Ray Dalio: "AI Is Eating Everything - and It Might Eat Itself"

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. You had provided some very 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 have been highlighting for some time—this Big 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 ratio to roughly 3%, we may have a shot at a smoother transition here. Today, the CBO estimates that the 2026 deficit-to-GDP ratio is about 6%. If you were building a global financial system from first principles today, you wouldn't build it on 50-year-old legacy rails. You'd build Airwallex. It's the single platform for global accounts, cards, and payments that treats the entire world like a local market. Stop paying the legacy tax and start building the future at airwallex.com/allin. Airwallex, build the future.

So, the first question I have for you, looking back on the past year of the administration, the actions of Congress, and the economy, is: 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 5 big forces that are intertwined to determine the answer to your question. There’s the debt-money one, and I’ll take you into that in a minute. There are the domestic gaps—the wealth and values gaps—that are causing irreconcilable differences between the left and the right, affecting how taxes, democracy, and everything works. There’s the international great-power conflict: the classic rising of a great power challenging an existing great power and changing the international world order. Then there’s technology. All through these cycles, there has been technology. And then there are acts of nature: droughts, floods, and pandemics.

When we think of orders, we’re talking about a monetary order, and all monetary orders have broken down for the same reasons. All political orders—all domestic political orders—always change. In the United States, less so; we have 250 years here, but they always change. There was 1 civil war in there. Internationally, they always change—all orders change. The international geopolitical order, going from a multilateral to a unilateral world order, is changing, and certainly technology is changing.

Okay. So, given that they’re all in play, I’ll 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 the ability to print money. Look at it like a company or like your own finances. Basically, it’s projected to spend about $7 trillion and 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%—6 times the amount of money that it takes in—and we can project that number.

The problem with debt cycles, and you can see them transpire, is that 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 productively 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 plaque building up in the system, and it squeezes out spending. 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.

If you were to look at a company or an individual like that, you’d have that problem. So, 3% of GDP was a handy number that would sort of stabilize the situation. It’s a very unhealthy condition. It’s not just unhealthy because it’s squeezing out spending, 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.

So, now you go to 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. First of all, it’s a lot to acquire. Their dollar-denominated debt is already a large percentage of their portfolio, larger than it would be on a prudent basis. But we also have political and geopolitical risks that extend to the possibility that the debtor and the creditor will have a conflict. You could imagine that with China. You could imagine that with Europe, even.

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 going to bring in that money. The things that I’m describing have happened repeatedly through history. I’m not just making this stuff up. If you were to look particularly at the 1929–1945 period, you saw this dynamic. You saw it before.

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 effect, 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 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? Is there too much capital flowing, with the economy too dependent on it and too many individuals and businesses dependent on it? Is it structurally impossible to pull our way out of it? Does DOGE tell us something about what’s possible at this stage?

You’re talking about taking an inefficient government and making it efficient, and having to do it quickly because there are elections. If people don’t like it, then you lose your mandate. In a society in which, no matter what you do, you’re criticized and torn down, we have the question of whether democracy and our system lend themselves toward the sort of executive leadership that both makes it efficient and makes it acceptable to all people.

There were a lot of cutbacks, things like school lunch programs, and then trying to do it surgically. So, how do you do that effectively and quickly, in a manner that doesn’t cause so much controversy that the government falls?

If you look at history, and even common sense, are you going to have the executive leadership that’s going to be able to make this satisfactory to most people and do that quickly? I think that’s a hell of a trick to pull off.

Right. So, it might just be structurally 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. There were these daycares that don’t exist, and billions of dollars are flowing to individuals to run these daycares. 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 the problem that we’re generally talking about?

It’s both the stage of the cycle and the question of whether, if you’re going to have something well managed, you’re going to have the government manage it well. How well managed is it? Go to the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s so big and complex and such a mess. When you think about it, is it 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 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 you’ve been highlighting for a number of years at this point? Or is it because China is structurally abandoning the U.S. 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 going on with gold and how it relates to the market’s acknowledgment 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, and it's the second largest reserve country currency that central banks hold. What we've seen is that, for various reasons that I've pretty much covered—the economic, the supply-demand, the political, and the geopolitical—central banks themselves have acquired gold to build that up. Individuals and others are looking for an alternative form of money.

