Jim Baer

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately, how they got to where they are today. Alright.

Hey, guys. It's Caitlin here. Today, we're gonna be doing something a little bit different. We're flipping the table and putting Jim in the hot seat to discuss his thoughts and experiences as they relate to the broader economic landscape. Let's go ahead and jump right in.

What's new in the life of Jim Bear? Well, life is good, Caitlin. I have a son about to get married. Congratulations. Thank you.

And there is snow in the mountains, and so I am very grateful. I'm so happy to hear that. So what made you decide to do this episode at this moment? I hadn't initially thought to be the subject of an interview, but I did find myself having similar discussions with a number of people in my life. You know, friends, family members, employees, people at companies that I work with.

And I found that a lot of people had questions. You know, where is the economy going? How did we get in this situation? I recognize that I have a fairly unique perspective since I both run a corporate restructuring business, and I host this podcast. So in talking with my producers, they suggested that we do another mailbag style episode, and so here we are.

Nice. Okay. Well, that queues us up nicely. Let's start talking about what's in front of you right now. What are you seeing economically at the moment?

Well, let's just be blunt about this. I think we have been in for some time. We've been heading into a recession, plain and simple. Okay. And why do you say that?

Couple of reasons. First, as I mentioned, when I'm not hosting the Puck, I run a corporate restructuring firm. People come to us when they need help with their businesses. And I've noticed in the last sixty, ninety days that our phone has been ringing much more frequently. Some people ask if we can assist them in turning around their struggling company so that it can raise new money or survive this, what I would call, tougher economic period.

And then others have just called to ask for our help to sell, liquidate, or otherwise kind of just help them find a buyer because they've concluded that their company can't really be saved in its current situation. The second factor, Caitlin, is inflation just isn't under control yet. When inflation rises, in order to combat inflation, the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates to tighten liquidity to stem inflation. And the Fed will have to, in my opinion, keep raising interest rates until they slow this economy down enough to break the back of inflation. Now in the meantime, we're gonna have a recession and with some risk of stagflation like we saw in the seventies.

Got it. Alright. So it sounds like inflation is a problem in and of itself, but it's also causing other potential issues. In your opinion, what do you think has led to this financial mess? In the aftermath of 2008 and the financial crisis that we suffered, the Federal Reserve utilized complex tools to avoid what a lot of people thought was gonna be a full on depression.

They used a tool that we now call quantitative easing. And quantitative easing is essentially the government buying our own government debt to jump start the economy. The good news is it worked, and we dodged a disaster. However, the Federal Reserve continued to buy its own debt and has continued to do so to the current day. And add to that the economic stimulus associated with COVID, where Congress doubled down and borrowed and spent additional money, it's kind of led to what I call a perfect storm because it's overheated the economy, and that's led to this high inflation we're experiencing.

And would you say this is a new problem? Well, we've struggled in the past with deficit spending. However, what we are experiencing today is on a scale that has never been seen before because we have literally created trillions of dollars despite not being in a recession. Okay. So can you explain why we can't just keep creating money?

What's the problem with that? Well, inflation is already getting high, but it has the potential to really get out of control. And another worry is that the Fed will succeed in slowing the economy, but the expectation of inflation becomes embedded in our national psychology. And in that case, you risk what is referred to stagflation, where our economy is not growing, but you continue to have inflation. And that's why it's so important that the Fed is trying to slow inflation down quickly to avoid it becoming embedded.

Right. And I don't think that the country has ever truly experienced stagflation, has it? Well, we did go through stagflation in the seventies. It was a really, really challenging time. And, again, that's one reason the Fed is so concerned about avoiding that.

Because when you're in a stagflation environment where the economy is not growing and you have inflation, you've got kind of the worst of both worlds. Yeah. It sounds pretty scary. Well, I've also been hearing a lot of talk about interest rates. So we can talk about that.

Why are people concerned with them? How do interest rates play into all this? They are the mechanism through which the Fed tackles inflation. So our economy operates with a lot of debt, and that's a good thing most of the time. For instance, if you wanna buy a house, you don't need the upfront money to do that.

You don't need a million dollars. You come up with a down payment, you get a mortgage, and that allows you to make a large purchase and be a productive member of society while you pay it off over time. And then you've even got money for retirement. But as interest rates go up, people borrow less because it's more expensive to borrow, and people also save more because they get higher rates on their savings. Now saving more means there is less money in circulation, obviously, which decreases the supply of money.

