Comedian River Butcher returns to talk about Biden’s student loan cancellation plan! He talks to Nikki Nolan, Shanna Bennett, and Emma Klauber about how he is personally affected by the announcement and why it’s great, but not good enough. We also dive into matrilineal society structures and communalism that could inform our path forward in education reform.

References

• Episode 45: Caring 10% More
• River Butcher
• Matriarchy
• Matriarchal Studies
• Stanford scholar explains why zombie fascination is very much alive
• Love of Money Root of Evil
• What You Need to Know About Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan (New York Times)

 

Transcript: 

[00:00:05] Shanna Bennett: Hi, I’m Shanna Bennett and you’re listening to Matter of Life and Debt. So today on the podcast, we have writer, comedian, actor River Butcher back with us today. We also have two of our wonderful producers, Emma Klauber and Nikki Nolan.

[00:00:30] So as we know last week, the Biden administration made a monumental announcement, as it relates to student debt and also the payment pause. There’s been a lot of chatter River. I know that you reached out and you wanted to chat, so let’s start there. What, what made you want to re-engage in this conversation on the podcast?

[00:00:51] River Butcher: Oh, well, thanks again for having me back and thanks for having me to begin with. I just felt like we had such a good conversation about student loan debt to begin with. And then I personally didn’t think anything was gonna happen. So when it did happen, I was like, well, I want to go talk to these folks about what they think and how they feel about it.

[00:01:12] And, you know, talk about it just in general. Cause like there’s so much, I mean, we’ll get into it I’m sure. But like, there’s just so much punditry about it and like just trying to stop it, which is really wild to watch that happen. But yeah, we talked so much about how detrimental the debt is.

[00:01:28] I feel like this announcement, because it’s not a bill, he’s just doing it, which is like, duh, you could have just done it.

[00:01:36] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:01:37] River Butcher: But you know, I’m trying to practice with this very particular thing. Like, hey, I’m very grateful cause this actually will affect me personally and my mom, you know?

[00:01:48] And also it’s not enough and you can totally do both. I feel like a lot of people about a lot of things, but specifically student loan debt, it’s like so black and white, you have to be one or the other. And it’s like, no. I’m really grateful this is happening, but we have to keep going, cause this is 20, 30 years in the making, it didn’t just happen overnight.

[00:02:11] Shanna Bennett: Right. First of all, where were you when you heard or when you found out about the announcement and then secondly, what was your knee jerk response?

[00:02:20] River Butcher: I feel like I was just online or something just scrolling on Twitter and I saw it on there and I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And what’s really wild is that, so that was Wednesday. And maybe Friday, the week before I just had this, like, just like a truly intuitive thought to tweet the phrase “Where my Pell Grants at” and I deleted it. It didn’t get a lot of traction. And I was like, oh, maybe, maybe this is offensive to people. I don’t know. So I just deleted it. And then immediately when I saw that I said wait, what? It’s tied to Pell Grants. And then I went back and tried to find my tweet and I had deleted it.

[00:03:01] So that was my initial thing, the Pell Grant thing is really important because I don’t think people understand and they also probably don’t wanna understand . But if you got a Pell Grant to go to college, you had no money and you had to prove it.

[00:03:21] You had to show it. You had to have the humbling conversation with your parents to say, hey, can you tell the government how little money you make so I can go to school? I wish that people didn’t have to share their super hyper personal and vulnerable stories all the time.

[00:03:45] Cause it also feels very unsafe, you know? But at the same time, let’s be honest here, you know? If you had to get a Pell grant, that means you did not have any money to go to college at all, period. None, none. You couldn’t do it. The reality of somebody making $125,000 in 2020, let’s also talk about how, if you make that much money, how much money you’ve made for the last 20 years?

[00:04:14] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:04:15] River Butcher: If you’re making $125,000 in 2022. So anyway, it’s my knee jerk, I can’t believe this is happening. Holy shit. I can’t believe it. . And also, we gotta do more for other people because of all the people. I was so grateful for all the people sharing their student loan situations, because I had a dose of humility too, like, oh, I had it very difficult, but they made it even worse for everybody that came after me.

[00:04:42] The student loan situation after me- I feel like I am of a very particular age that was right at the moment where they’re like, oh, we can profit off of this. My interest rate has not been that ridiculous and I haven’t paid into it and stayed at the X amount over time.

[00:05:04] But seeing people say their initial loan amount is $40,000, they’ve paid $50,000 and they owe $80,000 and I’m just like, wait, this is criminal.

[00:05:12] Shanna Bennett: I know. I know.

[00:05:13] River Butcher: Literally. What about you? You all? What, what are your feelings?

[00:05:17] Emma Klauber: So I feel like I spent the beginning, the first part of last week kind of seeing the anticipation happening on Twitter or like news outlets started saying, okay, he’s going to make an announcement on Wednesday. And I had a ton of anxiety leading into Wednesday that he was gonna be very disappointing.

[00:05:40] River Butcher: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I definitely felt the same way. I was like, this is not gonna be anything.

[00:05:46] Emma Klauber: Yeah. I thought maybe he would extend the pause longer, but was gonna be like, actually I decided I’m not canceling anything. I’m in a particular situation where I may not get to benefit, which is funny because I was not making more than $125,000 last year.

[00:06:07] I don’t know. We’ll see what year’s tax returns count towards it. So maybe I will get it, to be honest, if I’m being truly vulnerable with you guys, I was kind of devastated, because I have six figures of student debt, most of it is private now, but I have $18,000 in federal, so I would love $10,000 to be canceled.

[00:06:28] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:06:30] Emma Klauber: So it’s kind of like what you’re saying River. There’s just too many kinds of individual situations where some people I’m so like I’m genuinely so happy for everyone who never has to think about this again, once it gets canceled. That’s incredible. But yeah, I’ve kind of been overdosing on all the tweets where everyone is sort of showing their balances of like $90,000, $150,000. That interest will be racked up again in a year for everyone like that.

[00:07:05] And it sucks. And I feel similarly, but I think I’m trying to look at it as like, this is incredible progress. All of our organizing and voices made this happen. That feels like a huge achievement. I really didn’t think he was going to move his stance on this. So, you know, I love the Dark Brandon memes.

[00:07:26] It feels like he gets a kick out of the public response, so like let’s keep encouraging him if that motivates him to make these kind decisions.

[00:07:36] River Butcher: My God.

[00:07:37] It’s so funny.

[00:07:39] Emma Klauber: Yeah.

