In this 200th-episode special of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO & Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, begins a three-part series exploring why some economists are discussing the potential for a future downturn, and what history can teach us about investor behavior during times of uncertainty.
From the fall of Rome to the Great Depression to today’s evolving economy, Darryl connects four powerful influences – government spending, inflation, demographics, and technology – and discusses how these forces interact to shape long-term economic outcomes. He also examines how optimism and pessimism affect investor psychology and what it means to stay steady when headlines predict doom.
If you’ve ever wondered whether history is repeating itself – or how to stay grounded when headlines predict doom – this episode offers clarity, perspective, and practical insights to help you think long-term.
Key Highlights from the Episode
-Why predictions of a “2030 Depression” are gaining attention.
-Optimists vs. pessimists: how each influences investor behavior.
-Lessons from history: Rome’s collapse and the Great Depression.
-Why history doesn’t repeat itself – but it often rhymes.
-What gives U.S. currency its resilience, and how trust plays a role in economic stability.
Listen to more episodes: https://PAXFinancialGroup.com/podcasts
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Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. I pause for a second because I’m super, like, elated because this is our 200th episode, and I honestly can’t believe we’ve come this far. And, and I mean this sincerely. Thank you so much for listening.
I know many of you tune in every single week, and then if you don’t, if I bump into you, you’re like, oh, man, I need to go catch up and binge on you and I am just so stinking thankful for you guys, because every time you tell me, you listen and that you like listening and you tell others.
That encourages me to keep doing it. Hopefully to be a voice of reason in all of this noise. But I really didn’t think 200 episodes was going to happen. It’s a rarity in the podcast world to make it this far. But again, because I have so many people encouraging me and listening and giving me ideas and feedback, and even in some cases, some, negative feedback, which is all good, I love it.
So, thank you guys so much. 200 episodes. Certainly, honored and blessed and thankful. For those that are tuning in for the first time, I just welcome you to Retire in Texas. This is a show that’s designed to help you stay grounded, to live generously and to make wise decisions in this financial journey that we have, I’m your host, Darryl Lyons.
I want to provide you insights. I don’t want to use a lot of numbers because I don’t want to confuse you, want you to be able to pivot into retirement with confidence. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. And look, I’m going to talk about the 2030 depression.
Supposedly there’s a depression coming in the year 2030. And so, I’m going to use two episodes, two episodes to unpack this. And I’m actually going to do it in a way that hopefully is insightful, where you can make a rational decision, not me, but I can give you information that might help you think through this. There’s more than a handful of people out there calling for a depression in 2030.
A depression. I’ll unpack depression. And what that means. Provide some insight into the angles that they’re considering and or, you know, utilizing, adopting into their framework to present this idea of a depression in 2030. I’m not going to just dismiss their commentaries. I want to kind of dig in a little bit, but I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to have to stay high level and let you do homework where you see fit.
I want to start out by just examining the speakers, because when you hear about, I have an issue in my business. I generally am an optimist. I have been for a long time. I own a business. By definition, if you own a business, you’re betting on the future. Even if you say a lot of negative stuff.
You can say all you want, but if you own a business and you’re continuing to invest in a business, you basically do have optimism about tomorrow. So, I’m an optimist. And my investments reflect that. What I do in my, you know, passive investing reflects that. My investment in business. Just all of it is one of optimism.
But when you’re an optimist, you know, generally you come across as sounding like a salesperson. So that can be problematic. But if you’re a pessimist now, you don’t get defined as pessimist. But if you’re somebody that presents a framework that says there’s a depression coming in 2030, you’re not a salesperson, you’re somebody that’s helping you discover this problem.
So, it comes across more as a somebody that’s just, I’m just trying to help you see this. And so therein lies, an advantage that people who are pessimist operate from, that they operate from a place of – I’m just trying to help you. Some guys that do this, girls that do this, Robert Kiyosaki. Some of you guys might have read some of his work.
Rich dad, Poor Dad. He says the biggest crash in history is right around the corner. I’m not quoting him. I’m just kind of paraphrasing. Glenn Beck says it. I don’t know. Every six months, he talks about the biggest crash ever. A lady named Meredith Whitney was really good at this. There’s a lot of people I’m just naming off a few.
Meredith Whitney talked years ago about the biggest bond market crash ever. There’s a research firm out there called ITR. They actually have a book called the 2030 Depression. I think it’s a book. I don’t know, you can YouTube it. The 2030 Depression, ITR, plenty of data out there and plenty of speakers. Sometimes you just have to wonder about the credibility of the speakers.
Don’t forget. So, I’ll let you use your judgment on whether they’re credible or not. Don’t forget, almost all of them have made one prediction in the past at some time that came true. The question we always ask is, well, how many predictions have you made? Because I mean that you can make 1000 and one of them eventually is going to land, right?
