How to save yourself from the tariffs
Michael founded a coding school in 2014 that hit 90% job placement and eight-figure revenue under Obama-era grants and tech hiring demand. When policy shifted under Biden toward re-industrialization and tighter money, funding dried up, loan costs rose, and the junior-coder market flooded. He warns that tariffs will reshape supply chains and every business needs to watch Washington's moves to survive the next shift.
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So there's a lot of talk about the tariffs right now, and here's the fundamental idea I want you to think about with the tariffs, which is the economy, via Trump's efforts, via what is going on in Washington, they are at the federal level trying to fundamentally reshape the American economy. And I wanna tell you a story in this video about how when the winds change at the highest level of government, You should not ignore that. When the winds and the directions go from tailwinds, which are helping your company, to headwinds that potentially are in the way of your company, uh, you have to be careful. You have to be mindful of that stuff. You can't ignore it. And fundamentally, what's going on with these massive tariffs, what's going on with the change where the Republicans own all three branches of government, uh, deeply, including all their domination of judicial the legislative branch, and now the executive. Uh, things are changing, and the thing that we as small business people have to do and entrepreneurs have to do is pay attention to what's happening. So my name is Michael. If you're new here, I do videos about business and lessons learned and tell stories to hopefully open up people's minds, uh, to skip some of the steps I've gone through where I'm 50 years old now. I've had a lot of battle scars and things I would do differently over the past 30 years in business, and I share stories while I go for walks about things that that could benefit hopefully you and help you be more successful as you build a business to hopefully make the world a better place for you and your family. So if you like that kind of stuff, give me a follow, turn on notifications, or write a nice comment below. It'll make me feel good about life. So I talked about this particular story which was— had a bunch of highs and lows for me in terms of founding a business that ultimately we shut down after 10 years. I've talked about this story before, but fundamentally what I learned through that whole process was this core lesson I'm trying to teach in this video, which is you have to be paying attention to the change in trends brought on by change in government policy. And so I've done a video about this particular business before, and, and, and I did a video about the decline in coding jobs in the US. The outlook is really bad. Put a link to that video below. You can check it out. But fundamentally, if I go look back at that business, and it was a coding school that we started back in 2014, it benefited hugely from the government wanting people to become programmers. And I talked a bit about in that other video how the Obama administration spent a ton of money to try to get every single facet of education and every single part of the economy growing in terms of software developers. Like, can you program computers? We'll help you there. And the government was all behind it and tons of money was flowing into it, tons of pressure. And so you saw lots of opportunities around that, which we did too. We started a school that basically would allow people who were good graduates of colleges and stuff like that but didn't have good job prospects. We would train them over the course of 4 to 5 months, then we'd help them get a coding job. All went really well, and the business was very successful for like 10 years precisely because there was so much of a tailwind coming from the government. Like, we're— so much money coming from the Obama administration, so much societal pressure. People wanted to be coders, and all of that worked really well. Funding was easy. We were able to help people get loans. All that was pretty straightforward. The government tons of grants from people. We had them at the federal level, and a lot of money flowed down also to the local level. We were able to help people fund kind of this education, and things worked great for years. We had a 90-plus percent placement rate. People were getting great jobs. We were truly helping people change their lives. And then what happened? Well, those tailwinds, eventually one by one, they went to headwinds. And the first of those was that the government money started to change, and during the Biden administration, whereas there was all this money that was flowing towards people getting coding jobs, suddenly there was this idea that we're going to reindustrialize America, that we were going to turn around and we were going to have more manufacturing jobs here, more union jobs, all that kind of stuff. And so the money that had been going towards helping people change into coders, well, it started to push them into blue-collar jobs and it started to push them into manufacturing and high-tech and all that kind of stuff that was making physical products. And so first tailwind changed, second tailwind changed, or headwind, tailwind turned into headwind, was suddenly interest rates started to go up and it was harder for people to get loans. And the government started to tighten on the money supply because we were trying and scared of inflation, uh, post-COVID. And lastly, uh, there was a big change societally in terms of how big companies thought about, uh, how many coders they should have. Uh, the ideas brought forth by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon, all this kind of stuff, they wanted to have companies that were less full of employees and fewer people and thinner with less kind of middle managers and stuff. And all that made it harder for junior coders and a lot of existing coders to keep having jobs. So those big companies, they laid off a bunch of people. And suddenly we looked up and our business, which had been helping people get these junior-level jobs in these big companies, those companies weren't hiring anymore. And they had also laid off a bunch of people who are now competing with our graduates to take these junior-level jobs because people just were desperate for anything if you're a programmer. And one by one, the government's actions had started to influence the entire part of the economy. And it's easy to think if we as a country are just, you know, the government's just part of that, they're allowing us to do our thing. But fundamentally, like, the stuff going on through those years and the initiatives coming out of the White House Like, they fundamentally took our business that was once a pretty viable business to one that suddenly couldn't get people jobs anymore. And when we couldn't get people jobs anymore, our business was screwed. Like, it was over. Like, we couldn't do that because that was our fundamental mission. So the same thing is happening now, which is Trump, the Republicans, and everybody is trying to reshape the American economy. And frankly, like, they can do it. Nobody spends more money in our economy to affect the outcomes than the federal budget. Like, by far. Like, the federal budget spends a ton of money. And the taxation schedules and all that kind of stuff. And fundamentally, what's going on with these tariffs are, they are taxes on products getting imported. Let's call them what they are. And when you do that, and when you selectively pick certain other countries, it is going to shift everything about how our economy works. And so that's the fundamental lesson in this video, and the thing I learned from a business that went from from zero when we started it to 8 figures in revenue, and then it was out of business within a few, you know, within a decade. The fundamental lesson there was you have to pay attention to those trends, and it's easy to think that things are gonna stay the same. What's happening in D.C. on a day-to-day basis, you know, easy to think that's not gonna affect you, but the reality is it will potentially impact every business in the United States. And it's up to each of us to think about how what these guys are doing up in D.C. is potentially going to either help, hurt, or even put us out of business as we own our businesses. So it's a pretty scary time, and it's to some extent why everybody's freaking out. So pay attention, keep your eyes open, and then hopefully we'll all get through on the other side. But the best thing we can do, man, Try to be ahead of it. That's the one thing, if I look back on my journey over those 10 years, I wish I'd seen it coming. But I learned my lesson. It's not going to happen this time. Let me know what you think below. Thanks for being here, and, uh, we'll see you next time.