The question is: What is money? When we're thinking about this 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. If you're holding a debt instrument, what you're getting is a promise from somebody to deliver you money.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the power of the central banks when they have too much debt is to print money. If you've got that down, then you can understand what's happening. The question is, Dave, what money do you think is safe, given what I've just said?

Yeah, yeah—I want something asset-backed. Right, I want an asset. I want to have something that's got some physical, known limitation to it. Particularly, what you want is something that can be transferred from one place to another, because money is both a medium of exchange and a store of wealth.

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. If you want to transact, you have to transact in something that you can transfer to them, and so on.

Gold is the only asset. It's a long-term, historic asset for reasons. 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—if you hold debt, or stocks, or something—you're holding a promise from somebody to give you buying power.

It's important to distinguish wealth from money. Wealth is in stuff. It's in buildings, it's in companies, and so on. But you can't spend wealth. 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. Right now, we have an awful lot of wealth relative to money. The question is: What is that money? There's the risk that you go to convert your wealth into money and they're going to print money, because that's what they've always done since we've had fiat currencies.

As you look out and have conversations with all the market participants that 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? 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 come to mind. What I look at is literally who has what assets, including central banks. What is the money, and what is that mix? I look at the amount of wealth relative to money, or I look at the amount of wealth relative to gold. What we've seen is that there's an enormous amount of wealth, and there was an enormous amount of other money in central banks relative to hard money—gold.

We've seen it go from what I would call an extremely small number to something that is a less small number. That price increase and that change in composition have brought it almost—not quite, but almost—toward the average of what it's been over a period of time. So, it's been out of balance. However, because total wealth is still so large relative to money, that's a real issue.

Let me give you a practical example of wealth taxes and wealth being a risk. One question that might be asked is: 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 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.

Quite often, that need comes from borrowing money to buy those assets. Then the assets go up in price and so on. But it can't be sustained because you have to make the debt-service payments, and they're not throwing off the cash to make those payments. So, they have to start to sell those assets. When you have to sell them because you need money—you need cash to pay your debt service or, nowadays, wealth taxes—now we have a dynamic. The bubble will burst as that dynamic takes place.

There are a number of things we could talk about regarding the bubble if you're interested. But just imagine if you put in wealth taxes. Everybody can talk about whether they like or don't like wealth taxes or something. If you put in wealth taxes, and there's a lot of fear of wealth taxes in and of itself, that can drive wealth to cash. There's only one way you're going to get the cash from the wealth, and that's either to sell it or to borrow against it, which causes its own cash-flow issues. We have a dynamic having to do with the social part of this—the wealth gap—that makes that politically an issue.

All I'm saying is people should worry, and companies should worry, or countries should worry. Do they have enough gold? 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 one's portfolio in gold because of how it works with the other components. In other words, it's a diversifier: when it hits the fan, gold does well and the other things don't, generally speaking. 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. I'm not trying to tout people on buying gold, but I would say: What is safe? What is safe? If you had no view, somewhere between 5% and 15% is safe.

Why hasn't Bitcoin performed in the same way? In the same period that gold 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 are important differentiating characteristics of Bitcoin, and then there's also who owns it and why they buy and sell it. Bitcoin does not have privacy. Transactions can be monitored and then, indirectly, perhaps controlled. Central banks are not going to want to buy Bitcoin and be able to hold it. So, it's not just individuals; it's institutions and so on, but not central banks. Those are some of the attributes.

There have been some questions or thoughts about the development of new technologies like quantum computing and so on. Can there be issues regarding that? Then there's also who owns it and what other exposures they have in their portfolio. It tends to have a pretty high correlation with the tech stocks. From an ownership perspective, supply and demand are affected if somebody gets squeezed in one thing: they sell whatever else they have. So, there are those dynamics.

It's a relatively small, relatively controllable market. I think a lot of attention has been given to Bitcoin, but as money, it's small in relationship to gold. So, those are the dynamics. There is only one gold.

What about silver? Silver has had a big run-up in the past year as well. Is that a derivative of gold, and is it effectively people playing off the wake of gold-price movement?

Silver, in its production, is a residual commodity. The supply of it is difficult to increase. Through history, like the pound sterling, silver was perceived as a monetary item, but it has also taken on a speculative life of its own. People are hot on it because it's been hot.

