 Something to think about, 44% of U.S. economic activity according to the U.S. Small Business Administration employ almost half of all American workers. Now if you take this and if you put it in Canada or in most other countries, you'll see the statistics are pretty much the same as well. North America's based on the dream of the entrepreneurial dream. Yet what we're seeing today is the complete disillusion of your ability to provide for you and your family. This is a war on small businesses. Now I find it kind of ironic where, wait a second. And before I begin, I'm gonna be mentioning big brand names, Costco, Walmart, McDonald's. I'm not here to hate them. What I don't like about their policies is lobbying. I'm not in favor of lobbying. Lobbying destroys the free market. It doesn't create a fair market for you and I to participate as small players. So I'm not here bashing the companies themselves. I always say show me the incentives. So I get their incentive. It's not like I'm sitting here saying, oh wow, I really don't understand why Walmart's doing that. Oh, I really don't understand why. Of course I fucking understand. If they didn't do it, then I'll be baffled. Wait a second, why aren't they doing that? So before I begin, I just wanted to clear that out. Now you have places like McDonald's. You have places like Costco who are allowed to stay open. These are huge, 30, 40,000 square full fucking buildings that have ridiculous amounts of human beings inside of them and they sell everything underneath the sun. They're allowed to stay open. But yet small businesses of every shape and form are under such scrutiny that for them to even stay open, they have to follow this fucking checklist they came in possibly think about. And in some places like Ontario and Red Zones, depending on which type of business you're in. So let's say gyms forget about it, restaurants forget about it, retail like clothing, forget about it, anything to do with fitness. So for example, would it be like spin, sauna, any of this like let's actually get healthy? No, forget about your clothes. You can't even allow one human being inside. So you're not even allowed. You're not given permission to even provide for your family. And it's funny how we see people react online. And people don't really think about the second order, third order effects when it comes to businesses. We had a report where a huge, I won't name the name, but a huge restaurant chain in Ontario. They own a bunch of different restaurants and people are like, oh, they should do business better. Oh yeah, well, blah, blah, blah. Idiots are in debt 20 million. One of the owners of this chain of restaurants or I would say chain of hospitality options came out. It's like, you guys don't get it. Like this is what the general public doesn't get and this is what the powers to be. They put it into place where they try to divide people. Like, yeah, I hate business owners, hate entrepreneurs, but yeah, I don't see people hating on McDonald's. I don't see people hating on all these big mega corporation. How much money these guys have made in the last six months? Billions of dollars from the stock, billions, because they're the only players in town and they're sucking up everybody. Amazon just the other day hired 400,000 people in America, roughly 400,000 people to do a warehouse work. Walmart and Amazon are literally becoming the social security net of the United States where we will pay you your minimum wage so you can barely get by. And now remember, I'm not hating Amazon and Walmart as a corporation. I give them kudos, I give them all the fucking credit in the world, the founders are for starting it. What I don't like is the crony capitalism and the lobbying behind it. That's what I don't like. So you have this group, let's go back to this. You have this group in Ontario that has all these chains of different hospitality stuff and be like, oh, fuck these guys, okay. Well, let's talk about second order effect, third order effect. What happens when they claim bankruptcy and miss normal? Bankruptcy doesn't mean disappearing. Bankruptcy means restructuring the company. It might mean disappearing. It might mean, hopefully that's not the case, but for the most part is restructuring the corporations around assets they have, debt of their own, management, et cetera, and trying to reestablish something that might work in the future. Okay, that's the whole reason why corporations and trusts exist in the first place is so you can do that. Okay, but that still doesn't fix the second order, third order effects when it comes to the actual supply chain that a business is part of. See, people think everything is a linear fashion. We're like, oh, this business, fuck these guys, okay. That means that the person they're employing, guess what, that person is gone, doesn't have to paycheck. Well, maybe that person was doing business with somebody else. Well, that person had to pay rent or mortgage. Well, that person can't pay rent or mortgage anymore. That's just an individual thing, right? People really don't think about the domino effect. Let's look at the bigger picture of the domino effect. The hospitality chain, it's really important because they're also tied into the transportation industry, meaning airplanes, right? Commerce, me going on vacation, me going visiting somebody. They were