How Colleges Use Merit Aid to Trap Families (Degree Free #205)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Welcome back everyone. We have a lot of stuff to get into today. Let's dive right into it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:04]:
All right, so the first thing I want to talk about was this absolutely insane call, Ramsey call I heard. We're talking about Ramsey calls, I feel like every other week, but that's because I feel like the age of people calling into the show have more kids going to college. And because of that, the stories are getting more relevant to us. And also they seem to get progressively more unhinged. Again, my rub with these calls is that never once, never, not ever, uh, you know, put a finger down if you've ever heard a Ramsey call where they told someone, hey, your kid probably doesn't need to go to college. Oh wait, they've never done that. It's against their religion to tell people, hey, actually, why is your kid going to college? Yeah, they probably don't need to go to college at all. You probably just don't even need to spend that money.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:43]:
This is a great example of that. So this dad calls into the Ramsey Show and like, let me just set the scene. His daughter's 18 years old and she's going to college this fall. And the family, again, not at any point does it come up, what is your daughter going to college for? Oh, does that even need a degree? That's never the conversation. Never, not ever is that a part of the conversation. This family is in $200,000 worth of debt. They have credit cards, they have personal loans, they have their own student loans still. They still have their own student loans.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:14]:
These parents who have an 18-year-old kid still have their own student loans and they have a HELOC. And on top of that, they have a $4,000 a month mortgage. And the dad is calling in because he earns too much for aid, which is really just loans, uh, more friendly loans, because he's going to have to take out private loans probably. And he then proceeds to talk about how his daughter has been given a little bit of merit aid, a few thousand dollars worth of merit aid. And so he is in fact going to send his daughter to get student loans while he has his own student loans because she got a little bit of merit aid. And it's incredible how effective this is. At pushing people into buying their kids degrees when they don't need them for no reason, when they can't even afford them. But it's that little bit of merit aid that makes them feel like, oh, well, my child was in the honor society.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:03]:
And so they got $3,000 a year worth of merit aid at a college that's going to cost them $55,000 to $90,000 a year. And that's going to put this family in even more debt. They're drowning. They're literally underwater. And it's unbelievable to me to see that again, you're calling into a financial show where they're supposed to give financial advice. And not once is, is it questioned as to whether or not they need to spend this money to buy this kid a degree at all. Not once does that come up. It's all about how do we structure this, how, where do we send her to college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:34]:
It's never about do you even need to buy this paper for your daughter, because the answer, statistically speaking, is probably no, not at all. But that's never part of the conversation, and it's getting increasingly more frustrating to me to hear that not once have they ever asked Why? Why is she going to college? For what? For what? That's the question I just desperately— I want to beg the Ramsey people, when you, when you have callers that call in and they're talking about sending their kids to college and they are in dire financial straits or they can't afford it, the first question you need to ask these people is, for what? Why are you considering this purchase? Because by and large, what you're going to find is that rarely do they need to go at all. Rarely do they need to go at all. And rarely is that the wisest or even the most efficient or even the best path for them to get into their desired career. And that is the question that I want to see start getting asked on this, on that show.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:24]:
For me, I want to take it in a little bit of a different direction. I want to zoom in on the merit aid portion of it. We've talked about this before years ago, but I'll say it again here, stepping all the way back. College, they are the best marketers in the world. They've literally, I mean, with the government's help, They have turned it into like college debt. They've turned purchasing a college degree into like the second largest industry and like really cause for concern for the American people. It is massive. The student loan debt crisis is like huge.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:58]:
