Carol Roth: How She Wrote The War On Small Business
Carol Roth is an American television personality, bestselling author, entrepreneur, radio host, and investor. Carol appears regularly on national cable television networks including Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
She is author of a new book The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America, published by HarperCollins.
In this episode we talk about Carol’s book, her work as an author and why she wrote her first book, the bestselling The Entrepreneur Equation, and how she promotes her books in the media.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the published author podcast, where we help entrepreneurs learn how to write a book and leverage it to grow their business and make an impact. I'm your host, Josh Steimeley. Carol Roth is a TV pundit and host, entrepreneur and selfdescribed recovering investment banker. She's also the New York Times Best Selling author of the entrepreneur equation and she just came out with her latest book, the war on small business, how the government used the pandemic to crush the backbone of America, which was published by broadside books, a division of Harper Collins. Carol advocates for Small Business, small government and big hair. Carol, welcome to the show. Thanks for that great introduction. Very pleased to be here with you, Josh, and I think I got to say I didn't come up with a big hair thing. Carol came up with that, so I'm not making fun of her anything. That's her thing. Well, that's not literally my advocacy. All that small business, small government, Big Hare Awesome and I'm excited to talk to Carol today because she, like me, kind of leans libertarian and we don't go into politics on this show, but we share a lot of the same sentiments about the content of her book, but we're also here to learn about the story behind the book and how her books have shaped her career. But before we dive into that, Carol, give us some background on who you are and where you come from and what you do. Oh Lord, all right. So the the the five dollar version, is that I came from a family where neither of my parents were college graduates. My mom was a stayathome mom, term sort of Hobby entrepreneur and my father was an electrician, and so I was the first in my family to have the opportunity to go to college. I got myself into wharton just after my parents had decided that they were getting divorced. My Dad had been laid off at the time and it was like, I don't know how you are planning to pay for this college, but good luck, good luck to you. And know, by the way, you can't go do this and take on dead unless you're gonna be able to pay that off really quickly. So that was kind of the mantra and in my head. But I had done enough research and I knew there were a lot of opportunities if you went to a great school at that point in time and did well. So I fortunately to vote vote my time to making sure that I was in a position to do well, and there were a couple opportunities at that point. For people who like to do a deep dive into something, they usually go into management consulting, and for people who have add and like to do a million different things at once, they go into investment banking, and that's that's the road that I decided to pursue. That's a phrase that not everybody understands and sometimes gets bantered about. So where I was was in an arena called corporate finance, which meant that I helped companies raise capital to expand and as well do merge, as well as doing mergers and acquisitions. And you know, they're during the the mid S and late s. If there was a restaurant company or, some cases, consumer products or technology company, those were the kinds of businesses that I raise my to make sure that they could expand their business. So if you were sitting at a cheesecake factory at any time in the past few years or in the years to come, I probably helped get them some of the capital to be able to do that. So those kinds of things and well, I loved investment banking and it was a very successful career. I was a vice president and an officer by the time I was twenty five years old. I kind of skipped over the NBA path and and you just kind of kept pursuing the career. I didn't really want to be an investment banker for life. It was never something that I had sort of aspired to do and even though I enjoyed it, our company had gone through some mergers in the culture had changed and so eventually it was an opportunity for me to go explore other things and even though the first thing I explored was doing my own investment bank, eventually I kind of extracted myself from that. But a couple things came out of that. One is that when I was an investment banker, I would get calls from small business owners all the time saying can you help me, and the reality was I could, because they couldn't afford the retainer fees and I couldn't afford the overall fees that the investment banks were charging. And so you know, I kind of was like, well, there's got to be a way to get information to small business owners at scale. At the same time, I always had a personality that wasn't maybe the best suited for investment banking, even though I was, I did it, a pretty good job at it, and that's like I always said what was on my mind and people kept going, you should be on TV, and I like yes, I want to be a game show host. Like how do I how do I get on