all intertwined, restaurants, restaurants, Airbnb, hotels, they're all intertwined for greater, bigger experience and they all share in one shape or form the supply chain. What is in the supply chain? Well, we have providers of food in the supply chain. We have farmers in the supply chain. We have cleaners in supply chain. We have maintenance crew in the supply chain. This is what people really forget. It's not like you're living in a fucking vacuum where your business is dependent on itself 100%. That's not how business works. Every business, I don't care what business you have, you're dependent on other providers so your business can run. And if you look at the supply chain, if you take out, let's call it the big fish of the supply chain, everybody else suffers, everybody. And this is what we're seeing right now. We're seeing, there's some early statistics, we're seeing roughly, they're saying one third of all small businesses in North America will foreclose completely. And so this whole idea of we're gonna get back to a V shape economy, there's two economies by mind. You have the socialist stonk market where you have the Fed printing trillions of dollars as much as you want through the Kentilinian effect, giving that money to the crony capitalists on the top, the Wall Street bankers, and then they can buy back their stocks before you can buy it. So they have a premium on their dollar, they inflate the price and they get out before you do and they dump it on your ass because you're the retail, we're the plebs, we're the schmucks, we buy the high and we sell the low. That's the whole point of the stock market today. This whole value investing in stock market as of today, I find it hard. I don't see any value there. All the price earning ratios you can think about, how to evaluate a stock, forget about it. I don't see whatsoever, it's a Ponzi scheme as of today. And now we have one third of small businesses that are pretending, in my mind, I think it's gonna happen. Like if they continue lockdowns, like draconian lockdowns we see in California, you have a fucking curfew, well, did I forget COVID stops at 10 o'clock? Oh, hey, oh, oh, oh, we're COVID. Oh no, 10 o'clock, let's get out of here, it's curfew, let's go, let's go. Our leaders are so incompetent, but yet we only have one person to blame us, that's it. We need to blame ourselves, we elected these leaders. They've never run businesses before, they've been in the political arena their whole lives. They are actually devoid of day to day normalcy, they are. They really don't understand day to day actions. And above all, the number one thing policy makers don't understand across all different levels of government, and most people, but primarily they, is second order, third order effect. They never think, oh shit, if I do X, what is the secondary and tertiary reaction of my policy that I implemented? And we're seeing that right now across the board with COVID. Now, I'm not here to be fucking Nancy Bad News and be a fucking bummer, let's look to silver lining. Some of these businesses should have been out of business a long time ago. Some of them, not a lot of them, but some of them. And a lot of these businesses that shouldn't have been out but are out now, I think this gives opportunity for us to rethink our priorities in life. I think this gives us opportunity to rethink, listen, the government it's not here to help us out, it's not. I keep on telling this people a hundred times, study history, like Jesus Christ. There's never been a government in the history, whether you wanna call it a regime, a government, a governing body that represents the people. There's never been a time in history when they haven't turned their backs on their own people in some shape or form, period, end of story. It always happens, it's the old Boris, it's the oldest mythological, psychological trait of us human beings, snake eating its own tail. It happens, I keep on telling you guys, read René Rajard, read his work. It's so simple, you'll understand it, just go out there and read it. And so we're seeing the cycles repeat. We're seeing the changes in different zeitgeist psychology from millennials to Zoomers, different power vacuums coming in, people fighting for different ideologies in North America. Now Marxism, once again, is cool and people want socialism. We call them the champagne socialist. They crack me up, they legitimately crack me up. Remember what I said, I'm not fearful of them, they're just pawns in a greater scheme. However, I see this as an opportunity now to expand our thinking of the possibilities of what we can do as a community. I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to create better lifestyles for us than we had before. Before we were, most people are still trained in the classical way of thinking, well, what should I do? If I want to become successful, I have to go to school, go into debt, $100,000, get this job, blah, blah, blah, follow the line, go into corporation, go up to a hierarchical ladder, blah, blah, blah, and even entrepreneurship, right? We've been programmed to think that there's certain ways to do business. Well, entrepreneurship, at least on the lower spectrum, not in the upper echelons of the lobbyists, it's a little bit more free market, it's more cutthroat. I don't have any special handouts for the government. I