Arthur Hayes Predicts Massive Market Crash and Bitcoin Surge by 2030

Cape: 33% off your first 6 months with code IMPACT at https://cape.co/impact HomeServe: Help protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month at https://homeserve.com Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Huel: 15% off with this exclusive offer for New Customers only with code impact at https://huel.com/impact(Minimum $75 purchase). Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod IT EPISODES: What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Welcome back to part two of this incredible conversation. Without further ado, here we go. If we know that the government is going to print, if we know that Trump is doing everything he can to drive interest rates lower, and we know that both of those things are inflationary, they will drive up asset prices, they will make houses more expensive, they'll make rent more expensive, on and on and on. What does the world look like over the next three years as that easy money continues to flood the system?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I mean, S and P 10,000, NASDAQ 100,000, Bitcoin 1 million, gold 15,000, right? Pick your assets, they're all going up. Maybe some go up more than the others.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  But that is the state of play. And so then the question is, how do you take whatever savings that you have and buy one of those things? Whatever is you feel comfortable buying, because those are the things that have to go up as a release valve for let's run the economy hot, let's allow wage inflation, uh, let's reduce the debt to GDP on the government's balance sheet.

• 2:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you've talked about how Trump would effectively take over the Fed. How does he do that? Because right now, obviously, he's not able to get the things done that he wants to get done. So how would he pull that coup off? And

• 3:05Tom Bilyeu?

  in a magical world where you have a wand and you can either help him or stop him, would you help him get control of the Fed is what he wants, what you want to see happen? Or would you stop him?

• 3:18Speaker 02

  So I answer the last question first. I'm a financial asset owner, so I want what he wants. I want cheap money and I want it to be plentiful, right? I own the things that are gonna go up because, because this works, right? So, and no, that's, that's just the, the truth of it. If you own a house, you want what Trump wants to have, have happen, right? He's gonna pump your house price too. Now, the, the situation is, you know, how does he gain control of the Fed? So first of all, every single US president since the Fed has been created always gets the monetary policy that they want. This is not a news phenomenon where the, you know, the president and the chairman of the Fed are, are butting heads. This is not new.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  And always the Fed chairman, whoever that is, caves or the Fed as a political body. There's a great essay written by Arthur Burns in 1979, The Anger of Central Banking, where he essentially says that because the politicians want to provide this free money to do stuff for the people, because the people have elected him to do this, we as a Fed, whether we like it or not, are there to facilitate that. And the, um, the thing that will let go is the value of the currency and sort of responsibility of, you know, what is the value of the dollar? And we will always do that. It's essentially the message that he said. This is the 1979. So people need to do a real little bit of history in terms of.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Understanding that Trump, Biden, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Reagan, they all got the monetary policy that they wanted in the end. And so Trump will get it. I wrote an essay called four seven and we talked about the bureaucratic mechanisms on how Fed votes and how you get control of this board versus that board. Maybe that's something like that. Maybe, you know, everyone in the Fed is convicted of mortgage fraud and you replace it all. I don't know. It doesn't really matter. All I know is that there's, there's never been a president who's never gotten the monetary policy that they desire. Trump will get his monetary policy. How long it takes? I think sometime in the, you know, second half of two thousand twenty six, he'll get another monetary policy that he wants, however he does it.

• 5:22Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. You painted a picture, or maybe I painted it and you agreed, of what's going to happen when Trump gets the economy that he wants, or the Fed to do what he wants. And that's asset prices go up. But right now, asset prices are down. So what's going on with Bitcoin, Ethereum?

• 5:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. And other assets that we see struggling right now. What, what's the underlying cause?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  The underlying cause is the Fed is not printing as much money as we thought they were as fast. And the technical thing is, you know, the government shutdown, so the debt ceiling fight ended in July 4th, and the US Treasury essentially had to pull a trillion dollars out of the economy to rebuild its checking account. And that's essentially in a very simplistic manner, why Bitcoin all of a sudden caught up with that, that destruction of credit, and is previewing what could happen to equities if the Fed doesn't change course. Now, starting in December 1st, quantitative tightening, i.e. the balance sheet reduction of the Fed, ends. The US banking system is starting to issue more loans and these are loans that are going

• 6:36Speaker 02

  to the industrials that the Trump administration wants to build things, whether that's weapons or nuclear or semiconductors or rare earths, what have you. The banks are starting to lend to those companies who are now getting government guarantees for contracts. That only accelerates. So I think this little bit of period of weakness in crypto is very minimal. Well, keep going back up as credit expands. The quantitative tightening ends at the Fed, Trump gains control of the Fed, sometime in 2026, and money is printed in some way, shape or form. There's also the housing market. A key policy of the Trump administration is to pump housing. It's a key policy of every

• 7:18Speaker 02

  single administration. I don't care if it's Republican or Democrat. And so, again, I think people need to take out this partisan nature of like, oh, Trump's a Republican, he's bad because I'm a Democrat and I oppose these things that he's gonna do. Well, put in Kamala Harris as a Democrat, she'd be doing the same stuff. And so I think, once you remove all that, then you're saying, okay, well, why am I trying to fight this? If I'm not going to fundamentally get politically active and change the system that puts this structure on how I am as a financial person in this world, then I better just get with the program. And it's buy stocks, buy crypto, buy

• 8:00Speaker 02

  gold, don't use leverage, and just wait, and it'll go up.

• 8:06Tom Bilyeu?

  What does it tell us about human nature or the markets in general that people just cannot bear to wait? They always panic. Like, they didn't expect that it was gonna go down. This whole notion of this time is different is so wild to me. So yeah, what do you take away every time people start freaking out when the price dips?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  We're all human at the end of the day, and this is this is human nature. The, you know, the market is not there to make you money if you're over if you over trade. And this has always been the case. There's nothing changed. We're still humans. We're still these, you know, lizard brained mammals that live in this, you know, new computer age world. Like, it's only been 150 years since we really have sort of emerged from pretty much like subsistence, very basic subsistence. So I think that, you know, human nature is human nature. And so the average human is impatient, wants the future today, is willing to gamble to get it. And unfortunately, the politicians play on that.