TV? And all of this craziness sort of conspired for me to, in addition to some of the other things that I pursue, pursue a career in media and use that as a way to leverage feedback and Information and guidance to small business owners and entrepreneurs at scale. So there was sort of that, you know, that intention sort of kind of position me over there and then, you know, I'll help broke this after that an investment making. I mean it's a ton of work too. That's the other side. People think it's all about money, but you're putting in a ton of hours, right. Yeah, it was like probably it's like sixteen to twenty hours a day, up to seven days a week, for multiple years and it hasn't shifted. I've been reading getting some of the articles and I have a mentee who's going through his first year right now and yeah, I mean it's just one of those it's a grind. But what it does, if you're willing to sort of sacrifice and give everything to the job, you learn a ton, you get a lot of financial flexibility and you get a lot of professional flexibility. So it's definitely not for the fate of heart. And the other thing I would say because my husband, who I met in the company Jim, and he was actually a sales trader and I convinced him that trading was dying in that mechanism is going electronic and he should switch to investment bank, in which he did. He continued on that path for a while and then became a partner at a different investment bank. He's also now a recovering US banker as well, but I can tell you even as a partner and a firm he was still pulling crazy hours and still working weekends and things like that. So that doesn't ever really go away. You're probably not working twenty hours, but it's definitely, you know, it's a well paying job, but it's one that like always there with you, that the people who work their work very hard. I guess on the Plus side, once you've done that, everything else maybe seems easier. You know, it's funny, it not really, because it's a very defined path and it's a very defined process and like once you it's like a really big learning curve and once you get up the curve of and you understand it, there's like only so many different variables that come up. I mean, yessach deal has it sort of unique qualities to it and there are differences and market environments and whatnot, but there's only so many things that you know can kind of go wrong or go sideways with it. You have to learn. Once you have that knowledge base, where so many of the other arenas that I've been involved in, places like Hollywood and your traditional media, where there is no kind of clear set path and where things can go sideways for all kinds of factors. I've been working as an outsource chief customer officer and Joint Bunch or partner with a collectible toy company for sixteen years and all of the issues that come up there. So I actually think in some ways it's it's like it's hard in terms of getting up that knowledge curve, but like once you have it. I think it's actually in many ways, as long as you have that endurance, easier than some of these other arenas where you know there isn't that path and things kind of come out of nowhere. Right which leads into the book. I mean, with entrepreneurship it's a different challenge every single day and no matter what you figure out, it seems like there's always something new coming up. So for you, what was the inspiration then that led to the first book, that made you say I'm passionate enough about this that I'm going to put in the time and effort to put this book out there. So I didn't intend to write a book. When I wrote it, I was writing lots of content. I was doing videos online, I was on I think, maybe just to maybe touching social media that point, not too much, but you know, like a blog and things like that, and I was just getting really mad, kind of like I had previously investment banking, at the really bad advice the small business owners were getting and also the people who were sort of glossing over it as like, oh well, that's easy and it's really, really difficult and it's really risky and it doesn't get enough appreciation, and so I just got mad and I just like started vomiting words on to a page and like within six weeks I had like eighty thousand words and I went out, I guess this is a book, and so you know that. Then was like, well, do I want to have a book? Well, sure, that seems kind of cool. And so then I went through the like completely backwards. I do so many things backwards, but completely backwards. Then I went to like try to find an agent and then try to find a publisher, and then, as a first time author diva, I broke up with my first publisher, found a second publisher that was a better fits and kind of all of these ups and downs. But then I spent a year and a half on the marketing plan because at that point the kind of sales of the book and and like kind of the packaging around it becoming a bestseller and all those things were really important. I was doing speaking, I was doing kind of brand things and so I wanted to have that. So I really did a lot of very out of the box things, including creating my own action figure that was a premium that went along with the books, to kind of really focus on the marketing, which was a completely different experience than myself book. All right, so first question, where do I get the action figure? And second question breaking up with your agent or your