It's mortgages and then it's student loans.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:00]:
Yes, exactly. And at least mortgages, there's like hard asset, right? Exactly. And then, but this thing is like a piece of paper that you never picked up. sits framed on your wall or it's in, it's in a crate.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:11]:
It's hardly required for any job.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:12]:
In the basement. Right, exactly. That does nothing. So if you take that marketing lens and you look at what merit aid is, merit aid is nothing but a discount. It's nothing but a discount or a coupon.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:25]:
It's a coupon.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:26]:
The, you can look at it both ways. It's, it's, it's both, it's both of those things. And if you look, let's take it from the coupon lens. We've all been there. Like literally we've all been there. We've been to our local supermarket, Safeway, H-E-B, wherever, wherever it is that you are in the world, Kroger. And you've seen the coupons and then you're like, buy one, get one free, buy 2 of this thing and then get this unrelated thing for free. We've all bought more than we needed.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:00]:
To get that second thing for free, to get that third thing for free. Buy one, get one 50% off.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:05]:
I almost did that this morning at H-E-B.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:07]:
100%. We've all been there. And this merit aid is exactly the same thing. They dangle a few thousand dollars in front of you, in front of you and your child and say, oh, here's $5,000. Here's $3,000. Let's see how much, how little we can give you, how much we can give you, however you want to think about it. And let's see how much you'll spend after that, because we give you a little bit of a taste. We give you a little bit of a coupon, which is going to make you overpurchase after that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:37]:
What makes it not sinister, but what makes it so much more convincing than an actual coupon that you just see at the store, or, you know, you're shopping for shoes or whatever, is that there's value and status. I guess better said, there's status attached to it. And so because they've used it, they're marketing to you and they're using ad copy. They're using marketing copy to sell this to you. They're saying this is merit aid because of the merits of your child, because they're so special, because they've done such a good job because of XYZ.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:14]:
Because, yeah, because you put them in tutoring, cuz you got 'em to this SAT score, cuz you did whatever and they got honor society and they're Mensa and they're whatever and they're whatever. And Aren't they so special? And you wouldn't squander that. They're special. Their grades are so good. You would waste that? You would throw away all their work? You're not throwing away their work. You're saving them from a lifetime of debt that will close more doors than that stupid degree is going to open. I'm very tired of seeing people fall prey to this. Like, they stress their kids out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:42]:
They spend all of the 4 years of high school stressing these kids out so that they can reach these arbitrary test scores, arbitrary, whatever, get enough hours so they can get these partial scholarships so they can apply or get accepted to these colleges to be thrown a couple grand that is not even sort of going to put a dent in the amount of debt that these kids are going to be in. And again, when the parents themselves are still carrying student loans, it's unbelievable how this is starting to ruin people's lives and how they're about to do this again. They're about to do this again sometime for the 3rd generation in this family that is still in student loan debt. Because there are people now, and we're going to talk about this later, but I just read an article about how a ton of those over 60 are putting off retirement because they can't retire because of their student loans, which is something you and I have talked about before. The middle generation, the Gen Xers, the parents of these now 18-year-old kids, they still have their student loans. They're, they're, they, they all have student loans for the most part, a vast majority of them do. And now they're going to do this to their kids again for like $3,000 a year. To feel like their kids' effort and all of this stress and all this money they spent to get their kids into, accepted into these schools that they don't even need to go to to get good jobs.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:55]:
And now they're, they're just going to throw that all away for a couple grand a year in merit aid.

