In this Episode, Mike TV explores poverty, and how it effects all people, no matter their economic status. Told through the lens of Mike's own struggles with money. Being impoverished, or just-barely-better-than, while simultaneously releasing hundreds and hundreds of songs, multiple books, thousands of live-performances, and now two seasons of a podcast, Mike makes the case that work and working hard isn't necessarily the recipe for climbing out of financial hell. But if it's not hard work, what is it? What happens when working smarter and working for what your heart wants don't exactly match up? This episode features brand-new recordings of The Cost of Everything, Working Class Poor, The Trouble With Being Poor, Today is Your Birthday, and Everybody's Working. For additional bonus content, including the brand new song, Everybody Lives for Money, you can find that on his Patreon channel and Patreon RSS Feed. https://www.patreon.com/getsetgo
0:00 Episode Open
1:04 Cold Open
7:08 [song] Cost of Everything
10:15 Main Title
10:49 Working Class Poor Lead-In
13:48 [song] Working Class Poor
18:01 The Trouble With Being Poor Lead-In
19:21 [song] The Trouble With Being Poor
23:15 Today is Your Birthday Lead-In
25:43 [song] Today is Your Birthday
30:03 Everybody's Working Lead-In
33:36 [song] Everybody's Working (Singalong!)
40:51 Episode Summation
38:31 Asking for Your Attention
40:47 END
The Trouble with Being Poor
Hey, I’m Mike TV and this is Hesitation Cuts. On this episode, I am trying to tackle a subject that is, at its core, untackleable.Did I just coin a new word? But, poverty…being impoverished, is something that affects every aspect of who you are. Your sense of self-worth, the way society views you, the way your friends and family view you, and none of it for the better. Right? It is the ultimate albatross around a person’s neck. So, I w ant to discuss not so much solutions for poverty but the damage it does to everyone. Every single person on the planet earth. So, sit back and enjoy what I hope will be a pleasant and perhaps even humorous ride through some of the bleakest topography in the human mental landscape.
But, before we hop in the Way Back Machine, I just want too say that every episode of this show, every song, every story, every single moment was made possible by my Patreon patrons.If you’re not one, and you dig what you’re listening to, you have them to thank. Because they’re bad-assess. And give not single fuck about how popular this show or how many awards its won or the ratings it has achieved and instead support it because it aspires to be excellent. So, I thank them every day and you should thank them every time this podcast hits you in the feels.
Cold Open: We’re gonna hop in the Way Back Machine but rather than travelling in time, we’re gonna use it as a conveyance to yank us up to a 40,000 foot altitude. So we can look down on this monster, this brutal, uncaring, vicious, self-harming monster that is poverty.
First things first, being poor sucks. As a poor person who has struggled for money for 25 years, I can tell you that being poor really, really sucks. Surprise, surprise. Not only because you have no agency, no freedom, and don’t get me wrong.The ultimate expression of freedom, in our society, is money. If you want to be in Paris tomorrow, and you have enough money, bam! You’re in Paris tomorrow. If you want hang out with celebrities, or command the attention of the people that are into the same things you’re into, and you have enough money, done.Right? Not only is money simply options…but because everybody needs money, if you’ve got it, you have a lever that you use to bend all of human everything to your will. It is so built into us as humans that we don’t even see the damage that money and the pursuit of money does to us, which we’ll discuss at some point in this series.However, the flipside of all this is, if you have no money, there is a very real, and palpable sense that you have no options. That you are trapped in a cage, and your life gets reduced to just subsisting. You know, finding your next meal. Trying to keep the power on. Or keep a roof over your head. Or, in even in some cases, just finding your next escape, be it a drug fix or a bottle of booze or some other self-destruction that occurs in small easy payments that always, always, always cost way, way more than you can actually afford.
Poverty is the gasoline that we pour onto all of our more self-destructive human experiences. Right? It’s an accelerant. When a company makes a business decision predicated entirely on profit, and they leave thousands of workers without jobs, particularly if those workers were just barely getting by, well, they didn’t just eliminate jobs. They steal hope.And the sense of security. You know, that feeling that you know what tomorrow is gonna bring and you can handle it. That feeling goes away, gone.