publisher? Breaking Up with your publisher. That's something most authors don't do, especially first time author, so I've got to hear that story. Yeah. So the well, I don't know if you can see this over here, so the right behind me as the action figure, and you can find them usually on Ebay. Someone usually has one up for sale on Ebay. That that's usually the easiest place to get it, and that came a Gat. Unfortunately, I work with this collectible toy company, so for me to get them to do that was not as difficult as it would be anyone else to get somebody to do that. So that was a cool thing. Yeah. So again, going back to what I were and I started with, is that, having been an investment bank or, I have a lot of flexibility and I had a lot of financial flexibility, and so for my standpoint, I was in that space where like, if I was going to do this, I wanted to do it the right way and the way that served my purposes. And the first publisher kept doing things like let's call this the no nonsense guide to entrepreneurship, and I was like no, like, first of all, like I would never say that. That sounds like Ned blanders and like it's it's not really what the books about. Like my my original title for the book was stop, drop and don't quit your day job. That was that was literally the title for it. So we were going from that to the no nonsense guide to entrepreneurship and it's just so not aligned with my personality and they just kind of weren't getting there from a branding. So my thought was like, well, screw it, if I have to self publish it, I will still get it to the market and, you know, be great to find a publisher, but if I don't, I'm okay with that. and not everybody's in that position and you know, not everybody it was in the same place or has the same personality or the same objectives. But for me that was the right thing to do. So yeah, as as a first time author who even found a great publisher to then put the Kabash on it was it was a big deal and I'm super glad that I did it. My second the second publisher who's the actual publisher of the book, Been Bell was fantastic to work with. Loved them that they did a tremendous job and we're just great, great, great partners. Yeah, I hear lots of good things about Ben Bella. So how did you get connected with them and how did you get that deal? So I worked, and you may have heard of her, with a woman named Elizabeth Marshall, who I love and Adore and she is a sort of thought leadership guru and helps people with brands kind of step into their branding and she was doing sort of book quarterbacking at the time, which I don't believe is a focus of hers anymore, and she had had a good experience with some of her other authors and Ben Bella. So really she kind of made the connection and then my agent ran with it, even though he already knew them. He didn't do it and and so yes, that basically made the connection and I hit it off with Glenn, who is the the the actual publisher in the CEO of the company and, as I said, tremendous have like every great thing to say and, you know, recommend any author to work with him and in fact, on my second book because, as we'll get into. I was approached that it. Actually called him first before I accepted the author and just said Hey, like, they brought it to me and so like, I can't bring it to you because it's not my concept, and just just to give the courtesy because, you know, I really do have that level of respect for what they what they do at Ben Bella. Well, so you went through the process, you get the book, the book comes out and then what's the reception like on your first book? It was fantastic. It was fantastic. The amount of emails that I have gotten over the years, and I you know, I wrote this ten plus years ago now, people like I saved there. For one case, I saved them six figures, you know, for something they were going to go into on a whim, as well as people who have been very successful and said I needed to jump through that to prove to myself that this was the right thing for me. Has Been Really, really gratifying, and the funny thing, as so many off potential authors or content creators or other people will tell you, is that many of the people who turned it down, many of the the publishers who turned it down the first time around said, you know, we really don't like it because it's not inspirational, like you're too too much telling the truth, you're giving it. It's kind of a slap in the phase. You're crushing people's dreams. Know that reality crushes people's dreams, but whatever that's that was their perception. And as soon as it was successful, the same people were calling me back being like, you know what we really loved about it was so different. It wasn't that like same old you know, Oh, you know, bright eyed, you know, starry eyed entrepreneurship dreams thing. I was thinking literally turned it down for the same reason. So everybody wants to jump on something that's hot and when you do something that's different or contrarian, it's harder. It's harder to get it done. But it was something that was needed in the market. And you know, as I mentioned, I get these these calls from or emails from entrepreneurs. I also get a lot of intermediaries, and particularly folks who are mentors with places like score, who we distributed a lot of books to, and you other places, who say, you know the amount of times that I've handed this book to somebody, like it's