The Economy Is Crashing... Please listen to this advice...

I work with a ton of entrepreneurs all over the world and universally everyone is feeling chaotic right now. There's all kinds of things in the news right now, like inflation and the debt ceiling and a pending election, that nobody knows what is going to happen. And there's a lot of fear and uncertainty about what's going to happen in our country, in the world and with the economy. And I want to speak to those of you who are feeling really afraid right now, because I have dealt with this too. It was 2006 when I started my first business, and that was my first year of college as well. And that was a really good time in the economy. Things were booming and interest rates were healthy and there was a real estate boom. And then 2007 things continued to expand. And then 2008 happened and everything came crashing down. That has affected a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included. This affected a lot of stock portfolios, myself included. And I was also an economic student at the time, so I was studying the whole thing live as it was happening. So I was in this weird experience where I'm starting a business, I'm studying economics, and the school of thought that I came from was vindicated in their doomsday scenarios. And everybody else thought the economy was great and it would go, the boom would go on forever. And my school of thought said, no, there's going to be a crash. And they were right. I used that as a reason to slow down and be fearful. And I went down some conspiracy theory rabbit holes in which I was very convinced for a long time that maybe the recession was manufactured, maybe there was a One World Government on its way. At the time, one of the big theories was that there was going to be a currency like the euro, but in North America, and it was going to be called the Amero. And there were these evil elites called the Bilderberg Group. And all this seemed very logical at the time. And so I internalized a lot of this and I used a lot of this bad news as a reason to not invest. And it also made me feel vindicated or justified in my viewpoint of the world. And so one of the things I did was I stopped learning. And I was wrong. Because what happened on the other side was that I again played defense and I waited for there to be a further crash. And we were wrong, as evidenced by the fact that there was a 10 year bull run in the economy, 2008, say that wrong, a 12 year run after 2008. And so I've had, I had to over the years kind of come back and relook at recessions and economics and where we are in sort of the evolution of the economy and the markets and the theories about the economy and what's going to happen are exactly the same as they were 13 or 14 years ago, but the names have changed. Instead of the Bilderberg Group running everything, it's the World Economic Forum. Instead of the Amero or the one World Currency, it's the cbdc. Now, these things are worth considering, these things are worth exploring, these things are worth diving into so that we can keep our government in check. But when they run our lives, when they run our decisions, specifically about how we will invest or run our businesses, this is where we get into trouble. And so what I would like to do for the next few minutes is give you a little bit of perspective. Here's a fun fact for you. The idea of capitalism really became mainstream around the year 1800. 1800, the first big publication to introduce the idea of free markets was Adam Smith's wealth of Nations. It was published in 1776. Now, back then, this is going to stun you. In 1776, they did not have the Internet, they didn't even have ChatGPT. So information spread much slower back then. And so the ideas of capitalism did not gain a foothold until the early 1800s. And when this thing called the Internet came along, ideas started to spread much faster. And the idea of open markets, free markets, free trade, e commerce accelerated at a rate that we've never seen before. And in the last 20 years, the overall US economy has tripled. Now, you can say inflation, you can say government intervention, you could say we're no longer on the gold standard. I like to play those games, too. I have plenty of things that I am unhappy about, about how our government is run, about how the Fed runs policy. But the fact of the matter is, we have three times the economic activity today than we have in the year 2000. One stat that I found while I was preparing this for you is that the United States has reduced their carbon emissions back to the levels of the 1970s and 80s. Are you telling me that while we're all worried about global warming, the United States has reduced its carbon emissions back to the levels of the 1970s and 80s? And the answer is yes, we made tremendous progress here. And some of it is due to companies like Tesla, which, if you look back at their history over the last 10 to 15 years, if you had invested in that company, you'd be up like a billion percent right now. These numbers haven't Been fact checked. Don't listen to anything that I say. And the same is true with things like early industries like cryptocurrency. Web3 if we look at where we are in the overall trend of history rather than what is just in front of us over the next two or three years, we start to see that the trend of freedom, the trend of capitalism, the trend of the growth part of humanity is picking up steam, not slowing down. So now that we've established some context about where we are in terms of history, let's look at some context of where we are on a shorter timeframe. Like where we are over the last 18 to 24 months. Because before COVID we had these crazy record highs in the economy. Everything looked great. Then we had Covid, obviously we had the big crash and then we saw this big artificial bubble recovery that was fueled by low interest rates. Now we have actually appropriate interest rates and things have come crashing down in some cases and some people think that there's going to be a further crash and correction. And there might be, but let's look at some context for this. Interest rates have gone from 0% to 5%. 