• 9:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that that is for sure. So as you look out into the future, you know that humans are gonna react that way.

• 9:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you see anything that can change the divergent economies? Because this is the thing that probably I worry the most about is, given that human nature, given how busy people are, given that some people don't have the intellectual capability to understand it, given that many have the capability but just aren't going to put the time into understanding it.

• 9:45Tom Bilyeu?

  They are going to be moved by policy decisions, full stop. They are not going to go, oh, well, given that there's money printing, I know assets are going to go up, so let me go get in assets. Do you worry about that? Do you not think about that at all? Like, how do you factor that into your calculus?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Well, obviously, you worry about societal breakdown. And I think we talked a lot about this sort of this AI battle that we're gonna have versus should we have it? If we do have it, who should benefit from it? Or maybe we shouldn't have it at all. These that's gonna be the colossal defining sort of battle of of this century in the same way that communism versus capitalism, if you want to reduce sort of the imperialism, if you want to reduce the two world wars to those very, you know, simplistic terms, was the defining moment of sort of late 19th to early 20th century humanity. Right? And we're sort of living in that reaction to that and that post World War II, World War I situation right now. This is the funny moment of what it means to be human.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Are we gonna blow ourselves up because we couldn't decide how to share AI? I don't know. I think that's the the number one question.

• 10:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60, and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax. The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag. That's why everything they make runs 50 to 80% less. And it's not just the cashmere. I ordered a few things myself, their fleece joggers, a couple of their tees, which I wear obsessively.

• 11:38Tom Bilyeu?

  First thing I noticed was the quality. Soft, well-made, built to hold up. They make down jackets and wool outerwear now too. So upgrade your stuff to things you'll actually wear. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time.

• 12:20Tom Bilyeu?

  And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material. It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number, to anyone willing to pay. Incogni goes after that supply. They handle removal requests across 420-plus harmful broker sites. And they keep checking back as brokers constantly try to relist you. On the Unlimited Plan, the Exposure Scanner hunts down your information. Send a link and their privacy experts handle the takedown. Track your progress in the app and get a monthly risk assessment showing exactly where you stand.

• 13:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Go to incogni.com/impact and use code IMPACT for 60% off an annual plan. Incogni is I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash impact. Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

• 13:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it. I worry very much about society tearing itself apart. Oh, this is another reason. You don't live in America. So, in America, man, it's really palpable. And you can feel it. Like, I even have to think about, like, what advertisers are going to consider me speaking to their demographic. Certainly, politically, everybody's on a team. When you listen to the way that people talk, everybody speaks in team talk. If I wanted my channel to triple in views overnight, I would just pick a team and just do the team talking points. It is crazy. I know how effective that would be.

• 14:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Because people want that team perspective. Everybody wants to be in their own echo chamber. They want the heuristics of just tell me how to think. They don't want... Like, I'm all about cause and effect. So, I'm always trying to lay out what's the cause and effect and where does this go? And so, when I look at this particular problem, which is that most people, either because they can't or they won't, they're never going to get into assets. And so, that problem is not going away. And so, and then I have the belief, the base assumption, that the only problem that's impossible to solve is the political problem. The other problems, maybe. But the political problem, I don't think is ever going to be solved.

• 14:49Tom Bilyeu?

  They will give things away for free because it is how you gain and retain power. And only on the other side of tremendous pain will a culture change. This is why every empire has fallen. So, that's my big concern. So, from a...

• 15:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do I make the content that I make? I'm making the content in the hopes that I can make a simple set of choices accessible to more people so that at least more people will get on the life raft. But for that, people have to face what's actually going to happen. And... Yeah, man. I don't I don't know how many people are gonna do it.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  I think the the United States is specific because that's the majority of your audience is not in the worst off shape of all countries that are highly indebted. There's no enemies, right? There's two big oceans. Canada and Mexico are essentially vassal states of the United States. The United States is energy self sufficient at the right price, right? Oil is too cheap right now. That's why shale is struggling and some of these oil producers. There's plenty of offshore drilling to give oil and natural gas to the US. They have enough energy to be self sufficient. There's plenty of food in the United States. Yes, maybe it's not the best quality and there's too much high fructose corn syrup or whatever nonsense that is in the food supply in the US. But again, there is enough food in the US. So the debt is a problem, kind of.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  But from a holistic standpoint, I don't see this like zombie apocalypse, hyperinflationary problem for the United States anytime soon. When you think about Rome, right? It took hundreds of years for Rome to fall after the underlying economic model didn't work. They couldn't import enough slaves to do enough labor. And there's not enough free, you know, Italian, Roman citizens to do stuff. Took hundreds of years before, you know, Rome fell. Like, the United States is not going anywhere just because the debt to GDP is 135 or 140%. Like, there's, you know, an immense capacity to add more debt in the US situation. Life might not be the most fun and, you know, pleasurable for a lot of people.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  But I don't see this as this sort of like, oh, my God, the US is going to blow up sort of situation. Because again, there's enough food, there's enough energy at the right price. And there's no intern, sorry, outside invader is going to come to the US and sort of like take over. They're like, why would you want to do that? Who wants to rule the United States? Like, that'd be the dumbest thing I could ever think of.

• 17:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, well, then let me walk you through my thesis on what's going to happen next. So this is how I see this playing out. We're stuck in Thucydides' trap. China's on the rise. We're on the decline. No declining power ever has just gracefully accepted that they were being surpassed. England being the most recent example. Only accepted defeat because they just got battered so hard during World War II and just found themselves so indebted to us. They just didn't have an option. They were so fatigued. They had suffered so much for so long and they were so in debt. They didn't have a choice. So they obviously, they go through war. So now 12 of the 16 times that a declining superpower

• 18:01Tom Bilyeu?

  has collided with a rising superpower, they've ended up in open kinetic warfare. So it's like statistically, the odds are not in our favor. We're already doing weird things in Venezuela, doing currency swaps with Argentina. From where I'm sitting as a way to let China know, "Hey, motherfuckers, South America is our hemisphere. It is not yours. You will stay out of it. Be a real shame if something happened to one of your ships in the Caribbean." So obviously, China is now doing all kinds of shit off the coast of Japan to let people know where they're at with Taiwan. Japan clap back. China clap back, you know, to Japan saying, "All right,

