Ray Dalio, welcome back to the All In podcast.
Third time's the charm.
Thanks for being here.
It's always a blast to be here.
Thank you for having me.
The last conversation we had was so popular and it was so timely, because it was just a few days actually after the inauguration of President Trump.
And you had provided some very kind of prescient outlooks for the administration that I think we all thought would be very helpful to get on the record.
At the time you had highlighted and as you have been for some time this great debt cycle we're in the fiscal and monetary policy issues that are driving that debt cycle and provided some input that, if we were able to cut our deficit to GDP to roughly 3, we may have a shot at a smoother transition here.
Today, the CBO estimates that the 2026 deficit to GDP is about 6%.
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So the first question I have for you, looking back on the past year of the administration and the actions of Congress and the economy are we on a good path?
Are we on no different a path than we were, say, a year ago?
Are we moving too slowly?
I've studied these big cycles in history, going back 500 years, and there are five big forces that are intertwined to determine the answer to your question, which is.
There's the debt money one, and I'll take you into that in a minute.
There is the domestic, The wealth and values gaps that are causing irreconcilable differences between the left and the right.
That is affecting how taxes, democracy and everything works.
There's the international great power conflict, the classic rising of a great power challenging existing great power and changing the international world order.
Then there's technology all through the cycles that have been technology.
And then there's acts of nature, droughts, floods, and pandemics.
And when we think of orders we're talking about, there's always a monetary order, and all monetary orders have broken down for the same reasons.
All political orders, domestic political orders, they all always change.
In the United States, less so.
We have 250 years here.
But they always change.
There was one civil war in there.
But internationally, they always change.
All orders change.
And the international geopolitical order, going from a multilateral to a unilateral world order, is changing and certainly technology is changing.
Okay, so getting that fact that they're all on there, now I'll go down to explain the government's finances and answer your question.
The economics of a country are basically the same as the economics of a company or an individual, except the government has a ability to print money.
Look at it like a company or like your own.
Basically, it's projected to spend about $7 trillion, take in about $5 trillion.
So it's running a 40% deficit, 40% of its spending.
It's been running deficits for a long time.
So it has a debt that is 600%, six times the amount of money that it takes in.
And we can project that number.
The problem with debt cycles.
And you could see them transpire.
They're almost like the circulatory system of the body.
The capital markets bring credit to different parts of the economy.
And if that Credit is used to be productive and produces an income that pays for the debt service.
It's a healthy process.
But what happens is that if the debt service grows relative to the income because it's not paying for it,
It's like a plaque in the system growing up and it squeezes out spending.
And so we now have that $2 trillion deficit.
Half of that is interest payments.
Plus, we have to roll over $9 trillion of debt that has been accumulated and is maturing.
Okay.
So now if you were to look at a company like that or an individual like that, you have that problem.
So as a handy number, 3% of GDP would sort of stabilize the situation.
Very unhealthy condition.
It's not just unhealthy because it's squeezing out those spendings, but also because there's a supply and a demand.
In other words, you have to roll over the 9 trillion of debt that's coming due and you have to sell 2 trillion more, something like that.
Okay?
So now you go to the buyers.
And the buyers, who are the buyers?
There are some domestic buyers and there are foreign buyers.
About a third are foreign buyers.
And now it's a riskier situation from their point of view.
It's riskier.
First of all, it's a lot to acquire.
Dollar-denominated debt is already a large percentage of their portfolio, larger than it would be if just decided on a prudent basis.
But also we have geopolitical risks that also extend to possibly the risks that the debtor and the creditor will have a conflict.
You can imagine that with China.
You can imagine that with Europe even.
And Europeans could wonder whether they will get sanctioned.
In other words, the debt service payments might not be made as a sanction and the United States has to worry about whether it's gonna bring in that money.
Now, the things that I'm describing have happened repeatedly through history.
So in other words, I'm not just making this stuff up.
If you were to see, particularly in the 1929 to 45 period, you saw this dynamic.
You saw it before.
So there was this financial piece, which in and of itself is not healthy for the U.S. government.
But it's also problematic because of the other factors compounding the problem.
