service. You don't own a car, you summon one. You don't own a home, you subscribe to one. 09:04 Speaker A You don't own tools, music, books, software. You have access to them as long as you keep paying. Now, I do want to be careful here cuz the WEF didn't say, "We are going to make you own nothing." The fact checkers have 09:17 Speaker A correctly pointed this out. This was just one guy's opinion, but I would challenge you to kind of look around. 09:23 Speaker A Forget about politics for a minute, just look around. You don't own your music, you rent it from Spotify. You don't own your movies, you rent them from Hulu, Netflix. A lot of times you don't even own your photos unless you pay for 09:34 Speaker A iCloud. Most people don't own their cars, they pay for them with debt. Almost everybody who has a home has debt on that home and they'll end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the sticker price on that home 09:45 Speaker A because of the interest. One of the worst parts is even if you do have your home totally paid off, if you stop paying the government their monthly fees, then they'll come and take your home from you. I know that whole you'll 09:55 Speaker A own nothing and be happy quote sounds dystopian, but you already own nothing. You're not happy. You're generally depressed. You're generally stressed. I forget what the stat is, but like a large amount of people have already cried about their finances in the past 10:08 Speaker A like couple months. Most people, if their paycheck is delayed a single week or a single month, would have to start going into debt to pay for crap that does not matter. But they didn't even force us into this. A lot of us opted in 10:20 Speaker A because it's just easier to rent something than it is to buy. It's just easier to get the food that you want right now even if you can't afford it. 10:27 Speaker A It's just easier to DoorDash your food than to go out and get it even if it's double the price. You can always pay for it over the next couple months. But if you go to act to that line, you own 10:34 Speaker A nothing, you'll be happy. I think one thing that if we put this in, makes this make a lot more sense is if you'll own nothing and be distracted and you'll be happy. Most people are so distracted that they don't realize what is 10:45 Speaker A happening. They don't realize that they're even in the rat race, that they're in a trap that has no escape, that they'll never stop having to leave their families to go work inside a box to make somebody else a 10:58 Speaker A multimillionaire, to go home, to barely have enough money to scrape by so that they can watch on TV, be entertained on their phones. The average person takes up in about 13 hours of content per day passively. So you're just like flat out 11:11 Speaker A pacifier in your mouth, neutralize that threat, move on to something else, and you have now become a product. There's a lot of companies that actually subscribe a value number to a new customer. Where once you buy something, they know that 11:22 Speaker A they can get X amount of money out of the average customer over the the lifetime of this company. Even doctors do this. Even when you're born, the medical industry puts a dollar amount per person and they try to milk as much 11:33 Speaker A money as they possibly can out of each person that is born till the time that they're 18. There's like this value that you got to get all the shots, you got to get the doctors and whatever and I'm not 11:41 Speaker A even like I don't even care about that, but everything has turned you into a product. Everything is designed to get as much money as possible out of you. 11:49 Speaker A Every couple of years they'll nerf your phones so you have to buy a new one. 11:52 Speaker A They'll keep adding subscriptions on here and the main goal is to just keep you distracted enough that they can extract as much money as possible out of you and you'll just be kind of in a daze producing for them. I would encourage 12:03 Speaker A you to take a step back right now while you're watching this video and just think for a minute. You have worked really hard at your job, I assume. Maybe you don't work that hard, I don't know. 12:10 Speaker A What do you have to show for it? Is the system is the race you are running right now, is it working? Are you ahead? Do you have $100,000 in the bank? Do you have $100,000 in stocks? The average 12:18 Speaker A person will earn between two and four million dollars over their lifetime if they earn 50 to $100,000 a year. What do you have to show for that? If you are like most Americans and don't have much money, you're not where you want to be 12:30 Speaker A financially, that is because they are extracting it from you. They are taking your effort, your life force that you are going and trading that life force for money and then they're doing everything they can to extract as much 12:42 Speaker A of that life force out of you as possible without breaking you so that you keep the cycle going and produce more and more for them. So the more you work, the more money you have, the more money you spend, the more money they 12:51 Speaker A have. And if you are sick of that system, there's a couple things you can do to opt out. I'd say one is to build something that you own. Like it was really hard for me to start all the 12:59 Speaker A businesses that I started and I had years of literally I would have made more money at McDonald's, but I kept sticking with them. I