• 18:44Tom Bilyeu?

  well, if you guys want to fucking test us, if you want to start talking that it's existential and that you're gonna have to do something, if you're feeling froggy, leap." So it's like, I feel all that instability. Then factor on top of that, you've got the US right now choosing between essentially brands of socialism. So we both agree that there's gonna be what I will characterize as additional stress put on the system. So if I'm China and I'm looking at America, I'm like, "Oh, good. You fuckwits are gonna like tear yourselves apart. Fantastic. I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna build a gold corridor in South America. I'm gonna peg the yuan

• 19:24Tom Bilyeu?

  to gold. I'm gonna make sure that the US loses the reserve currency status. I'm gonna weaken you guys." Yeah, I don't plan to invade you, but I am gonna, by the way, take over Taiwan by 2027. You're gonna do fucking nothing about it. And so now you get in a situation where your biggest rival is picking off allies. Your biggest rival controls essentially your entire warfare pipeline.

• 19:56Tom Bilyeu?

  They're going to be able to do effectively what they want because they can choke you off from rare earth minerals and drone parts and all kinds of stuff. And so the US is going to be just put in a weaker position like you. I don't imagine this isn't you wake up one day and it's catastrophic. It's the US is just put in a weaker and weaker state is in a worse off position in terms of who they can influence globally, which means things will get worse economically. You'll be in an economic battle with China for who gets to trade where with who with what. And given that we're already printing money ad infinitum, that yeah, it just everything gets weaker and worse.

• 20:40Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that we are already doing political assassinations. We're already at each other's throat.

• 20:47Tom Bilyeu?

  You get the Venezuela fication or the Argentina fication of the US over the next 10 to 15 years. That's what I worry about.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess a lot there to unpack, but I think the US will transition from a hedge, you know, unipolar hegemon to a very powerful country. And I guess the question is, how does the American psyche handle that? Could be bad, could be, could be okay. People get like, hey, fuck it, whatever. China is the number two, the number one, we're number one and number two. And, you know, we deal with it, right? And as you mentioned, right? China has rare earths, US doesn't have any, you know, that'll persist for how long, however long it persists. But it basically means that if China's not going to sell you this stuff to, you know, shoot the weapons and you can't shoot the weapons, which essentially is a really good thing. Because if the US had enough weapons to shoot, then this whole situation would be probably

• 21:43Speaker 02

  a lot more scary in terms of the global sort of situation globally. Now, because they can't shoot enough weapons, then, you know, Trump has to stop the war in Ukraine. You know, as sad as the Israel Iran situation was, it lasted 12 days because Israel started to feel what happens when you get bombed by another country, because you don't have enough missiles to defend yourself, right? And so, again, this is all predicated on China's there to make money and trade. They're not there to supply the United States with carburettical launching missiles at people. What's the US would love to do, you know, because that's just in the nature of the country. It's been at war for pretty much 95% of its existence. So, again,

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I take a little bit more of a glass half-full sort of attitude towards, you know, the declining, you know, empire of the United States where there are limits. There are other countries that can enforce these limits on the United States. And there are internal problems that will be dealt with, however they're dealt with. But hopefully, we don't have a thermonuclear war or everyone is shooting hypersonic missiles at each other. And, you know, if we take that off the table, then, you know, if you don't like the way the situation is in the United States, there's a whole big old world out there, um, leave.

• 22:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's easy for somebody like me. Uh, that isn't easy for the vast majority of people. That's the thing that I worry about. Okay. Uh, that's enough doomerism, black pill. Uh, yeah. So now talk to me about, um, 2030. What does 2030 look like? This is only, you know, four years really away from the time that we're recording this. What does that look like? What do we have to look forward to?

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Uh, I think that we have some sort of like massive market crash between now and then.

• 23:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Hey, the end of doom and gloom. Tell me about the market crash.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, but it's more predicated on, again, AI adoption is going to happen faster than we think and impact the structure of the economy in a way that people aren't really appreciating right now, but.

• 23:45Tom Bilyeu?

  In the ways that we already talked about or something that we haven't touched on yet?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  No, the ways that we already talked about it. I don't, but I don't think that's the common knowledge. The common knowledge is, you know, Facebook is going to be a $15 trillion company because they've created the best AI possible or, you know, Tencent or whatever company, right? It's not, oh shit, what happens when all the bankers don't have jobs anymore? How does that change the society? But I think we get to 2030, you know, we have a larger installed robot base. Cost of labor goes down. We, we have essentially a very intelligent.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Prediction engine called an LLM. Maybe we have AGI or whatever that means or not. I don't think it really matters. But we do knowledge work cheaper and more efficiently and we take human intelligence. And instead of sending the sparse or brightest people, you know, like myself, to study bullshit finance versus being an engineer or being a dancer or being a poet or whatever, we have more people doing creative things. Whatever that means, creating sort of joy for other people because there is no other option. You can't be a banker anymore because that's not a profitable sort of profession. But you can be a writer, you can be a philosopher, you can be a sports, somebody who does sports, whatever it is, right? And I think there is a better scenario where labor is cheap.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  We have a global conversation about what it means to be a productive human. We haven't killed each other. As we've moved to this sort of much less scarce, society is definitely not post scarcity by any ways. But we have much less scarcity and so we have much more creativity, intelligence, doing things to just make the human condition better. So I, I want to believe in that. And I'll be, you know, positioned in my portfolio for, yes, aggressive money printing. Maybe there's a backlash to that because the inflation gets too unbearable on a lot of countries. And so you have to have political rhetoric that sort of at least tries to pretend that there's austerity. And then we have sort of this AI, not miracle, but labor is cheaper.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Knowledge work is cheaper and we have a better human existence in terms of more things to enjoy of just being ourselves and, you know, commuting with each other.