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:59]:
I want to circle back to merit aid here for, for the listener and for the viewer. The merit aid, just view it from the lens of the consumer, view it from an impartial standpoint. Look at this. Would I buy this at full price? Yes. No. Why? Why not? What is the value of this thing? What is happening is that they are making you feel a certain way about your child and about the way that you raised your child. He's like, exactly what you were talking about and what I was talking about, the value. If we had a dollar for every time that we had a discussion with a parent that said, what do I do? Because they had, they got merit aid because, and then they filled out words after, after that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:48]:
Never did they say like, oh, we got a discount. We, we, we got a few, we got a few dollars off. What should we do? It's, it's always, they got merit aid because they got good grades. They got merit aid because of their community service. They got merit aid because of whatever.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:04]:
'Cause of test scores, 'cause of whatever.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:06]:
The secret is, guys, is they give merit aid to literally everybody. They give merit aid to anybody because it's a coupon. It's literally just like you're walking into a store and there's a coupon sitting next to the fricking cereal that you're looking at. And, and all they do, like, you don't know because it's not as obvious as that because they sell to you in private.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:26]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:26]:
And because they're selling to you in private, you don't know what the other person did. And then they say, oh, that person got $5,000 because their grades were a little bit better, whatever. Like, no, they're just testing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:36]:
Like, yeah, that's not how merit aid works.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:37]:
They're just, they're just testing. They're just like, I think that you, I think that you're going to pay, uh, if I just give you a coupon of $2,000, I think you're going to pay if I give you a coupon of $5,000. I think that you're going to pay if you give you a coupon of $500. And it's like, they just test and they're just doing it. They're marketers.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:52]:
Parents need to know this about how merit aid works. I highly recommend people look up the book, The Price You Pay for College by Ron Lieber. It's one of the most unhinged books that I've ever read because he goes through exactly how colleges charge, how they make up pricing. how they do all of these unethical things. He comes to the conclusion it's not necessary for a good job. He comes to the conclusion it often does not have good ROI. And then he comes to the conclusion that he's still gonna send there his kids, cuz I guess just because. Literally, that's how the book— it's, it's a crazy book.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:19]:
It's a wild ride. But essentially to just tell parents how this works, the colleges keep profiles on— they, they do keep profiles, especially the Ivies, but even regular state colleges. They look up how much money you make. They look up any assets you have, any businesses you have. They look up all of this stuff about you. So this guy, because he's a high income earner, they absolutely just went through how many houses does he own? Does he own a business? They go through and figure out as much as they can. They use probably things like LexisNexis, I would imagine, to just figure out like how much your house is worth, like what's your profession? And they just extrapolate from that how much you earn, how much you might be worth. And then from there, they basically put this information into a little wheel and then they decide how much they're going to charge your family to put your kid through this college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:02]:
It's dynamic pricing. People get so mad about grocery stores rolling this out, right? They say, oh my gosh, you know, I can't believe dynamic pricing's the devil. Like we should burn everything down, burn out all the grocery stores with the tags that if, if it's at 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock, you know, your noodles will cost like 17 cents more because there's more demand for the noodles at 5:30 when people have to get home and make a quick dinner or whatever. But they don't understand and they're not, no one's furious about the fact that colleges have dynamic pricing, which is. They try to figure out your tolerance for how much money you will pay to get your kid a piece of paper that will not get them a job, that will not help them earn high, that will not necessarily even get them a job that helps them live the life that they want. That's what they do. And then the worst part, like insult to injury again, and the funniest part of all this is, this is the class that we aspire to, right? Like these are our finest institutions full of our best people and they are doing financial detective work on families to figure out what they will pay for that piece of paper. And then they are also like, how much merit aid can we give this kid? They don't care.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:09]:
They don't care that your kids have whatever test scores. They don't care that they did whatever community service. They do not care. All they're doing when they calculate that merit aid is they are figuring out how much of a discount based on your income, your assets, your profession will be enough to get you to sign that loan. They get all the money upfront, by the way. That's why they do this. People are wondering why are colleges incentivized that way? That's what they do. And so it is very important for people to understand that's how colleges charge.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:34]:
That's how they come up with the merit aid. It's all, it really is a scam. It really is a scam. It really is gross. And that's how they do it. And so this guy is about to fall victim to that because his daughter got a little bit of merit aid. Meanwhile, he's completely underwater financially in his life. It's unreal.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:51]:
It's unreal. It's criminal what they're doing to people.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:53]:
All right.

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:54]:
We're spicy today. All right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:55]:
Moving on to other things here. Talk to me about this enrollment cliff.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:01]:
All right. So basically what happened, guys, is 18 years ago, people didn't have enough babies. So we've got basically the most 18-year-olds we'll have right now. And then from now on, it will always be going down. That number has started to decline now. So the number of high school graduates peaked in 2025. So we are done. And Unless something drastically changes, and if it does change, it'll take decades for this to improve.