read literally like hundreds of books and studied and worked really, really, really hard to 13:10 Speaker A build the businesses that I built, but now I've been able to retire my wife, travel, help a lot of people, really make an impact, really change my family's life. And while that was hard, it would have been much harder to have 13:20 Speaker A my wife go and support somebody else's dreams five days a week where we pay somebody to watch our children. Like for me, mentally that would have been way harder than taking the safe, secure, work at a job, go make somebody else 13:30 Speaker A rich, or you can sacrifice your nights, weekends, try to build something on your own so that you can reap all those rewards instead of other people. And the second part of that is, even if you earn a lot of money, as we saw in some of the 13:40 Speaker A stats, if you're spending everything you're making, you're building no margin, you will never have freedom in your life. You will just be a slave to the system with more stuff around. 13:48 Speaker A You'll have newer, shinier things, but you'll never be able to stop working because you'll have payments for everything. You'll just have a bunch of junk. And so, you need to take part in the buy nothing building. You have to 13:57 Speaker A say, "No, we're we're done buying new crap. We don't need it." This is where I've loved the idea of minimalism, where like, I don't buy new clothes. I don't buy new anything. What I buy is myself freedom. I buy my wife out of a job. I 14:06 Speaker A buy family members out of jobs. I buy things that I need to be happy, to thrive. I buy high-quality things, but not more than I need. And because of that, I've had a 50% plus savings rate for the past 10 something years, even 14:18 Speaker A when I was earning next to nothing. And now that I earn a lot more, I have made sure that I don't spend anywhere near as much as I make. But I'll tell you, if I had fallen for this trap early on, if I 14:28 Speaker A had bought a new car that was $30,000 instead of buying a $3,000 piece of junk that I could actually afford, and by afford, I don't mean payments, I mean I can actually afford to buy it by working multiple jobs to save up that $3,000, 14:41 Speaker A then I would have destroyed my life and I wouldn't have freedom. My wife would have to work. She wouldn't be home with her kids. We probably wouldn't even have as many kids. Everything is a trap. And if you let your monthly expenses 14:49 Speaker A continue to creep up with $10 a month here, $20 a month there, $2,000 a month with that housing payment there, $700 a month for that car payment. Now, you're suddenly there is no chance that you'll ever stop working, you'll ever be able 15:01 Speaker A to have more than 2 weeks of vacation a year, you'll ever be able to build something to help people because you are just trying to survive. Stop buying their crap. Take 5 minutes, cancel a bunch of subscriptions, save $100 a 15:13 Speaker A month. See if your life improves or see if your life really gets all that worse. 15:16 Speaker A Sell your new car, bike to work, move to a smaller house. I have done all of those. Playing their game will never get you freedom. You have to play a different game. You have to opt out of this trap that they are building. You 15:26 Speaker A can't just get all your money siphoned from you constantly. You have to live a radically different lifestyle of personal responsibility, of building your own thing, not making somebody else rich, of not consuming everything always, not consuming content, not 15:39 Speaker A consuming all the food, not consuming all the technology, the toys, and the junk. And by making those decisions correctly for 3 years, for 5 years, your life will change. If you make no choices, it like change anything, nothing's going to change. I'm going to 15:52 Speaker A see if you can get out of debt. This is something I'm working on this year. I'm trying to pay off my house as soon as possible. I realized I was paying $2,000 a month in interest on this house, and 16:00 Speaker A that kind of disgusts me. And so, I gave myself a time period that I'm going to try to pay off this house in under 3 years. And if I don't, I'm going to sell the house. And so, I personally am have 16:09 Speaker A always taken drastic measures to make sure that my family and my life are safe and secure and and I'm not subject to other people. The borrower is a slave to the lender, and I've been there, and it sucks. And yeah, this is the whole 16:19 Speaker A design of the system right now to just to make you a slave to every lender that there is. Cuz right now, everything is a buy now, pay later, down to the very food that you eat. So, if you got some 16:27 Speaker A value out of this, feel free to subscribe. I have a whole series where I break down the psychology and how they are kind of programming us and how to escape that. So, I'll leave that um right here if you want to check that 16:37 Speaker A out. And I'll see you next week. Topics: buy now pay later subscriptions planned obsolescence consumer debt financial fragility economic system personal finance Gabe Bult buy nothing movement consumer rights --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/not-buying-crap-anymore/ — the same content, without the markup. Published by SozAI (https://sozai.app). Reuse and quotation are allowed with attribution and a link back. Machine-readable index: https://sozai.app/llms.txt · data API: https://sozai.app/api/