And if there's less money in circulation, that means that people's disposable incomes are smaller, so they have less money to spend on items in general. And that is why increasing interest rates brings down prices theoretically. People will borrow less and therefore spend less when the price of borrowing money increases, and the Fed does this by raising interest rates. Now, what I just said makes it all the more prescient because we have this potential recession looming, and we don't want inflation to occur concurrently as we said, because that's the worst of both worlds. And so that would make the problem only worse.

Got it. So why do we want people to spend less? There's a great episode of The Daily from, I think it was July 28. It was called how expecting inflation can lead to more inflation. I'd encourage all our listeners to listen to it.

But the gist of the episode is that the more people expect inflation, the worse the problem gets because people demand higher wages to keep up with anticipated inflation. And similarly, companies are incentivized to raise prices to continue to maintain their profit margins commensurate with their competition and to have the funds to pay those higher wages and the higher cost of raw materials that go into the production of goods. If we can get people to spend less aggressively, then we can work to stabilize costs to cool inflation. If people have less money to spend on goods, that means there is less demand for those goods. And if demand for goods goes down, then prices generally go down as well.

Essentially, if people spend less, demand goes down, and prices go down. It goes back to your point earlier that we don't want inflation to become embedded into the economy, and it sounds like disincentivizing spending is one way to accomplish that. Okay. So but I'm hearing words like mother monetary theory and quantitative easing, which you also spoke about earlier. How did MMT and quantitative easing impact where we are right now?

Let's break this down a couple ways. First, let's address quantitative easing. So I spoke to that before, pumping money into the economy by government buying its own debt. And going back to 2008 and continuing through the pandemic, the Federal Reserve in an effort to keep the economy growing kept interest rates low in an effort to encourage more people to buy assets. Stocks, houses, crypto.

And as more people bought stocks and houses, the prices of those assets naturally rose. And that created what we call a wealth effect, where the owners of those assets now, seeing their net worth go up, they feel more flushed, they feel more able to spend money, and then upon the sale of those assets, they earn more than they would have otherwise. They have that cash to spend, and when they spend that cash, that keeps the economy growing. We refer to this as asset inflation because, again, the price of assets have higher values. Your second point was turning to modern monetary theory, which says we can actually print money and distribute it directly to people to encourage them to spend money.

We don't have to resort to lowering interest rates, which disproportionately favor the wealthy and those people that own assets. While this might make complete sense from a fairness perspective, it does beg two lines of thought, which is, first, we shouldn't be creating asset inflation to begin with. And secondly, while MMT doesn't directly cause asset inflation, because again, bubbles come down eventually and it also exacerbates the spread between, you know, the wealthiest in our society and those less fortunate, It does, unfortunately, cause wage and goods inflation because without increasing the labor pool or goods available, such as gasoline, for instance, we now have more money chasing the same amount of goods, and then prices are inevitably gonna go up. And this disproportionately hurts the people on fixed incomes who can't pass that price increase on to other people. And this is all due to what happened back in the aftermath of the two thousand eight financial crisis?

Primarily. So in addition to the post nineteen eighties financial trends, yes. Essentially, we had deregulation that has been getting increasingly more and more out of balance since the Reagan administration in the eighties. Then Clinton came along, and for political reasons and otherwise, in the nineties, enabled the repeal of Glass Steagall. And then after 2008, Congress, you know, was in political gridlock.

And although they took action decisively when the crisis initially hit, it led to a lot of gridlock. And with a weak economy, the head of the Fed at the time, Ben Bernanke, he essentially decided to continue to print money essentially with quantitative easing. And this kind of led to this financial storm where since 2010, we've essentially continued to print money. If you want to get more information on this, you can listen to my episode that I did with Christopher Leonard, who wrote a book where he interviewed the chair of the Kansas City Federal Reserve, and the book was called The Lords of Easy Money, How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. It's really a fascinating deep dive into this period of history and really sheds a lot of light on how the Fed doubled down and continued to print money since 2008.

And because, you know, what I think was reasonable, I. E. That in 2008, it was arguably necessary and reasonable to print money. But then in 2010, when we didn't have a crisis, we doubled down on printing money, and that has led to this perfect storm twelve years later. So if this has gone on for twelve years, why are we only seeing the effects of it now?