been just like an enormous resource and it's just much easier to outsource that dream crushing, I guess right. You don't want to tell somebody that it's a bad business idea or they don't have what it takes, but when they can go through and hand them the book and I can tell them that for them, it makes it much easier for a lot of people in their relationships. So I'm very proud of that book as that it's a resource today. The one thing I'll say about it where we're once in a while I get a little point of confusion because this is like a small business book, which is like ninety nine point nine percent of the businesses. It's not a venture capital start up book, like if you have a tech company that's going to raise like twenty million dollars and your first two series. Like yeah, this is not you, but like you're the exception, you're not the rule, and so if you read it, it go well, that's you know, hasn't been my experience and silicon val it like yeah, I know you're in this microcosm and you're not the audience for the book. You can still take something away, I think, but it's really matched for the traditional small business owner which, as I mentioned, is ninety nine point nine percent of the businesses, not just here in the US but worldwide. And the books actually been translated into languages like Korean as well. So I have a Korean version and I get emails from people throughout the world say Nice things about the book. So that's that's a that's a good feeling as well. Quick break here. Are You an entrepreneur? Do you want to write a book that will help you grow your business? Visit published Authorcom, where we have programs to fit every budget, programs that will help you write and publish your book in As little as ninety days, starting at just thirty nine dollars per month. Or, if you're too busy to write your book, will interview you and then write and publish your book for You. Don't let the valuable knowledge and experience you have go to waste. Head on over to published authorcom to get the help you need to become a published author. You've already waited long enough. Do it today. Now back to the show. All right, so it's obviously you put a lot of passion into your books and your books might come from a place of frustration or anger, with some sort of situation in and that certainly seems to be the case with the your second book. So tell us the story behind the second book. What was it that made you feel like, all right, I have got to put this one out? So apparently I also always get approached during a financial crisis, or rout it financial crisis. I was approached and was in a documentary about the auto bailouts. I was in a series called booked about the big short, which was about the recession financial crisis. So this one comes about and Harper Collins, who I had been acquainted with my editor over there previously and he followed me on twitter and kind of had talked about some things, came to me with the idea very macro, Hey, I think this is going to be a historic economic story. Do you want to capture that for posterity? And at that point, right, I was grounded. So I like what from somebody who was like flying all the times, like sit it, sitting in my desk at home. I wasn't doing speaking engagements because they were all canceled, those kinds of things, and had some extra band with and like a moron what like, Oh yeah, that sounds fun, that seems like a good death. Now I'm just kidding. I actually really enjoyed it. So they were the ones that planted the seed and was their concept to do something. Now, in terms of what it turned out to be, we really collaborated on that and I truthfully wrote three and a half different books with three different titles during the course of the pandemic unfold because things changed very rapidly. New information would come out, but one big piece of it that was the through line was the small business piece and the government picking winners and losers and how that always went wrong for small business how, in this case they were told that they weren't essential and it wasn't based on data or science, but it was purely based on political clout connections, and the outgrowth of that was the most historic transfer, welld from main street to Wall Street that has ever been seen in history. So you know, that ended up being the story that needed to be told, even though it was kind of like a component of the story as it as it was unfolding. But man was this a different experience and a lot of work. I mean, first of all, it's going to just be different than anything else because I'm sitting in the middle of a real time situation as it unfold and its historic and there are no benchmarks and I'm literally taking information and then rejiggering it as new information comes out. Like everything is sourced, like you can't help go like more than a couple sents and says in the book without there being a footnote. And you know so very, very heavily source and you know there was so much to say and to just like be have to like kind of tip away and only say ninety thousand words worth of what to say because my editor said nobody's going to want to read past that. That was hard. So it was a hard thing to do. And it wasn't a marketing focus book, like I didn't spend my time on the marketing like I did on the last book. This was very much a news, economic, political, your real time current events, historic thing that I was was