Real Fund Manager Solves Politics Using Economics: RANT

All right, all right. Welcome back to the show. Today, we're going to talk about the whole world is just in an uproar. Politics, you got religion. I mean, there's just right, left, conservative, Democrat, Republican, libertarian, whoever you are. Everybody's upset about something. Censorship, you got COVID vaccines, all sorts of stuff. I got the solution for all y'all today. And the answer is economics. With Gotham, we tried a new one, economics. Economics is the answer to all of this. And we're going to explain that today, what I mean by that. Welcome to the channel. If this is your first time here, my name is Bridger Pennington. I've started 2 funds in my 20s, launching a 3rd fund right now. All of our channel's content, we talk about funds, finance, and all the above. Welcome in. Good to see you guys here. Now, as some of you guys know, for the best comment, my favorite comment, and people who like the channel and subscribe, we give out $100 on every single video. Now, this comment goes to Christine Mezeralde. Christine, you won $100. Send me an email or message us, whatever. We'll send you the $100. Venmo, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever you want. She said, it's amazing how this can change perspective. I'm so inspired by this type of content. Found it a week ago and already watched 17 of your videos. This week, I did a nice comment. It was really nice for her to say that about us. Usually, I do funny comments, other stuff like that. So, Christine, thank you so much. All right. So, as I prefaced, economics. Economics is the answer to all of our political, social, economic, problems, even environmental problems, climate change. All you guys are posting on your little Instagrams about climate change. You're not doing anything about it. This economics, I'm gonna explain to you guys right in just a minute what I mean by this. Okay? Economics is a big word. We're gonna dive, we're gonna drill in a little bit, I promise. What I mean by this, this is how actually regular people like us that aren't in political power, doesn't even matter what country you're in. Doesn't matter if you're in a democracy or a republic or you live in a dictatorship. Maybe that would be a little bit harder, but— Economics is how we solve all of these problems. Let me explain. Let's go down to the whiteboard. Here we go. All right, now I'm gonna use 2 examples here. We got Nike, we got Home Depot. Both have been in political, at least in my understanding, political action. Nike's been very, I would say, a lot more liberal. Home Depot has come out pretty very conservative, or just, they just wanna stay away from everything, which actually I respect. As a company, I agree. Just, let's just stay out of politics. Everyone currently loves to just drag in every celebrity, person online, anybody into politics right now. I actually respect a company that just says, hey, we want to stay out of it. Either way, both these companies, whether they chose or not chose to get into it, have been dragged through the political realm a little bit. Now, what typically happens, a few articles get written, it gets shared on Facebook and Instagram. Everyone starts sharing. Us, people like us share it. We all— we're in such an uproar, right? Well, what happens is no one does much and you still buy Nike products or you still shop at Home Depot. Why? If you're really that concerned politically, that Nike is saying something you don't like or supporting something you don't like, or Home Depot is supporting something that you don't agree with or don't like. Vote with your feet. Vote with your feet. OK? You don't think, oh man, I just can't do anything. The biggest power— you vote every single day by where you spend your dollars. It blows my mind that people don't realize They hate a company, yet they pay them dollars every day, whether they know it or they don't know it. And by the way, if the product's free, you are the product, okay? If it's free to be on Instagram, you are the product. They're selling your data, okay? If you don't like what Instagram's doing, then vote with your feet. Go somewhere else. But Bridger, wait. I mean, if I leave, that's not gonna do anything. Everyone will stay there. Well, let me actually walk you through some numbers of how this looks. Most of these major companies run on anywhere from 10% to maybe at the best 30% margins. That'd be for a good company. A lot of companies are even less. Major companies, I mean, they're down to like 4% to 6% margins. Margins meaning this is their take-home net free cash flow to their shareholders. Well, a company, at least in a capitalist society, they serve their shareholders. That's their biggest person they serve is their shareholders. Now they say they serve their customers, but they're really serving their shareholders. Guess what happens when only 10% of customers or people vote with their feet and decide to not shop at XYZ place anymore? 10%. Because you might say, well, 10%, they're still going to be just fine. No, they have so many fixed costs. These companies have so many fixed costs that they make— all their profits come from the final few customers. The reason it's called Black Friday, You guys know why it's called Black Friday? That's the Friday after Thanksgiving is because that's when companies go in the black. They finally go from losing money to making money is that day. So think about like a company like Walmart, right? Walmart does tens of billions of dollars a month. OK? They don't— the only time they actually take home money is between Thanksgiving and Christmas. One month of the year, they actually make money. make money. The rest, the other 11 months are to keep all their inventory and supplies and houses and taxes and all that kind of stuff, all their fixed costs. That's what I'm talking about. So if 10% of people, 10% of us vote with our feet and we go here, that takes away almost their entire margin depending on their business. If it's 20% of customers, 20%, let's call it 25%. They are now losing money in general. The entire company is now losing money. It only takes 10% to maybe 20% of customers to turn away from a company for them to make massive changes in that company. And most likely, the CEO will— Guess what? The CEO is a servant of the board and a servant of the shareholders. Guess what they do? They fire that CEO like that. You see it. You look at the Wall Street Journal time and time again, CEOs getting fired because this happened. Now, so if you— whether you— I'm not going to tell you which way to vote politically, but whatever way you go, vote