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:26]:
But essentially the number of high school graduates is declining because our population is declining in the United States. And colleges are trying to attribute the drop in enrollment to the fact that there are less 18-year-olds, but that's not what's going on. Uh, and the reason that they're trying to attribute this to just the decline in the amount of 18-year-olds is because they can't have people suspecting that parents have realized their product is not worth it. It's not worth what they're charging. It's not getting the result that parents want for their kids, which is a life they actually want. It's not getting them high-paying jobs. It's not making them well-rounded citizens. It's not doing any of the things that supposedly college claims that it's doing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:09]:
It's not educating them. It's not making them employable. It's not giving them a social network. Most of the kids are coming out with mental disorders. So it's not really like helping at all. And because of that, colleges are like, well, it's just because of the population. I mean, there's just not enough people. That's why we're having a decline in enrollment.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:26]:
That's not why. It's actually because high school graduates are opting out of going to college. And that in large part, because we know that parents are the biggest determinant of whether or not young adults go to college, it's because parents have realized it's not worth it. And a lot of that is because they're still carrying their own student loans. And some of them have parents. So the grandparents of these 18-year-olds still are carrying student loans and are now unable to retire. That's what's really going on behind the scenes. And that kind of leads into something else because while fewer kids exist to go to college, the ones who do exist are choosing not to go.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:02]:
And that's the core of it. And colleges are just desperately, again, they're, as you said, master marketers. They're looking around for anything because they don't want people to suspect that they're hemorrhaging students because the quality of their product is not good and people are no longer buying it. Their whole model just assumed that they would always have a permanent line of 18-year-olds ready to go through and buy, and that line has shrunk and they're now panicking. And a lot of colleges are feeling this, including state schools.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:30]:
Not only has the line shrunk, which is the number of 18-year-olds, but then also a lot of people have gotten out of line.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:36]:
They're walking away.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:36]:
Right.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:37]:
Yeah. They just wanna make sure that people know, and I've seen so many articles, so many pieces talking about like, oh, it's just because of there's not enough kids to enroll. Like, no, no, no, that's not why. It's because public sentiment of in quotes higher education is like 73% negative. If you have a negative sentiment about in quotes higher education, you're not gonna pay $40,000 a year to send your kid to it for 4 to 6 years to get a piece of paper that you now know and is very obvious in the age of AI is not gonna help them get a good employable job. It is that simple.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:07]:
It's so crazy to even hear that, that it's a negative sentiment. I mean, when we started this 5+ years ago now, it was not that way at all. Like at all. But the tide has really come out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:19]:
Oh yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:20]:
I mean, like it is really come out and we are really seeing who's not wearing pants.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:26]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:26]:
Right.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:26]:
Like, well, if you're a parent and you've been like, yeah, you know, I feel like it's just me. It's definitely not just you. And I, I guarantee you, if you start bringing up that you're considering not sending your kid to college or you're considering a degree-free path for them, You will probably experience other parents go, oh, I'm so glad you said something because everyone is doing this math right now. And when they finish the worksheet, they are coming out and the choice is not college anymore. That's not it. Parents are looking around for any other option at this point.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:54]:
Yeah. This is like a symptom of this. You can see that this is the case because I mean, just one data point or just one university is University of Oregon closes down some of their dorms for freshmen because enrollment is down for non-resident freshmen.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:11]:
Correct. And what's interesting also is that they're expecting just under 1,900 freshmen at University of Oregon. And that's down from— this is not a small drop, by the way. They're expecting 1,900 students. Last year they expected 2,400. That's a massive cut. And it's so obvious too that so much of this is artificial because a lot of A lot of this is because the money is cut off. And so the demand was completely artificial.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:39]:
And when it comes down to brass tacks, parents are going, mm, yeah, no. And what's also interesting, and this is something that I also see is happening in the UK, but when this happens, do you know what these universities do to try to make up these deficits? Because they're going to have a, they're going to have a $20 million shortfall this year. The university, the University of Oregon is going to have a $20 million shortfall. Where do you think they're going to make that money up?