crafting, and so that's where my time at it. So your first book, it became a New York Times best seller right correct, and this book it just came out in June. We're recording this in July, so it's really early on in the process. But how's it doing so far? So I say it's doing fine. Like it's not, certainly not at embarrassing levels, but it's certainly not at the levels that I came out of the gate with with my last one. And again, part of that is because of the structure of the marketing programs and the intention behind it. The other challenge that I've had this time around is that even though I'm somebody who's in the media and have been, could have media adjacent for about a dozen years and I have people whose shows I've been on over and over again, a lot of the what I'll call corporate press or mainstream media doesn't want to cover the book, and I think there are two reasons, as I've spent many hours, because my publishers also highly confused by this. Right. This is a major publisher that has authors on these shows all the time and literally told me like this is our plan. There's two reasons. One is that they were very complicit in many ways in covering up, or at least shaping this information, and a lot of their comrades or sponsors or, you know, Co conspirators or whatever you want to call them, are these big companies, and so perhaps they don't want to rock the boat on that. I think the bigger issue is that this is a nonpartisan book and we live in highly partisan times when it comes to the traditional media. So if I had called this book trump's were on small business or the Democrats were on small business or Bidens were on small business, I guarantee you the coverage of this book would have been entirely different. Now the book would have been disingenuous and it wouldn't been a book that I wanted to write. So that wasn't going to happen and in many places where I was kind of pushed to go in a direction, I'm like, I'm sorry, the thesis just doesn't support that. So I'm not gonna you know, that's not the story we're going to tell here. But there is really important story to tell which, by the way, everyone who's read it and people in social media and whatnots it's get a ton of action. So there's an audience for this information, even though the people with the platforms don't necessarily want to put it out there. So I do think, just sort of a gut feel, that this book is going to have a long tail on it and already the way that it's rolling as I'm starting to get the attention of like, not necessary mainstream people, but people with bigger platforms who are like, Oh, that's interesting and who are willing to kind of take it in, shepherd, and want to share the information. And, frankly, you know, as we're recording this, all of the stuff about the delta lamb to land Lambo, make a move variants, whatever they want to call them, this week, and the potential for more lockdowns and more mandates than kids wearing masks at school, like kind of the trajectory that they're trying to push this in is not a good one, and so I feel between that and sort of the outgrowth of what's going to end up happening with these small businesses that we're not going to see for long periods of time, will put a long tail on this in terms of sort of historical record. So it does it. I want as many people to have it as possible because I think it's an important book that helps to educate people and give them the tools and the resources to carry on conversations that are already being covered up right now in the media. But in terms of like my life, whether or not this hits the best seller list or not, like it doesn't really matter. It's an interesting conundrum because, on the one hand you could say there's a lesson here for author's of Hey, if you want your book to get picked up by the media, you have to tell the story that the media already wants to tell. It's got a fit their narrative. On the other hand, you have to be true to yourself, and so there's there's that friction there. But elaborate on that, because this is really one of the things that my publisher and my editor in particular really focused on. Is like they won't do a book unless it's the first to market the contrarian take or you just happen to be like the most popular person on planet. So this did fit the normal media narrative, but this is the first one to market telling a big, big story that applies to a lot of people, like Hap the economy. So the normal, the normal form of that theoretically should have garnered more attention that it did. That it did. So I think that speaks to how even that focus what the media wants has shifted so real time and how completely politicize that has gotten, unfortunately, I think, to the detriment of all of us. Yeah, now as this. When did you start working on the book? When did you start writing it? So I started writing it, I want to say it was like June of two thousand and twenty, so pretty early on, and we'd had a I'd written an up ed which is cut was kind of repurposed in the book, back in March, so like before the cares act, like right when that's all started going down, and then, you know, kind of in earnest, really started digging in in June. Okay, he's like the very beginning of you and, like you said, you rewrote the book three times. What were some of the events that change what you felt like you needed to write about, the stories that you needed to tell? You know, I don't