You highlighted this problem.
You provided a diagnosis that if we could get to 3%, we could soften the effects.
But it hasn't happened.
We were all very hopeful last year around this time when Elon Musk decided to lead Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency.
He was going to go in and there were going to be these kind of big, sweeping changes to reduce government spending, find fraud, waste and abuse and so on.
Did Doge fail because the actions that were taken were wrong?
Or did Doge fail because the system itself cannot be changed at this point in the cycle?
That there's too much capital flowing.
The economy is too dependent on it.
There are too many individuals and businesses that are dependent on it.
And it's structurally impossible to pull our way out of it.
I mean, does Doge tell us something about what's possible at this stage?
Yeah, you're talking about taking an inefficient government and making it efficient.
OK, and having to do it quick because there are elections and people don't like it.
Then you know you lose your mandate and in a society in which, no matter what you do, you're criticized and torn down,
So we have the fact of the question of does democracy and our system lend itself toward the sort of executive leadership that both makes it efficient and makes it acceptable for all people?
You know there was a lot of cutbacks um, you know things like school lunch programs and things you know.
Um, and then trying to do it surgically.
So it's um, how do you do that effectively quickly, in a manner that uh doesn't?
Uh, It caused so much controversy that the government falls.
So if you look at history, that's why I deal with the political.
If you deal with history and you deal just even common sense, think you know like are you going to have the executive leadership that's going to be able to make this satisfactory with most people?
You know, and do that quickly.
I think that's a hell of a...
Hell of a trick to pull off.
Right.
So it might just be structurally, it's a little difficult at this stage.
What an understatement. structurally a little difficult at this stage.
Yeah.
Well, there was another big news story recently that there may be quite a lot of fraud going on with public dollars in Minnesota, that there are these daycares that don't exist and billions of dollars are flowing to individuals to run these daycares.
And now there's a lot of this sort of citizen journalism going on across the country that federal spending is actually being fraudulently abused.
Do you think that this is a symptom of this stage of the cycle?
What's your view on how this relates to this problem that we're generally kind of talking about?
Yeah, it's both the stage of the cycle.
And if you're going to have something well managed, are you going to have the government well manage it?
I mean how well managed you know, go to the Department of Motor Vehicles for your.
It's so big and complex and such a you know, such a mess.
Like you know, when you think, is this a surprise to you that there's all of this stuff going on all over the place in terms of inefficiency?
Is that a surprise to you?
No.
But, you know, I guess the question is, are people waking up to this?
Because last time we spoke You highlighted that a piece of your portfolio was in gold.
You had invested quite a bit in gold.
Since we spoke, I think gold has climbed from 2,900 an ounce to 5,200 an ounce.
What has happened with gold over the last year?
Is it that markets are waking up to the point in the cycle that we're in that you've been highlighting for a number of years?
At this point,
Or is it because China is structurally abandoning the US dollar and treasuries and moving more into gold and other central banks are moving into gold?
Is it because individual speculators and market participants are getting bubbly with gold?
What's your view on what's gone on with gold and how it relates to the market's acknowledgement of the stage that we're in?
It's the big cycle.
And what you have to understand is that gold is not a precious metal that's speculated on, like most people have come to think of it as.
It is the most established money, that it's the second largest reserve currency that central banks hold.
And so what we've seen is, for various reasons that I've pretty much covered the economic, the supply-demand, the political, the geopolitical.
For those reasons, central banks themselves have acquired gold to build that up.
And individuals and others are looking for an alternative money.
The question is, what is money?
So when we're thinking about this, money... mechanistically, money is debt.
What I mean by that is that if you're holding money, you're holding it in the form of a debt instrument.
And if you are holding a debt instrument, what you're getting is a promise from somebody to deliver you money.
Okay.
And, as I mentioned in the beginning, the power of the central bank's when they have too much debt is to print money.
Okay.
So if you've got that down, okay, then you can understand what's happening.
Okay.
Because the question is, Dave, what money do you think is safe?
Right.
Given what I've just said.
OK, yeah.
Yeah.
Asset back.
Right.
I want an asset.