5% is like a healthy interest rate. That is a modest interest rate. They're probably not going to go higher. They might, maybe, but the Federal Reserve has said probably not going to raise interest rates. And economically speaking, there's really no reason right now to go higher. Inflation is now coming down. We had fears that inflation was going to continue to run rampant because of all the quote, money that we printed. Well, that money is being destroyed now. So a lot of the fears that we I had, that we had, that a lot of entrepreneurs had, was that there was going to be this crazy inflation run where we would have hyperinflation, we'd print the dollar away, they'd introduce one world currency. Etc. This is a lot of the use case for buying Bitcoin. But that thesis didn't play out. Might still play out long term, but there's really no reason for it to play out anytime soon because the Fed actually acted appropriately. I also would like to point out here, I think it's a very healthy thing for us to be having this conflict about the debt in the United States. The one thing that I'm really glad the Republicans are doing is digging in their heels about the debt ceiling. Why? Because inflation doesn't just come from the Federal Reserve's interest rates. Inflation comes from the deficit that we have on our spending and balance sheet. When we're running trillion dollar deficits that Money has to come from somewhere. And so that money gets created and is now debt on our balance sheet, maybe we'll get spending in the right direction. All this to say these are anti inflationary signals. Also you have crypto down 80% from its highs. That is a full retracement. Tech stocks, which are the next riskiest asset class, are down 50 to 80% in some cases. Go look at the chart of PayPal or Zoom. Tech stocks have been crushed in the last year and real estate in some areas, including where I live, Austin, Texas is down 30%. All of this to say we're all afraid of a recession or a crash. We're in it now. Which means that in my, in my evaluation, we could probably stop fearing that it is going to be this great meltdown and so we can build for the future knowing that we may have a slower economy, we may have a recession, but we're already in it. We're in it now, we're dealing with it now. And it might be a long, but we don't have to fear it because we're already in it. So let's start building through it. A few things that I'm keeping in mind during this next period is I think, I think we'll have about a two year slowdown, maybe three before we have another big acceleration and expansion. And so I'm using this to accumulate, accumulate things that I think are going to expand in value for the next 10 years. If you're batting on what worked or expanded in the previous years, you may get crushed. But if you're betting on the future, if you're creating the future, if you're looking at companies that are going to expand through the future, this can be a really exciting time. And the last point to make here is now is not the time for most people to be expanding their lifestyles, but it is the time to be expanding your wealth. This is, this is springtime. This is when you, the winter's over. In my belief, winter's over. We've seen the worst of it. This is the time to plant seeds knowing that it's, we're going to have to work like hell through summer to get a reap of a harvest come fall. I don't mean seasonality in terms of the year. I mean it's springtime in the economy. It's time to plant new seeds and time to play at them and work like cowl for the next two to three years. And there will be another harvest in a couple of years. That would be the time to expand your lifestyle. So what I would like for you to take from this is the context that in the broad view of history, capitalism expands and rarely contracts. And when it does contract, it contracts for a very short period of time before the next new emerging trend becomes possible. And it's our job to bet on those. It's our job to seek them out. It's our job to create them. It's our job to partner with others that can help create that next trend. And we're sitting on the verge of that next one. And I hope you can take away from this that even if there is a slowdown, it's still an opportunity because you're the opportunity. I'm Ryan. Dana brand with capitalism.com thanks for listening today and I'll see you next time. Take care. And by the way, check out this new setup. What do you guys think? Is this baller or what? Is that an old person word to say baller? Did that stop being cool like eight years ago?