Well, because now we're experiencing widespread traditional inflation. You know, until recently, we were just living with asset inflation, and the upper middle class and the wealthy got richer, but that doesn't really affect our day to day lives. And it's also a myth that we weren't seeing inflation. We just saw it confined to areas such as housing, health care, and higher education. But when gas prices and the cost of milk rise, when people suffer the effects of these price increases on necessities such as food, energy, and housing, that gets a lot more attention.

Okay. So we've established that we have rampant inflation. At the same time, interest rates are going up in order to slow it down. Those increases in interest rates mean money has become harder to come by and liquidity is drying out. You host a venture capital podcast.

How's the tightening of liquidity affecting the venture community? So venture capital firms are businesses. And like all businesses, ultimately, they need to be profitable. They have to show return on their investment to stay in business. In an environment like there was over the past decade, where almost any company could get a loan or get additional venture money, venture capital firms had the luxury of being more aggressive.

If they had a bad investment, someone could come along and bail them out by loaning or investing more money into the company, or the VC could turn around and sell the company to another company. But in this new environment, when loans and investment are harder to come by, firms are having to make tough decisions about financing their most profitable investments. And this means less money for the companies in their portfolios that are not doing as well. And as time goes on, the companies that can't raise money or find a buyer will have to go out of business unless they can cut expenses to get through this tough period. Are you getting calls right now from VCs and lenders saying that their liquidity is tighter and that they need your help with a company that's struggling?

Absolutely. What do you tell people who ask you if you can turn the company around? Well, first I explain that we have to get a picture of the company's prospects and current situation. We do our due diligence. We do a thorough accounting of the company, and we give them an honest opinion as to whether they can practically move forward.

What do you tell people who have lost hope and who want your help in selling or otherwise liquidating the company? You know, that is painful as it may be. Sometimes that's the best option. What would you say usually precipitates these calls? It depends.

But if a CEO is running low on cash, they will typically go to their VC or investors or lender, and they'll say, hey, you told me to come knocking on the door when we need more money, and we are getting close to that point. In this environment, unfortunately, those same CEOs are now being told, sorry, we can't give you more money at this time. Check back, you know, when the economy changes or you essentially become profitable. Well, I mean that's a catch 22, because these companies no longer have the cash or the time to become more profitable. So they do what?

Well, they try and make their cash last longer, which means they stretch their payables. That leads to a host of other issues. But essentially, they really, really have no choice but to reduce their burn and make that cash last longer. So what are some strategies that can make the cash last longer? Unfortunately, the most realistic option is often a cut head count, because labor is typically a large portion of a company's variable costs.

Okay. So basically, people are gonna get fired? Not everyone. But as we see more companies struggling to meet their financial benchmarks, yes, I fear that we are going to see significant layoffs. And just look at what Meta and even Amazon recently announced.

And what's interesting is that this new younger generation hasn't yet experienced a severe downturn. Yeah. That's true. If you think about it, during COVID, the people that were hit the hardest were people in service industries or people who weren't able to take care of their jobs at a computer. Waiters, yoga teachers, people who had to really stay out and about in the world.

And there were massive, you know, massive layoffs in those sectors. This time around, it's entirely possible that layoffs may include people who traditionally are more fortunate. And I also suspect that this downturn is gonna last longer than people are expecting. Wages are gonna fall, people will lose their jobs, and people will see their homes, stocks, and crypto go down in value, which is gonna have the opposite of a wealth effect. These things tend to feed on themselves, and so the concern is that once it starts, it's a little hard to reverse it.

Okay. And so once it does? Once we start in this new environment where recessions building steam and companies are suffering, there isn't a magic wand. But what has to happen is that companies start looking at their profit margins, their business lines, and their overall strategy to see if there is an opportunity to pivot. But it is important to remember that recessions are normal, and they used to happen every seven to ten years.

But once the word recession became poison, we came to fear it, more so than accepting that booms and busts are part of a capitalist society. There are droughts, but that doesn't mean they aren't difficult. But knowing that droughts come along is the first step in preparing for them. Right? If you on an individual or business level know that periodically there's gonna be these tough periods, then what you do is you naturally save during the good years, so that there's a cushion in the lean years.