know that it was any specific events as much as just sort of some of the reporting that came out and like change things that we thought we knew. I mean there were things like fouchy coming out in June and basically admitting that he had intentionally misled the public on masks, which, again, I don't care which side and maybe you agree with where he was pretty it doesn't matter. I all I care about is the flip flop and the shift in it and so, you know, me going back to then. Oh, that's interesting, what was said in February? Oh, look, and February, every single one of these media not only tell us not to wear masks but that it was dangerous for us. And then like having to kind of go back and trace that path. There was reporting that came out, you know, also from Kate Kelly, who I used to collaborate with, its C MBC. It's some other short the New York Times about the big fall off in the market in February and how that was in part due to leaked inside information. And so that's like I've known that there was you know that that event happened, but like then going back and putting that context around it like reshape the importance of that. So it was it was a lot more of that kind of stuff and also just getting like other stuff away. And then you know, the amount of Federal Reserve support and the sort of you turn, of the market and the Fed increasing its balance sheet, you know, trillions and trillions of dollars, really change the narrative to because you know, if you were looking at this and March, you know the stock market had completely tanked and June's five were hitting new highs. So, like there were just things that kind of shifted and then just as I was digging into each of these things, like trying to construct what happened and seeing the through lines, the more that came out, the more that it you know, became clear that the information on the cares act, you know who got who got the money and the cares act. Obviously I had the first sort of take of it, but then you had the oh and by the way, went to Kanye west to also was named a billionaire by forms and you know now it's his partnership with the gap. Like those kinds of things where it's like, okay, so it seems like there's a lot going on and this big versus small thing. So it's the kind of stuff that, as it was playing out, kind of cleaning away, and so the book informed what it was. It wasn't that I went in with a point of view, and so let me try to prove this thesis. It was the opposite. And you know, for anybody who looks at the title, it's really a it's not just a book about small business and Covid it's actually a much bigger thing, a bigger messaging around the centralization versus central power, and that's really what the book is about. There's a check full chapter on the Fed, there's a full chapter on a relationship with China and certainly there's a tie into covid and there's a tie into small business. But a lot of people are surprised at sort of how deep and rich the book is in terms of that bigger narrative. Right, because this is not a new game for big business. Big Business has been doing this well essentially throughout history. But really you could point to the Federal Reserve as a starting point for accelerating the war on small business. But even before that, I mean with the socalled robber barons, the Carnegie's and the Rockefellas. I mean those people. They had their interests and they used a government as a weapon against their big enemies, against their small enemies. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? As like you've been reading some rock guard. I'm reading everything, but yeah, it's like, and I'm a small business owner, so I say this right because I see, wait a second, I own a small business and we're getting I mean in this in the cares act, there was the PPP and all that stuff and everybody got a piece that. But that's not the whole game, right, because there's this part of the game where it's where people one of the things that I feel like people don't understand is they say, well, Hey, this law, this regulation, it's hurting this it's hurting big business, so that's a good thing, right, because it's keeping big business under control. And I would say you have to look further than that. It's not about whether it's harming the big business or not. It's about how much it harms the small business versus harming the big business. If it harms small business more than it hurts the big business, that's a win for big business because it's taking out their competitors. So people sometimes it's actually blanketed as something. You know, there's anti big business and it's not small business even talked about, and they bear the consequences. And that's one of the things I talked about very early on in the book with Dot Frank, which is the regulation that came out of financial crisis. Were big business or big banks did things that obviously we're to risky. We all so for the consequence of that and through their own actions and US paying the price. We bail them out because they were told they were too big to fail. Okay, great, so the slap of the risk they were going to get was this regulation. Well, what did the regulation do? It completely decimated the formation of new small and community banks. It put a bunch of small business of business banks out of business because they couldn't afford to comply with the rules and regulations. And then, as one might be able to