Josh TrentIdentity Transformation Architect and award winning Host of the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast—a decade-strong show with over 750 episodes and 15M downloads.

Why it’s difficult to get wealthy in the U.S. 🔥 #wealth #podcastclips #financialeducation

10 Jul 2023 · 1 min

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YouTube clip (Josh Trent, July 10, 2023) arguing that media and corporations exploit biological stress responses to drive consumer spending, which in turn makes it difficult for many people to accumulate wealth in the U.S. The speaker explains that constant exposure to anxiety-inducing news raises cortisol, and advertisers immediately offer dopamine/serotonin-producing products (alcohol, ice cream, pharmaceuticals, luxury goods). Repeated use of spending as a stress-coping default creates a reinforced neural habit that perpetuates consumption and undermines wealth accumulation.

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The media and corporations have basically weaponized this knowledge, their knowledge of our biology against us, which has made it very difficult for people to amass wealth here in our country. And we're inundated with things that cause us anxiety and cause us cortisol to course through our system, whether it's Covid or Russia or political stuff, whatever it may be. You turn it on and you're just inundated with that. And then what do you see? You immediately see ads for beer, ice cream, pharmaceuticals, purses, shoes, cars, whatever it is that's going to give us dopamine and serotonin that's going to make us feel good. So they get the cortisol rise and they give us something to buy. In order to extinguish that, all of us have our go to default mode for how we extinguish that cortisol based in a Western society, which usually 99% of the time requires us to spend money. After doing that for years, that neural pathway just becomes the default highway. And. And before you know it, every one of us has been there. If you're stressed out, you've got a pint of ice cream or a glass of wine in your hand, and you didn't even know how it got there.