You know, it's really never too early to start developing that habit. From my perspective as a society, we can do a much better job of doing this. You know, Jim, the answers that you gave are good for people who have been planning for recession. But what about the people who haven't? What would you say to them?

This is something that I think I struggle with in my own life, and I think as a society, we have to have more conversation about. And that is that there is such a thing as insurance. Right? We do have people that are less fortunate. We do have people that get caught off guard.

And then as a society, we have insurance, and we have the ability to help those people that do get caught off guard. To me, the real question is, how do we encourage people and as a society, our politicians, to really do a better job of creating a rainy day fund. And then sharing that in a more equitable manner because the whole idea is that if you save in a good time, right, and you hit a speed bump, then you can, in an equitable way, help those people who are less fortunate. What's troubling to me is that we're not doing that. What we're doing instead is just spending money like there's no tomorrow because that's easier.

Right? I mean, it's easier to run up your credit card and never pay it off. But because of the fact that America is the world's currency, the fact that we've had globalization and this ability to outsource jobs together with an aging population that generally save more. We created some bad habits. We got to this point where people were saying, wow, we can spend almost in an unlimited manner with no consequence.

That's just not true. And so I think what's good about this recession and where we're headed is I truly believe it's gonna force us to have these difficult conversations, and it's gonna force us to realize there are a lot of people that can't really plan as easily because they just are living paycheck to paycheck. And therefore, we as a society have to do better at creating a safety net for those people. I mean, I certainly hope so. That's definitely an important point to make.

I think that there really isn't an easy answer to that question. You going down that road and pointing out that it's the leaders in charge that really need to start thinking about these issues is true. I mean, I think that that's right. Especially in the world of social media and people catastrophizing things. It's easy for the people on the right to say, if we create a safety net for people and we give away too much, people will take advantage and they won't work.

And then the other extreme is, oh my god, you know, the rich have everything and you've got to give us all this money and it's not fair, and we should have money handed out to us to pay for things. And to me, either extreme is bad. The key is finding a balance. I think most people wanna work. I think most people wanna have the self esteem and the sense of taking care of themselves and helping other people.

This notion that we don't help other people, I think is ridiculous. And I think that finding that middle way, where as the richest country in the history of the world with all these resources, we should be able to do better at saving money for those rainy days, and then sharing it on an equitable basis when we do have these downturns. And, you know, you hear economists all the time talking about it, and I just heard Elizabeth Warren talking about this, you know, how we've got to avoid a recession, and we've got a lower interest rates because people are gonna get laid off and how terrible that is. If there's another way to avoid a recession that is healthy, that's great. If people get laid off, right, because companies are pivoting and we're going through a hard time, but they're given retraining or they're given a safety net, it's not the end of the world.

Right? Creating this false narrative that a recession is the end of the world is what, in my opinion, got us into this mess in the first place. Right. It almost sounds like it's a two prong way of dealing with the issue, which is one, to have the government create policies that don't let these recessions become huge in the way of allowing inflation to get out of control. And so since everything has blown up so big, when that pops, it's gonna be a huge pop.

And keeping things in a more manageable size, so to speak, That's one prong. And then the other prong is but when it does happen, there should be an onus on the government to have some sort of either rainy day fund or maybe education for people to learn how to save for themselves or whatever it is. But there should be some sort of social responsibility on the government's part to help people and provide some level of safety net. That's kind of what I'm hearing from you. Is that right?

Absolutely. And I think that if you go back and you look at what happened in the twenties and in the thirties when we had a major economic downturn, and then you look at what happened in 2008, when we get ahead of ourselves because we either had the roaring twenties or we have too much deregulation and we have too much focus on spend, spend, spend, then things get out of balance, and when they crash, they crash harder. Right? What I'm saying is the way we learn from our mistakes in this situation is we put balanced regulation back in place, We get balanced and fair taxes back in place. We get balanced spending back in place and balanced safety nets back in place.

And then when we do inevitably have COVID and other unexpected events or natural recessions, we are not caught off guard. What I think is likely to happen now is this is gonna be more painful than it needed to be, because instead of going back to 2008 and really fixing the problem, I think we put too much of it under the rug. And so now what we're gonna experience, I think, is gonna be a little more painful than it needed to be because we haven't yet gotten our house in order. And I think that once these bubbles come down, and they're starting to, but once they really come down, it's gonna be an opportunity for this conversation we're having now to expand and really, really get people because there are a lot of smart people out there working together to come up with checks and balances to prevent this. You know, as a young lawyer, I remember studying the 33 act and the 34 act, which are federal regulations that were put in place after the crash of twenty nine.

