Scott Christiansen (00:06):
Welcome, Andy Busch. You are the Economic Futurist at andrewbusch.com. I’m going to pick at you for being Andy at andrewbusch.com, don’t you think that causes some brand confusion?

Andrew Busch (00:19):
People always ask me.

Scott Christiansen (00:21):
I’ll let you do.

Andrew Busch (00:22):
Yeah. People always ask me, what do you go by? Is it Andrew or Andy? I go, look, call me Andy. The only person that calls me Andrew is my 95-year-old mom when she’s angry at me, just for the record, but for the print material, it’s Andrew. So yeah, it’s totally confusing to people like you, Scott.

Scott Christiansen (00:40):
Okay, we’ll get past that. We’ve obviously known each other for a long time, by the way. We don’t speak respectfully to each other, but no, our paths have crossed countless times in our careers. When we first started working together, you were kind of a currencies trader. On your way up, strategist, you moved on to CNBC host of your own show, an author, the first chief market intelligence officer for the US government, and now you’re under the title of Economic Futurist where you’re sought up strategist and advisor. That’s a lot of change. Are you always thinking economic, futurist? Are you always thinking about Andy Futurist? How do you position yourself for the market moving up, or is this something you do instinctively?

Andrew Busch (01:30):
I think it’s a little of both. You always want to position yourself depending on what the market is doing. And so in the sense of being different from an economist, I wanted to let people know from a branding standpoint, you’re not just getting an economist. And I tell people, look, if you want to hire an economist, go get one. They’re cheap compared to me because what I deliver is high value and it is with a really forward looking lean to it. And I think that’s what people are trying to figure out. They want you to connect the dots for the future for them, and that’s what I’ve been doing for quite some time. So yeah, I mean, it’s funny. The whole economic futurist thing kind of came up because I was trying to think of why should I be calling myself that? And I went back to the book that I wrote back in 2007, and it’s really funny. I always tell people about that book. I go, I worked really hard on it. And here’s the thing about that book was written in 2007. No one read this book.

(02:37):
I read it. It came out. No, it came out during the global financial crisis. And of course nobody read it. And I tell people, look, I mean, I call myself an economic futurist for this reason. The first five chapters in that book in 2007 were on infectious disease outbreak and their impact on the economy and markets, the next chapters were on disputed elections. The next chapters were on short-term war, and the next chapters were on big climate events like hurricanes. And all of those are happening today. And that’s why I have some gravitas and credibility in that space to be able to talk about what the future holds. And I think that’s unique about what I do.

Scott Christiansen (03:21):
I actually was going to go back to your old stuff and then kind of pepper you with some things around the economic future and be like, but you said this, but you said this. And I pulled up the world event trading and I’m like, oh, damn, this is kind of silly. What made you be thinking so much about short-term war, but what made you be thinking about AI at that level and pandemic at that level in 2007?

Andrew Busch (03:53):
Well, it wasn’t AI, but I mean back then, I mean as far as, because we’d been through SARS, right? But I was like, there’s a pattern here historically. I mean, I go all the way back to the Black Plague to look at what people did back then in reaction to an infectious disease outbreak. And it’s the same thing. It’s so consistent over time, whether it was the Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, SARS, it’s the same thing. People get the disease, they try to get away from the disease, they move out of the cities, they spread it like crazy, and then eventually they move back into the city. So it was a pattern that I saw over time and being in the markets, you see global financial crises, you see things happen and you’re like, I know I’ve seen this before. Or being a historian of the markets. I look at this stuff all the time. I think, wow, okay, it’s not exactly the same, but it’s close enough and it really tells you a lot. So that’s kind of where I came up with the concept of the book. And it’s just been, I think pattern recognition was one of my fortes as a currency trader and an advisor. So it just spilled out from that.

Scott Christiansen (05:04):
Did you predict quiet quitting?