When you’re impoverished, you’re 3x as likely to commit suicide than your better well off brothers and sisters. You’re 10 times as likely to experience multiple, what in educator and academic parlance is called, in quotes, “Adverse Childhood Experiences”. And these, again in quotes, “Adverse Childhood Experiences” are those life events, or rather, that life trauma, that forever stains and scars us. Parents that are drug addicts. Or intense neglect. Or physical or sexual or emotional abuse. And each of these events, these Adverse Childhood Experiences, increase the likelihood that the child will engage in self-destructive behaviors later in life. Addiction, alcoholism, gambling, incarceration, sexual encounters that damage rather than heal, and the list goes on and on and on. And all of these behaviors contribute to poverty and keeping poor people poor. And if you’re impoverished, you’re 10x as likely to experience “Adverse Childhood Experiences”, in quotes, multiple times, than are kids of the highest income families. Despair begets despair. And the despairing often don’t have the emotional wherewithal and they certainly don’t have the financial means to take care of the people around them.
And the other huge problem with being poor is stigma. Most everyone looks at poor people through the same lens. 1. They deserve their poverty. If they simply worked harder, worked smarter, they wouldn’t be poor. 2. They’re not very smart. Because if they were smart, they’d have more wealth. Smart people, educated people, people that care about life and living it to its fullest, those people are not poor people. Right? And that’s pretty how everyone sees things. Oh, also, 3. They’re lazy. They’re the slackers that don’t work hard when the job is in front of them. Right?
I mean, look, I am advocate for poor people, they are my people, but even I, when I see some 20-something kid with fully functioning arms and legs sitting at a freeway exit holding a sign that reads, “Anything Helps…”, you know even I go, Dude, there are organizations that will clothe, feed you, house you and help you get a job. What gives?” You know, even I get incensed. Like, what the hell, slacker?
And that’s the thing. At that point, when I am judging this kid for having the gall to thrust his poverty in my face, I’m not thinking about him as a person. I’ve invented my own little narrative that allows me to ignore him.Oh, his shoes are too nice. He’s too well fed. He’s obviously had dental work. So, therefore he comes from a family that can afford dental work. He must have burned h is bridges. Because he’s a scammer and a taker and a user of people. Oh, look, he’s got tattoos. Why’d you spend money on tattoos, dude. And this narrative that I create allows me to simply look the other way.
Right?
Does that resonate with you? Because I do it pretty much every day I drive around town. And I am a poor person who understands the plight of poor people, and still I judge, and create shitty little narratives that allow me to ignore someone who is right in front of me asking for help.
But it’s not just the homeless. It’s the people that work at my grocery store. Or fast food joints. Or the gas stations. You know, I walk into a Target and I’m immediately dismissive of every single employee. They’re not homeless, certainly, but they’re just a little bit better than. And it’s terrible. Why do I think like this?
And that is my impulse, because literally, all of society, all media, film, television, books, radio, and the Internet, plus all of my fellow humans, in conversations, in comments, in behaviors, we all prop up this idea that you being poor is a failure of you. You’re at fault.
And I pretty much bought into that full tilt. Because, yeah, there are lazy people. For a given value of lazy, right. Most people, when I compare my work-ethic to theirs, are fucking lazy. My work-week is typically about 70 hours. And it’s not 70 hours where I’m hanging out chatting up my workmates and taking a long lunch. It is 70 hours of writing, recording, assembling, arranging, editing, non-stop. And often it can push 100 hours. So, I look around me, and mostly I see people that barely work at all. If you work a forty hour week, you’re a slacker.
Of course, I don’t intend to impugn your or anyone’s work ethic. But for the sake of this argument, why is it that I can’t walk around like I’m King Shit all the time? Right?This is America. We respect hard work. Ha! Ha! Wrong. We respect wealth. Fuck what you do. And how well you do it. It’s how much money you have. Hard work, in the right industry, doing smart things, does bring you more money. But not always. And if it doesn’t bring you money, all your hard work, is just dust in the wind.