• 25:51Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So let's talk about the road to get there. So 2026 is here. Stablecoins, I think, is going to play a big role. I know the Trump administration is trying to do some interesting things with stablecoins. Does stablecoins become the new bank? Does that start happening in 26? Like, walk me through what you see in that near term window.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  So I think for stablecoins is a way, the reason why the Trump administration supports stablecoins is they see it as a way to shove treasury debt down the throats of the global population at very attractive rates. And so I think that in 2026, you're going to start seeing. Big tech platforms and the large banks have their own stablecoin or redistribution platforms for things like Tether and Athena and Circle, USDC, to get these stablecoins out there. So you will be more familiar with sending each other a stablecoin than you are with going on to your online banking system and sending somebody a bankwire. I think that's going to accelerate very, very quickly, especially for Gen Z and millennials who

• 26:55Speaker 02

  already are comfortable with online banking. And that's going to lead to a proliferation of stablecoins and people are going to be using DeFi, they're going to be comfortable with these solutions. And then there will be a lot of banks that no longer are relevant. There'll be some like AP Morgan and Goldman Sachs who are agile enough to survive, but your average bank, I mean, I go online, I use a lot of banks, most of their technology is trash, right? And now you're going to say, oh, I can literally like move my money from my bank to this app where it does everything. I got an AI assistant to help me. I don't have to deal with humans at work nine to five, only five days a week and who are very annoying to deal with. I've got this awesome thing called smartphone and an AI assistant.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  I'm going to use that in the stablecoin. I can send money 24/7, no, 365, great, I'm using that. I'm not going to use my pick your small little bank that is pretty shit. So they're going to face existential demise. The large banks will still exist, they'll offer their own solution to that, but I think we're going to be very comfortable with using stablecoins and then very comfortable with using DeFi, whether that's a lending platform, that's trading, and some of these protocols like Athena, like Pendle, like EtherFi, obviously I'm all invested in these things and this is why. We'll do well in this scenario, but yeah, we're just going to move to this post-banking world and the banks either adapt or they die. You adapt to this digital first native way or you die. Yes, there'll be some banks

• 28:24Speaker 02

  for the boomers who still want to walk down this future branch like my mother. There'll be that, cool, whatever, but the fun stuff's happening over here and the money keeps getting printed. When crypto keeps going up, but and we sort of crescendo in sort of the 27, 2027, 2028 timeframe where you're going to have at least a pushback on, hey, there's an affordability crisis and maybe there will be some negative rhetoric to money printing towards austerity and they might gain some support which will spook investors and like, oh shit, is XYZ countries, United States, is China, is Europe, is Japan, are they really serious about stopping the money printing and allowing the credit to contract and putting out a business, all

• 29:08Speaker 02

  these over levered, you know, businesses and financial intermediaries, maybe I should take some chips off the table, right? Maybe, you know, Nvidia 20 trillion market cap with all this accounting nonsense that they're doing with these deals, maybe I'm done with that. Uh, I'm going to exit stage left. And that's when I think we get like a massive collapse in all these over levered markets. And by that time, maybe the AI sort of effectiveness and usefulness will start to catch up with the hype. Maybe think about 2001 when all these massive fiber optics companies like Cisco and all them crashed, that they built out this amazing substrate that created social media in the next decade. It would be much faster with AI. So there'll be a massive crash in all of these hyperscalers and, you

• 29:53Speaker 02

  know, model builders like OpenAI and Anthropic. And then in the wake of it, we'll get whatever useful application that entrepreneurs create to essentially make labor super cheap and make knowledge super cheap. And what are we going to be able to do with that as a human society?

• 30:08Tom Bilyeu?

  The pressure that you see that's going to make that happen in 27, 28 is inflation due to money printing, giving us that K-shaped uh, two tale of two economies. People get pissed off enough that they begin speaking up. The speak up then makes the politicians go, huh, maybe we need to start signaling that we're going to tighten. And just the hint of that signal is potentially going to spook the market and that causes the drop.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, think about 2021, right? We had, at least in the United States, you had, what, 10% inflation or whatever it was. Again, that's not Zimbabwe or Argentina or Weimar Republic. It's all officially just high inflation. And just the act of the Federal Reserve in December saying, hey, we're going to start a tightening program in three months' time was the thing that popped all the bubbles. Crypto, stocks, housing, whatever, right? And so that's when we got the bond market. Worst performing bond market since 1812 in the United States from 2022 to 2023 or 2025, three-year rolling average, right? So it doesn't take much when you're a highly levered economy. And the levers are like even more insane

• 31:21Speaker 02

  because people are going to print that much more money because they believe that that's the way to win elections. And so when somebody stands up and says, hey, maybe we should try something different, just the threat of it actually happening, just factoring in that probability, even if it might never happen, is what takes investors to say, guess what? I'm going to exit stage left and maybe I'm going to sit in cash for now.

• 31:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Give me the scale of what you see happening. Is this 2008? Is this, you know, 80s minor downturn? Is this 1929? Like, what scale are we talking about?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  I think we're talking 1929, 2008. Because the AI capex buildout is as big as, or maybe I should say 1907. The railroads, when the railroads, so 1907, 1903, whenever the crash due to the robber barons and the railroad trusts in the United States. The buildout of AI capex is as big or bigger than the buildout of the railroad infrastructure in the 19th century, which was one of the largest, if you look at percent of GDP, capex buildouts in modern human history. That is what we're doing right now with AI hyperscalers, whether that's in the United States or in China. And guess what? Railroad business is a shitty fucking business to be in as a long-term investor. And sooner or later, investors will realize, oh, shit, I'm investing in the new age railroad.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  I don't want to be the new age railroad. Google's not the new age railroad. They're now, but Google wasn't the new age railroad in 2001. They were the thing that used the cheap, the cheap hyper, the cheap fiber optic connectivity to build their service. Same with Facebook. Same with Amazon, right? They did well after the capex spoon. So investors will re-realize that situation and be like, oh shit, I'm investing in new age railroads. I don't want to be in that. Let me get out of that.

• 33:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is interesting. I've not heard this before. So basically there are business types that are so capital expensive, but people get hyped about them. So they invest in them, but they're not going to make their money back ever. Maybe, or certainly not for a long time. And so bad risk adjusted return, they finally realized that they get out. And then we realize, oh, like we had a whole lot of capital tied up in something. They got spooked. They pulled out presumably at a loss. And now we're basically sucking liquidity out of the system. Is that how that would play out?

