Episode 29: How the Kardashians Ruined Your Brain

Everyone says "keeping up with the Joneses." Almost nobody knows the Joneses were a joke invented by a broke cartoonist to warn people off the exact behavior we turned into a national pastime.

This episode traces the phrase from Pop Momand's 1913 comic strip (based on his own humiliating Long Island debt spiral) through Chevrolet's 1956 ad campaign that used the line outright, to the modern influencer economy that industrialized the same instinct at scale.

Along the way: Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumption, a 2005 study linking income inequality to household borrowing, Leon Festinger's 1954 theory of social comparison, and a 2013 study on Facebook envy that explains why your feed feels like a hundred driveways you can't stop checking.