And man, that just tilts everything. The stigma that poverty brings, the taint of being poor colors so much about the way we think of our fellows. In ways we don’t even really consider. And being impoverished, and having no real road map of how to climb out of poverty, it becomes an ever shrinking cage. And so you find ways to cope. And those coping mechanisms often accelerate the shrinking of the cage. Until you’re hemmed in on all sides. And then it’s pressing into your flesh. And it hurts. And it crushes. And finally, it kills.
The Cost of Everything Insert:
And it’s crazy, right? When you are broke, and you’re working jobs that don’t pay the bills, and you’ve borrowed all you can borrow, you’ve exhausted every relationship, when you’re at the absolute end of your rope, what do you do?
Main Title: Hey, hey, welcome to Episode 6 of Season 2 of Hesitation Cuts! The show where we hunt down the most egregious prevarications, lies, and mendacities, we slay them, we skin them, and then we fill those skins with effervescent music and parade them around like Pride Day balloons! Today’s episode is about being poor. And how much it sucks.And how every day, the poorest of us, steal a piece of our soul. Which is 100% true. And I will explain that in just a few moments.
Working Class Poor Intro:
So, I don’t think it’s a mystery to anyone listening to this show that I am a working class musician.Has my music been heard by 100’s of millions of people? Yes.Do hundreds of thousands of people own my music. Yes.Do more than 50,000 people listen to my music each month. Yes. Do I have 20+ albums in stores, hundreds and hundreds of song recordings and over a score of film and tv music licenses. Yes, yes, and yes. Do I also still worry about making rent and putting food on our table every single month? Yes.
And doesn’t that, that alone, feel a bit incongruous? And that’s what I’m saying about the narratives we tell ourselves that let us ignore self-evident truths about the world around us. There’s no way in hell that any Spotify subscriber hasn’t considered that, oh, me getting access to 100,000,000 songs, all the best music by all the best artists on the planet earth, since recording first started happening, that, maybe, for $12 dollars, or, what, $17 dollars a month if you’re a family, that maybe that number is complete horseshit.
Of course it is. But, considering that ten years before Spotify, everyone was just stealing music outright using peer-to-peer and torrent sites, you know, hey.$10 bucks is better than nothing.And we believe that bullshit.It’s another shitty narrative that allows us to keep on keeping on without seriously questioning our values and our fidelity with the artists we love and frankly, the underpinnings of this unchecked-capitalism/greed-is-good-economy in general.
And so, here I am. I live-stream 8 to 10 days a month. Often 2 times a day. I release a podcast episode a month, with five fully produced studio recordings. I am now writing and producing a brand new, never-before-heard-song for the monthly bonus content. I am now producing a new featurette, where I walk my audience through how I write, produce, and arrange a song. I am putting four albums a year. Plus the songbooks, the posters, the merchandise.And still, I have to worry about whether I can pay my rent. Seriously? What gives?
Because it’s so much easier for people, often my friends and my family and my audience to just sell themselves on a shitty narrative. Oh, Mike’s a Peter Pan that never truly grew up. He just plays. He plays music. It’s built into the way we even talk about music. The lexicon we use. He plays.And he practices. He’s so talented but so clueless in regards to what he does from a business perspective. Like, Taylor Swift deserves to be rich. Unfortunately, Mike doesn’t. He’s just a starving artist that will always make things that sound great, and really, when I really need his songs, I can always lean into them, but he’s just never gonna go anywhere. Silly old Mike that just doesn’t know when to quit.
And fuck, man, I’ve had to endure this bullshit for fucking decades. It’s all just faint praise and the hidden subtext behind all this idiocy is, “hey Mike, we can get all the music we want for free. We love you. You’re a friend. We’re in your corner. Just not in your corner in a way that’s gonna cost us $4 dollars a month. I mean, we’re already spending 12 whole dollars a month on Spotify. And for that, we get 100,000, 000 songs.Really? You want us to spend four more dollars on you. And then they take a sip of their $7 dollar Starbucks coffee and look at me incredulously. You want more from me than the 12 dollars I already pay? Really?
Nevermind you, that your 12 dollars never makes its way into my pocket.
And that, my friends, is my reality.