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if, yeah, if AI is a thing that powers the American and Chinese forward economy, and literally all we're doing is building out essentially a railroad for other awesome entrepreneurs to build something on top of. Well, again, the railroads are not great businesses long-term. They're a natural monopoly, if you want to call that.

• 34:05Tom Bilyeu?

  But what I'm, what I'm trying to figure out is, okay, fair enough. But England would go into a country, the first thing they would do is build the railroad so they could extract all of the resources and England becomes a gigantic empire on the back of railroads. So I get why it might not be a good investment for a small number of people that put a ton of money in. But overall, it's so transformative. I'm trying to figure out why you think this brings like a full-blown crash like 1903, 1907, whatever the year was.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Like you mentioned it, because the return on capital is not there. When you invest alongside the government, at first it feels great. Oh, great. I've got the government behind me. They're just going to like pump my bags, right? People feel great that the United States government is now getting into industrial policy, that they're pumping nuclear, they're pumping AI, they're pumping semiconductors. Well, guess what? Go back and become a Chinese investor and look at the average return over the last 20 years. Who did really, really well? Yes, China built all this amazing infrastructure that helped the average person upgrade their standard of living. But as an investor on a long-term basis, you made no money in China. Right? You invested alongside the government, you provided your capital, trade's gonna say,

• 35:16Speaker 02

  "Great, thank you for that capital. I'm gonna build airports, roads, apartments, whatever." On a macro basis, you made no money as an equity investor in China. Now, they're great for society, bad for investors. We're gonna repeat the same thing with AI, and the United States especially. AI is great for society, hopefully, bad for individual investors who hold these investments too long. Because yes, it feels great investing with the government right now, but you know, maybe by 2028, not so great when, you know, Nvidia was up 10x, but now you're down 90% because you didn't get out in time. So I think that's the lesson. And as you said, right? These are great investments for the collective,

• 35:58Speaker 02

  but it's bad for the shareholder. Right now, you know, Trump and whoever else comes after him are gonna be like, "Yes, we're gonna support the shareholder. We're here to make sure that the private investor makes money." But guess what? Trump's a politician. What if you invest with Trump on some semiconductor fab and you wanna reduce headcount by 50% because that's more efficient? But Trump says, "Huh, that's a district that's at risk for my, for this so-and-so Republican. No, no, no, you're not firing those workers. I don't care if your return on equity declines. I have an election to win. These people have, you know, put me in power to make sure that they have a job. I'm gonna make sure they have a job." And so that's the risk when you invest alongside the government. The government has different goals than you do as an investor. And that's what essentially the AI is transforming

• 36:41Speaker 02

  into with all these massive deals that the US government is now supporting, whether it's semiconductors, it's nuclear, it's data centers, it's permitting for the building out of electric capacity with, you know, natural gas and utilities, whatever, right? You're investing alongside the government. It feels really good right now. It's good for the stocks right now, but if you hold it too long, you're gonna be, you know, best case at flat, more likely you're gonna crash out. And you can look at China, and you can look at this and see it happen over the last 20 years where, you know, the needs of the state came over the needs of private investors. It always happens this way.

• 37:20Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting. That one was not on my radar. I will definitely have to spend some more time with that. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 38:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes.

• 38:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Talk to me about how you approach AI investing. Obviously, right now, the stock market is effectively AI, period, full stop, end of story, there's nothing else. And now you're saying that a huge part of what people are hyped about is going to get them in trouble. How do you approach AI?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  I don't invest in it. I'll wait for what comes after this build-out of the hyperscalers. After they spend the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, really these data centers create this amazing intelligence. Okay, what can we do with this intelligence after the fact? Again, I don't want to be in the railroad business. I'm not smart enough to know when to get off the train. So let me just not play the game. I don't own Nvidia. I don't own Google. I don't own the NASDAQ. I know crypto. I know they're going to have to print money to sort of ameliorate the social pressures and the social dislocations created by knowledge we're going to essentially zero in terms of price for intelligence. I know we got to print more money, so I'll just stay in crypto.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Am I gonna have the best return if I pick Palantir or Nvidia or whatever stock over the last two years? No, but I don't know when to get off the train. I'm not that good. I'm just not gonna play the game. I'll wait till, you know, I wanna buy Amazon in 2003 and 2004, not in 1999.

• 39:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep, that makes a lot of sense. Now, the conventional wisdom would be that it's not timing the market, it's time in the market. So while I get you don't wanna buy March of 1999 at the absolute peak, you actually are in some ways trying to time the market in terms of waiting. Is it because you think the signs will be so clear on the other side? And/or you don't mind missing an opportunity in an industry that you don't really understand?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Well, let's say that Nvidia goes, let's say that this, the AI thing is used and Nvidia goes from a 5 trillion market cap to a 20 trillion market cap, right? Cause they're just rock stars. Jensen's the man, signing titties all over the place with his leather jacket, right? 20 trillion dollar Nvidia. So you for extra money if you put, if you put your money in now. But then Nvidia goes from a 20 trillion company to, let's call it, let's go, let's just go back down to like 5, right? So it goes down, what is that, 80%? Or whatever the math is, that's shaky on that right now.

• 41:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  And then let's say that, you know, there's a period of lull and then Nvidia goes back from 5 to 10, right? So I invested at 5, it went to 20, it went back down to 5 or even, even lower and I've basically done nothing over the last two years. And Nvidia's still a great company. Or I waited, I waited for the first real shakeout and then I went back into the, the really good companies that are still around and I bought their stock after the crash. Even if they don't get back to the market cap that they were when I first invested, I still make more money. Then I would have in the first scenario on a risk adjusted basis or just probabilistically.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Right? So you always want to invest from, you know, from two to 10 gets you a 5X return. But from like 10 to 20 is only 2X return, but I'm taking more risk because I already it's intrinsically believe that it's overvalued. But I feel like I have no other choice. I have to invest in AI. Well, just wait. You could make more money in a shorter period of time. Once things have actually crashed out on the rebound. Then you can investing in something when you intrinsically believe you're buying at the top. And so that's how I feel about AI and you can look at sort of the internet stocks that survived the crash like Amazon, right? Amazon went down something like 95% from 2000 to whatever the low it was in like 2001 or 2002.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  And then it's up, I don't know, whatever, like 30, 40, 50X, whatever it is from, from then until today. Yes, if you kept your money in from 1999 until the present, you've made money, but it took you 30 fucking years. So that's just how I, I look at things.

