Welcome to Citizen. We have a very special guest today, Mackenzie Moser. You're from North Carolina. You went to school near where I grew up and you do real estate, but you've also started a podcast recently that I enjoy.

And you're friends with friends of mine, so I wanted to talk to you about what you got going on. So introduce yourself.

Well, thanks for having me. This is fun. It's fun to see your setup. My name is Mackenzie. I, like you said, from the East Coast, from North Carolina. I do commercial real estate full time, work with my family and a small family business.

So and recently did start a podcast. I'm very new to it and figuring out it's a lot more than I originally thought, but it's called American made stories.

And what are you trying to do with it? I mean, American made stories. What does that mean to you?

So I'm the product of an American made story that my dad grew up in an abuse of alcoholic home where he statistics would show that he wouldn't make it. He wouldn't succeed.

And he grew up in a very rough area. He would find his dad drunk, passed out underneath trailers and having a single mother and working three jobs at a very young age, he decided, I'm not going to live this way.

And I'm going to start my own business. And so he started cutting grass ended up growing it. And when he went to school paid for his own school and was able to send some money home and started painting and was a serial entrepreneur navigating through just trying to figure out how to not be in the position that his family was in.

Painting like painting houses or painting pictures. Painting houses, painting apartments, painting, whatever, cutting grass, whatever came along. And he started getting in the real estate business.

And so he actually listened to the story under show. He borrowed money from a body of his right borrowed 100% started the car washes start started the self storage. And he was able to change the trajectory of his family.

And for myself, I loved real estate. I loved going with my dad to all of the places and believe that capitalism is the anecdote to poverty and everything that we're experiencing in our country.

And especially the last several years has caused so much frustration that the government has been overreaching.

And it is harming the people that they say that they're helping. And I believe that just working with the small businesses, I've seen firsthand some of those frustrations.

And so I started originally out of frustration, originally out of anger, doing deep dives into, okay, how did we get here? How did we come to this place that things are so crazy?

And it's hurting the small businesses. And I just started.

Well, small businesses kind of a code word for ordinary people. Right. Entrepreneurs that.

Because you don't see it when things go sideways during the last couple of years, shut down to things like that. Amazon did pretty well. Walmart and Target still did pretty well, but you know, a lot of small businesses got put out of business.

I think 750,000 privately owned family businesses went out of business forever. Like some, some closed down for a while, 700, at least 750,000 closed permanently, which means that family lost their entire life savings probably they lost their, their ability to gain any kind of upward mobility.

So they're back at square one now. Right. And I saw that bailed out that families and people that I, that had that American dream that they wanted to create better for themselves.

They had started those businesses. And in, I work in North and South Carolina and North Carolina, they.

Work told that they had to completely shut down, but in South Carolina, they could be open. It was just a 20 minute drive, but families that I'd helped in North Carolina, I would walk into their businesses, seeing them crying because it was their life savings. And they were just told.

They had to stop, but they still had to make their payments to the bank. They still had to feed their families. And they did have to shut down their businesses.

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