I want to have something that's got some physical known limitation to it.
And particularly what you want is that can be transferred from one place to another, because money is both a medium of exchange and a storehold of wealth.
So in other words, if one country's central bank or government wants to pay another government, it can't just be in fixed assets like buildings.
Okay,
If you want to transact, you have to transact in something that you can transferred to them, and so on.
And gold is the only asset.
It's a long-term historic asset for reasons.
That means that it can be transferred.
They can't print a lot of it.
And it is not dependent on somebody giving you something.
In other words, most money, most if you hold debt or you hold stocks or you hold something, you're holding a promise from somebody to give you buying power.
OK, so you can like wealth is important to think to distinguish wealth from money.
OK, wealth. is in stuff.
It's in buildings, it's in companies, and so on.
But you can't spend wealth.
You have to when you want to spend it and that's the purpose of money you have to sell it and then you get money to spend.
And right now, we have an awful lot of wealth relative to money.
And the question is, what is that money?
And there's the risk that you go to get convert your wealth into money, that they're going to print money, because that's what they've always done since we've had fiat currencies.
So, as you look out and have conversations with all the market participants that you know and you know everyone that's of size and scale where are we in terms of folks converting their wealth into gold or their money into gold like, how much more do we have to run in terms of the dollar denominated value of gold in the market cycle as this great rush for the doors, rush for the exit happens?
Two things that come to mind.
What I look at is literally who has what assets including, like central banks, what is the money in, and so on.
And what is that mix?
And I look at the amount of wealth relative to money, or I look at the amount of wealth relative to gold?
And what we've seen is that there's an enormous amount of wealth and there was an enormous amount in central banks of the other money relative to hard money, gold.
And so we've seen about what I would call it go from an extremely small number to something that is a less small number.
That price increase and that change in composition has brought it almost not quite but almost toward the average of what it's been over a period of time.
So being out of balance.
However, because the wealth is total wealth is still so large relative to money.
That's a real issue.
So let me give you a practical example of this.
Wealth taxes and wealth being a risk.
One question that might be asked, are we in a bubble?
In other words, are AI stocks and other such stocks in a bubble?
If you want to get into that, we'll get into that.
But one of the things that we know from that is that one of the characteristics of bubbles is that there becomes a need for money that requires people to sell their assets to get money to meet that need.
Now, quite often that need comes from borrowing money to buy those assets.
OK, and then the assets go up in price and so on.
But what happens is it can't be sustained because you have to make the debt service payments and they're not throwing off the cash to make that.
And so they have to start to sell that.
And then you, and when you have to sell it because you need money, you need cash to pay your debt service or to pay nowadays, wealth taxes.
OK, so now we have a dynamic.
The bubble will burst as that dynamic takes place.
There are a number of things we could talk about about the bubble if you're interested.
But just imagine if you put in wealth taxes, everybody could talk about whether they like or don't like wealth taxes or something.
But anything that if you put in wealth taxes and there's a lot of fear of wealth taxes in and of itself that can drive money, wealth to cash.
And there's only one way you're going to get the cash with the wealth, and that's either sell it or to borrow against it, which causes its own cash flow issues.
And we have a dynamic having to do with the social part of this.
You know the wealth gap that makes that politically an issue.
So anyway, all I'm saying is people should worry And companies should worry, or countries should worry do they have enough gold?
I mean, if you didn't know what gold was likely to do and you had no view on gold, one should have between 5 and 15 of their portfolio in gold because of the fact of how it works with the other components.
In other words, it's a diversifier.
When the shit hits the fan okay, gold does well and the other things don't.
Generally speaking,
And because of that correlation, Depending on what else is in the portfolio, if you put it through an optimizer, you'd have something like that.
So I'm not trying to tout people on buying gold, but I would say, what is safe?
What is safe?
And it's safe as somewhere, if you had no view, between 5% and 15%.
Why hasn't Bitcoin performed in the same way?
In the same period that gold's climbed 80% since we last talked, Bitcoin's down 25%.
What's your view on what's happened with Bitcoin and why that hasn't played the role that many thought it was going to play, which is the safe haven asset?