Working Class Poor:
Now, it wasn’t too long ago that this song, every sing detail of it, was my reality. When I wrote this song, this was my life. And now, not so much. Which is wonderful. Because, I am always working, and always trying to figure out a way to make buck without losing the part of me, that joyful, exuberant part of me, that loves making music. And that’s a really fine line to walk. It’s a balancing act. The joy on one side, the making of the money on the other.
Trouble With Being Poor Lead-In:
The trouble with being poor isn’t simply just not being able to buy the things you want, or vacation in exotic locales, or drive expensive cars. The real nightmare is not being able to keep the things you have. Where one financial calamity can send you into a fiscal death spiral where there’s just no climbing out. A car accident, you’re fucked. Someone in the family gets seriously sick, you’re fucked. Your company needs to remodel the office for a month and so they’re gonna go on hiatus without pay, you’re fucked. Living paycheck to paycheck is exhausting. And it definitely increases the deep abiding desire to hit the pause button. Booze, drugs, sex, whatever, man. Anything that gives you a little reprieve from the unremitting and relentless horrorshow that is your day to day.
And when you have $300 dollars in the bank and $1500 of upcoming bills and you have no idea where the money is gonna come from, it really feels to me like I’m just watching a tsunami racing towards me.You know, a gigantic tidal wave approaching. And it’s at that point the nihilist in me kicks in. You know, fuck it. I work hard. I make all the money I possibly can. I have tens of thousands of people that enjoy my music every single week. I don’t spend money wildy. I don’t live high on the hog. And still, I can’t pay my bills? This disaster is rushing in on me? Fuck it. Fuck me.Fuck you. Fuck this noise. Fuck it.
And, it colors everything.You can’t hang out with your friends.You can’t date. You can’t see movies.You can’t go get coffee. The entire realm of human experience that most people engage in is denied you. Even your relationships suffer. ‘Cause, n o matter how much someone loves you, no matter how committed they are too you and being with you, no matter how hard you work, if you don’t bring in enough money, that relationship is in peril.
Trouble with Being Poor Insert 1: And that’s the thing, right? Being poor, in my experience, is a ticking time bomb attached to every relationship. People will be with you if they see the promise in you. If they see you’re working towards something bigger. But, man, that only holds them for so long.
Trouble With Being Poor Insert 2: When I first recorded this song on Get Set Go’s 2008 record Sunshine Joy and Happiness, the La la la’s you just heard were a recurring motif that appeared throughout the album, and they represented people putting their fingers in their ear and just singing, la la la to drown out the reality that they refused to acknowledge. Because, again, we tell ourselves self-serving narratives that allow us to ignore the way world really is.
Trouble With Being Poor Insert 3: And there’s a reason why alcohol and drug and suicide deaths are much higher amongst the poor and the impoverished than their wealthier brethren. You know, it’s despair, compounded by poverty, compounded by hopelessness.
Today is Your Birthday Lead-In:
The other thing that makes being poor so difficult is when you, for instance, have $150 dollars in the bank and know you’ve got a $120 dollar electric bill coming up and a $150 dollar credit card payment, and your album is under-performing, and you are literally doing everything you can to keep your life from collapsing, you have no time for anyone else. If you take the time out to be a kind and loving and attentive lover, there’s a part of you that knows something else is suffering. You can’t take the person you love out on a date. Or buy them something nice just remind them that you love them.
And the thing is, I’m not the only person that is dealing this. I’m not the only person who works twice or three times as hard for half or a quarter of what their fellows make. But, the reason why I get to say this and you get to hear it, is because this is my job. And even so, I’ve been dreading this episode. Because, I have to admit that I am broke, I am literally dying on the vine, and that my people know, and they mostly just don’t care. And every day, we, all of us, encounter poverty and then the narrative machine kicks in, assuaging the wounds that we incur every single time we encounter someone who is in need, asking for help, and we do nothing.Right? Humans are tribal creatures. And unless you’re some crazy, super-narcissist, you’re gonna feel a little shitty every time you see someone ask you for help. And you don’t.
And that’s what I mean by the fact that the poor steal a piece of our soul. Because, we like to think of ourselves as good people right? So, how, in the face of someone asking for so little, and us saying no, can we consider ourselves the good guys. It creates this weird, soul-level friction. And, thus, the narratives kick in. Now, my go-to narrative is that I just can’t afford it. But really, I can. I can afford a buck here or a buck there. I currently support 8 Patreon artists.