There really were teeth and regulations, and the SEC was created, and there were really significant things done to prevent another Great Depression. And what I hope happens is that after we get through this, we will also put in place smart checks and balances so that what we're about to experience and we're starting to experience will not happen again. So how do we prevent this from happening again? Well, as we said, I do think recessions are part of the fabric of a capitalistic society. And so I don't think we should expect never to have recessions.

However, when you talk about prevent this from happening again, which is where we've run up so much debt, we now are being forced to really rapidly raise interest rates and throw people out of work and have these, quote, bubbles come down, which I think is gonna cause a lot of pain. I think the best way to avoid extremes is to try to really stay in balance and recognize that excessive behavior in either direction is not good. In a political environment where people are demanding constant giveaways, where we haven't gotten people used to the notion of moderation, it's harder. And so this political gridlock, this lack of really focusing on proper allocation between taxes and spending, you know, has got to really be addressed. Right.

I mean, that makes sense to me what you're saying. It's like, realistically, there's no way that we're ever gonna prevent a recession. It's just a natural aspect of capitalist economy and economy in general, I'd say. But what would you say would be a positive change or effect that you could see coming from these potential upcoming challenges, whether it's cultural, technological, in other areas of life. Do you see any benefits or positive possibilities that can come out of this?

I do. I think when you have to make choices, and you have to balance the pros and cons of something, it leads to a more healthy outlook. We all know that being spoiled and never being told no is not great. I think that one of the things that's been healthy about our capitalistic society is that most of the time, we really do weigh how important something is with our willingness to pay for it. For instance, if we want to have national defense, right, and we feel that we need to keep ourselves safe, Then when we go to people, we explain that to people, people are willing to have their taxes go up because they see the tangible benefit of that.

If you instead decide to just print the money and there's no cost benefit analysis, I think people pick up the bad habit of assuming that there isn't trade offs, that you really can have this unlimited wealth without paying the price. And that's just not the way the universe works. There's no free lunch. Right. And so I think cliches are cliches for a reason.

And I think reminding people of that, and really starting to realize as a community that we're all in this together, and we have to do it in a fair manner, I think is important. And I want to say one other thing about that. I think one of the insidious things about the last twelve years is that we created this false sense of security that this worked. And on the one hand, our politicians and the Federal Reserve came out and said, you know, we dodged this bullet by using this brilliant tool called quantitative easing. And so, therefore, everybody just went on with their lives and kind of assumed that there wasn't a problem.

But I think that was misleading because asset inflation has really created a huge exacerbation of the wealth to income in the world. And whether or not it's Thomas Piketty's book Capitalism in the twenty first Century or otherwise, the entire world has experienced this incredible increase in the disparity between the haves and the have nots. And although we've raised hundreds of millions of people, billions of people out of poverty all over the world, which has been a good thing, It came at this cost of exacerbating wealth inequality. Via day to day experience or reading, what do you find most effective as far as keeping yourself informed? There are a few things that I find really helpful.

First, recognizing that we do have some polarization in this country. People have their perspectives. Right? I find that reading the Wall Street Journal is one perspective. Reading the New York Times and Paul Krugman is another perspective.

If you look at the debates between the different economists, whether or not they're Republicans or Democrat, conservative or liberal, it gives you their different perspectives. And so I find following Larry Summers very helpful. There's also a man by the name of Richard Duncan who's been on the Puck who lives in Indonesia. He, I think, does a really good job of explaining kind of the macroeconomics and the effect of quantitative easing. I don't always agree with his conclusions.

He really lays out the facts in terms of the use of quantitative easing and the pros and cons of it. He has a newsletter called Macro Watch, and it has videos and so forth. I find that very helpful. I think there are, you know, a lot of sources out there. Again, not everybody's gonna read The Economist or Barron's or The Wall Street Journal.