Andrew Busch (05:07):
Quiet quitting? No, but I can go one better. So I was actually in Chicago in January of 2020 and I was given a talk to a commercial real estate group at the time, and my hair was out in a little bit of fire at that point. And they asked me and they said, well, how, what’s a black swan that’s out there? And I was like a black swan. I said, do you want to know an unknown unknown? And they said, yes, I do. And I said, that thing in China, that outbreak, you really need to keep an eye on that. That worries me. And so I was buying, I bought masks in January. I sold half of my portfolio in January, and I didn’t get it all right. I didn’t see how bad this was going to get, but at least I anticipated it because I had the background of all the work I’ve done in the past. But no, I didn’t get quiet quitting, but I had other things pretty accurately.

Scott Christiansen (06:06):
So anyone who’s seen you speak or who’s hired you to be an advisor has heard you say the phrase more with less many times. Tell me what that means and why you got a tattoo of it on your arm.

Andrew Busch (06:19):
I do actually, hold on a second. Stay right there. Because what I did was I went and got tattoo. I dunno if you can see those tattoo. There they are. That’s what I tell you.

Scott Christiansen (06:31):
That’s awesome

Andrew Busch (06:33):
Right there

Scott Christiansen (06:33):
Send me one.

Andrew Busch (06:36):
It’s kind of funny, but it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you’re in healthcare and I do a lot of work in healthcare. And so what I tell people is like, look, you’ve got baby boomers retiring, so demand for your services and products is going through the roof. No doubt about it. But at the same time, the government is paying for a big portion of that, whether it’s Medicaid or Medicare, and so they’re going to look to dial back as much as they can on the spending side. So your prices are going to be under pressure because of that. And so that’s the concept of more with less, you’re going to have to do more with less money. And so you’ve got to get much more productive and much more efficient at what you do. And that is a central message of almost every presentation that I do.

Scott Christiansen (07:25):
It’s interesting. Selling into healthcare is what I do. Selling into healthcare is always something that takes a really long time. It was never built to be a fast decision making business, multiple decision makers. It can take two years to sell something. I was at a conference about a week ago

Andrew Busch (07:46):
And risk adverse, right?

Scott Christiansen (07:48):
Yes, absolutely.

Andrew Busch (07:50):
Yeah.

Scott Christiansen (07:51):
So I was at a conference around digital health technology and I love the way the conference was set up. It was a Becker’s conference and everybody was just sitting at different round tables. So you could just sit down, meet the people at your table, have a little discussion before the conversation, and lo and behold, these healthcare leaders, department head leaders said that they’re actually under a directive to find and implement AI, next gen tech, that word directive, usually they’re always receptive, they always want to improve, but a directive for new technology to get it, that’s a more with less mentality. And I was just shocked to hear that kind of flip in the paradigm.

Andrew Busch (08:36):
And I will tell you that looking at AI right now, I would say this, it’s akin to I would say, the development of computers back in 1987. And everybody was predicting all this great productivity increase and what was end up happening. People are typing on their keyboards with one finger. So it took 10 years for that thing to really explode and the internet right at the same time, and then all of a sudden it was like a cambrian explosion of growth. And I think it’s the same thing with AI today. I think we’re just at the forefront of this, and yes, is there overinvestment in it likely, but who’s to say if it’s right or if it’s wrong? So my guess is I wouldn’t say it’ll take 10 years to get this going. I’d say it’s probably three years and less because of the pressure that’s building to do more with less, and we can talk about that. But there’s the different levels of AI. It’s not just LLMs. It’s not just ChatGPT and Gen AI. It’s really the agentic stuff. That’s interesting.

Scott Christiansen (09:46):
So you’re out there marketing as an economic futurist, positioning yourself, who’s finding you and what are they hiring you to do?