[00:07:40] River Butcher: I have so many opinions that are just bouncing around in my head right now that I’m not gonna say.

[00:07:45] Emma Klauber: Yeah, yeah.

[00:07:48] River Butcher: Oh God.

[00:07:50] Shanna Bennett: What was your knee jerk response on Wednesday when you learned?

[00:07:53] Nikki Nolan: Well, it was not enough. It was not enough. I paid off my student debt. So it’s not gonna impact me in any way. And I’m still so excited that it’s going to help so many people. And also it’s not gonna help so many people.

[00:08:08] So it’s so frustrating to sit back and be like you had the power, you just showed us that you had the power through an executive order to cancel student debt. Why did you do so little? Why did you do so little, especially with all this PPP stuff coming out. I love this thing, the people who are complaining about forgiveness have these millions of PPP loans forgiven.

[00:08:29] River Butcher: And what’s incredible for me. The thing about the PPP loans is, this is my opinion on it is not that oh, those are bad. This is good. It’s that we have enough to do it all. We absolutely have to do it all. Actually, we actually could do it all. And that’s not to say that, you know, I personally think that if you are a Congressperson, you probably shouldn’t be taking them. You probably should have some more regulation on your business and how easily you could take out millions of dollars for them specifically.

[00:09:01] And a lot of fraud was done for those PPP loans. However, it’s not actually about what’s good and what’s bad. It’s about the fact that like, we can even pay for the bad we actually have enough to do all of it. We could do all of it. We could do all the things we wish to do. And then some, you know, like we actually have enough.

[00:09:19] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:09:21] River Butcher: It was very much laid bare.

[00:09:23] If you look at that spreadsheet of all the millions of dollars that just went with the flip a switch. And there it goes. And it’s like, oh yeah, we, we totally have enough. We totally have enough for all of us.

[00:09:36] Shanna Bennett: We have enough. I think for me, I totally resonate with what you said, Emma, on the anxiety. Cause just hearing that there was an announcement coming. I think I felt so out of control. Like there was this there’s gonna be this potential announcement that could affect me and my life and my finances.

[00:09:56] And I felt like I had no control over it. It’s gonna sound really common sense, but like, that’s the essence of our government and politics. I had this moment where I was like, oh, this is how this works. Right. They have the literal strings pulling on my life and I have no control over it in some sense.

[00:10:15] I think ultimately I feel the same way as I think we all feel it’s, it’s definitely a move in the right direction in terms of progress. I think it’s awesome to watch an elected official, in my opinion, be forced to do something that he did not wanna do.

[00:10:33] River Butcher: Who campaigned on doing it and then was like, I’m not gonna do it.

[00:10:36] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:10:37] River Butcher: Yeah.

[00:10:38] Shanna Bennett: Right. So that was pretty cool.

[00:10:40] But then I just feel like if this administration wanted to make meaningful change, and if they’re looking at the data that we’re all looking at, right? The data says that the average college student is leaving school with $30,000 of debt. The average black student has $50,000 plus of debt.

[00:11:01] River Butcher: Yeah,

[00:11:03] Shanna Bennett: $10,000 is not significant.

[00:11:03] Emma Klauber: Yeah.

[00:11:04] Shanna Bennett: This is not significant. So where did we get this number?

[00:11:08] Nikki Nolan: There’s no significance, no significance.

[00:11:10] River Butcher: Yeah. It literally is like someone like me who has a remaining balance of something that they’ve been paying. You know what I mean? It’s a very specific slice of the student loan debt crisis. The Pell grant thing gives me hope. That to me is a symbol of oh, this is, this is coming from activists, because that means that they’re looking specifically at a specific group of people who had the most need.

[00:11:44] And like that is the beginning point, you know? So then the progress could be from that point, as opposed to, you know, top down or something like that. Because, you know, the big fear is like, oh, these rich people are gonna get their loans. And it’s like, nobody that’s rich has loans.

[00:12:00] They get PPP loans and they are forgiven. You don’t have a loan if you’re rich, it just doesn’t happen. You get everything for free.

[00:12:07] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:12:07] Emma Klauber: Yes.

[00:12:08] River Butcher: Hang out in Los Angeles for 20 minutes. Everybody gets everything for free. Exactly.

[00:12:12] Shanna Bennett: Right, right. And I was saying, what’s the significance of $125,000? Why that number of all numbers? It makes no sense.

[00:12:21] River Butcher: RIght because they have that their taxes is anybody that makes $450,000.

[00:12:26] Shanna Bennett: Yes, exactly.

[00:12:28] River Butcher: Why is it not that then. So somebody, because like, you know, obviously on the face of that, that’s a big number. That’s a big number to me, but I also live in the world and I live in a place like Los Angeles.

[00:12:43] I know what things cost, you know? And you can’t actually pay off your student loans if you have three kids, a house and all, you know, all these things like you could potentially still be carrying quite a bit of debt. Just get rid of it.

[00:12:59] You wanna have a big boost to the economy, just get rid of it.

[00:13:03] Where does everybody think that money’s gonna go? It’s gonna go back to buying stuff.

[00:13:07] What are you gonna do? What else are you gonna do with money? Even if you put it into a retirement plan, what are you gonna do when you retire? Spend it. Ugh.

[00:13:19] Shanna Bennett: So silly. And I think it’s frustrating this idea of painting people again, that make more than $125,000 as wealthy, because, and I’m gonna go back to this, but you know, studies are showing that black women are attaining these advanced degrees. So they tend to go beyond a bachelor’s degree.

[00:13:35] Right? And so I don’t know about you, but the doctors and the lawyers that I know that are making these nice fat, healthy salaries. A lot of times, especially if they’re coming from a family without resources, they’re coming from nothing, they have a significant debt burden. And these are people that have $300,000 in debt, half a million dollars in debt.

[00:13:54] And so sometimes these folks are living paycheck to paycheck because of their loan burdens. So again, I don’t know what the significance of $125,000 is, but I think it’d be so amazing to free those people who are really trying to advance their families. The first graduate of the family, the first doctor of the family.

[00:14:14] Emma Klauber: Yeah.

[00:14:17] River Butcher: Yeah, exactly. These are the people that you were like, you have to go do this so you can better yourself, you know? And then affluent people can’t understand that you are the support system for that family that couldn’t pay for your college.

[00:14:34] Shanna Bennett: Right, right,

[00:14:35] River Butcher: You then become the earner or support system which brings me to I am glad, again, none of this is enough. I’m gonna preface all of that with it is not enough because people still have student loan debt. And I think school should be free. It’s ridiculous that it’s private and it’s wild that you have to pay for a public university.