So that’s often, you know, that’s how we, I find that oftentimes I’m like, man, you made a lot of predictions. And one of them came true. Well, that’s just, anybody could have done that. But hey, we’re still listening to them. You know, there’s a lot of smart people. I often like to juxtapose the ones that are kind of talking heads versus the ones that manage money, because the ones that manage money, some of their rhetoric is regulated so they can’t make, they generally can’t make these claims.
You know, the words have to be carefully construed under an SEC framework. But if you’re managing money, then I can also see your track record, like you said stuff. But did you move your money around to reflect that? So I like that there’s a fund out there a long time ago called The Bear Fund.
I watch them because, you know, they’re negative and they were negative in their portfolios, not negative in returns. Well, maybe. But the way they managed money was negative. So that was good. Ivey Asset Management was kind of like that. Rob Arnott ran this fund. There’s a lot of negative people out there that were kind of pessimistic that I could see their portfolio of money, and that was always helpful.
I was objective, sometimes a mismatch, sometimes the portfolio was positive, but their rhetoric was negative. So, but you can’t see that difference if somebody doesn’t have a portfolio of money. So that’s the advantage. So just something to think about. If somebody’s saying stuff about the market crashing, do they actually manage money? If not that’s fine. But it does help because you can see if the cook is eating their own cooking, but they’re always going to use data that makes sense.
They’re always going to use historical data. I tend to think that they anchor too many times, not all the time. Two events in our history, world history, one of which is Rome. And the other one is the Great Depression. Rome’s an interesting one. The Western Roman Empire, that lasted to about the 400’s. And then there was a transition to the Eastern Roman Empire that went another thousand years, Constantinople was the home base.
And then they got taken over later. But the Western Roman Empire, that one declined, namely because of just excessive spending on military. And then it created this tax burden that fell on farmers. And farmers are like, forget it, I’m not working anymore. I’m not getting anything out of this. I mean, basically, Rome took away the incentive of hard work and innovation.
And, you know, if you look at it, I find that decisions are often done, made well, or we often make good decisions when we understand both what’s happening, what happened historically and globally. And I actually look over to Western Europe now and I see some of the, I hear some of the sucking sound of taking away hard work and innovation.
It’s happening in other countries. It happened in Rome. So, what we extrapolate from that and some of the talking heads that do have credibility are saying, hey, we’re losing that here. We’re about to lose that here, the way that we’re overspending. And they look to Rome and say, hey, Rome created this environment where people were just not incentivized to work anymore.
Now we still have a lot of incentives today. The biggest companies like Nvidia and Facebook and Google, they are all American companies. So, we still have a framework of innovation. But the concern that we all have is are we losing it? And there’s reason to consider when you look at Rome, they overspent and they burden the farmers.
So, there wasn’t a desire to innovate anymore. So, it looks like we might be repeating ourselves here now how we’re repeating ourselves from, you know, when we look at the Great Depression, this was 1929, probably could have just been a recession, just like a normal detoxing of the market. Frankly, that probably would have been normal.
Recessions are good. They get the bad stuff out in the market, but this ended up being a massive depression, 25% unemployment. I mean, you’ve seen the lines, you’ve seen the pictures. It lasted a decade, though. People forget that. I mean, it was World War Two that got us out. But this was, again, bad decisions. I think we shored up some of those mistakes that we may have made, but the big one there was letting the banks fail.
So, when we look at Rome and the depression, some of these people that are talking about the coming depression, they will reference those two times in history, there’s other times that they’ll point to. But those are two big ones. This is an important saying. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And the reason it rhymes is because humans have these tendencies that don’t change over time.
You know them, they’re greed and they’re fear. And so, these two tendencies that, I don’t know if you call them emotions, I think they’re just motivations, but they don’t go away. They just continue, in our hearts. And I, you know, I have a biblical worldview on those two things and greed and fear.
But that’s why they say history doesn’t repeat itself. So, some of the nuance things may not happen, but greed and fear do find itself rhyming with historical greed and fear. Events like so, for example, Rome, which we already talked about, they, you know, they were taking over territories. There were looting communities, looking for resources.
Lavish spending, self-indulgence. And it ultimately resulted in the reduction of the value of their currency. And then people became concerned about whether or not their currency would be worth anything tomorrow. Sounds familiar. Right. And the depression. The depression, you know, this the way it rhymes there is, you know, people were enjoying the Roaring 20s, rightfully so.
But what they started to do is they started to borrow against their stocks because they were just too excited. And then when banks started to fail, they just like, man, I just, this fear overcame them and they started to run to the banks and pull their money out. So, you see greed and fear repeating itself here even today.