• 42:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. So the investing that you do do, is it entirely just, I'm in crypto because I understand that I pay super close attention? Or do you have a diversified strategy that you use? How do you approach this moment if you think that the most popular asset on planet earth is overvalued?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  So my view is I believe in money printing. I think everyone does, whether you are Warren Buffett or you're crypto DJ in the basement, you believe that whenever there's a problem, there's going to be money printing. Okay. So if I believe in money printing, what is, and I, and I don't want to pick stocks. I want to invest in a broad base, either equity index or something that is a broad appeal like gold or crypto or house or whatever. Right? I'm not a stock picker. Yes, stock pickers can outperform the strategy that I'm talking about, but I'm not a stock picker. I just want to invest in the fastest horse. What has been the fastest horse from 2008 till the present? Which has probably been one of the largest periods of money printing, whether it's US, China, Japan, Europe. In human history, it's been Bitcoin historically, hands down.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  So if I want to bet on the fastest horse, an asset that's in fixed supply that cannot be debased by the government that is digitally native. So you could imagine an AI using Bitcoin or people, because now they're more comfortable using their phone or the internet to transact value. They'll prefer Bitcoin over say gold, for example. Then I just want to own the fastest horse in this race, in this debasement race. It's Bitcoin. So just buy Bitcoin. That's it. That's all I gotta do. The old, my whole job at Maelstrom, and I tell my employees this, is we do investments to make a return. I pay you a bonus, I take my return, and I buy more Bitcoin. That's all I do. All I care about is stacking more Bitcoin. Because I believe that in this debasement scenario, as long as I can have my pulse on

• 44:32Speaker 02

  the money printing, the banking system, and this is why I study. I read very boring reports about, you know, bank call reports and bank balance sheets. And I understand, you know, how the central banks print money in all the different major jurisdictions. That's what I study, because I believe if I get that right, then all I need to choose is the right horse. And the right horse, historically speaking, is Bitcoin. Obviously, his history doesn't portend to the future. It does advise the future. I believe that Bitcoin is going to continue to be the best performing broad asset. Again, it's not like you pick Palantir and it went up 20x over the last year. Great, if you can do that, you're amazing. I'm not. I'm gonna choose Bitcoin, and it's gonna go up the most. Whether it's gold, or stocks, or houses, or bonds, they're all gonna go up.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  But Bitcoin's gonna go up the most. And that's how I approach investing. And so that's why I mostly focus on liquidity. What is the expectation of liquidity? How does reality conform to that expectation? And that's what informs me when you see me on, you know, when I write an essay or I'm on X, and I post a call, I think Bitcoin's going down to this level, or I think Bitcoin's going up to this level. It has nothing to do with me reading the chart of Bitcoin, and everything for me to read, oh, I think the market's misinterpreting what's happening with the US banking system, or with how China is printing money, or the fiscal situation in Japan, or how Europe's gonna fund this war they want to fight with Russia with defense spending. Again, these are all the things I care about, because if I get that right, then I just have to pick the right asset, and I believe the asset is Bitcoin.

• 46:01Tom Bilyeu?

  So given all that, do you think Michael Saylor's strategy is perfect? Or is there something that you would do differently?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Because he has access to the corporate debt markets, I think the initial strategy is perfect. He's able to issue an asset, borrow dollars that are going to be an infinite supply and buy something that's going to be in finance supply. So I think as a fundamental level, it is a great strategy. Now, the nuance is how is he able to do that in a price per share accretive way for the micro strategy stock? Obviously, it was easy to do back when rates were lower, a little harder to do now. I'm not really sure how if you have a dollar of capital today, if the micro strategy is the best way to play there or to buy Bitcoin. I don't really play in the stock market very much. I'll just stick with, you know, street Bitcoin.

• 46:48Tom Bilyeu?

  The thing that I've always found fascinating about what he's done besides the just absolute gigantic brass testicles is, because I just could not do a single strategy like that, is that he basically pulled all of the like fancy gambling options that the stock market has on top of Bitcoin so that people can do all the fancy derivative tradings and all that, but with Bitcoin as the underlying asset. Is there any potential risk there given that on a long enough timeline Bitcoin should, I mean Bitcoin's already going down in volatility.

• 47:29Tom Bilyeu?

  His strategy requires volatility. Does he hit some sort of problem or is it just that people will slowly stop investing if what they want is volatility? What does that look like?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  So he'll have a choice at some point. At some point, he'll have to, he'll have to take a lot more risk in the type of debt and structures that he issues, whether that's coupons or it's the data which he needs to repay things. And he either make a, either it's A, I'm going to take this, add more leverage to my capital structure and then I have to really hope Bitcoin keeps going up. Or it's, okay, I'm going to stop playing this game and micro strategy just becomes, you know, my 1X Bitcoin. Doesn't go, it doesn't go up or down faster than Bitcoin. It just is Bitcoin. And if all you can buy is a listed stock, that's what you get. I don't think we're there yet. But at some point, if he gets big enough, he'll get to that decision. And then that's a corporate, you know, that's a corporate decision of what they want to do.

• 48:25Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. What did you think when Michael Burry folded his hedge fund and said, ah, I don't understand how people are pricing this market. I'm out returning the money back to shareholders or investors?

• 48:39Speaker 02

  I mean, shorting is hard. It's I don't do it. It's a it's a mindset. It's a skill. And if, you know, maybe he mentally just wasn't there to to suffer the the knocks, right? If he fundamentally believes AI is a bubble, I 100% agree. Would I ever shorten Nvidia? Never. But Michael Burry will do it. He's got the the mentality for that. I don't have the mentality for that. And so maybe he was like, you know, fuck it. I've already made so much money. I've got my own family office to manage. I'll pursue these strategies and I won't have to care what my LPs think about why these returns are lackluster until I get to that situation when Nvidia goes down 95%, right?

