BigDeal - #29 How the Debt Crisis ACTUALLY Affects You

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

🚀 Main Street Over Wall Street is where the real deals get done. Join top investors, founders, and operators for three days of powerful connection, sharp strategy, and big opportunities — live in Austin, Nov 2–4. https://contrarianthinking.biz/msows-bigdeal In this episode, Codie Sanchez talks about her time in Argentina during Cristina Fernandez's presidency and the risks of government overreach in business. She warns about similar issues in the US, including federal debt, rising interest rates, and economic instability. Codie emphasizes the need for individual freedom and less regulation, linking past events to today. She also discusses financial trends like the devaluation of the dollar and the real estate crisis, offering tips for achieving financial freedom in uncertain times. Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. Chapters 00:00 START 00:56 Current Events: Government and Business 01:20 The Argentina Experience 03:26 Government Spending and Economic Concerns 06:04 Elon Musk's Economic Warnings 09:10 The Debt Crisis and Its Implications 20:45 Commercial Real Estate and Other Economic Issues 22:21 Censorship and Free Speech Concerns 24:19 The Dangers of Price Controls Register for Bizscout - https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XYT2zr Main Street Millionaire Book Pre-order - msmbook.com MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: 🫂 ⁠Our community⁠ 📰 ⁠Free newsletter⁠ 🏦 ⁠Biz buying course⁠ 🏠 ⁠Resibrands⁠ 💰 ⁠CT Capital⁠ 🏙️ ⁠Main St Hold Co⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whenever the government says, I'm from the government and I'm here to help, they're typically not. And I am talking about red, white, blue, purple, whatever the f*** color they show up as. The only good government is a one that is at a distance, allowing you to be able to continue to do the things you need to do on a daily basis, as opposed to mandating you do one thing or another. Quick, FYI, before we get too much into it, we've got just a few months before my first ever book is out in the world. If you want to pre-order it for yourself or anyone you love, you can do that in the link in the show notes, or you can search it online. It's called Main Street Millionaire.

You'll love it. I think it'll make you a lot of money, and I hope you guys pre-order it. Hello, and welcome back to all those who put in the work. I'm Cody Sanchez, and this is the Big Deal podcast. Okay, this segment's a little bit different and interesting, I hope, for you guys. We're going to call this one something along the lines of current events. If you want to tell us what you think we should name this podcast, drop it in the links. Come up with a catchy name for us.

We've got our interview podcasts. We've got our Moneymaker podcast series. And now we got this one where we talked to you about what's happening in the world. Let me preface it with this. I think we have to obsess a little bit for just a small amount of time on what's happening with the government right now around us. Let me tell you why. I used to run a business in Latin America at a company called First Trust.

We grew it to over a billion dollars in assets under management. We were one of the fastest growing international businesses in Latin America. And before I left that company to go start my own, I watched what happens when, we let the government get in the way of business. In fact, when I was in Latin America running our business was the same time a new president came on board in a country called Argentina, and that president's name was Christina Fernandez. Christina Fernandez came into an Argentina that was just starting to write its way out of formally socialist policies. And Christina Fernandez came in, and over the span of three to six months, she nationalized just about every business. She kicked

people out of the country like me who had financial companies where we were helping people who knew that the Argentinian dollar there at the time was really volatile. So even now if you go to Argentina, you don't go to a bank to exchange your currency, you go to the black market because you get a much better rate. And oftentimes they run out of dollars in the banks in Argentina. And that is because they've had really poor management by the government. So my business was all around Latin America. And in the span of the night, Christina Fernandez made my business illegal, which was just allowing them to invest in international exchange-traded funds, mutual funds, things we think of as normal,

because she wanted to keep all the money in Argentina, she wanted to lock down all of production, and she wanted to own everything. And because of that, the economy cratered overnight, and some of my friends who owned businesses there had them taken away, and we had a mass exodus from Argentina, and the country has never really recovered. And I watched that.