I just want to shift gears a little bit back to something you touched on. The last time we met, you also talked about the importance of making sure that interest rates remain low for us to manage the effect and the impact of the stage of the cycle that we're in. What's your view 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 3 main considerations. There are taxes, spending, and then interest rates on the debt. But you can't make interest rates severely and artificially low, because one man's debts are another man's assets. If you make those interest rates too low for the creditor, you will produce a dynamic that we understand. In other words, they'll produce a lot more borrowing, they'll put it into things, and you can fuel a bubble.

At the same time, you can't have them so high that the debtor gets squeezed unaffectedly. So, there's a balancing act: keep them high enough that they're adequate for the creditor, but not so high that the debtor gets squeezed. 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 is made more difficult because of what's called the K-shaped economy. In other words, there are bubble elements going on in one part of the economy—where the question is who will be the first to be a trillionaire, with 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 read below a 6th-grade level.

And to make them productive, particularly as we are also having AI replace them, is a particularly difficult thing to achieve. In other words, when you have so many dead assets and liabilities, and then you have such a disparity in conditions between those at the top and, let's call it, the bottom 60% of the population, what that's like is another hat trick. That's another difficult thing to pull off. So this is a challenging situation. As far as monetary policy is concerned, the idea of setting an interest rate and having a fiscal policy and a monetary policy for the economy as a whole, without dealing with the differences in circumstances, is more challenging.

Well, 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 U.S. Treasuries and are shifting to gold. Does this mean the Fed in the U.S. is going to have to start buying Treasuries and expand its balance sheet again? Is it inevitable that we see a reexpansion of the Fed's balance sheet in this phase of the cycle, given what's going on with global market activity?

I think that'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 sell less long-term debt, try to hold the short rate down because the longer rates are attached to it, which 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, hold the debt, or 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, 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 economists were, for fear of inflation and reduced consumption, which would perhaps mean a negative effect on GDP growth. The president and the administration put in place a number of tariffs under the emergency economic powers act, which the Supreme Court overturned in the last week or so. But looking back on the economic effect of tariffs, what do you think economists got right and wrong in their predictions about the effect tariffs would have on the economy, consumption, and inflation? 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—thinking of that just as revenue. I think economists make the mistake of not including taxes in inflation. What I mean by that is, if your taxes go up, that's inflation. Why shouldn't it be any different from if your cost of housing goes up? Why shouldn't it be part of the inflation calculation? It's taking money out of your pocket. It's probably, for a lot of people, the biggest expense.

So when they say inflation is something separate, I think it's changing the form of inflation, in a sense. What I mean is, through history, tariffs used to be the biggest source of revenue for the government throughout most of history and in most countries. So I think it's viewed as a totally valid way of raising money, and it should be kept in consideration for that. And you get the foreigners paying a portion of it.

But as part of the big-cycle question, the problem we have is that we are not independent. 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 with large trade deficits? You have unsustainable trade deficits that the United States has, which are capital surpluses. In other words, the dependence on foreign capital is the other side of those trade balances, and that's unsustainable.

Because that's unsustainable, you need some way of rectifying that. Part of that plan can include 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, bring in industries, and so on.

You need that not only economically, but 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. In that environment, everybody's threatening to cut off everything. The goods and capital wars that we can have are threatening. And so you have to build independence. That's part of a plan to try to build that independence.

So when I look at that, I don't think that's the problem. I'd say it's misunderstood. Yes, I think people are misunderstanding that. The important thing is that we get the other things right. Let's get down to 3%, and by the way, there's a bipartisan bill on this—the 3% bill. [?] has come out in favor of it. I'm in favor of it. 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's a feasible path? Does it make sense at some point for tariffs, which are effectively consumption taxes—

I don't think it's going to—no, I don't think it's anywhere near that, both because of the 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 biggest problem of the wealth gap, which is a social problem, is also the productivity gap. You have to make most people productive. You have to do that through infrastructure and so on. 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, a government service provider, or a contractor. The data over the past year shows that the federal workforce declined by 317,000 employees, roughly 14% of the total federal workforce. As this administration has reduced the size of some of these agencies and 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—an important role—but even that role, it's handling very inefficiently. Other governments handle that role, maybe education and some of these things, in a better way. The best thing you could invest in is education.

But anyway, where they go and what they do from the government, and the other inefficiencies, is a problem. The one thing that's good about the capitalist system, in a sense, is that it doesn't live if somebody either won't bet on it or it doesn't make a profit. So 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, and improve their livelihoods? Is that the fundamental issue we're dealing with at the moment, or is it that 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 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 that they have to come out into an environment that is orderly and civil, where people can compete and work with each other to be productive, and where that works for most people. And the third thing is that you have to stay out of wars. You can't have a civil war or an international war.