But for me, I think, again, The Economist does a great job on this. The Wall Street Journal does a good job on it. But you do have to look outside the mainstream media sometimes, like the people like Richard Duncan, to get a perspective because these issues are esoteric. They are painful, and they are complicated. And so you really have to, if you're interested, dig beneath the surface to get a complete picture.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's definitely true. I definitely struggle with trying to find unbiased media and also simply watching the news is pretty depressing. What does a day in the life of Jim Bear look like? Well, I try to practice what I preach, which going back to this notion of balance, I really do get up in the morning and get out every day, six or seven days a week, and either walk and jog a little.

And then I do some meditation and what I would call my quiet time where I'm introspective and, you know, with all the craziness in the world going on right now, I find that if I have the morning to set myself, kind of calm my thoughts, put things in perspective, focus on gratitude, that it really makes my day much better. And so I really spend that early part of the day kind of taking care of myself. Stephen Covey would say sharpening the saw, so to speak. And then I jumped right into work in in this environment with the restructuring practice booming right now because we are experiencing this kind of tightening of liquidity. I spent a lot of time with my team working on really trying to help people and really lessen the pain they're experiencing because there is no painless way to restructure or shut down a company, and you have to remind yourself that you're dealing with real people and real people's lives and try to do it in a humane manner.

I also do try to take one day a week off unless it's an emergency, whether or not it's Saturday or Sunday, you know, having my own, what I call Shabbat, where I really recharge my batteries and spend time with the people I love, read. And then for fun, love to have a glass of wine, love to go out to new restaurants, love to hang with my friends and my family. As I think I alluded to earlier, love to go up to the mountains and ski. And that's about it. It's a pretty simple life, Caitlin, but I feel grateful.

Are you reading anything right now? I am. I'm reading two biographies. I'm reading a biography about Lincoln, and I'm reading a biography about Napoleon. I think the main reason for that is in these tumultuous times, I am really focused on leadership, and not that I think we need a Napoleon.

I do think that people like Lincoln really dealt with and lived through very tumultuous times, and I find it comforting to read about people who struggled through ungodly horrific times and yet kept an optimistic perspective. I mean, he had his dark days, but ultimately, you know, really really wanted to live for something bigger himself and keep the country, the union together, so to speak. I find reading like that very comforting and reassuring. Yeah. I can imagine that both of them would offer great perspective of where we are right now.

When we're sitting where we are right now, we tend to look side to side and compare where we are with what's going on next to us. But when you take a moment and look back at where we came from, there's a lot of optimism that we can take from that to see how far we've come along. And Caitlin, it's funny because I remember when I was younger thinking that the sky was falling and talking to my father-in-law at the time. He was about my age at this time, and and he was much more relaxed about it all. It's like, you know, we're gonna get through this.

And I was like, no, you're not. You know, the sky is falling. What are you talking about? One of the things that I benefited from from being around for a while, but also reading a lot, is that it is hard to have that perspective. When you're in a crisis, right, it feels overwhelming and it feels like it's never gonna end.

If you take a step back and you look at the historical perspective, you do realize how incredibly fortunate we are. Yes, we have these challenges. But more people are reading and writing and living with the comforts of air conditioning and heating. And, you know, when you look at our middle class, as strained as they've been, and again, relative to the upper class, it's not fair and we need to work on it. But in a lot of ways, we in the twenty first century are living better than kings and queens did a few hundred years ago.

Look at COVID. COVID was horrible and a million people in this country died. That is a tragedy. But if you look at how many people died when we had the Spanish flu in the beginning of, you know, the twentieth century, and how many young people perished, the fact that we got these vaccines, the fact that we've come out of it, so to speak, it is miraculous. And, again, you can focus on the glass half empty or half full, but I think there's reason for optimism, but that doesn't mean we don't have to do the work.

Absolutely. Part of being optimistic is you have to work towards it. Doesn't mean it's easy. It just means that there are better days ahead, and there's a lot to look forward to. Well, this has been a fun conversation, and I learned a lot.

Oh, good. I think that you have a wealth of knowledge that I'm excited for other people to hear. I feel optimistic after talking to you, even with the knowledge that we likely will be going into another recession. It is going to be hard for many, and there will be many companies that will have to shut down, unfortunately. But like we said, not the end of the world.

We can restart. There's a lot of things that can be done. Absolutely. Caitlin, it was great. Thank you so, so much.

Thank you for your time, Jim. This was fun. Cool. The Puck Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMEG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation and haven't subscribed yet to the show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

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