[00:14:57] Nikki Nolan: Thanks Reagan.

[00:14:58] River Butcher: Yeah…

[00:14:59] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. I think of that.

[00:15:01] River Butcher: That dude. Oh man. That dude really did it. And then all the dudes after were just doing different versions of Reagan. The parent plus thing is really, I think, important too, to build off of, because like, I feel like people who don’t have any experience with that don’t realize like, yeah, they really got us with that.

[00:15:20] Not just you, we’ll get you on the hook too.

[00:15:24] Shanna Bennett: Yeah.

[00:15:26] River Butcher: You need it and they convince you it’s like good debt. Like you’re eating an avocado or something. You know what I mean? It’s like, oh no, it’s good, dad. Don’t worry about it.

[00:15:35] Emma Klauber: Yeah, River, I think you touched on a good point about it not being good enough. We’ve not even begun to excavate the root of the problem. He’s not implementing anything to make college more affordable for the next class of students.

[00:15:53] River Butcher: I mean, the one thing that he did that’s in there was reduce the 10 years to 5. I don’t disagree with you, Emma.

[00:16:01] There is one thing that’s going to change things quickly, but not enough, you know, you still have to pay for it. It’s not doing anything about exorbitant tuition fees going up by rates that are just ridiculous and teachers not being paid and you know, all that stuff.

[00:16:17] Shanna Bennett: Right. I was talking to someone at work about this and they were saying, you know, they’re surprised that there’s not more pressure placed on the universities in terms of explaining their budgets and in terms of explaining why the prices are so high. This person was also saying these are organizations that have these charters, they’re supposed to be providing education.

[00:16:40] Right? So at some point the Department of Education could come to them and say, hey, so you guys are supposed to be in the business of education. What’s all this other stuff you have going on? And what’s up with these galleries and it’s just not happening again. The onus comes back on us for some reason.

[00:16:57] And also on the servicers. But what about the universities?

[00:17:00] River Butcher: Yeah, dude. To me it’s very obvious that, you know, each administration, education is not a business. It should not be a business just like healthcare should not be a business. Like these things should not be run as businesses, but we have since Reagan turned the government into a business, as opposed to the government is, was supposed to be.

[00:17:23] Now, this is just my understanding, basically like a set of lawyers for the people to protect them from businesses and they were like let’s turn this into a business too. And everything can turn a profit, you know? And so when you begin to run things for a profit, transparency goes out the window, cause you can’t. You can’t be transparent if you’re trying to make money, you just can’t.

[00:17:46] And like my school, I think it is in danger of losing its accreditation because of this stuff. That goes that far. Who loses the most when a school loses its accreditation?

[00:18:05] Shanna Bennett: We do. Yeah.

[00:18:07] River Butcher: And faculty.

[00:18:08] Shanna Bennett: Yep.

[00:18:09] River Butcher: Do you think any of those people at the executive level that caused the loss are gonna suffer at all? No. They’re just gonna go find another job, but like a teacher that has hung their entire life since they were 20 years old on tenure is gonna lose it. And then a student has a piece of paper that just becomes worthless, that they just paid for.

[00:18:31] And so the onus, like you were saying, Shanna is always on us, because we’re all just consumers, that’s all we are. Every aspect of our life is about consumption. And so the buck is always passed to us.

[00:18:44] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. I agree.

[00:19:32] Nikki Nolan: So one thing that is interesting, and I wanna go back to this, like $125,000, cause I just had this thought, did you ever play the game of Life? Did any of you play the game of Life?

[00:19:40] River Butcher: Oh my God.

[00:19:41] Emma Klauber: Yeah.

[00:19:42] Nikki Nolan: The top salary was $100,000 and I always wanted to make $100,000. Maybe this is just a working theory that I have. It’s based on that game.

[00:19:53] River Butcher: And they were like, just add 25 to it.

[00:19:56] Emma Klauber: Yes.

[00:19:58] River Butcher: Dude.

[00:19:59] Nikki Nolan: It’s a working hypothesis.

[00:20:02] River Butcher: I am all about those kinds of things, cause honestly it’s probably some figure from like Jeopardy or something, you know what I mean? Like the cap on a $100,000 Pyramid. $100,000 throwing 25 on there, you know, that’s a rich person.

[00:20:17] It’s like, yeah, that was a rich person in 1992, you know? It’s such a weird number, you know? What if you make $126,000?

[00:20:28] Shanna Bennett: Yeah.

[00:20:29] Emma Klauber: Well, right. Yeah. What if you just missed the cutoff? Can you get 9,000 canceled?

[00:20:35] River Butcher: Yeah, like that’s what I hate. And also, one of the first disclaimers is like, if you owe, you know, $18,000, you will not receive $2,000. That was the case.

[00:20:50] Shanna Bennett: Right. Seriously. I think the other part, I think what we’re getting at too is like the means testing portion is what’s bugging us, but then, you know, what comes with the means testing component is this idea of there being an application. So now there’s yet one more process that we have to go through.

[00:21:12] River Butcher: Yeah.

[00:21:14] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. Well,

[00:21:16] River Butcher: Well also there’s some people, something like 8 million people will have it automatically go, but just, but also there is also means testing.

[00:21:24] Shanna Bennett: Yes. Yeah.

[00:21:26] River Butcher: Cause it’s likely that the people who are not up to date would maybe not know about an application. The odds of that coinciding are very high.

[00:21:33] Shanna Bennett: Exactly. And so what we’re talking about is if the Department of Education has your most recent or up to date income information on hand, then you most likely will be getting your $10,000 or $20,000 cancellation automatically, but for everyone else, most likely you’ll have to apply.

[00:21:51] And so it’s a lot cleaner to have an automatic process than to have another, you know, bureaucratic arm come out of this. So it’ll be really interesting to watch.

[00:22:00] Emma Klauber: That’s one of those advantages of just canceling it all. Like there’s no reason not to.

[00:22:04] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:22:06] Emma Klauber: Just wipe it clean for everyone.

[00:22:10] River Butcher: Yeah.

[00:22:11] Nikki Nolan: It’s not gonna work because like everything shut down. So as soon as he announced it, all the servicers’ websites crashed, all their call lines were so busy that they were like, please stop calling us. We don’t have the infrastructure in place to handle this. Just cancel it all.

[00:22:28] Like Nina Turner said, cancel it all.

[00:22:32] River Butcher: Just turn it off. It literally has an off button.