• 49:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. Okay, the thing that keeps me up awake at night is China. I know you've spent a fair amount of time looking at China. What is their economy actually like right now? I hear rumors that I want to believe, and so I absolutely hit the pause button because I know it's what I want to hear. I hear that Xi is losing power. I hear that their economy because of the housing bubble is just in terrible shape.

• 49:43Tom Bilyeu?

  What's really going on, at least as far as you can see from the outside?

• 49:47Speaker 02

  So I I haven't been to China since mainland since 2019. I've been to Hong Kong a few times. Obviously, I live in Singapore with a large Chinese diaspora, so you hear what goes on in shore. And I think that there is, at some point, I may write an essay about this. I think that China is a potential future for a post-AI world. Let me explain that. So China has been one of the most aggressive in installing robots, right? They have the most installed robot capacity in an industrial sense of any country per capita in the world. They've been the most aggressive in terms of AI, right? There is no sort of like individual data. The data all belongs to the state. The state says, I want to use this data and to create these these AI services,

• 50:31Speaker 02

  whether that's ride hailing, it's ordering your food, it's using your palm to pay for things on WeChat or whatnot, right? You go to China right now, it it might feel like, and the tier one cities, I'm not talking about the countryside. I'm talking Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, the four tier one cities in China, they are the future. Right? Everything is seamless. Everything is clean. Stuff is fucking cheap. The quality is good. And this is the future. But youth unemployment might be forty percent. You have uh Oh.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  You graduate from university, you go to a top, you know, very, it's very difficult to get into university in China. Um, you have to be very, uh, and if you do get into university, you graduate, probably thirty percent, thirty to forty percent of you will not have a job. And so you're literally living at home, you're doing odd jobs. They call it the lying flat movement. You have some like micro apartment in Beijing or Shenzhen or wherever it is. But you, you live, you, there's great entertainment. You've got, you know, WeChat, other things on Are you getting UBI? Kind of. It's your parents. It's the savings of, you know, one child policy. You have four, you have essentially, uh, you have two parents, you have grandparents. And so you have all these people contributing to you as this little emperor, right? So you're just living

• 51:47Speaker 02

  off of your extended family. And it works for now. Now, she has a problem, well, maybe he'll have a problem, maybe he won't, I don't know, of dissatisfaction because he doesn't care about employment. He believes that AI is the future. Now, when they get to that future, what will this, this Chinese state's policy be about taking care of the population? Will they increase the amount of social services that they provide? You'd be very surprised to know that, you know, the amount of social states in China is less than Europe and the United States, which is why the savings rate is so high in China. But she believes that the future is this

• 52:26Speaker 02

  AI manufacturing techno country, um, with lots, with basically a homogenous Han Chinese population. And that's what he is creating. And right now, it's, no, it looks like it's, it's succeeding. This might be the future where, again, most people don't have a, you know, most people go to university, don't have a job that they went to university for. But everything else is so cheap. Their services are so good. Doesn't really matter. They get by. Can you have a socially cohesive society when that happens? Obviously, in China, because you have a much more ethically homogenous situation, a culturally homogenous situation, and scar tissue from, you know, the 60s, 70s during the Mao era,

• 53:11Speaker 02

  and then previous with the warring states and, you know, such humiliation, right? Chinese people love this ability that Xi Jinping provides society. So all this talk about he's super unpopular is kind of off the mark. If you, because you haven't read Chinese history, to understand that people like the stability and the control that is, you know, right now in China. And so, again, but I also think the mistake is they, people think, oh, they want to go to war. Well, what parent wants your only child to be going to the military? Is what, you know, Chinese woman, who was a very good analyst, said like, she does not have the juice with the average sort of parent who's going to want their son, their only son, only child. I'm going to ship them off to the PLA to go to war against who, for what reason?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  When, you know, from all, you know, ways to look at things, there's abundance of food, there's abundance of energy, and there's abundance of services provided to the people. Why do you, what do you need to go to war for? So I think this whole sort of Western

• 54:11Speaker 02

  fear over this like Chinese army going to like, going into Taiwan or like going in all these other countries is sort of misplaced because they don't understand Chinese history and the demographic situation. That they haven't been there to see these gleaming cities of sort of what AI and robotics can do, and sort of mobile apps and ubiquitous data sharing between the government and big tech. Right? That is what China is. I think that the West is going to move more towards that situation than they might want to admit to themselves at this point, but that's sort of how I see the Chinese situation right now.

• 54:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, uh, very clear picture. Now on the economy, the economy easy enough to bounce back from. They have a lot more room to print money than we do. What's that feel like?

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, they, Xi Jinping said houses are for a living and not for speculation. I forgot it was 2018 or whatever it is. And the other message is common prosperity. He doesn't care that people lost money in housing speculation. And as long as people aren't razzing up in the streets, I think it'll continue to pursue this, this policy. The Chinese government has not stimulated uh, as much as the West has to uh, abate this property crisis. He is stimulating to build more AI to overcome the semiconductor embargo that the United States placed on them. Um, to make sure that their BYD car, electric cars, you know, 2,000 US dollars or whatever it is, that they sell those to the emerging world, right? You go to China, everything that you get in America is better and cheaper in China.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Uh, and so it just is a fact. Uh, so that's what they've been focusing. That's where their credit has gone. Whereas the US credit went to go blow up Muslims in the Middle East. China took their credit and we're going to build AI.

• 55:57Tom Bilyeu?