don't have any special regulations that helps me out. I have to be, I have to provide the best product or service for my customers and hopefully they like what I offer and it's a free voluntary exchange. And so the whole idea of how we've done business in the past, I think it's gonna start changing. I think more and more opportunities that we have where how do we digitize what we're offering? How do we create hybrid versions? How do we start thinking outside of the box that we can become more anti-fragile as businesses as opposed to fragile? I can't tell you personally in Ontario, I just know Ontario, I can't tell you any businesses I know just function on government grants. I'm like, how the fuck is that a business? They just accept handouts. It's ridiculous. I'm like, that's not a business. That's a charity fucking case. But I think, and we see with the retail collapse, Tip Top is collapsing. A lot of these big brands, they've never really adapted. But I think for the entrepreneur in the unfortunate circumstances with the lockdown and the ability that they have to fight back the lockdown as much as they can without them going to jail and they don't wanna go jail and they have their wife or husband and son and daughter et cetera. There's a lot of variables that play over here. I think people need to really start thinking of A, is this the best place for me to live? B, moving forward because I always tell people the greatest gift that you have is not the gift of, hey, I have money. That's always good to have. But the greatest gift you have is the mentality that you develop, the skills that you develop, the grit that you develop during your process. Joseph Campbell always said, it's not about the end, it's about the journey. And if you're a small business owner and entrepreneur, you've gone through fucking hell in high water to build what you've built. You've built a mental blueprint of how things can be done. You've built grit. You've built the ability to be agile if you can. These traits, you can't buy these fucking traits. I'm firmly in the camp. It's almost hard to train to be an entrepreneur or somebody to just go out there, head first and fly off the cliff and build your wings while you're flying down. I'm in the camp that is a born natural trait. It's very hard to learn because of genetics and nurturing. Now, with this experience that you have, I think it's time for us to audit what we think is the norm. And we start thinking outside the box and let's stop fear mongering. This is what they want at the end. They want you, they want us to be scared. They want us to bend over. And when they say they want us, policymakers, whenever people say they, I say it's the policymakers. Who is imposing these laws? You have enforcement is done by local enforcement and if it escalates then it's federal enforcement. Now, they meaning the individuals that sit down in a democratic election or a democratic vote in council, whether that is local city hall council whether that is provincial federal state council, they sit down and they have a vote, bang, bang, all in favor, aye. The article passes once or twice. They vote this bill into action. Now this bill is here in case of an emergency situation like COVID, we have amendments where we have, well, superseding rights where we don't need to have a vote as governors do, bang, bang. I just say what I want to say or I do what I want to do, boom. This is in law right now. So that's they, it's policymakers at the end of the day. So these policymakers for the most part, they're not really looking after your back. You think they care about you, they don't care about you. They have their own incentives, they have their own skin in the game and the more you take emotions out of it and just look at who gains what, what incentives are structured for who, then everything becomes a clearer picture. I always keep on saying show me the incentive and I'll show you why and how people behave a certain way. That's it. It's not convoluted, it's not conspiracy, it's not complicated. That human being or that group of people are behaving a certain way because there is an incentive attached. That's it. And so I just want to wrap up this video guys with we, I think, I think in the future people who've come out of this, who've learned from this, who've personally experienced pain and utilize this as Victor Franco says, utilize this as input and knowledge to respond healthier as opposed to reacting. That's what they want. Victor Franco said the best, the most important thing in your life is how you respond as opposed to how do you react. And people who have gone through pain and their small business has been shut down. Take this, don't react. Don't get crazy angry and do stupid things. Stupid things is what they want you to do. What pisses policymakers off the most is when you come out with better technologies, when you come out with better ways or better methods to supersedes any of their policies or regulations. That's the key, as I said before. The best thing a small entrepreneur can do right now is become an apex predator and create better methods, systems and technologies that will supersede any of these different policies or regulations they've put into place. And I'll leave it at that guys. Leave a comment below this video. Make sure to subscribe and I'll see you tomorrow. Peace out.