There's an important differentiating characteristics of Bitcoin.
And then there's also, you know, like who owns it and why they bought and sell.
OK, so Bitcoin does not have privacy.
Any transactions can be monitored.
And then indirectly perhaps controlled.
Central banks are not going to want to buy Bitcoin and being able to hold it.
So it's not just individuals, it's institutions and so on, but most you know and central banks, so that there are attributes of that.
There has been some question or thoughts of the development of new technologies like quantum computing and so on.
Can there be issues regarding that?
And then there's who owns it and what are the other exposures that they have in their portfolio?
It tends to have a pretty high correlation with the tech stocks.
So from an ownership, you know just the supply demand is affected by.
If somebody gets squeezed in one thing, they sell something that, whatever else they have.
So there are those dynamics.
It's a long way and it's a relatively small market that's a relatively controllable market.
I think a lot of attention has been given to Bitcoin.
But as a money, you know, it's it's it's it's small in relationship. to gold.
And so, you know, those are the dynamics.
There is only one goal.
What about silver?
I mean, silver has had a big run up in the past year as well.
Is that a derivative to gold?
And it's effectively people playing off of the wake of gold?
Silver and its production is a residual commodity.
The supply of it is difficult to increase.
And through history, you know, like the pound sterling, silver was perceived as a monetary item.
But it has also taken on a speculative life of its own.
So, you know, people are hot in it because it's been hot.
I just want to shift gear a little bit back to something you touched on.
But the last time we met you also talked about the importance of making sure that interest rates remained low for us to kind of manage the effect and the impact of the stage of the cycle that we're in.
What's your view, I guess, today on where rates are and how the Fed has acted over the past year relative to what needs to be done to soften the effects of the stage in the cycle that we're in?
Because we have so much debt, federal debt.
Interest rates are one of the three main considerations.
There's the taxes, there's spending, and then there's interest rates on the debt.
But you can't make interest rates severely, artificially low, because one man's debts are another man's assets.
And if you make those interest rates too low for the creditor, you will produce the dynamic that we understand.
In other words, you'll produce a lot more borrowing, you'll put it into things and you can fuel a bubble.
And so at the same time, you can't have them so high that the debtor gets squeezed uneffectively.
So there's a balancing act.
You know, keep them high enough that they're adequate for the creditor, but not so high that the debtor.
So when you have a lot of debt assets and liabilities because for every debt asset there's a debt liability
And when you have a lot of those, that balancing act is very difficult.
This made more difficult, you know, because of what's called the K economy.
You know.
In other words, there are bubble elements that are going on in the part of the economy.
You know where you know the question is, who will be the first to be a trillionaire?
And that you know that top 1 of the population.
And all of that at the same time as you have the other part of the economy where, for example, 60 of all Americans have below a sixth grade reading level and to make them productive, particularly as we are also having AI have replacements for them is a particularly difficult thing to achieve.
In other words, when you have so much debt, assets and liabilities and then you have such a disparity in conditions between those that are at the top and, let's call it, the bottom 60 of the population, what that's like?
That's another hat trick.
That's another difficult thing to pull off.
So this is a challenging situation.
As far as monetary policy exists the idea of setting an interest rate and having a fiscal policy and a monetary policy that's for the economy as a whole and doesn't deal with the differences in the circumstances.
Maybe more, it is more challenging.
Well so, taking a look at Fed action and market activity, there's been a lot of reporting over the past year that a number of global central banks have stopped buying US treasuries and are shifting to gold.
Does this mean that the Fed in the US is going to have to start buying treasuries and expand their balance sheet again?
Is it inevitable that we see a re-expansion of the Fed's balance sheet in this phase in the cycle, given what's going on with global market action?
I think that it's likely down the road.
Right now, there's the shortening of maturities as a means of trying to deal with that.
Of course, that increases the debt rollover risk.
But you know, sell less long debt.
Try to hold the short rate down so that the longer rates attachment to it doesn't get, you know, helps to hold the long rate down.
And then try to use the government's power of persuasion on other countries to either buy the debt or to hold the debt, or to have other forms of capital enter the United States.