Mostly musicians. One writer. Couple podcasters. And when I’ve got cash in my pocket, I’ll give a buck. In fact, one guy in a wheelchair asked me for money and I said I didn’t have any cash and I jokingly asked him if he had Venmo and he said, I do, and so I sent him five bucks. Because, hell yeah. I like being the sorta person that helps people in need. And you know what, most poor are exactly like that. When they’ve got an extra few bucks, they share because they know what it’s like to struggle.
But, again, the real heartbreak when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, or in my case, royalty payment to Patreon payment to Kickstarter to live-streaming tip, is that it’s absurdly difficult to plot a course out of poverty. There is no consistent revenue around which I can budget. Which, frankly, is why I’ve begun to push Patreon so hard. But, along the way, as you are putting out one fire only to discover that three other fires have started, you’re letting down every person that relies on you. Right?You can’t give them a normal life.And that, takes a fucking heavy toll.
[song] Today is Your Birthday
Today is Your Birthday Insert: You know, and that hurts, man. Feeling like you’re disappointing everyone, every day, it just kills.
Everybody’s Working Lead-In:
If you live in an urban area, which 80% of Americans do, and you’re making subsistence level income, you are just, again, one financial calamity away from disaster. You have no agency. You have very little options. Unless, you’re a solo individual that doesn’t really care about the things you own. And that was me for the 15 years of my music career. Because, it was just easier to flush everything down the toilet, migrate, and start over. But, add a partner, add dogs, and then recording gear, and all the things that most people feel like they are laying down roots, but when you’re poor, they also feel like shackles. You can’t just pick up and move if things get tight.
In fact, that’s what my partner and I are currently dealing with. Our current place is just too small for us now. Two people and two dogs in a ¾ scale hobbit hole, even though it’s two-stories with cathedral ceilings in main living area, it’s just too small. But to move, it’s first month and last month’s rent for the new place, plus security deposit, plus truck rental, and packing supplies, pet deposit, it’s taking time off, what, maybe a full week and change, to get everything packed up. Can we afford to go a week without revenue? And then where do we move? What out of Austin? How far? Every extra mile adds cost.
So, it makes sense to me why people, when they find something that works, they don’t mess with it. Right? You find a job that pays, you stick with it. Even if it is awful. Even if it sucks the life out of you and gives you no sense of satisfaction, gives you no real sense of purpose and accomplishment, hey, it pays the bills.
And I have, over the course of my life, worked these sorts of gigs. Fortunately, for me, they were always transition gigs. I wasn’t looking at them as a new career. In 2003 or 2004 I was working for Guess, the clothing company. They hired me as a temporary worker. They had their file depository, for all the corporate files that the company generated over the course of a year, and it had not been organized in a few years and there just stacks of files everywhere.
And they were like, hey, we know you’re not gonna complete this. But we just want you to make a dent in it. There are thousands of file here, just in random stacks. So, just get through as much as you can over your 10-week contract with us.
And yes, I saw that most people just grabbed a stack, looked at the top file or folder in that stack, and then went and tried to put it in the file-cabinet where it belonged. And then they looked at the next file. Rinse and repeat. And so they would have to do that ten thousand times to file all of these papers.Which is insane. So, I started separating the stacks. And arranging them by department. And then alphabetizing them.
And for the first couple weeks, they would walk in and see that the piles were shifted and looked much neater but it didn’t seem like much filing was getting done. In fact, one person said to me, “You do know the files need to go into the cabinet, yes?” And I was like, “yes, yes, there is a method to this madness.”
And after all the files were organized and alphabetized, I put the stacks right in front the filing cabinets where they belonged. Without filing them. I just stacked them right in front. And then, when all the files, literally every single fine in the warehouse had been stacked, and arranged, and alphabetized. I started filing them in the cabinets. It took me 8 weeks. And I got every single piece of paper filed, and filed correctly. I chan ged their file structure to be way more intuitive, everything in each individual folder was organized by date, and they were stunned. And they were like, you finished? How is that even possible? And you finished early? Like, we can find more work for you if you want. And I was like, no thanks. I don’t care.Get me the fuck out of here. And so, I finished the job they said couldn’t be done and I cost myself two weeks of pay. But I knew I had done what they thought was impossible. And that was reward enough.