Andrew Busch (09:54):
Yeah, this is really, so we act as one day consultants, which is really fun. So we do board directors meetings, we do large conferences, and the way that they find me is through two major avenues. One is through speaker bureaus, so they’ll hire me. They have a big list, but also we use LinkedIn quite a bit and we a little bit less Twitter. But what we try to do is produce research all the time that is impactful on a lot of the different areas that we speak to so that people understand and clients potential clients understand. Look, we don’t just kind of talk about this. We’re not like some CNBC head that can come in and talk about economics or the markets and tell silly stories. And we’re not futurists that come in and talk about, I don’t know, like asteroid mining. Super interesting but not helpful to those on us on planet Earth.

(10:47):
What we do is we ground our research in the company and in the sector of the economy that they’re in, and we provide four things that really help them. We talk about the economy, we talk about public policy rules, regulations, tariffs, things like that. We talk about really big trends that are out there. It could be climate, but it’s also demographics. Then we wrap those all together. When we apply it to the company, we show them where we see future growth opportunities. And that’s the structure of what we do. The way people find us is through, there’s a lot of word of mouth because we cover the entire economy. So my clients are from ExxonMobil to UBS as an example. That’s what we just did over the last year or so. And so as you see their clients and they see you, and then all of a sudden it just really builds some momentum as far as where we get our clients from.

Scott Christiansen (11:40):
Okay. You are position as an economic futurist. My big question is, who hires you to be that? How do they find you? What do you do?

Andrew Busch (11:49):
Right?

Scott Christiansen (11:51):
Is that three questions?

Andrew Busch (11:52):
Yeah, something like that. My wife asks me this all the time.

Scott Christiansen (11:57):
What? You have a good job when people don’t actually know exactly what it is.

Andrew Busch (12:00):
Exactly. Exactly. Well, my clients range throughout the entire economy from ExxonMobil to UBS, and basically people are looking for an ability and a framework to understand what’s happening today and how it’s impacting their business. And that’s what we do. It’s broken down into four sections. We talk about the economy. We cover things like inflation, interest rates, fed policy, where it is right now, where it’s going in the future. Next section, we talked about big public policy issues, things that are coming from the Trump administration, tariffs, regulatory policies obviously are really important. The next section will be on big trends. We show not only demographics, but also some really interesting studies on where people are moving to in the United States as an example, and then of course climate, things like that. And then we wrap ’em all together and we apply it to the industry and show where we see future growth opportunities. And a lot of that is wrapped around technology, of course, but there’s growth opportunities that come from changing policy, public policy and changing tastes in the American consumer. So all of those things kind of wrap together what we present for clients.

Scott Christiansen (13:21):
Well, my pitch for Andy at andrewbusch.com is that from my experience working with you, your ability as a presenter is bar none. The energy you bring to it is one thing, but also what you do is you take all these complex scenarios and data and the big picture and you boil it down into something that’s really easy to comprehend that has actionable steps. I don’t think that’s easy to do, and it’s just something that you’re really good at.

Andrew Busch (13:56):
Well, thanks. I mean, going back to when I was a currency trader, I mean, my biggest edge in that market was I understood the news as soon as it came out, and its impact on currency values and everything that I do, to some extent spills out for them. In other words, I just distill things down rapidly and then I can explain them to people because that’s the way my mind works. I got to make it simple for Andy, and then I can communicate that effectively. I mean, I get up in the morning. I mean, I’m just digesting and acting as a filter for my clients all day long. We’ve got sources of information coming in from all over the place. But that’s really, I think, the most effective thing. And honestly, it’s what people want. You can get your data jockeys to come in and take a look at a lot of data crunching. Obviously with AI, it’s gotten a lot easier. But to be able to go, oh, I see that thing out there, this thing here, this thing over here, and this thing, and that’s all coming together at the same time. That’s a value, I think. And that’s where people, businesses really don’t have very many people that can communicate that in an effective way that can resonate with them.

Scott Christiansen (15:08):
Okay, that’s enough about you. We’re going to do the three pointer section, the Root3 Pointers. And your job here is to give me information that’s going to make me better, my clients better, or maybe just to entertain me.