So, but referencing history is important and reflecting on what’s happening globally. But what does this look like practically? There’s, this like an intersection in a highway, and you’ve got four different lanes and a traffic light and if this traffic light goes out, then there will be collisions. But let me talk about these four lanes.
Government spending, inflation, demographic trends, and the AI bubble bursting. Let me say it again. The government spending, inflation, demographic trends and the AI bubble bursting. They’re all sitting at a traffic light. All is going well. The lights are red, yellow and green. No issues today. But if that light goes out, then there will be a collision course because all of these elements I’m describing are very fragile right now.
So, I want to talk about each one of them. And this is going to be two segments, maybe three if I need to stretch it out because I want to give you some ideas on I mean, I’ve written this down, but I haven’t fully unpacked it. Some ideas on how to navigate through this a little bit.
If you’re really nervous about a 2030 depression, there’s ways to absolutely position yourself if you do have concerns here. And I want to acknowledge that. And by the way, I don’t want to discount that. I don’t worry like I probably said that a few times, but I do worry, like sometimes I turn on the news and it’s scary.
Just what you hear about debt and the politicians and nonsense in China and all of that. I feel, though, that I do a lot of self-reflection. If you know me by now, and I would also like to believe that I’ve spent a lot of time, intentionally training myself to be cerebral and, having started in the business in 99, right when the market crashed, I think it was helpful for me personally.
And it allows me to navigate several very difficult times of the last several decades. But to say that I don’t worry. I’m with you. You know, there’s always something to worry about. I think if you think about, y’all know my faith by now. My faith is rock solid. And so, I do trust, that it’s all going to work out.
But at the same time, let’s unpack this reality and let’s start with one lane government spending. And it is absolutely out of control. Have you thought about it? We were on the gold standard. You might have heard of that. The gold standard. A long time ago. You know, we issued money to the degree that we had gold in the vault.
And then in 1973, we allowed, the country allowed itself. I guess that’s how that works. To print money beyond that gold in the vault restriction. It was a self-imposed restriction to show constraint, just like you would in a diet. Maybe not buy cookies and stuff, but, you know, you had an ounce of gold is worth 35 bucks, and the government and I actually get this, but, you know, it’s frustrating when you think about it.
And history would rewrite itself in different ways. So, we don’t know if it’s good or bad. But once they decided to not anchor themselves to that gold standard, all bets are off. And now they can print as much as they want. They can do whatever they want it can. There’s no rules, right? It was like, okay, we can only print as much as we had in the vault.
And it’s not the case anymore. And so this little piece of paper that we all have, it’s only a function of trusting the government whether or not we can trust the United States. The crazy thing is, despite the United States and the mess, we’re still the cleanest shirt in a dirty load of laundry. So, people still trust us, which is amazing.
And, it allows us to print money and still have something that’s valuable, like Zimbabwe could print a lot of money and the value of their currency is going to go down, not us. And we have to print money because we’re not really good at restraint. Just like Rome, they just kept overspending. Rome again, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Rome didn’t have problems with entitlement spending. Rather it had problems with military spending. It overspent with the military. So, what is our spending like? I just need to make sure you know, what is our spending all about. So, our spending is all about Social Security, Medicare. I say it is. That’s 40% of our spending. But when people start talking about like DOGE was a big thing, like reducing spending here and there, I want to, I think that’s important.
But until you touch Social Security, Medicare, you really haven’t made a dent. Social Security and Medicare, 40% of our spending and we also just so you know, I think you know this already. We’ve borrowed a lot of money, namely, from the 2008 financial crisis and Covid. We borrowed a lot of money and the interest debt. And now get this, the interest debt is more than what we pay to protect our country, more than our defense budget.
Just the interest alone. So, the gold standard was originally intended to put boundaries on our spending, but right now we’re overspending. You know this already. I’m just repeating myself and repeating what you already know. We’re overspending on nonsense with no willingness to slow down, and it’s creating massive amounts of debt. And that interest is piling up.
So, think of this intersection. This is one lane in the intersection that eventually is going to collide into something else. I want to talk about those other three lanes in our next show. And we’re going to unpack it. We’re going to talk about inflation. We’re going to talk about the demographic trends. And I want to talk about the AI bubble.
And so I’m going to save that for our next show. But again, I want to thank you for tuning in today. This is our 200th episode. I want to remind you that living generously is the purpose of our lives, not simply to make ourselves richer for the purposes of being rich, but rather, sincerely and authentically living out the Great Commission with our dollars.
And so, I appreciate all that you do and all that you do for the community. And I want you to remember to think different, because when you think different. You think long term. Did I say that right? No. You think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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