And so now when people say, Cody, stay in your lane, don't talk about the government. I don't talk about Republicans or Democrats. I think they're largely the same in many ways. I talk about the fact that we have to protect our own freedoms and that I will do everything I humanly can to fight for each one of you to be your own sovereign and to be in charge

and to have no big brother or big government tell you what you can and can't do. You don't need it. I think that you are more competent than most people who wear a little flag lapel on their pin and try to tell you that they're here to protect you. And so today I thought we've got to look at something that's a little crazy,

which is what's happening with government spending. And I want to break that down, but I wanted to tell you why. Because if we let the government become what Argentina became, which is somewhere where they nationalize the economy, because the government doesn't know how to build, government only knows how to protect and how to spend. They are not innovators. You guys are.

And I don't want us to become a poor replica of a country that has more wealth and beauty. you can imagine Argentina's gorgeous, but sadly, people in power who don't believe in the individuals. They believe in the collective. And so let's talk about what the hell is going on in the world today. We're going to do this pretty quickly. We're going to break it down and we're going to come up with some ideas for what to do next. Okay, first, as of July 26, 2024, the U.S. federal debt has skyrocketed to $35 trillion, almost equal to the size of the economy. Not fun. Listen, the thing is, this is not actually new news, as the U.S. has been running a deficit for a very long time since 2001, meaning we've been spending more than we earn and borrowing

to fill that gap. Things got even worse after March 2020. You guys all remember this. COVID when central bankers started partying like they just closed an IPO and had bottle service at Tao in New York. I can just picture the little central bankers shaking their champagne bottles. So why should we care about this? Well, economic ruin does not sound fun. And not to be dramatic, but this debt could lead to a budget crisis, higher interest rates, and economic instability, and so I think we've got to really understand it. Because more than that, long term, it could hurt America's standing in the world, which, candidly, we can't afford right now.

I thought I'd do an episode really clearly breaking down what is going on, why it matters in a way that won't put you to sleep, but will make you sound smarter than either your neocon, perma, or your family gathering or your kind of commie money as a human right cousin who's never had a real job. Cool? Okay. We're going to break it all down, and we're going to read up on what some of the brightest minds in business have to say about this. So let's steal their homework and get into it. But first, don't be greedy. Share the pod with the needy. I repost all of you who tag me in your Instagram stories, sharing the pod. So make my day and your buds bank accounts well and share this episode. We see a ton of people downplaying our economic situation, and it makes me nervous. Some of the smartest minds in business are starting to sound the alarm. The contrarian view here is that we should actually.

actually be listening to these warnings. You see, our economic challenges, it doesn't mean that we're about blind optimism or doom and gloom. It's about facing hard truths, considering unconventional solutions, and being prepared. All right, so Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm about our financial situation. I know some people don't like him and think he's mean or think he's not great, and that could all be true, but he's definitely smart. And anytime somebody has a bank account bigger than I do and has built something bigger than I have, I like to at least listen to part of it. And I want a breakdown and see where I disagree or where I agree, but with a guy like this, it's worth seeing what his brain is thinking. So he said things like, the dollar will be worth nothing

if the U.S. doesn't do something about its national debt, like this tweet right here. And he's basically talking about the fact that this tweet talks about interest payments on U.S. national debt will shatter $1.1 trillion this year, eating 76% of all income taxes collected. And I think whether you like the guy or not, he's pretty much a legend. And so let's quantify him before I use a few more takes from him and a few more of his research. So think about this for a second. I think that Elon Musk might be one of the best CEOs of our generation. And then you might go, Cody, you're just a fan girl. You're an Elon Stoge. Okay, let's qualify this in a few different ways. Do you run a business that is harder than rocket ships in space? No, you probably don't. No, I

fucking don't either. Okay, well, he does that business. And not only does he do that business, get this stat. 60% of all satellites in Earth's orbit are now from Starlink. 6-0, 60%. Look at this image, which basically shows of the 10,036 satellites in the Earth's orbit, Starlink has 6,800 of them. How about from this perspective? The U.S. will launch like 159 rockets this year. SpaceX has already launched 84. Last year, he launched 96. Okay, so he's pretty good at space, one of the hardest games out there. And oh, by the way, if you fuck up, you die. That's pretty serious.