If you do those three things right, you will have a successful country. That's true throughout history. We're having problems with those.

And are those three things the antidote to some of the rising movements that we're seeing, including increased unionization and the 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 wealth taxes, which, from the view shared by those participating in those movements, are meant to solve income inequality and 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 it?

Yes. What we need is to stop fighting. 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. I think when we have the midterm elections, we're going to go past the midterm elections with probably the Democrats taking the House—and maybe, I don't know. It's going to be difficult.

Nobody can succeed because everybody's going to be fighting. They're all going to be fighting. So how does that affect productivity? And then, when you deal with things like how do you get a good education system, you have now almost mob disorder and inefficiency. Nobody's allowed to take charge of this.

If you go back in history, Plato, around 350 B.C., wrote about the cycle of democracies and the threat to democracies. What's happening now is similar to Julius Caesar and Rome, with Caesar being stabbed in the Senate. What you need is 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.

How do you force this mob of people, who are behaving this way, including in the elections, and are so fragmented, to create order? You need a tough leader who will force them to do difficult things, 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—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 5 of a cycle. In the book, I described the pattern that's happened over and over again. When you get to this position, when there are bad finances combined with large wealth and values gaps, irreconcilable differences, and 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 is 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.

When we look at the bubble question around AI, what a lot of people don't realize about bubbles is that, through all technologies, they think they're betting on the technology when they buy the stocks in the companies. That's not true. There's a giant difference between the behavior of the companies and the behavior of the technologies.

The norm in these situations is that a lot of companies won't survive. At the start, a very small percentage will, and they'll all fight and so on. But the technologies will go on, and they'll be great. The technologies will.

I want to emphasize that dynamic to people. We've seen it to some extent with the 2000 bubble in technology and what went on. Even if I describe what it was like in the late '20s, it was unbelievable. But the technologies will go on, and the companies won't necessarily go on.

When I'm looking at that, it has big implications. Right now, it looks to me like AI is basically eating everything, and it might eat itself. What I mean by that is that it might not produce adequate profits.

We can't take just a domestic view of that. We also have to look at what's happening in China and make interesting distinctions there. There's a difference in philosophy that's carried through in how the economies of the United States and China work. We have 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. Let's make it free for everyone, and let's make it open source for everyone.” They might get much higher usage, and they'll get their productivity gains through the usage. We have a profit system to pay back.

Now we're in one world. How do you compete in that world? What do you do with that? Imagine that their technologies are almost as good as ours, because they are. They're not far behind. Then imagine that you could get them for free, open source. You have to pay yours back.

I just want to emphasize that these are also systematic risks that enter into the picture with AI.

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—all of which seem largely avoidable if we hadn't taken or made the decisions we made along the way?

You've highlighted that these patterns repeat over and over again. But if you could go back and restructure the United States, be a Founding Father, and write the Constitution yourself, what are 1 to 3 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 we're in today?

It's like the marshmallow test. You know the marshmallow test? You want to see it. At an early age, you give a kid the choice between 1 marshmallow now and 2 marshmallows in 20 minutes. The kid who chooses 2 marshmallows in 20 minutes is going to have a better life and make better decisions, kind of thing.

Therein lies our problem: immediate gratification and not knowing whether things are going to be productive. But the system has been remarkably adaptable, too. In other words, we've gone through crises, we've wiped out debts, and we've gotten past them. There are certain ways of getting past them.

It's a tough question to balance financial prudence with innovative inventions. Take AI now. Nobody knows what's going to come of it, or in what way. Is it going to pay? Is it not going to pay? And all of that.

What do you write into the law that's going to get you financial prudence and control? When you write it into the law, does that lessen the experimentation, the entrepreneurship, and all of the things that come with them? It's tough to do this with rules.

I think maybe the main thing I would say is: Read history. Read history, know these things, and try to get that balance right. Everything's a matter of balance. So is the balance between the pain of failing and the pain of putting money into something that fails.

Ray, I want to thank you once again for taking the time to be here with me. It's always great to catch up and 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. Thanks so much.

Thank you for what you guys do. I'm riveted to your program, and I think you make a great contribution. Conversations like this are practical help for a lot of people. Anyway, thank you for letting me participate, and thank you for what you do for a lot of people.

Thank you.

That's right. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.