Ray Dalio: Our System Is in Jeopardy - Debt, AI & the Cycle That Destroyed Rome

Ray Dalio, welcome back to the All In podcast. Third time's the charm. Thanks for being here. It's always, 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%. I'm doing all in. 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 slash all in. Airwallex, build the future. All in. 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 five hundred 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 gaps, 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 these cycles, there have been technology. And then there's, acts of nature: droughts, floods, and pandemics. So, 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 two hundred and fifty years here. But, they always change. There was one civil war in there. And then they, 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 …