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:02]:
Grad school.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:03]:
Ooh, good guess. Good guess. But the funding for that just got cut off. So probably not. What they're going to do instead, they might do that, but no, I think—

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:12]:
Elementary school programs, preschool programs. They're going to get them out of the womb.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:16]:
They're going to get them out of the womb. No, I actually have predicted, and I will refresh this prediction. Do you remember 3 years ago I said that what you're going to see is as these colleges start to get more desperate, they are going to let people sign their kids up for loans sooner and sooner. And I also think the crazier thing that I predicted, which is that, you know how they're tapping out grandparents for student loans? I think that they're gonna allow people to sign student loans for unborn children. I'm not even kidding. You, you, you think that that's nuts? That's my, that is my crazy Cloud Atlas wild sci-fi. I'm not kidding. I, I'm so, these people are so greedy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:50]:
No, the colleges are gonna become, this is my wild theory. The colleges are like, they hate kids, right? Colleges hate kids. They don't want women having children. Like they're anti-family, but they're gonna have to change that because like somebody's gotta pay their loans, right? Otherwise they're gonna have to lay off all the professors. And so all of a sudden you're gonna have these professors that like hate families. They hate women getting married. They're like, you know what? You really should get married because, uh, we wanna make sure that you do have children. They're gonna close down, like they're gonna stop handing out birth control on campus because they want people to have kids.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:18]:
That's crazy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:18]:
No, you watch, you watch. I, I'm so serious about this. Like, you think I'm kidding? I'm not. They're gonna allow people to take out student loans on, on behalf of their unborn children. That's how desperate these people are for money. Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:28]:
This is some like Rapunzel, uh, Rumpelstiltskin trick.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:32]:
In the column on Heroes Write— no, I always say stuff that sounds— no, no, I'm serious. Uh, you, and then you listening, you may be like, wow, she sounds insane. You know what? I always have these wild theories, but they only sound wild for a couple years until they completely come true. A couple years ago, I said that having a college degree on your resume was gonna be a contraindication of work. And the only way that people could get hired was to take them off their resumes. And I got thousands. I am not lying to you people. I've got thousands of nasty, I've gotten the meanest comments.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:01]:
I've gotten the meanest DMs. I've got unhinged, crazy people that said the wildest things to me. And guess fricking what? I was absolutely right. 3 years ago, 3 years ago, I said this and now they're writing articles about it. In the Western Journal, they're writing articles about it in the Western Journal that the only way the bachelor's degree holders can get hired is to take their bachelor's degrees off their resume. 3 years ago, I sounded absolutely insane to say that. People were like, what are you, you're, what are you smoking? Blah, blah, blah. Nothing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:31]:
I could just see what was gonna happen as a logical conclusion of college greed, overselling degrees to people that don't need them. And again, when you tap out the parents and the grandparents and, and the kids, like, where are you gonna go? You gotta go to the, to the people that don't exist yet. 'Cause that's the only people you can take money from.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:46]:
Anyway, I, I, I will stand, I will stand as the voice of reason here and say that I, I think that that's very outlandish.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:55]:
Mm-hmm. But, uh, they gotta get the money from somewhere.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:57]:
But sure, let's, uh, let, let's put that down in the record. I think that's gonna, I think that's not gonna age well, but we'll, but, but we'll see. I do hear what you're saying about this, um, phenomenon that is happening in where people are experimenting. And I think like this is, In defense, or not that they need to be defended because they're getting work, so it's good. When going out to the job market, it is good to test things, right? Change your resume, change different things, experiment, see what works. 100%, that is what you should be doing. And so the fact that people are willing to change one of the most like foundational things about their resume. Is good.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:41]:
