What's up, guys? It is your host, as always, Brian Lubin. And today I am hopping right up on my

soapbox and I'm going to preach the gospel for you on this Monday morning. I don't know if you

guys have realized this by now, but the recession that we keep talking about that's right around

the corner, it's here. It is right here. It is staring us in the face. We are right smack dab in the middle of it.

If we are a plane flying in the sky, we are going through the storm cloud right now. Everything is kind of on fire.

And right now we're the meme of the dog that's sitting holding the coffee mug. Like, everything is fine.

This is fine. While everything in the room burns. That is us right now. So I'm done with

the sunshine, rainbows, butterflies, no, let's get to the real details and gravity of our situation right now.

We are getting punched, left and right, up and down, getting freaking haymakers thrown at us

by the U.S. economy. Right now, the Fed last Wednesday, just raised the interest rate up another 25

basis points. So that took us from 0% in 2022, now to 4.75%. So they're digging their heels even

harder in their stance on trying to fight inflation, which right now I understand because

inflation is kicking the ass to the middle class.

All right? So essentially, we have a perfect storm. On one side of the coin, you have inflation,

which is absolutely decimating the bottom 50% of the population. The grocery is more expensive.

Gas is more expensive. People that are looking to buy their first home, their first property,

that's too expensive with these interest rates. Now they can't afford to move into a home. And on the flip side of the

equation, you have the Fed screwing the banks to where now the banks are starting to crack and starting

to splinter because of how they're adjusting these interest rates. And that's what happened with Silicon

Valley Bank. We've had hundreds of thousands of layoffs all across the country, especially in the tech space because they realized that 30% of their freaking workforce was useless. Like the positions did not

matter. The nine to five jobs, the salaries, the benefits, everything, the insurance premiums,

they did not matter. They weren't needed. They could be automated. So they just got to let go

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