[00:22:36] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. And I feel like his administration too, over the past year has come to at least public acknowledgement of the failures of some of these systems and they’ve cited them as they’re putting in these measures to improve things. Right. So they’re saying, okay, well, we’re acknowledging that some of our servicers haven’t been doing a really great job in managing Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

[00:22:58] But then at the very same time, they’re like, well, let’s add yet another barrier.

[00:23:03] River Butcher: Right.

[00:23:06] Shanna Bennett: It’s not working. And why would you add more to what they already have to do?

[00:23:11] River Butcher: And I’m like, how is this? Not just, how do you not, I dunno, seize it all from a government perspective, make government jobs for people to process this stuff. It’s a government loan that’s being privately serviced. Everything is farmed out to some private thing that then goes and does its own shit, as opposed to, and I understand like the whole bipartisan thing is, oh, Republicans want a small government, but that’s not even true.

[00:23:39] I was raised by people that were like, oh, government jobs. That’s what you gotta get. It’s like, they hate the government, but they want a government job. Let’s just have more government jobs. Why don’t we just have more government jobs for people? They could be doing these jobs with decent healthcare and all that shit.

[00:23:59] Why can’t we have good things? And it’s like, oh, because very rich people are being funded by oil companies to convince people that whenever you get anything good, it is very bad for you. And people believe it, butI do think that while again, this is not, I don’t think this is the glorious coming of the thing. I just think that it is the beginning of progress of people starting to see behind the curtain of the whole thing. The Republicans were so freaked out. They were admitting that this is like their best recruitment tool for the military.

[00:24:40] Emma Klauber: That tweet was unreal.

[00:24:41] River Butcher: There are more people who disagree with the military than there are who agree with it. You know? Like there are more people that are like, wait, what? And that’s what I come from. So many people in my life were in the National Guard or the Army to go to college. And then the ones that were in the National Guard who were like, hey, I’ll be safe.

[00:25:00] I’ll be home. Then 9/11 happened while we were in college. And they were like, shit. And they had to go to war to go to college, you know? And so it’s very obvious, I’m no historian or anything, butI’m from Akron, Ohio, which is just literally down the street from Kent state, you know?

[00:25:17] And like when you go back to Vietnam and you see that like college was a physical space for anti-war demonstrations, and then that’s anti-racist, it’s pro-black, it becomes a space for those progressive conversations, and then you just see what has been done to it, but specifically the anti-war demonstrations and stuff. And then to then have this sort of not crescendo, but just this moment, this blip of like, well, yeah, we sent all of you to war for this, you know, it’s like people were going to college to avoid war and then they figured out how to flip it around and go, no, you have to go to war to go to college.

[00:25:58] So good luck hippie. People are a lot more aware than that, you know?

[00:26:05] Shanna Bennett: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:06] Nikki Nolan: And the numbers are super down. And I remember, I think it was during Trump, there was the one loan thing that they were trying to get passed which was basically like the only way that you could get funding is if you joined the military. It went nowhere. It didn’t make it through the House or the Congress, but literally they said the quiet part out loud, even back then.

[00:26:25] So look up the one loan program. It was literally the only way that you could get any money, you would have to do some kind of military service. Really wild. So yeah, no, it’s so ridiculous to me, all these systems that they put into place that make people do things against their best interests.

[00:26:45] Shanna Bennett: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:46] Nikki Nolan: This sort of like polling, what is that fricking word?

[00:26:48] What is the word? Where we’re extracting things from humans in a way. Why do we live like this? Why is this so hard? I don’t know. I don’t have a question there. I’m just like, this is why everyone’s quiet quitting, you know?

[00:27:04] River Butcher: You mean, just doing their job?

[00:27:07] Emma Klauber: Yes.

[00:27:08] Nikki Nolan: I know, I know. It’s so annoying that they’re calling it quiet quitting.

[00:27:14] River Butcher: It’s such a joke.

[00:27:15] Nikki Nolan: So ridiculous that now companies are looking for quiet quitters. It’s like the whole thing is so ridiculous. It’s so it’s so weaponized, the whole thing is so weaponized.

[00:27:29] River Butcher: It is weaponized.

[00:27:31] Nikki Nolan: Why can’t we just have nice things?

[00:27:32] Why can’t we all just live. Let’s solve this now. We all need to solve this now.

[00:27:40] River Butcher: I do think we are moving towards perhaps not in our lifetime, but I’ll speak for myself, perhaps not in my lifetime. More towards something that resembled what existed before patriarchal capitalism, which is, matrilineal communalism. And I think we are moving towards that and it will have to happen eventually.

[00:28:01] We go into a climate collapse, money will not matter. If you get to a point where, you know, like money is nothing, something else will have to replace it because patriarchal capitalism and patriarchal anything, rests solely on ownership. Period.

[00:28:22] Like that’s what it breeds off of. When you can no longer own anything, then that system can’t survive. It’s kind of like, have you guys ever watched Station 11?

[00:28:39] Emma Klauber: Oh yes.

[00:28:40] Nikki Nolan: I was afraid it was gonna be scary.

[00:28:44] River Butcher: It’s kind of like a little bit of that, you know? It’s imaginary now, but eventually everything will, the reality will match up with the imagination and you’re just like, oh yeah, this doesn’t matter.

[00:29:01] Shanna Bennett: I need to watch that.

[00:29:02] Nikki Nolan: It’s like this quote, when the last tree is cut down, the last fish is eaten and the last stream is poisoned, you’ll realize that you cannot eat money. And what’s interesting is what you were saying about Station 11, which I haven’t watched, but when you watch zombie apocalypse shows and movies, like no one has a job, no one has a job.

[00:29:18] Apparently they did studies. They did studies that people watch the shows because those characters don’t have jobs and they’re imagining, oh, what could my day look like when it was just survival? I feel like this pandemic and all of the things we basically have learned that even if there was a zombie apocalypse, we would still have day jobs.

[00:29:36] Like it blows my mind.I actually wrote that in something- so we do these things that my company called retros, you know, where we like to review like the last quarter and figure out what happened, sorry, I’m getting really jargony. But it was an anonymous thing. Like what did we learn?

[00:29:53] And I legit put in, if there’s a zombie apocalypse, we’ll still have to have day jobs. Because it was anonymous.

[00:30:01] Shanna Bennett: That’s awesome.

[00:30:02] River Butcher: Wow.

[00:30:02] Shanna Bennett: Awesome.

[00:30:03] River Butcher: That is, it’s very funny and sad.

[00:30:07] Emma Klauber: Yeah.