Is this sentence fragment really? It's like University of whatever, bachelor's, you know, like, okay, awesome. Is this sentence fragment useful to me getting a job and being willing to detach all of the sunk cost and all of the effort and time and money that they had to put in to get that sentence fragment on their resume? And the fact that they're willing to experiment to take it off, that is Amazing. Like, that's great. And the fact that it's working is also good, right? Awesome. It is a little telling of what it says about the employers if that is happening. Like, from anecdotally of all this, like, these people that are doing it and they are getting jobs and they're getting at least interviews, job offers after they take it off, what does that say about the value That employers are placing on the degree. What does it say about the mindset of the people that are looking at these resumes and looking at what this says about your child? I don't, I don't know what it says, but possibly it's, hey, they're, they're going to expect too much. They're not going to do enough.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:55]:
They don't have the skills. They're not going to be willing to learn. So I'm not going to deal with any of that. And let's deal with somebody, somebody that doesn't have all that baggage.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:03]:
Yeah, I completely, I completely agree with you. And really too, what's crazy is when I did predict that, I said that was my only suggestion was make another resume and just test it. See if I'm right. That's what I said. That's all I said to do, which was crazy because you'd think that I'd done something insane, but all I said was, hey, if you're having trouble getting hired, it's probably because your degree is on your resume. Take it off, make another resume and test. And tell me if I'm wrong. And, uh, quite to the opposite, the people who did actually test were like, oh shoot, I got an interview.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:33]:
I was like, yeah, well, that makes sense. But I just want to circle back around really quick before we jump off. And then I'm just going to recount real quick the past predictions and then future predictions, because I just want to be very clear about what had happened and what I believe is going to happen. But the University of Oregon, I believe, again, they're missing $20 million. They're going to miss $20 million. And where they're going to make that up is the same place that UK colleges make it up, which is from foreign students who will pay full price, international students. When they get those international students, they do not hold them to the same academic standards because they need their money. And it's more difficult for international students because, uh, they're one, not in their home country.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:12]:
A lot of international students are like, suffer with depression because you can imagine they're very far from home and it's difficult to be far from home and they're young. And so they come here and it's difficult for them to do that. A lot of them struggle with English, with the culture, because it's just different from their home, and then they come here and their families are paying full price because they got into these US colleges. And then they're not allowed to be graded on the same standard because the college cannot afford to lose their money. And you need to understand why the degrees are no longer worth anything. And it really truly is because of greed. It's because of college greed. It's because of the financial incentives colleges have to behave a certain way.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:47]:
And it's because they do not have the moral ethical fiber to behave in a different way because they're just businesses. They're just hedge funds. And so it's very important for parents to understand that this is the institution that is trying to get you to believe that $3,000 worth of merit aid is a good reason to put your kid in a ton of debt. Meanwhile, they're subsidizing their budget shortfalls by bringing in international students, giving them better grades than your child simply because they need their money more. That really is what's going on. And that's part of the reason why it's not worth as much as it was. Like just Point blank, that's the reason. Now, just a real quick recap of past predictions, which is, yeah, the degrees actually are the reason a ton of people aren't getting hired.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:26]:
And I was right about that. 2023, I said that. 2026, it's been proven right. Not by me, but by other people writing articles about this phenomenon. And then people saying, oh, that actually was the reason. And then they're able to get interviews after they take it off and they test with their resume. My wild prediction, you think it's wild, I don't think it's wild. Is that as colleges run out of kids, 18-year-olds, parents, and grandparents, which is the largest group of people taking out student loans sometimes for the 3rd or 4th or 5th time at this point, I believe that they will come to the conclusion, dystopian as it sounds, that the only way to get money is to allow people to put their future children in debt.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:04]:
If there's no more alive people and you can't take money from dead people, you'll just take it from future people. It just seems like it sounds super crazy, But our society in general is moving more and more dystopian every day. And I absolutely think that I'm gonna be proven right in 3 years. 2029, we're gonna check back in. And unfortunately, you're— I'm gonna be laughing because I'm gonna be right. You'll see.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:23]:
All right. Until next week, guys.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:25]:
Aloha.