But it's not even talking about what he's done in media, electric cars, batteries, and open sourcing that technology. If you think about it, a friend of Mimbology has a great tweet where he talks about how hardware is one of the most difficult tech or businesses that you could run. And then you add the fact that he's going electric, space, reusable rockets, and managing three multi-billion dollar companies simultaneously. I think his pain tolerance must be unrivaled. And on top of that, anyone who thinks he's bad for the economy is either lying or so dumb as to be irrelevant. I think we should pray that our best and brightest, like him, continue to exist and that our government is one-tenth as efficient using our tax dollars as he is using his shareholders' dollars. In fact, I think if you're wondering if you should date a woman and take her home to your mom, or if you should date a guy and take him home to your dad, you should ask them what they're think of Elon Musk. I think it is a great litmus test of intelligence to ask somebody, do you think that Elon Musk is better for society or worse for society? If they say worse for society, cut and fucking run. And so, before we get into more, I just wanted you to know what the man's accomplished, because I think it's really easy to look at Twitter and say his memes are dumb, and I don't like

that he did this or that. But we've got to go one step deeper than this. So when I was looking at more data from a couple people that I respect highly, from Elon Musk, from Bologi, from another one of my good friends, Brian Westbury, who's an economist, I pulled together a bunch of information on the debt crisis overall in the U.S. And what I thought was fascinating is we've been running a deficit for years, obviously. And at which point, most people on the internet will go something along the lines of, this doesn't matter, we can keep printing capital. We're the tallest of all the midgets, which is a way of saying that, you know, we're the best economy in the world still, even if all the economies aren't that great, at least we're better than theirs. But there's a couple things

that are different than at any time. One is look at rising interest costs. I mean, the government is spending more and more just to pay interest on the debt. This is becoming one of the largest expenses in the federal budget, which you can see right here looking at this slide. And then look at social programs at risk, like Social Security, Medicare. They could run out of money in the next decade, leaving millions of Americans without critical support. I think if you also want to have a litmus test of an intelligent person. The next question should be, can we continue to have social programs structured the way that we do? Or should they be need-based? Because at some point, we won't be able to have an input like this for one generation to the next. In fact, Scott Galloway has an

incredible TED Talk basically talking about how these programs are stealing from the youth to give to the next generation. And I think that is actually true. I think if you are a mom, a dad, a grandma, and you look at this data and you don't think that you are stealing from the youth to pay for your generation, you're not looking at the math very clearly. Now, the problem is that the government can't seem to do anything about this. Lawmakers don't want to fix it. It's very unpopular, but why? Because voters are not young people. Voters are middle-aged to older. And so it's human nature. We vote in our self-interest, and those who are older are going to continue to vote these programs on. And, you know, I think there's a really interesting post out there by Vibology. He basically

talks about the true state of the financial situation in the U.S. and talks a lot about debt borrowing and the value of the dollar. What's interesting, I'm going to break down three of these graphs. So the first one, we basically see how when the government puts a program in place, they rarely pull it back. This is important to know. It happened during TARP. That's the asset relief program, which happened in 2008 post-financial crisis. It happened on 9-11. with rolling out widespread ability to keep us safe, but also learn a lot about its citizenry. Never pulled that back as well.

So in 2003, the Fed issued more emergency loans than during the 2008 financial crisis. Think about that for a second. If you look at this graph, you can see it's like, I don't know, 5X more emergency loans in 2023 than 2008. If you guys weren't around in the workplace in 2008, it was bad.

I was actually at Goldman in 2009, 2010, which was the worst part of the crisis. 2008 is when it started. You saw the first trickle from Lehman Brother. And like a game of Domino's, you basically saw one bankfall after bank ball after bank fall. And in 2009 and 2010 is when Goldman really got it. And we had to go in front of the Senate and give a bunch of commentary about what had happened in the financial crisis. So what is scary to me is remembering what happened in 2008.