with your feet. Stop support— stop going on Instagram and telling everybody, don't support this person or this company, yet you still go shop there or your phone bill still goes there or your— energy bill is done through there, or you somehow, you still use their app. If you don't like Twitter, right? All these conservatives got sent off Twitter. Delete the Twitter app. If they look, if they open up, crap. January 30th, 2021, we lost 25% of our people deleted the app on their phone. Jack Dorsey is probably in some trouble from his shareholders. They're going to have to make some changes in the company or changes on leadership. It only takes about 25%, 10% to 25% to make massive, massive changes. If you don't like the way Facebook or Home Depot or whatever, right? Right or left, vote with your feet. Another great example right now, literally voting with your feet is where you decide and choose to live. Right now, we are seeing one of the largest migrations on planet Earth. happening right now from major metropolitan cities to rural areas. And specifically in the United States, you're seeing major, major shifts from Democratic states and very high-tax states, namely California and New York, moving to tax havens. Guess what the number one destination spot is? You have Florida and you have Las Vegas and Nevada. Both places have near to or 0% state income tax. State tax. Next, you have Wyoming, also zero. Texas, very low state tax. I mean, vote with your feet. And guess what happens? They start to lose congressmen. And guess what they do? Like, shoot, we can't— people are leaving. We got to change something to incentivize people to move back here. Vote with your feet. It is probably the most effective way we can vote right now is voting with our feet. I mean, your politicians do whatever they want in Washington. We the people, economics drives more change than anything else. Let me show you another example. Let's talk about climate change. A lot of people up in arms about climate change, which is, you know, whatever. There's a lot of different facets of climate change, you know, different ways. There's just totally— there's a huge topic. I'm not going to cover it. Guess what? Companies did not care about climate change 25 years ago. And it was— people talked about it. Global warming was a thing. No one cared. Until customers— guess what? The biggest thing just happened. Organic. They started to realize, man, organic. Products that said organic on them sold 30% more than products that didn't have it. And they made a rule. Well, to be organic, you have to follow certain orders and regulations and all this stuff. Cage-free. And hopefully, they're actually cage-free. They're not lying to us. They have, you know, good ways to check all these things. Customers, 10 to 25%, started to say, no, I will shop for organic more than just the plain old whatever. I will buy cage-free. I will buy— there's actually a huge movement to get off meat, right? A lot of people going vegetarian or buying less meat. Guess what happens? Companies follow the dollar bills. Yeah, they say all their stuff, oh, we support this community, we help here. Great, they follow the money. Companies, and that's the beautiful thing about capitalism. All you guys online hate capitalism. That's the most beautiful thing about capitalism. In a communist country, the government just decides. In a capitalist country, we decide. It's democracy. Capitalism is democracy. You, if you want climate change, only shop at stores and places that support whatever, you know, part of climate change you support. Whether it's recycled or organic, cage-free, whatever, you know, flavor of climate change you support. Support those companies. And guess what? Those companies over, it might be a few years, it might be a decade, it might be whatever, will take over the bigger companies. Why? Because customers vote with their feet. Or those companies, which we've seen the last few years, they've all shifted. They've said, you know what? We're going to go. And they go, yeah, we're going to make a— yeah, we believe as a board, we're going to now take on and help out with climate change. That didn't just happen because they woke up one day and said, yeah, let's do this. They saw money flowing out of their bank account to other bank accounts and said, why is it doing that? Well, I think it's because of climate change, because customers are supporting other companies that are more eco-friendly, green, whatever it is. How about we become that too? And guess what? Money will probably flow back to our pocket. I mean, it's just like, it's just economics. Like, capitalism is the greatest thing on planet Earth because we the people vote with our feet. We get to decide. Now, the problem right now with capitalism is freaking governments come in and they bribe and infiltrate capitalism. And that's the problem is where they change and they change the rules where only certain amounts of companies can, you know, actually do wireless phones. There's only a certain number of companies that can do wireless phones. It's a locked-in thing. Good luck if you want to go try to start your own broadband carrier. Good luck. Go. Go see what happens. If you want to start your own pharmaceutical company, good luck. The government has come in and really regulated it and staved off competition. Competition is the greatest thing on planet Earth. Vote with your feet. So, I'm rambling on here. What I'm saying is, be mindful of where you spend your time and you spend your dollars. Online, where you spend your time, they track all of that. That's the product. If you see an ad, they are making money on you. So, don't support them online or on TV, whatever channel you watch. You saw like CNN, they've dropped 40% viewership. 40%. They're looking to sell now, right? People voted with their wallet. A lot of people decided we don't want to watch CNN anymore for whatever reason. See, the same thing with whatever channel or news station or app that you choose to watch, they are keeping track of that. Wherever you spend your time, Is one of the most valuable things they track, right? And it's ultimately where you spend your dollars. So keep that in mind as you go forward and whatever causes you support. Don't post your little thing on Instagram, but vote with your dollars. That's all I gotta say. Thank you guys so much. Like and follow for more. Subscribe, whatever the crap is on this page. Go check it out. We'll see you later for more videos. Comment, actually top comment though is gonna get $100. So let's see what happens on this one. in the comments below. Love you guys. See you later. Bye.