extrapolate, if you have small business lenders going out of business, you have less small business lending. So it ended up giving the bigger banks the ability to lend more to big businesses. took away their competition. So what was meant to rain in the big banks gave them free rain. And that just sort of is a prime example the type of thing that happens over and over again every time we try to stick it to the big guy and help the little guy. Yeah, and I mean servings Oxley too, same thing. I mean. It made it hard for small businesses to go public versus big businesses. Well, of course, the big business has money, they can do whatever they need to do. The small business, those are the ones who are hurt because all of a sudden it cost some five million dollars more to do what they want to do. So what are some of the other takeaways from the book in terms of this war on small business? What are some of the things that people out there who might not be small business owners who say? I mean they're people who kind of lump business owners all into the same category. Oh, if you're a business owner, you're wearing a monocle and a top hat or like the monopoly man, you're running around trying to steal people's bags of money, and it's like, well, no, there's big business, there's small business, there's good big business, there's good small business and there's bad of every kind. But what are some of the myths you're trying to bust yours, some of the lessons you're trying to get across through your book? Yeah, I think that first thing is just education. There are things that people hear about but they don't quite know what's going on. The Federal Reserve is one of them. I explain it and very easy to understand language and explain how they have really facilitated this wealth transfer and how they have given big companies an unfair advantage over little companies and frankly, over the average American, which I think is really important, as well as just understanding the makeup of our economy. When I talk to a lot of people and I say, well, how many big businesses do you think there are, they think there are millions of big businesses, and there are arts. There's about ten to fifteen thousand, depending on how you categorize them, versus small businesses, where before covid there were thirty point two million of them. So if you look at sort of a spectrum or a pie like, whatever way is easier for you to visualize half of the economy, around half the GDP and around half the jobs. Before covid was with these decentralized thirty point two million small businesses, which really look more like the free market. Nobody has too much power, they're doing their thing, and the other half of the economy is concentrated and these handful of ten thousand big businesses. And to understand and to look at that, and it's one visual I really wish I would have put in the book. That, as I've talked through it, it's like, oh, you know, everybody has their regrets, like what that's should have gone in there. But if you can just kind of understand that and visualize that and think about the balance of power. And if you're the government and you're getting lobbying money and you're getting your money to support your campaigns, like who is it easier for you to deal with like this concentrated handful of people or like thirty point two million, like we're all over the place? I think it becomes a little bit more clear why that's so important and I think people fundamentally want to preserve those opportunities for economic freedom for your average person, as well as for innovation, because those big businesses started out as little businesses. So if we want to preserve that, we need to make sure that we're preserving that decentralized part of the economy and making it as big as possible and not allowing for these this handful of businesses to control more and more of our economy. So I think that's a big takeaway and you know, hopefully just the understanding of this decentralization, whether you're a small business owner, gig worker, Somebody's into Crypto, somebody who's in the Creator economy, all of these things are decentralization and meant to be pushing back against central power and there's an opportunity to work collaboratively because it's all going in the same direction. So I think that's really important. And then also just understanding what capitalism isn't isn't, because so much stuff that gets blamed on capitalism is really cronyism and the government. And so putting a clearer set of boundaries and different definition around that and talking about the branding and thinking about things more in terms of freedom and choice and transparency versus force, coersion and control, and not worrying about what name you give it, I think is a much healthier or fruitful exercise and gives us some principles to go on instead of saying, Oh, well, this label or this party or whatever, because that's where we've all sort of lost the plot here. Yeah, until people tell me what you hate about capitalism and I'll show you how it's really government that you had exactly. So, if you could be dictator for a day and wave a magic wand and solve this problem or do one thing that would solve this problem, and maybe it's totally politically impractical today, but if there were one thing that you could wave up magic wand to bound change what would that be to fix this? I blow up the entire government, get