How do you like Kevin Warsh's pick for Fed chair?
What's your view on how he's going to guide interest rate policy for the central bank when he assumes his term?
It's a very, very big challenge.
I think he's a practical man.
He understands both sides of the pros and cons.
I think it's a tough job.
One of the other things that I would say was pretty surprising over the past year is how adamantly against tariffs for fear of inflation and reduced consumption, which would mean a negative effect on GDP growth.
Perhaps tariffs might be.
The president and the administration put in place a number of tariffs under the Emergency Economic Powers Act which the Supreme Court in the last week or so overturned.
But looking back on the economic effect of tariffs, what do you think economists got right and wrong about their predictions about the effect tariffs would have on the economy, on consumption, on inflation?
And are there things that economists fundamentally missed or didn't understand and why?
Yeah, I think so.
First of all, there's the tax revenue part of them.
I mean, thinking of it just as revenue.
And I think that people don't, all economists, make the mistake of not including taxes in inflation.
And what I mean by that is if your taxes go up, that's inflation.
I mean, why should it be any different than if your cost of housing goes up?
Why shouldn't it be part of the inflation calculation number?
It's taking money out of your pocket.
I mean, it's probably, you know, for a lot of people, the biggest expense.
And so when they say inflation is something separate, you know, I think it's changing the form of of inflation, in a sense.
So what I mean is, you know, through history, tariffs used to be the biggest source of revenue for government throughout most history.
And in most countries.
OK, so it is a I think it's viewed it's a totally valid way of raising money and it should be kept in consideration for that.
And and you get the foreigners paying a portion of it.
But there's also as part of the big cycle question, is the problem that we have that we are not independent.
We've had a hollowing out.
This is the big question.
We've had a hollowing out of manufacturing the middle class and so on.
Now, are we going to try to build that?
And what is the plan to build that?
Or are we going to continue on with large trade deficits and, And so you have unsustainable trade deficits that the United States has and which are capital surpluses?
In other words, the dependence on foreign capital is the other side of those trade balances.
And that's unsustainable.
So because that's unsustainable, you need some way of rectifying that.
Okay, so what is the plan to rectify that?
Partially, that plan can have trade tariffs.
I think they're totally valid, but it all has to be part of another greater plan, which is to develop the industries that we need to have developed, which we're seeing happen in a much more proactive way.
In other words, you're seeing more government activity to create infrastructure, to bring in industries and so on.
You need that not only economically, but you need it geopolitically, because you can't have dependencies.
In other words, we're entering a world of greater conflict.
We've moved from a multilateral world order to a power-based confrontational world economy.
And in that environment, everybody's threatening to cut off everything from you know the goods and capital wars that we can have are threatening.
And so you have to build independence.
And so that's part of a plan to try to build that independence.
So I think when I look at that, I don't think that's the problem.
I'd say, and it's misunderstood.
So yes, I think people are misunderstanding that.
And the important thing is we get the other things right.
You know, like, let's get down to 3%.
And by the way, there's a bipartisan bill on this.
And The 3% bill.
Scott Besant has come out in favor of it.
I'm in favor of it.
I mean, lots of people are in favor of what I'll call the 3 three-part solution.
3 of GDP, three parts, a bit from one thing, a bit from another taxes, spending and hopefully, interest rates.
And just to take the inflation question to its conclusion at the State of the Union this week, President Trump shared his vision, which is that tariffs can completely replace an income tax in the United States.
Do you think that that's a feasible path?
Does it make sense at some point for tariffs, which are effectively a consumption tax?
I don't think it's going to.
No, I don't think it's anywhere near that, both because of a combination of the size and then the impact of that size.
Tariffs are regressive.
And I think that there needs to be some, we have to deal with the wealth gap.
To me, the wealth gap, the biggest problem of the wealth gap, which is a big social problem, is also the productivity gap.
And you have to make most people productive.
And you have to do that through infrastructure and so on.
And I think that needs to be addressed.
It's a really important point you just made.
I think my analysis indicates that nearly half of Americans either work for a government agency or a government service provider or contractor.