If we are anywhere near that in 2023 to 2024, it's something. scary. If we are four to five times that by the federal government, I'm actually not sure how to quantify that. Then if we look at it from this level, all right, so emergency loans, not great. Maybe that's not that big of a deal. Well, let's look at borrowing levels. The U.S. is borrowing more now than during the COVID-19 pandemic with interest rates around 5%. So during COVID-19, we're basically at 0% interest rates. Now we're at 5%. You guys know what that feels like. Have you tried to go get a house lately? Have you looked at like the difference in interest rates? for the mortgage you could afford two or three years ago versus now.

That is what's happening in the government at scale. This graph is basically showing you, oh my gosh, we are issuing trillions of dollars in bonds. And, oh, by the way, we're paying really high interest payments to do it. The next graph is basically showing you interest payments on the national debt that we have. And what's crazy is for the first time ever. We have net interest. So just us paying our interest payments. It's like you having a credit card that instead of you paying off the amount every month,

you just pay the interest that you accumulate. That fat debt is still sitting there on your credit card. And on top of it, you're barely making interest payments. Well, for the first time ever, our net interest payments in the U.S., we pay more towards those than we do our national defense, which is scary in a world in which China's China in, and we have what's happening in the Middle East, and we have what's happening in Russia.

Then we got a trifecta in case you guys aren't ready to slit your wrist already, which is the dollar devaluation. So the dollar's lost like 25% of its value in just four years. 25 cents of every dollar that you own, you have lost because of devaluation of our dollar over the last four years. If you were to go back to the 70s, we're talking about losing almost 75% of $1 in just that amount of time.

Then, interestingly enough, who owns most treasuries or the way that we fund our economy? Who is our like mom and dad funding? our bills. Well, that's China in a lot of ways. China holds more treasury securities than anybody else, but Rutrow, since about 2010 when they peaked, 2014 when they peaked again, they are now back to almost historical lows of how much they own of treasuries. So China doesn't want to be our buddy and stabilize our economy anymore. So I talk a lot about business buying and I get a lot of questions about it. One of the most common questions is, where do you find a business to buy? The answer is sad,

because the worst deals are oversaturated marketplace sites, but the best deals are off-market or curated. Either way, finding a business to buy basically sucks, and I think it should suck less. So that's why we've built something for you guys, Biz Scout, a business buying marketplace full of only the best deals for both on and off-market. And Biz-Skout is just built different, okay? We've got verified buyers, so the best sellers are actually interested in selling. Scout sites, aka at a glance, what's the quick analysis of this deal? off-market data so you can get all the info you need to direct outreach efficiently. Embedded lending so you can get your financing for the business right where you buy it.

BizCout is going to change the face of Main Street buying and selling. Probably not immediately. We have a lot more work to do, but I want you guys to be part of it, to be part of the buyers and builders in this next round. So you guys are one of the first to hear. Go to bizcout.com and check it out. Then we've got the bricks. I remember when these got created when I was at Goldman,

which is Brazil, Russia, Indian, China. It's a grouping of countries that came. together to sort of combat U.S. dominance, right? They came together and said, what if we create a coalition between the four of us? Well, it turns out that many people outside of the U.S., including the Bricks Nation, which are a huge block of power, are buying large amounts of gold instead of U.S. Treasuries. I mean, check this out. You can basically see that during the financial crisis, we had record high levels of gold bought. More gold than I know how to quantify. We got Fort Knoxes of gold all around the globe. Well, guess what?