rid of has. That sounds there you go. Now, if you could do something practical, would you ask people to do? Small Business Owners, normal people? What can we do, what can normal people do to make some sort of progress towards fixing the situation? Yeah, I think the easiest thing for people to do that they don't is to vote with their dollars. I mean, people forget the capitalism is freedom and choice, and so if you choose to continue to do businesses with the big companies, which is fine if you find value from that, but then don't complain when you get more and more of the economy that is owned by these big behemoths. You have a say in that. So one of the statistics I read recently is that eighty five percent of back to school shopping, as it is expected digitally, to be captured by Amazon. If you're shopping for back to school, maybe think about using a small business retailer or somebody else. It's just just an idea. You don't have to do it, but those are the kinds of things that that are very easy for you to control. Somewhat more challenging is standing up against legislation that sounds good in theory and it is has good intentions, but we know is going to have bad outcomes for small business and I know a lot of small business owners are concerned, specially given cancel culture and sort of the heated environment about being vocal. But you can call your representative. You know people who are like minded that you can kind of get to at the maybe all at the same time call your representatives so they're getting twenty or thirty phone calls. You can find ways to do it more quietly, to advocate for the small business pro small business kinds of things, which are usually to leave small businesses this alone, frankly. And then the other thing which gets a little wonkier, but is why I think you should read the book and focus on Chapter Five. I would like to see more people calling the representatives and asking them to reign in the Federal Reserve and putting really clear guard rails because if we look at the amount of wealth transfer even just in the last year. Yes, when you close down a small business, some of that revenue got transferred over to Amazon and Wal Mart and target and they had an expansion of their revenues. But above and beyond that, the amount of value in terms of their stock from multiple expansion in the stock market and the disruption of risk. There were seven tech companies that gain three point four trillion dollars in value. In Two thousand and twenty will all this happened. There are now five technology companies that are collectively worth nine trillion dollars. The GDP pey of Canada is around too, before covid so that gives you a sense of what's going on. You know that the value of these companies are, you know, born four and a half times the output, the yearly output, of Canada. That's that's pretty staggering and that's all coming from the Federal Reserve and government together. So I would like to get more people educated about that because I feel like fixing that issue fixes so many of the other issues that we have to contend with. But it is opaque entirely by design, which I lay out in the book. You can learn about the backstory to that and and so I don't think anybody focus them yet other than like, as we know, like a handful of Libertarians right and stand up every once in a while. It say abolish the feder audit the better whatever, like you never hear about it and there's never any sort of practical solutions around putting some guard rails. Yeah, because Republicans love the Federal Reserve because that's how they spend money on their projects, and Democrats love the Federal Reserve because that's how they get money for their projects. Everybody loves the Federal Reserve, bobby money. WHO Doesn't? Look, who doesn't love having a counterfeiting machine in the basement? Rightly? Yeah, well, Carolys, has been so fun and we could probably talk for about five more hours about Rothbart and all sorts of other stuff. Where's the best place for people to find you and connect with you? So the best place to reach me is on twitter at Carol JS Roth. I always like to say I'm somewhat like a luxury brand. I am well curated, somewhat popular, but definitely not for everyone. So if that sounds like a fit, although very accessible, you know, check me out on twitter. And then I would also like to say in terms of the book, the war on Small Business in particular, I like to walk the talk here, so I've been pushing people to purchase that locally, whether it's your own local book shop, or if you just you're not sure which one is the best, go to bookshop dot org and they will fulfill from a local small business bookseller, which is a really great resource. That easy to do online as well, so it's a good way to support small business advocacy and support a small business. Awesome, Carol. Thank you so much for the engaging conversation. Thank you for being on the published author podcast today. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and if you want to spread the word, please give us a five star rating review and tell your friends to subscribe to we're available on Apple podcasts, spotify and everywhere else you listen to podcasts. And if you're an entrepreneur interested in writing and publishing a nonfiction book to Grow Your Business and make an impact, visit published authorcom for show notes for this podcast and other free resources.