[00:30:08] Shanna Bennett: Sorry, I don’t wanna take you in a different direction, but I wanted you to expound on that term that you used earlier, patriarchal capitalism and then you said like there’s another.

[00:30:19] River Butcher: Matrilinial communalism.

[00:30:21] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. What is that?

[00:30:22] Emma Klauber: Yeah.

[00:30:24] Shanna Bennett: I’m intrigued.

[00:30:26] River Butcher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it’s great. So it is something that I’ve recently learned more about through reading Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg. Are you guys familiar with them at all?

[00:30:37] Shanna Bennett: No.

[00:30:37] River Butcher: Yeah, so they’ve written a few books, big trans theorist.

[00:30:43] They passed in 2014, so they had lived with us, you know? And so they they’ve written Stone Cold or Stone Butch Blues, which was a major work in queer fiction. And then, wrote theory books, Trans Liberation and then Transgender Warriors and a couple other ones that are just escaping me now, but I’ve read Trans Liberation.

[00:31:07] River Butcher: And I’ve been reading Transgender Warriors, which is a sort of historical work but that is paired with their experience of the research. So like their experience of researching people like themselves and like their experience of understanding their transness. This was written in either 95 or 96.

[00:31:25] And so through that, they discovered that the sort of the moment of like trans erasure, I guess, for lack of a better word, but like the subjugation and oppression of transgender people, coincides with the rise of patriarchal, like capitalism first, it was land owning and then it turned into money.

[00:31:46] Because the invention of cities is actually what made it transcend from land to money so that people in the city could participate as well. Matrilineal communalism is kind of what it sounds like. It’s like that the center-ish of the community is the matrilineal line and it’s not even a matriarchy.

[00:32:08] River Butcher: It’s not that women are at the top. It is just at the center of it, basically like child rearing, which again is not hierarchical. It’s just that it is the center of the community. And then everything sort of radiates out from that to then support it, you know? So like we sometimes have that here, but you know, like we don’t really. To me that’s really like, I find that to be very liberating because even though I don’t like necessarily want to have children, I do think that they are the center of our world, and if we actually centered children, babies and raising them, which circles back to this educational conversation that we’re having, then war would become useless.

[00:32:50] All these things that have been created to own and steal and take and get and extract like you guys are saying, would fade away. I know that sounds like naive, but I’m talking about on a large scale of time, if we were really actually the center of our lives, if we shared that experience, burden is not the right tone of a word, but if we shared that responsibility, you know, the whole, it takes a village thing.

[00:33:17] That’s where it comes from, it is like literally a village of people who all had shared roles and everything was shared. So there’s nothing to fight over. If you know that you always have enough, but somewhere along the line, somebody was like, I’m gonna, I own this land.

[00:33:36] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:33:37] River Butcher: And so within that communalism, within that Matrilineal communalism, transgender people, play large roles because it doesn’t matter. Gender isn’t strictly defined by the job that you do or what you produce. So that can be a lot more fluid. There’s like really interesting stories of what we would call trans women today who literally menstruated. The groups of people were very fluid and important.

[00:34:11] And also this is pre-Catholicism and stuff like that too. So like the pagan rituals were very trans central and like, they were just revered throughout like all over the globe, not just central to one place, but as an entity within multiple cultures, you know?

[00:34:30] So anyway, that’s really interesting to me. And I feel like when the bottom drops out and these things, their worth is reduced down to what it actually is. You can’t maintain capitalism and you can’t maintain the patriarchy cause they’re just fighting.

[00:34:49] Shanna Bennett: Thank you for sharing that.

[00:34:50] River Butcher: That’s all it is.

[00:34:51] Shanna Bennett: That’s awesome.

[00:34:52] River Butcher: Sure. I hope it’s accurate. I hope nobody’s listening going, this person isn’t right, but it’s just a basic sort of idea or reality.

[00:35:02] Emma Klauber: Yeah, I think that connects a lot River. I’ve been seeing on Twitter, a conversation and we need to get away from this idea- I think conservatives constantly get called out because they had their tuition paid for, or they, you know, had a safety net, et cetera.

[00:35:22] But this idea that we go to college to get a job when it’s kind of like, we go to college for the educational experience, we go to college to learn. I don’t know where that break fully happened and how we get anywhere close to returning to that idea.

[00:35:44] Shanna Bennett: Mm-hmm mm-hmm.

[00:35:45] River Butcher: That was actually the thing I was gonna say is that, you know, education is, again, if you center this around children, it’s something more like a Waldorf school. Where it’s actually centered around their experience and how they experience the world and how we can grow. That, as opposed to, how can we mold and shape and change and fit them into this thing that they’re gonna need to do later?

[00:36:13] You know, I do feel like people are beginning to wake up to this idea, cause I think I talked about this before with you all, but that, it was just drilled into my parents, you know, of like go to college, it will get you out or get you up or get you whatever. And that’s all that I heard, you know?

[00:36:32] And so education to me was never like an experiential thing. It was always a means to an end. And that is also just a very capitalistic idea that everything is something to be extracted and it’s gonna happen later. Oh, nope. Later, later, even later than that, actually, you know, actually, can you be 99 years old and work at Chick-fil-A yeah.

[00:36:54] Nikki Nolan: That was so awful. That was so bad. Oh my God. And then they turned it into a pop piece where they were like, isn’t this so great? And it’s like, no, no, it’s not.

[00:37:04] Shanna Bennett: God. Was that a thing? Did I miss that?

[00:37:07] River Butcher: It was totally a thing.

[00:37:08] Nikki Nolan: Yeah.

[00:37:09] Emma Klauber: There’s a 99 year old employee, like who never misses a day.

[00:37:14] River Butcher: Yeah. They’re like, she’s our best employee.

[00:37:17] Shanna Bennett: Is it by choice? Is she there?

[00:37:20] [00:37:21] River Butcher: I’m sure not but it seemed like it, but really like what is a choice? We don’t actually have choices here. We have an illusion of choice in this country.

[00:37:31] Shanna Bennett: We do.

[00:37:32] Emma Klauber: Well, I mean talking about the illusion of choice, everyone’s saying if you couldn’t commit to paying it back, like the whole, well, we didn’t wanna take out a PPP loan. No one wants to take out a student loan either!

[00:37:45] River Butcher: Yeah, man yeah. It’s the same thing. We could just agree. Yeah, no one wants to do it, but sometimes you have to do it, you know?