We're just about to surpass that level of gold held in 2024. And gold holding is usually an indicator of a risk off trade, which basically means, oh, man, I'm worried about what's happening in the economy, so I'm going to pull back risk. Then we've got de-dollarization. So China has started to use its own currency for most cross-border transactions. What does that mean? Well, in the past, if you wanted to do a deal like China and India,

or if you wanted to do a deal China and Latin America, China would use U.S. dollar. Latin American countries would use U.S. dollar, and that would be their trading currency. China's now said, nah, nah, we're going to use our own. We're going to use the U.S. And that basically means that we're seeing more deals done in Chinese currency than the U.S. currency, at least by China. And that's not great because that decreases the amount of liquidity and usage of our own currency, which we don't want. Then we made another kind of series of dumb decisions. We had a sanction on Russia and Europe that we thought, That was going to hurt Russia, but actually ended up hurting Europe more. So we said, you know, no natural gas, no energy for you.

Europe, we're going to shut you off from Russia because Russia really needs your cash. Turned out not to be the case. The other problem with this, it's like a little high brow to understand is like, imagine we used to use the dollar. You were supposed to use the dollar as a government. You were supposed to say, we do not politicize our usage of the dollar. You just go out and for anybody who wants to use. the dollar, trade it back and forth amongst people, go off and prosper. Well, the second that you start politicizing the dollar, which means saying, hey, we are going

to use sanctions on Russia, we are going to tell them they can't trade in USD, well, what happens? They start using other currencies and going to other providers, and that's what's happened in Russia. Then the other thing that's a little scary is from a peacetime perspective, usually in times of peace, not times of war, debt goes down. Well, what has happened to us since the 1900s? Well, we have skyrocketed post-2000 to some of the highest levels of national debt we've ever had. And all of this together.

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And we'll get into answers of what you do next. But have you ever tried to solve a problem without having proper context for a problem? Have you ever started to sit down and think, how do I fix my business? It's not working. How do I fix my relationship? It's not working. Well, if you go to fix your relationship and you're like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to love language the shit out of it.

them. I'm going to buy her so many flowers and gifts and presents and outings. And you don't actually understand why your wife is upset is because she just wants quality time with you and you to listen to her more and you to be kinder to her. She doesn't want fancy things. She doesn't want flowers. If you don't understand the situation you're in, you can't actually fix it. So I think one of the most important parts of this podcast is to understand what's going on in our world around us so that we can fix it and we can prepare for it properly. So what's interesting is, according to my friend Bology, who is the CTO of Coinbase, one of the smartest men I know and did this. famous tweet right here. I just burned a million to tell you that they're printing trillions.

His point here was, I'm concerned about the chance of a crisis. And so Bology thinks there's a 10% chance of a crisis happening soon, a 70% chance in the next two years, which is scary because he's very smart. Now, what does that look like? If you look back at history, it took just two days from the collapse of SVB, you guys remember Silicon Valley Bank sort of collapsing and everybody freaking out, to then the government printing $300 billion. Within two weeks, $500 billion was withdrawn from local banks seeking safety. That was one bank and its ripple effect. Lockdowns due to COVID-19 were implemented just two months after the virus hit the U.S. The financial crisis was only acknowledged two quarters after Ben Bernanke's, the chairman of the Fed at the time,

mild recession, famously, mild recession prediction. And then, Bologi says, the USSR transitioned from of superpower to collapse in just two years. And so his point here is multi-pronged, which is we have major issues all across our economy, which means that you guys need to learn how to become asset holders more and more. We need to learn how to become asset holders. Because if we add on top of this, the commercial real estate crisis that I think is happening all around us, you guys have seen it. You travel around to different parts of your city here in Austin, Texas. If you were to drive any street with eyes to see, you would see vacant commercial centers. Why would that happen?

Somebody owns those. Why would they just be sitting there empty? Well, they're sitting there empty because in order for them to sell it, they'd have to mark down their portfolio, which means that they'd have to say, we told you investors this was worth $100. It's actually worth $20. And because of that, they're going to have a ripple effect through their entire portfolio. It's also why they aren't leasing those things out. Then we've got pension crisis.