The data over the past year is the federal workforce declined by 317000 employees, roughly 14 of the total federal workforce.
As this administration has reduced the size of some of these agencies, reduced the size of that workforce.
What happens to those individuals?
Do they go work in the private workforce and become productive?
Or do you think they're getting subsumed by other government agencies, either state or local or government service providers, to do work that fundamentally is not productive to growing the economy?
I haven't studied the numbers.
I don't think I can adequately answer that.
I would say government is extremely inefficient.
It has a role.
It has an important role.
But even that role it's handling very inefficiently.
Other governments handle that role of maybe education, some of these things in a better way.
We need fundamental, we need, you know, best thing you could invest in is education.
But anyway, where they go and what they do from the government and you know the other inefficiencies is a problem.
The one thing that's good about the system, that the capitalist system in a sense is it doesn't live if it can't, if somebody either won't bet on it or it doesn't make a profit.
So, yeah.
So I think wherever it goes, it's wherever those people go.
There are just so many inefficient people and inefficient systems.
Is there not enough productivity-driven economic growth in this nation at this time to give more people the opportunity to improve their income, improve their wealth, improve their livelihoods?
Is that the fundamental issue we're dealing with at the moment?
Or is it that you know people aren't prepared or educated to be productive and therefore the system itself has failed them?
There are three things basically that you need to do to be successful.
You have to first educate your children well and so that they are capable of being productive, and also educate them in civility, so that they are civil with each other.
The second is then they have to come out to an environment that is, an orderly civil environment that people can compete and work with and compete and work with each other to be productive.
That works for the most people.
And the third thing is you have to stay out of wars.
You have to have no civil war and no international war.
If you do those three things right, you will have a successful country.
That's all throughout history.
Okay, we're having problems with those.
And are those three things the antidote to some of the rising movements that we're seeing in increased unionization and effects that unions are having on the political process, which is also leading to these rises in socialism and support for socialist movements in the United States, as well as the wealth taxes which, from the view that's shared by those participating in those movements, they are meant to solve income inequality, wealth gap issues that we're seeing in the United States?
So that's their solution, is the solution to those movements education and civility, creating a civil environment and staying out of wars.
Is that all we need to do to make this successful?
Or is there more to the equation?
That's it.
What we need... is to stop fighting.
Okay, we're now at a stage where we have irreconcilable differences.
In other words, when the causes people are behind are more important to them than the system, the system is in jeopardy.
Our system is in jeopardy because People will not accept the system or the alternatives.
And so they're going to fight.
You know, I think I think when we have we're going to have the midterm elections you're going to go past the midterm elections with probably that Democrats will take the House and maybe, I don't know, it's going to be difficult.
And you know what?
Nobody can succeed because everybody's going to be fighting.
They're going to all be fighting.
Okay.
So how does that affect productivity?
Okay.
And then when you deal with things like how do you get a good education system?
So you have now almost the mob disorder, mob disorder and inefficiency.
Nobody's allowed to take charge of this.
If you go back in history, Plato you know I think it was like 350 BC wrote about the cycle, you know, of democracies and the threat to democracies.
What's happening now is similar to Julius Caesar and Rome and being, you know, stabbed in the Senate.
And what you need is you need a bipartisan...
You need the country to have a strong, almost a strong leader.
We do need a strong leader to get the reforms done to make the country work well.
But I mean.
So how do you force this mob of people who are behaving this way, including in the elections, and so fragment to create order?
So you need a tough leader.
Will force them to do different, force things to difficult things and not fight with each other and focus on being productive.
That's what you need, I think.
It sounds a little like there may be this inevitable path of the choice that no one wants to make between some form of socialism and some form of fascism.
Is that where this goes?
I think we're moving toward that war.
We're in that war.
We're in what I call stage five of a cycle, okay?
In the book, I describe the pattern that's happened over and over again.
And when you get to this position, when there are bad finances combined with large wealth and values, gaps and irreconcilable differences, and you have external threats as well as domestic threats, you have this dynamic.
I think that's where we are.
I'm like a mechanic.
My goal, I'm not ideological.