Andrew Busch (15:23):
Oh boy.

Scott Christiansen (15:24):
We’re going to start with healthcare. I work with a lot of healthcare businesses. I got into healthcare originally because it’s usually pretty immune to all the chaos that hits all the other markets. Not so today. Nope. Will the chaos be gone from healthcare anytime soon? Tell me yes.

Andrew Busch (15:40):
No, the answer is no. But it presents a lot of opportunities. There’s a huge shift. We talked about it earlier, about how many baby boomers are retiring and their demand for services. With that, obviously, one of the things that HHS has done is focus on diet as a matter of fact. And the MAHA, this is Make America Healthy Again. And a lot of people make fun of it. I understand that. But what do we spend most of our money on in the United States on healthcare? It happens to be obesity, right? Diabetes, hypertension, those are all related to diet. So if you solve diet to some extent, you really resolve a major component of what we spend money on. I want to say it’s over 30% of the healthcare spend from Medicare and Medicaid. So the point of this is that we’ve shifted direction away from focusing on taking on maybe a therapy per se. We still have therapy. We pay for that, which is right. But if you combo that with the diet aspect, that’s something that’s interesting. Those are opportunities to educate. Now, whether or not you can get Americans to change your diet, I have no idea, right? That’s the big question.

Scott Christiansen (17:01):
That sounds like an uphill battle.

Andrew Busch (17:03):
Yeah, and it leads you to GLP-1’s as the simplest solution. And drug companies will come up with a pill some of ’em already have, but injections are the most effective. But they’ll come up with a pill shortly and then it’ll be a lot simpler. But I think that’s the target of what’s going on in healthcare. It’s just pressure, pressure, pressure on prices. And you see that with the drug company deals that are going on with the Trump administration and HHS. And so it’s super complicated right now. There’s a lot of things that are moving through it. Is it going to get less complicated going forward? No, but you’re adding on some stuff that’s really interesting and provides opportunities.

Scott Christiansen (17:46):
Well, I like chaos with opportunity. I just don’t chaos with only chaos behind it, which is what we’ve seen. But chaos with opportunity, I’ll buy. Which leads me to my next question about the middle market. If I’m not in healthcare, I’m in the middle market and working with the people who are innovating, taking the next step. There’s capital there, there’s innovation there, there’s need there. All of those things. What’s missing is the opportunity. What’s the target? Where are we going? What’s working? Where’s the part of the economy that we could all aim for? Are we going to have a target soon? Do you even agree that we don’t have a target?

Andrew Busch (18:21):
For what?

Scott Christiansen (18:26):
Everyone. Just in general, that’s what drives the middle market is where’s the money?

Andrew Busch (18:32):
Yeah. So I think it’s a pretty easy answer. The money is in, of course, the build out of AI infrastructure and data centers and energy. Those are the areas that are just exploding in growth. The question everybody’s asking is, oh, can this continue? And the answer is yes, it can continue significantly. The Trump administration has done a lot of things to foster that. They’ve had a lot of executive orders that are taking down rules and regulations that were kind of, maybe not roadblocks, but certainly speed bumps for the industry. But the amount of money that’s flowing into it is massive. Now, the other area that’s massive amount of money that’s flowing into it is of course, domestic manufacturing. And this comes in the form of, I don’t know if people remember President Trump went over to the Middle East. He got a bunch of deals, a lot of other countries, a lot of other companies are stating that they’re going to invest in the United States.

(19:33):
And I added it up at one point. It’s surely beyond this, but just from those countries and companies talking about investing back in the United States, it’s $4.2 trillion. Now, let’s say 80% of that is nonsense, or yeah, let’s just say, let’s say 75% is nonsense. It’s still a trillion dollars. It’s coming back into the country. And if you want to take a look at what some growth it feels like, go down to Texas and take a look at Stargate. Actually, you can pull it up on YouTube and you can see what is being built out there. It’s extraordinary. And so it just cascades through there. There’s like turbines that need to get built. There’s generators that need to get, I mean, there’s all sorts of things that have to get built along those lines to fuel that industry. And so that’s where things get pretty exciting.