We've got underfunded pensions to the tune of like, $1.4 trillion with a T. We've got auto loans rising in their default rate, which means people not about to pay them. I think that's also at risk. We've also got record high credit card debt, so $930 billion in credit card debt in the U.S. This is a all-time high. And then we've got more people moving away from the dollar. So we've got some serious issues here in this country, which is why I impress upon all of us to really think about how do we get to financial freedom and protect ourselves from an environment in which we have global uncertainty that we've probably never seen before.

I think maybe the only place that's worse off in some degrees is Europe because they're literally playing a game of 1984. Between the government instituting that somebody could get jailed because of what they tweet or put on Facebook is something that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. All right, let's get into some wild and crazy stuff now that we're talking about 1984 in Europe because why not? Crazy idea. I don't think it's awesome to have Facebook CEO Zuckerberg tell you that he was lightly coerced into censoring news during the last election cycle and also during COVID.

I don't think it's awesome to have a founder of a tech company arrested in France for not sharing information on citizens. I definitely don't think it's awesome for governments like the UK and European Union to say that they would come after even U.S. citizens for things that they say online that they don't like. Elon Musk posted this tweet, which is sadly kind of true. It's 2030 in Europe, and you're being executed for liking a meme, which increasingly feels like that could be reasonable. But what's fascinating to me is we don't seem to be very good at second and third order effects. We think that if one party tells us something we don't like, we should censor them. But we don't actually think about the opposite, which is what happens when your party, or the opposite party

from yours, says something that you don't like? What happens when your guys go out of power and the other guys come into power? Then you just play a game of going after one another. It's why we shouldn't arrest former presidents for political reasons. It's why we should make sure everybody gets free speech, we don't like what they're saying. And it's why we should make sure that we push back on censorship anywhere we can. And yet for some reason, this has become non-normalized. It's become okay for people to say that you shouldn't be allowed to talk. Stay in your lane. You're not an expert. Motherfucker, no. I'm an expert as an American in the First Amendment, which is that we have the right to free speech. And I do not think we should allow anybody to push back on that.

Now, I got to read this next thing to you because let's go back to Argentina and Venezuela, where I had a business before. So if you've never been to Venezuela, you probably didn't know that if you wanted to buy a chicken, this is how much money you would need. Or about 14 million bolivars, which is their version of a dollar. That would be the equivalent to $2.22.US. 14 million bolivar to $2.22. cents. Now, how did it happen where in Venezuela, their currency became so little that they make purses out of it like this on the street? Like literally you can have a purse made entirely of dollar bills. You know how that started? Price controls. Two words, it sound awesome and actually

are not, which is probably why that quote is true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It just sounds so good. I go to the grocery store and I see the prices of groceries today and I get pissed. I'm like, why do I have to pay 20 bucks for this fancy organic XYZ? The problem is, is that we don't want the government to set anything. And let me explain by, and I'm not going after one candidate or another, I won't even say who said this idea about price controls. All I will say is, if you want a masterclass in price controls, go look at Venezuela and see how it worked out for them. Spoiler, not great. So I want to read you a tweet. from a friend of mine, we should just listen to what he has to say about it.

This is a friend of mine, Robert, who is the CFO of a company. He's saying, people need to stop overreacting about X's plan to reduce food inflation, as it would lead to communism, mass starvation, and the end of America. He's like, come on, I worked in M&A in the food industry. Here's a step-by-step summary of what would actually happen. Step one, the government announces that grocery retailers aren't allowed to raise prices. Grocery stores, which operate on one to two net margins, can't survive if their suppliers raise prices.