I'm just a practical guy trying to make money in the markets and trying to describe things, and that's what it looks like.
I think when we look at on AI.
What a lot of people don't realize in bubbles is that through all technologies, they think that they are betting on the technology when they buy the stocks in the companies.
That's not true.
Okay?
There's a giant difference between the behavior of the companies and the behavior of the technologies, and that the norm is in these is that a lot of companies won't survive in the start.
Very small percentage, and they'll all fight and so on.
But the technologies will go on, and it'll be great.
The technologies will.
So I want to emphasize to people that dynamic.
And I can go on and describe what it's like.
Of course, we've seen it to some extent with the 2000 bubble in the technologies and what went on.
But even if I describe what it was like in the late 20s, you know it's just.
It was unbelievable that the technologies will go on but the companies won't necessarily go on.
And so when I'm looking at that, that has big implications.
Right now, it looks to me like AI is basically is eating everything and it might eat itself.
And what I mean by that is not produce adequate profits.
We can't take just a domestic view of that.
We have to look also at what's happening in China and make interesting distinctions there.
You know, there's a difference in philosophy that's carried through in the economy and of how the economies of the United States and China work, in that we have basically primarily a profit-based system.
They have a system in which they might believe that profits are a second consideration.
They're not necessarily needed in order to achieve the best results.
For example, in China, they would say usage of AI is fantastic, so it should be like electricity or something and let's make it free for everyone and let's make it open source for everyone.
Okay, and they might get much higher usage and they'll get their productivity gains through the usage and we have a profit system to pay back, okay.
Well, now we're in one world.
How do you compete in that world?
What do you do with that?
In other words, just imagine that their technologies are almost as good as ours because they are.
They're not far behind.
And and then but that you could get them for free.
Open source.
OK, now you got to pay it back.
OK, so I just want to emphasize that these are also systematic risks that enter into the picture of AI.
But you certainly, yeah, there are a lot of unknowns here.
As we wrap looking back on the history of this nation, I ask myself the question a lot how did we get to the point that we've gotten to in terms of the amount of debt, the amount of government spending, the role that the central bank has played and the risks that we find ourselves in today?
That all seem largely avoidable if we hadn't taken or made the decisions we made along the way.
You've highlighted that they repeat over and over again.
But if you could go back and restructure the United States and be a founding father and write the Constitution yourself, what are one to three things that you would have done differently?
What would you have written into the Constitution that may have prevented us from getting into the situation that we're in today?
Well, I mean, it's like the marshmallow test.
You know the marshmallow test.
You want to see it as a kid going at an early age.
You give them the choice between one marshmallow now and two marshmallows in 20 minutes.
And the kid that chooses the two marshmallows in 20 minutes is going to have a better life and make better decisions, kind of thing.
I mean that therein lies our problem the immediate gratification and also the not knowing if things are going to be productive.
But the system has been remarkably adaptable to.
In other words, we've gone through crises, we've wiped out debts and we've gotten past it.
And there are certain ways of getting past it.
But you know it's a tough question to balance financial prudence with innovative inventions.
You know, because like particularly take AI now.
Nobody knows what's going to come of it and what way, right?
Is it going to pay?
Is it not going to pay?
And all of that.
And so what do you write into the law that is going to get you financial prudence?
And And do you, when you write it into the law, does that lessen the experimentation and you know, the entrepreneurship and all of the things that you know.
So it's tough to do this with with rules.
I think maybe the main thing is, I would say, read history.
Read history and know these things and try to get that balance right.
Everything's a matter of the balance.
So the balance of the pain of failing or the pain of putting money into something that fails.
Well, Ray, I want to thank you once again for taking the time. to be here with me.
It's always great to catch up, hear your perspective.
Obviously, so much has changed in the last year, and yet so much hasn't.
It's been great to get your view on it, and I think it's really helpful to do this.
So thanks so much.
And thank you for what you guys do.
I'm riveted to your program, and I think you make a great contribution.
So conversations like this are are really practical helps for a lot of people.
So anyway, thank you for letting me participate.
And thank you for what you do for a lot of people.
Thank you.
That's right.