(20:27):
And I try to tell people, look, you may not like President Trump for his policies in a lot of the social areas, but from a domestic investment standpoint, the United States is the number one country for foreign direct investment in the world and will remain that way because there’s just so many great opportunities here. But for middle market where you can go, okay, where’s this money flowing? And I think that’s brilliant for you to look at it that way, Scott. It’s like, follow the money and that’s exactly what you should be doing. That’s where I see a lot of opportunities.

Scott Christiansen (21:01):
Perfect. Alright. Now this is the part where I just get to entertain myself a little bit. We worked on a lot of financial TV and radio shows together back in the day. I’m going to test your memory on that.

Andrew Busch (21:14):
Oh no.

Scott Christiansen (21:14):
And I’m going to name a show or segment and you have to tell me if it’s actually a financial show that you’ve probably been on or hosted or a game show. The line in between them is fairly blurry.

Andrew Busch (21:29):
Yes.

Scott Christiansen (21:31):
Making Money.

Andrew Busch (21:34):
Well, that’s a game show.

Scott Christiansen (21:37):
That’s the first show that you were ever on that I interviewed you on.

Andrew Busch (21:42):
Makes you money?

Scott Christiansen (21:42):
It was by the Tribune Company.

Andrew Busch (21:46):
I thought you were talking about the shows that I was the host of. Okay, got it. Making Money. I do remember this.

Scott Christiansen (21:51):
I don’t want to hear excuses. That’s wrong. That was when I met you. Thanks for remembering. I hope you’re better at this memory game with Michelle.

(22:04):
The Bell Boys.

Andrew Busch (22:07):
Oh, The Bell Boys. I want to say that’s a game show, but I’m sure I’m wrong.

Scott Christiansen (22:12):
That was a segment on first business that you were on many times. Thanks for remembering. Appreciate that.

Andrew Busch (22:18):
Bell Boys. Oh yeah. Okay. Gosh.

Scott Christiansen (22:20):
Let’s make a deal.

Andrew Busch (22:21):
Who’s the host of that?

Scott Christiansen (22:22):
That was Tom Hudson and John Hudson. John, listen, this is a sidebar. This is an example of when I started to learn to keep my mouth shut in meetings. It’s because I threw that name out as a joke. Like the way we were trying to come up with the name of it. And I said, oh, we’ll call it The Bell Boys. And the owner of the station group loved it. And thenj are saying, they were like, that is the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard in our lives. And Tom never said bellboy once. And the five years that was on the air, he never uttered the name of the segment one

Andrew Busch (23:00):
Time. So here’s another question for you, and you’ll know the answer. We will throw it back. The quiz. What show did Jonathan Honig drop his pants on?

Scott Christiansen (23:13):
I want to say it was something like with Jim Kramer or something, because he was mad at him. But

Andrew Busch (23:17):
No, it was on one of your shows. It was on first business.

Scott Christiansen (23:22):
Oh, alright. You got me on that one.

Andrew Busch (23:26):
Bam. Right back at you, Scott.

Scott Christiansen (23:27):
Alright. That’s how we got banned.

Andrew Busch (23:31):
Yeah, pretty much.

Scott Christiansen (23:32):
Alright, I’ll give you a few more. Politics and Money.

Andrew Busch (23:35):
That was my show.

Scott Christiansen (23:37):
Money In Motion.

Andrew Busch (23:39):
That was my show for CNBC.

Scott Christiansen (23:41):
Naked and Afraid.

Andrew Busch (23:44):
Naked and Afraid. Yeah, that’s a game show. But

Scott Christiansen (23:46):
No, that’s it. Andy, thanks for talking today. It was fun catching up.

Andrew Busch (23:52):
Definitely Scott. My pleasure.