So the government announces that food producers, next line, also aren't allowed to raise prices. Okay, well, not all grocery stores are created equal, so stores in lower income areas make less money than high income ones, right? Because these aren't able to cover their overhead, grocery chains start to shut down. So that means we have food deserts and rural areas in low-income urban areas that becomes even worse. Meanwhile, margins for food producers going down. Their primary costs, ingredients, energy, and labor aren't fixed, and they have, shrinking profits. So number five, grocery stores, which have finite shelf space, start to repurpose their stores, those that didn't have to shut down, to sell more non-price

controlled items. So your local Kroger or Safeway starts to look and feel more like a Walmart. Food producers then stop making products with lower margins, no eggs or milk or bread, because they can't make any money on it, so their businesses are starting to die. So then they compete on things like payment terms and how long you can pay for something. Then small grocery chain start to shut down entirely. So whole chains. Or they get sold to larger chains like Kroger. In addition, not being able to cover the fixed costs, a major reason is because they can't secure delivery of products due to producers prioritizing sales to larger customers and those that might stay in business because they have to float sometimes the customer payment. So the smaller food

producers, which typically sell via distributors rather than right to the grocery stores, they go out of business because these producers have an additional step in their value chain. So they actually of higher costs because you're a smaller guy. As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning. Now, cities assign police officers to patrol store parking lots and food producers draft contingency plans to assign armed escorts to delivery trucks. Step 10, the federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores because government's here to help. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities because you're not allowed to close down. 11, the government announces that

prices for all key food costs, corn, wheat, cattle, energy are now fixed to stop profiteers, in air quotes, from gouging the now government-operated food industry. 12. Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding. What happens next? Communism, masturbation, and the end of America quickly ensue. Hey, wait a second. And you have to laugh at this slightly, except that it's a tale as old as time. I had to be a little. I had to be a little. a friend who ran, I kid you not, a distributor from Mercedes-Benz in Argentina. And when Christina Fernandez came in and took over the government, they nationalized his business and they mandated

he produced coffee. This motherfucker knew nothing about coffee, but they could export coffee. And she no longer wanted to allow imports of Mercedes-Benz. So what happened? He tried for a while before the business went under because he had no idea what he was doing. That is the problem with when we try to have the government as Big Brother taking care of anything. And like, this is where some people go, well, some price controls are great. And you're right. Some price controls are necessary. So profiteers do not gouge the American public. Like, for instance, you could say, what about pharma? What about those fuckers in pharma? Just charging us a million dollars for everything. And you'd be right in some ways. For instance, U.S. drug prices are roughly three X higher than prices anywhere else.

And yet we account for roughly a third up to 60% of the revenue of U.S. pharma companies. In some places, price controls are intelligent. Like, for instance, we should be thoughtful about life-saving drugs and trying to make sure that we have price controls so people can have access to them and there doesn't become a massive amount of profiteering. But the problem becomes when we think that something that works on the edges works across the board. And that is the truth of what's happening right now in this. the U.S. So the truth of the matter is we got some work to do. But I think what you need to realize listening to all of this is that your ability to earn is really focused on two things. That is your

willingness to continue to do what it takes and your ability to pick the right market for you. That market increasingly is something that you have to think about when it comes to federal and regulatory oversight. Lots of people these days like to play in online businesses, for instance. They like to play in businesses that seem a little bit sex here. But guess what? In a market in which we're coming into a recession, in which things might get harder, you are probably going to be happier with a plumbing company that everybody needs, as opposed to a gaming company online,

as opposed to starting that e-commerce store that you saw with some one-off widget that nobody really actually needs. When times gets tough, there's always a way to make money, but some ways are a lot harder than others. If you guys think we should do an entire episode on what to do in order to make money and continue to persevere in a down market when we have a recession, if the market continues to get more difficult, let me know and we will do that on one of these next podcasts.

But in the meantime, remember this, whenever the government says, I'm from the government and I'm here to help, they're typically not. And I am talking about red, white, blue, purple, whatever the fuck color they show up as. The only good government is a one that is at a distance, allowing you to be able to continue to do the things you need to do on a daily basis as opposed to mandating you do one thing or another. And that is a hill I will die on. All right, if you guys thought this was useful and an interesting way to break down some of the stuff that we're talking about so you can be more intelligent in conversations where people want to get emotional about politics and economics as opposed to being rational about it, let me know in the comments.

we're going to maybe do more of these current events because I think in a world so crazy, we've got to know what's going on so we know what's coming. See you next time.