Hey guys! I've been following UE for a few years now and joined the skool a few weeks back. I have to say I don't necessarily keep up with all the videos, but I do find what Simon says very interesting, the way he understands economics, and especially when he gives us "samples" of wisdom about life and money. So, not considering myself either rich or poor, I'm willing to make this post to learn a bit more about YOUR wisdom on how to be relaxed about "money" (I know it's a very wide term). So, here is my question for you: how, when you think about finances and it stresses you out because of whatever reasons, at your own personal scale, or on a worldwide scale, where all the leaders are taking the decisions for us, how do you get that stress down? Also, some people I know always tell me that I should ask for things, and those things will come to me (obviously, I'd have to work my way to them, one way or another, but if I ask, I shall receive). I've had a few conversations with religious people about that, Christians mainly, and they all said the same thing; Ask god, he'll give you more than you expected. How do you guys manage all that? Do you talk to yourself? Do you talk to God? And in the real world, do you talk to friends about your financial situation and ask for advice? Or a financial advisor? Do you have a kind of "through the day strategy" when it comes to thinking about things positively, saying thank you/blessings, praying etc...? Excuse the long message, but I'm just at this turning point in my life where I feel I'm onto something, and need to work at it for me to be able to provide without counting for myself and the ones I love. It's like finding a big treasure but there's a cage around it and the key's of the cage has been thrown into a small lake just next door, it's up to me to dive deep and find it😄 Thank you again Simon for helping us out with understanding the economical world around us, and thank you guys for posting interesting things every day 🙂

https://youtu.be/j2AvU2cfXRk?si=VZco7UJmGsYpa8i_

Things are always different and will never be the same again.

For whatever reason, speaking about the cannabis industry on YouTube is a major no-no. Very few videos I’ve made get demonetized and suppressed by the algorithm the way content about the cannabis industry does. That’s unfortunate, because it is a near-perfect real-world example of the Cantillon Effect, and a useful case study for applying the four economic forces. I grew up in Oregon, where cannabis was never treated as a serious criminal offense. If you were caught with weed, it was a misdemeanor and you paid a possession fine. For many people, it was a popular and quietly profitable side hustle. The illicit drug market is heavily influenced by pop culture and by laws that make the risk-versus-reward tradeoff extreme. At its core, this is supply and demand. If you take something people want and make it illegal, you don’t eliminate demand — you increase price. Sex, drugs, and firearms all demonstrate how prohibition creates extreme value through risk and limited supply. In Oregon today, the opposite problem exists. An overabundance of cannabis production has driven prices sharply lower. Supply has overwhelmed demand. Prices are now determined not just by availability, but by the disappearance of risk and by access to surrounding markets. When cannabis was illegal, projecting massive profits was easy. Once the risk was removed, the value evaporated. The uncomfortable truth is that cannabis is essentially worthless. Anyone can grow it, especially when it’s legal. The availability is nearly endless, and the volume that can be grown and harvested has completely overwhelmed the market. As a result, prices and projected tax revenues are collapsing, cutting into state budgets and creating shortfalls in social programs that were designed to fund behavioral health services and drug rehabilitation. This is the exact opposite of what was expected. What was sold as a massive tax windfall has proven to be a limited resource with no meaningful long-term benefit. That raises the question: what could Cantillon and 3 other economic theories have taught us about this outcome ahead of time?

I’m not entirely sure how best to articulate this one, but there’s a thought I’ve been turning over in mind for a while: which is that it honestly seems a bit dangerous to fight the Fed, because winning might potentially put the whole system at risk. The English speaking world on aggregate has a very high standard of living, and as Cantillon wrote, reducing that standard would be incredibly painful, and so would probably not be something a democratically elected government could risk allowing to happen. Nevertheless, the endgame for the Eurodollar system hardly looks stable either, as it is predicated on the system’s long term viability and relative integrity. For this reason, I don’t feel it would necessarily be existentially safe to end the Fed, the endgame of fighting the Fed, which is in a sense what we’re doing here. The ultimate consequence of the end of the cycle Cantillon identifies has commonly involved war, forced on the state by the collapse into poverty and misery ensuing from liquidity shortage which – in the modern, nuclear equipped age – does not strike me as being an acceptable path to risk treading on. What do you all think? I accept that as things are heading now, there’s a strong possibility that we will be forced to eventually face the music due to the excesses and imbalances our debt-based ponzi-nomic system is causing anyway; but, is it clear that the long-term consequences and suffering of this system are really so much worse than whatever chaos might ensue if the Fed were to fail? So, is that latter case really what we want to try to force to happen? Yes, the consequences are theoretically only becoming more serious as time goes by in this state of deferring paying the piper; but if those consequences reach a point which would result in all out war, and I think there’s a possible argument that they already did, it’s not a bill which could even hypothetically be paid; and would it not be more sane to continue to dig, so to speak? What are your thoughts on this?