[00:37:52] Shanna Bennett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my choice was take out loans or don’t go to college and the only job I could get outta college was the same job I probably would’ve gotten if I hadn’t gone to college, which was coffee, like a barista at the Borders books and music cafe. It’s presented to you as this perfect system that if you get this, if you, you spend this money, it’ll be good debt.

[00:38:17] River Butcher: And you’ll get this piece of paper and you’ll walk out of there with $100,000. And like, it is not like that for the majority of people.

[00:38:26] Nikki Nolan: Do you think it’s built that way? I’m just curious. Do you think, so what I’m hearing though is, since we have commercialized and privatized and turned things into a business,, I don’t know, my brain is just like, like, well, do you think they’re making college this thing, that’s not worth it,, so that people stop going to college.

[00:38:46] And then we have cheaper labor. I don’t know. This is, I’m really circling in my head right now.

[00:38:52] River Butcher: No. I don’t put it past them, but I think that is just perhaps a fringe benefit.

[00:38:59] Shanna Bennett: Yeah.

[00:39:00] River Butcher: I don’t think that’s the long game, I don’t think that’s the number one thing. I don’t think it’s the long game. But it could be. I wouldn’t ask them, they’re very smart.

[00:39:13] Shanna Bennett: They are.

[00:39:13] River Butcher: When it comes to making money, they’re very smart because that’s all they care about, you know, because the quote is not, you know, money is the root of all evil. The actual quote is obsession over money is the root of all evil. Because we live in a world that functions on money, so you can’t not have money, but when your whole life is about it, which my experience was.

[00:39:37] And I think we talked about this before, when we talked about, you know, mental illness, difficulties and stuff like that. I became obsessed with money because it was so terrifying to have this and not feel like I’ve totally screwed myself over. I’ve been sold some bad goods.

[00:39:56] You know, I trusted people that I should not have trusted. It’s just a brutal system to put people through and also the people that are like, here’s the way to avoid debt, get a job. It’s like, dude, first of all, you’re supposed to be going to school. That’s supposed to be the priority.

[00:40:13] Second of all, these people are just saying the same things that they hear other people say and all that stuff. So whatever, but you cannot make enough money to pay for college anymore. I remember having a friend that did that, but he worked construction in the summer, you know, whenever I hear people say, oh, I had to pay my way, it’s always white cisgender men who say, oh, I paid my way through college. And look, I respect that labor it’s hard ass labor, not everybody is allowed to do it. You’re the only one that was able to make $15, $20/hour, sweating your ass off all summer. I was working in a screen printing shop making $6/hour.

[00:40:57] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:40:59] River Butcher: And I was working my ass off too and that didn’t pay for college. So I don’t know. It’s all messed up.

[00:41:05] Nikki Nolan: I had my doctor, so I just went to my annual, which I haven’t gone to in a really long time because of the pandemic. It was literally the day of the cancellation and I was like, it’s so great. We did this. And she’s like, well, I paid off my loans. And I just was like-

[00:41:19] Emma Klauber: Oh, no.

[00:41:20] Nikki Nolan: I know I was just like, so did I. And she said, I just didn’t buy a car.

[00:41:27] And I’m like, you have so much misunderstood privilege in this statement. And then there was another person in the room who was a black woman and I was just like, this black woman is listening to this white woman say like, all I did was just not buy a new car.

[00:41:47] Shanna Bennett: Oh gosh.

[00:41:48] Nikki Nolan: It was also really awkward to be at the doctor’s appointment.

[00:41:55] River Butcher: Dude.

[00:41:59] Emma Klauber: Well,

[00:42:00] It’s funny. You say that Nikki, because last Wednesday I went to a happy hour for work after the announcement and my boss had me talk to the COO, and she was like, oh, Emma does a podcast about student loans. It’s a big day for her. And he was like, asking me why.

[00:42:24] River Butcher: Oh.

[00:42:30] Shanna Bennett: I’ve had the same experience by the way. I was so excited and I came into the kitchen and was making food or something. And, one of my bosses was there and I was like, hey, did you hear the announcement? And he was like, yeah, and he shouldn’t have done any of it.

[00:42:44] I don’t even know why he’s doing any of it. I was just like crickets. And he was like, cause those people, you know, they didn’t have to take out those loans. And so I said, take a deep breath. And I was like, well, are you aware for example, that a lot of servicers have been pulled into court for a lot of these predatory lending practices and steering borrowers in the way of accumulating more debt instead of steering them into proper repayment plans.

[00:43:13] And he was like, well, you know, if they’re in court, then they should be in court. And I’m like, yeah. And I said, so trying to explain, it’s not cut and dry. It’s not just, you took out a loan, pay it back. There’s a whole lot more going on there.

[00:43:25] River Butcher: Also not like the same kind of loan as a car loan. You get the car and then you have the debt for it. So you’re like, you get this debt before you get the thing that it’s supposed to be paying for, you know?

[00:43:45] So like it’s not the same as a car loan that you’re like actively using the thing while you’re getting it. Like you have to wait a really long time to implement the product. That’s the problem. When something is supposed to be a service, like healthcare and education, there’s no product.

[00:44:06] And they’re trying to say, there’s a product, but the product is education, you cannot define the product when you’re talking about something like that. You know, like you can’t define it in healthcare either you can point to oh a vaccine in a lab or whatever. But I am the product though, like my outcome, you know?

[00:44:24] But they’re not on the hook for that. But like the other thing, and I don’t remember the specifics of it, but there was a list of schools that I think they’re getting their money back or their loans canceled.

[00:44:44] And it’s all like DeVry and the Art Institute.

[00:44:50] All the super predatory retail colleges, which leads me to believe that there could be more coming. I’m not gonna be Pollyannaish about it, but things like that and starting with these people, this was clearly predatory.

[00:45:05] And then you just like, continue the conversation. People talk about it enough that they’re like, oh, it was all predatory, actually. That’s my hope, that it even then extends to private loans because they were very predatory.

[00:45:20] Nikki Nolan: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:21] Shanna Bennett: I think in working with people at Debt Collective, it’s a similar approach. They’re acknowledging that each win in one of those cases is another step in the right direction. Because in those cases they have to cite things and they have to acknowledge the predatory nature of what’s going on.

[00:45:38] And they have to acknowledge that there’s been failures in the system, which just further makes our point.

[00:45:42] River Butcher: If there’s failures here, then there’s gotta be failures over there.

[00:45:48] Shanna Bennett: I was talking to a young woman earlier today who worked her way through school, a young black woman. And she says that she graduated without debt.