Of course, they asked me t o stay on as a permanent employee. And I was like, uh, work a job that gives me no sense purpose? Yeah, sorry. I can do it for a few months to pay the bills but, sorry amigo, that will never be my life. And really truthfully, wanna know the only way I was able to get through all of the mind-numbing, soul-effacing busy-work. It was by listening to music.
Everybody’s Working Insert 1:
Music, man.Right? Do I need to say more?
Everybody’s Working Insert 2: I think that collectively, we, all human beings, are dealing with a serious case of “It’s somebody else’s problem.” And yeah, there’s way too much pain and struggle and conflict to deal with everything.But find the things that you are passionate about and just a do a little something. If you can’t give money, signal boost. Share with your friends. And coworkers. Just liking or commenting can be huge. But just do something. Sheesh.
Episode Summation:
Hey, so that’s the episode. And yes, like I said, poverty, I don’t think, is something that can be solved, persay. But, I do think it can be assuaged in some pretty simple ways.Like, what about teaching financial literacy in school starting in kindergarten. Right?As you’re teaching them shapes and numbers, you teach them to save, and to budget. And then by middle school, they’re sorting out investing and retirement strategies. And by high school, they’re learning the rudiments of high level finance. So that every kid knows how take their effort and turn it into something that has lasting value. And then, because they’re financially literate, they’ll have more money to spend, there’ll be more money all around. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll begin to truly understand the value of effort. And that money is not the hallmark of success. It’s doing good work. Making excellent things. Delivering exceptional value and service and experience.That’s the lasting, enduring, abiding hallmark of success. Effort translating into excellence and excellence becoming evergreen.
Patreon Plug
I currently have 1,000 friends on Facebook.And those 1,000 friends know me, they know what I do, they’ve had courtside seats to my music, my struggle, my messages, my heart, my soul, my everything. And if all 1,000 people of my friends became patrons of mine at $1 a week, I’d pull in $4,000 extra dollars a month. Which would eliminate all of my financial woes overnight. But, you know, they don’t. Because, either, they’re not really my friends, which is, of course, silly, or they’re relying on shitty narratives that allow them to ignore what I do.
And so I’m here to dispel those shitty narratives. Right here, right now. First, I am adult. I pay my bills. I work my ass off. I work in an industry where the major players are actively stealing from the artists and everybody knows it and nobody cares.I put out a podcast each month that requires 100+ hours of writing, recording, mixing, mastering, editing.It is honest, heartfelt, genuine, and crafted with skills honed over three decades of telling stories and making music. I put out amazing albums multiple times a year. I put out songbooks. I live stream a show that is better looking and better sounding than 99.9% of other music live-streamers. I’m not a man-baby who just tra-la-la’s his way through life.I work way, way, way harder than a person should ever have to work. I’m not complaining, I love what I do.
But, if you listen to this podcast, if you dig my music, if you enjoy the live-streams and entertainment I have provided to for over thirty years, then you choosing not to support my herculean effort is on you.
Good thing is, you can support in ways that are not financial. If you do have a couple bucks to spend, awesome, hop on my Patreon at a dollar every week, 4 dollars a month, maximum. If you can afford more, amazing, you will not be disappointed. However, if you can’t afford anything, just join my Patreon community. You can click the Join this Community button for free. And then bam! You’re part of the family. And you’ll be able to hang out in the live-streams, and listen to the featurettes, and receive the singles and all the other cool stuff that I offer to my community.
I’m just tired of feeling taken for granted.Dealing with folk that are trapped in ways of thinking about me and my music that allows them to turn a blind eye.I work hard, man. I deserve to be able to eat food and keep a roof over the heads of my partner, my puppies, and my plants. The three P’s! Ha! Ha! Okay, okay. Anyway.
I love you guys. I really do. Thank you so much for listening.
Be well. Eat your veggies. Live forever.