[00:45:58] When we started talking about it, she said, it sounds great, I know, but I reflect back on it. And it was a really difficult time. Like I had a very difficult time of it. And I was working nights, going to school in the daytime. She was looking for grants, she got some grants, she got some scholarship money where she could.

[00:46:19] She said, if it wasn’t for a local church taking her in, in terms of boarding and a place to sleep, she probably wouldn’t have made it. They were charging her like $1001/month, which she knew was a steal, but she was scraping by just to make that. And then she was saying that her grocery bill was $60 every two weeks.

[00:46:39] And she says, when she tells people she’s 30 now, it’s a couple years ago, but she’s saying when she tells people that they think she’s joking. She’s living this struggling lifestyle for all these years, just to be able to make it through. And it’s sad. She shouldn’t have to be going through all of that just to get an education, just to be able to earn a living.

[00:47:01] And that’s the story that they always use to do all these things and go to school and just work. And, well, she did that and it sucked and she barely made it.

[00:47:10] River Butcher: Yeah.

[00:47:10] Nikki Nolan: And why do rich people get the privilege of just being able to focus on school? Like that’s why this upward mobility tax is so incredibly ridiculous. It’s like everyone should have the same equal access to education. Everybody should have the ability to focus on growing their minds and all these things equitably.

[00:47:31] River Butcher: Yeah. When boomers or a little bit older than boomers, because like my parents were boomers but going to school in the seventies and being able to actually be able to pay for it and all those things, the marginal tax rate was like 70%. The marginal tax rate is now 34%.

[00:47:50] Like rich people are not paying taxes. So the money, the public money is not there and they keep taking and extracting more and more out of it. It’s also just illustrating the cost of living that hasn’t changed the wages, like all those things.

[00:48:10] It’s like, it’s truly, such a harbinger of everything else in terms of cost of living basically. And like, what is affordable? What is the working class? There is no middle class. Like, that was always a joke, but like there truly isn’t one now. Just like all these extra taxes on working people, cause like you just should not have to work through college.

[00:48:37] Like you’re in college. You’re supposed to go to college. That is supposed to be it. You know? It’s ridiculous.

[00:48:43] Shanna Bennett: And I think too, when a lot of these universities were instituted, you know, at the time who was getting an education, it was wealthy white men, and they had the luxury of studying whatever the hell they wanted to study. And it was this romantic experience where they could wear their sweaters and these gorgeous libraries and have these, you know, philosophical conversations and have access to higher level thinking and advanced subject matter.

[00:49:09] And I think we should all have access to that.

[00:49:10] River Butcher: That’s right. And then white women just popped in and just replicated the same thing.

[00:49:16] Emma Klauber: Yes.

[00:49:18] River Butcher: Just because I wanna circle back to one thing that I didn’t say. I just wanted to specify the difference between matrilineal and matriarchal is that, I see a lot of just like wanting to place women or anybody really, that’s not a ciswhite men or whatever.

[00:49:37] And like the reality is that you can change the system from the inside and we should be doing that, but that’s not the only way. The matrilineal, removing a hierarchy and pulling that hierarchy down and flattening it and having a central focus is way more important.

[00:49:55] I think all of these movements are more than simply placing different identities into those places and not saying that doesn’t do anything, but it’s not the only way. It doesn’t change things over time. Because it’s really just replicating the system that we already have.

[00:50:12] Shanna Bennett: Right.

[00:50:13] River Butcher: Anyway. That’s it.

[00:50:16] Shanna Bennett: Do you think, cause I’ve heard this theory, do you think that Biden has put forth this agenda, hoping that the Republicans will retaliate, take it to court, rip it to shreds, just so he can say, oh, you guys, I tried?

[00:50:36] Do you think that’s part of the strategy? Cause I’ve heard that as a theory.

[00:50:40] River Butcher: I hope not.

[00:50:41] Shanna Bennett: I hope not.

[00:50:42] River Butcher: That seems like way too much chess.

[00:50:46] Shanna Bennett: I think so too.

[00:50:47] River Butcher: I mean, yeah. The dude is Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania saying we need to fund the police right now. So no, I don’t think he’s doing that.

[00:50:57] Nikki Nolan: No, no. And I talked to Sparky and Thomas, who are they gonna say that it’s harming? So you need an individual that’s inflicted harm upon. But if the Republicans go after this, they’re gonna do more damage to themselves.

[00:51:13] River Butcher: They know that. I do think they actually do know that and that’s why they’re fighting it so publicly, because it’s just noise. And the noise is way easier than court. Republicans hate court.

[00:51:29] Nikki Nolan: They hate the court unless they’re Donald Trump.

[00:51:32] River Butcher: But Donald Trump was a Democrat for a long ass time.

[00:51:36] You know what I mean? They know that they are messing with some of their base when they know that this is a working class issue, which is why they’re fighting tooth and nail and saying, it’s not working class. Whenever they say something isn’t something, they’re just saying the opposite of what it really is, you know?

[00:51:58] They’re not out of touch. They know exactly what’s going on. Like, they’re very, I don’t even wanna say they’re smart. They’re smart, like a Fox. They know their plan like Ted Cruz sitting on that stage and saying slacker barista. It’s very, very important that he’s saying barista at this moment in time because Starbucks workers are unionizing across the country. There he is saying that for that reason.

[00:52:24] Emma Klauber: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:25] River Butcher: He knows that those two things are interconnected. And if he can diminish that labor, because there are people on the left that also think that’s not the right kind of label or labor. I think they’re small in numbers. And so I don’t wanna diminish that or anything, but there’s always this like masculinization of labor and it has to be like we’re saying construction work or something like that, then it has value.

[00:52:45] That’s the labor that Marx was talking about, not this other stuff. And it’s like, no, it’s all of it. Actually, if somebody is providing labor or they’ve become a product, then there’s a problem here and we need to fight for them. They are in the position of being oppressed and exploited. So it doesn’t matter what the labor is.

[00:53:01] Shanna Bennett: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

[00:53:04] River Butcher: Does that answer your question?

[00:53:06] Shanna Bennett: Yeah, it did. It really did. And actually to harken back to something that Sparky Abraham said when he was on the podcast and Sparky is an attorney that works with the Debt Collective River. He said something like, if you have a class action lawsuit, let’s say, and the court is acknowledging some failure.

[00:53:28] Some organization has failed some folks. And so now everyone is gonna get some kind of settlement because of that failure. You know, similarly with student debt cancellation, if we are saying that there’s a failure here, it’s antiquated. It’s not working. We’ve failed borrowers and students, then we all should get that settlement or cancellation.

[00:53:49] We don’t piecemeal it. It’s not just for these people over here and that those people over there, it should be for everyone.

[00:53:55] River Butcher: Right.

[00:53:56] Emma Klauber: Yeah, that’s a good point Shanna.

[00:53:58] River Butcher: Total a hundred percent. I am not one of those oh, change takes a long time kind of liberals, but I do know that these things, because of the bureaucracy and all the consultancy and all this shit that we have to put up with, I know that it could happen right now.

[00:54:19] He could just do it. I know that, which is why I push for it to happen. I also understand that there’s a bunch of bullshit and we have to wait, but it sucks. But I do believe that someday it will change.I didn’t think I was gonna be affected by any of this stuff either.

[00:54:39] Like, I truly thought I was gonna pay it off before anything was gonna happen. And so I’m like, I can’t believe it. And I don’t wanna revel in it too long because it’s not enough, you know? So like we just have to keep pushing. And not that that’s the other thing too. Like we talk a lot about, you know, colonizer mindset, but this is one of those issues when I’m like, you gotta investigate your settler mindset.

[00:55:01] What are you settling for?

[00:55:03] Shanna Bennett: Ooh.

[00:55:04] Nikki Nolan: What are you complicit with?

[00:55:06] River Butcher: Exactly. So this is one of those moments where as a person who is on the left and is distancing from liberalism, this is not enough. I love my neighbor and they don’t have enough, so how am I gonna help them out?

[00:55:24] You know, how can we keep doing that?

[00:55:27] Nikki Nolan: Can we have you back on once your loans are canceled to see what that’s like?

[00:55:33] River Butcher: Yeah. I’ll let you guys know when it happens, if it happens. Yeah.

[00:55:37] I think there’s also a possibility that some of my payments are gonna get refunded, which is just wild to me. So I’m just like, just do it for everybody. Do it for everybody.

[00:55:47] I mean, it’s a major influx of cash into the goddamn economy. I don’t even care about the economy, but I’m like, if I gotta speak your language, people will buy that new car, you know? It will happen, you know? It will happen. People all of a sudden have a $20,000, $100,000 thing off their shoulders. They’re gonna put some money into their neighborhood again.

[00:56:13] Shanna Bennett: Mm-hmm I would much rather be living in a home. That’s the sum of the debt that I owe rather than just throwing it at Great Lakes, you know?

[00:56:23] River Butcher: I know dude, Great Lakes. Wow. I haven’t heard of Great Lakes in a while. My loans were Great Lakes.

[00:56:33] Shanna Bennett: Yeah.

[00:56:35] Nikki Nolan: And actually people might not know this, but if you’ve made any payments in the last 12 months, or it says 2020, actually since March 2020. You can actually ask your service provider to give it back to you. So you can too.

[00:56:50] River Butcher: So that’s for anybody.

[00:56:51] Nikki Nolan: For anybody.

[00:56:53] River Butcher: I should do it.

[00:56:54] Nikki Nolan: Yes. Get your money back.

[00:56:56] River Butcher: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

[00:56:57] Get that paper. Here’s also just a position that I find myself in. I have also paid on my student loans. This is wiping out like a balance. I paid $60,000 plus. I don’t have the actual figure off the top of my head cause I had a small private loan and some other things, so I have paid. Cause they’re like, oh what about everybody that’s paid off their student loans? It’s like I did, what are you talking about? Everybody that’s getting this benefit has paid a lot of money in their student loans. They have probably paid quite a bit, you know? So this is just like truly a relief at the end, as opposed to like, yeah, this is taking care of your debt.

[00:57:45] I mean that’s like 60 grand that I could have bought a house, put a down payment on a house. 10 years ago, 6 years ago, which I did not do because I had student loans. I only just now have a new car for the first time in my entire life. I had my car for 15 years or something like that.

[00:58:07] And I’ve rented my whole life. Anyway, I believe that more will happen. I don’t know when, but the fact that this happened gives me some hope that things will continue to change. And I just have to continually look not necessarily towards the leaders, but like all of us, we are the ones doing the work, you guys with the Debt Collective.

[00:58:30] And all those people are why this happened, not Joe Biden, you know? He just happens to be sitting in the chair. Everybody else is working. And this is a 30 year process. So yes, change takes a lot of time and I truly believe that progressive organizations know that more than anybody else and right wing organizations, they are willing to wait and do the work, you know? So it’s just the two ends and we’ll see.

[00:58:59] Shanna Bennett: We will definitely see.

[00:59:03] River Butcher: It’s a 40 year timeline.

[00:59:04] Nikki Nolan: River, we’re getting really close to the end. Is there anything that you want to promote? Where can people find you? They should definitely listen to your last episode that you did with us. I think it was episode 45.

[00:59:16] River Butcher: Yes, that episode 45. I don’t have a ton to promote right now. I have a half hour on Comedy Central’s YouTube, that you could watch. It’s called A Different Kind of Dude. I’ve been touring in fits and starts because it’s weird out there. I have a website, it’s my name, www.riverbutcher.com.

[00:59:33] And so any shows that I have coming up will be on there. I think that’s pretty much it. I’m just happy to be back on here talking to you all about debt and I can’t wait to help more people. We need to wipe out more people’s debt because it’s made up.

[00:59:48] Emma Klauber: Yes, it is.

[00:59:50] River Butcher: It’s fiction.

[00:59:51] Emma Klauber: Yes.

[00:59:52] River Butcher: We can do that. We can do whatever we want.

[00:59:54] Shanna Bennett: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming back and chatting with us.

[00:59:58] River Butcher: Thanks for having me. Oh my God. A real pleasure.

[01:00:00] Shanna Bennett: Yeah, I think it’s great that we have this outlet, cause it’s actually helped me personally over the last week to kind of come around to my feelings and be able to express them. And it’s, it’s wonderful to hear your thoughts. So thank you for being with us. Thank you for your time.

[01:00:17] River Butcher: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I’ll come back probably before December 31st.

[01:00:24] Shanna Bennett: If you liked this episode of Matter of Life and Debt, subscribe and share it with a friend. It really helps people discover us. Matter of Life and Debt is hosted by me, Shanna. It is produced by Shanna Bennett, Emma Klauber, and Nikki Nolan.

It is edited by Nikki Nolan and Talia Molé, transcripts and writing is done by Emma Klauber. Efe Akerman created the theme music.

Visit our website www.matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen to more episodes, access transcripts, and get additional context for the subjects you just heard about. Absolutely for free the website again, www.matteroflifeanddebt.com.

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