  I hate everything about that last uh, few sentences there, Arthur. That, that was fantastic. Horrible, but absolutely fantastic. Uh, okay, that's China in a nutshell. Give me Japan. Uh, watching what they're doing, knowing that they have a birth rate crisis, knowing that they're eschewing immigration, knowing that the yen carry trade is unwinding. Um, what do you see there? Are they in trouble? Are they going to have some sort of contagion effect on the rest of the global markets?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  I mean, Japan, again, is a very wealthy country. They have what, 3 trillion, or 3 or 4 trillion dollars of net portfolio assets. And so eventually what will happen is the yen will strengthen. The Japanese government will tell, tell the Japanese um, people and companies, bring your yen home, invest it here in Japan, you know, stop funding the United States and, and Europe. Um, and they're build out of AI, bring this money home, let's build back Japan. And if the yen goes below 100. And you have robots, right? Yes, Japan does not like immigration, but they've got robots. And so the robots will be there. The population will fall, but they've made a cultural choice where they don't care. They're not going to open up this big of immigration to essentially fix our problem with humans. They'll fix it with robots.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  And again, another culturally and ethically homogenous country. And so they'll band together and they'll survive. I spent a lot of time in Japan. I love Japan. I don't see there's going to be, you know, any real issue. There'll be a lot of inflation to get there. But again, culturally and ethically homogenous society that is banding together to do what the government tells them to do, for right or for wrong. And so again, I don't see a problem because as a country, they're very wealthy. And so as they sell their US and European assets to bring that home, they will rebuild Japan to be, you know, again, a robot-first society. That'll spell trouble for the United States and Europe, who now need to fund those X, all that capital leaving.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  That just promotes more and more money printing, the same thing that we've been talking about over the last few hours.

• 57:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. The yen carry trade gets a lot of breathless coverage on X for sure, that it's going to have some sort of big knock-on effect. It doesn't sound like you share that concern.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Well, I guess, think as we had in, what is it, August of 2024, or whatever it was. Yeah, when that sort of kind of blew up. What happens? The Fed, the ECB, they all have to print money to make sure that the capital that's leaving, because that carry trade unwinds, doesn't, you know, destroy their bond and equity markets. And so we know what happens when there is financial disturbance. The Western authorities print money. When the Japanese ink removes their money to repatriate it to Japan, to build back better in Japan, the West will print money to plug the hole. So there might be a bit of sort of market dysfunction for a while, but it won't take much. The authorities will say, okay, cool, we're just going to print the money. Yeah, Japanese versus we get it, you got to leave, yen's got to appreciate.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  All that's cool. And the Fed's just going to print the money.

• 59:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Printing is the eternal answer. It is, uh, man, that is so true and so depressing that that is just the solve for everything. Ah, okay, um, very interesting. Now, you've talked about France, just to hit my, uh, another country that I'm very curious to see how this is all gonna play out. You've talked about France backing out of the Euro that you think that would be a good idea.

• 59:33Tom Bilyeu?

  What's why?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  And the Euro is a terrible thing. Uh, it should never have been created, but it was. Uh, it's essentially-

• 59:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Because it centralizes power and stops competition between the different currencies or something else?

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Well, there's twenty, twenty-seven members of the Euro. Are you saying that there is one monetary policy that's right for twenty-seven different nations, twenty-seven different cultures, twenty-seven different desires?

• 59:55Tom Bilyeu?

  We have one monetary policy for fifty states.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Uh, well, it used to be twelve, right? There used to be twelve district Federal Reserve Banks at a different, uh, discount rates in every district, right? Again, I think that decentralization is better than centralization. Uh, the Euro is a centralized, you know, monster. But again, it's fatally flawed and France is horribly in debt and very unproductive with that debt. They just spend it at the government level. That's coming home to roost because the United States and Japan will no longer fund them. And Germany for that matter. So Germany and Japan are the largest funders of governments and assets globally. They have combined something like eight or nine trillion of net portfolio assets. A lot of that, whoa, to Japan. And essentially, they made that money off the back of the United States.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  The United States said, hey, you host our military to contain communism, AKA Russia and China. We will let you export to our market and we'll let you restrict our companies from going into your markets. And that essentially gave them an eight trillion dollar wealth bucket, which they then bought US stocks, US bonds. And in the European example, Germany funded France. And so as it winds, as everybody tries to go their own way because the population is like, hold on a minute. We created all this wealth and I'm still fucking broke. Fuck this, print the money. Give me healthcare, give me whatever it is that I want, stop investing abroad. That money leaves France, France is like, oh shit, we have to fund this government. We don't have any real wealth to fund it with.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Nobody's funding governments anywhere, everybody's funding themselves. Well, this Euro thing, you know, Christine Lagarde and the ECB says we can't print enough money to do things domestically. Fuck you, Christine Lagarde, I'm going to print money and focus on France first. And that breaks the Euro. As soon as France says, I'm going to change baking laws, restrict capital from movement across Europe, or not do what the ECB tells me to do, whether that's like, you know, greater than three percent of GDP budget deficits, then the Euro in all effect is over and capital is not flowing freely around the Eurozone. And that's what ends the Euro. And so, you know, France is slowly walking towards that situation.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  And you can take a look at the liabilities of the French baking system within the EU system called the target two imbalance. It's deteriorated rapidly since 2021. And eventually, whatever that is, this will come to a head. And the ECB will be faced with a choice to print money to save the Euro. And they'll print the money. And again, it doesn't really matter if assets go up, money gets printed, Euro is either there or it's not there, but capital controls are introduced. So if you're in France, if you're in Europe, get out while the getting out is good. Get your money out of Europe, put it somewhere else.

• 1:02:36Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, man, there's a, there's a lot of money printing going on, a lot of uncertainty in the world. Through it all, you have stayed very sanguine. Tell people, what is the one thing that you have as a core belief that most people do not? That allows you to be very even keel through what is certainly in our lifetimes, completely unprecedented instability.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  I read books and when you read books, you find out that everything that we're experiencing today, yes, of course, there's an AI, money printing, debt jubilee, social discontent, empires in the rise, empires on the fall. We've done this all before. We've done it in Rome. We've done it in Weimar Republic. We've done it in World War II. We've done it in, you know, pick your ancient civilization. They've all had the same problems. They've all had the same, you know, menu of solutions. And every time the politicians chose to put the money and every time math and the compound rated interest in time worked against them. And every time, if you own gold or certain other assets, you did well. It's something that you could keep them from being confiscated from the state. So as long as you do that and you don't use

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  leverage, you'll be okay. Because again, time, math and human nature are on your side.

• 1:03:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. Brother, I am grateful for every chance that we get to spend time together. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time. Where can people connect with you online?

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  So on X, at Crypto Haze, on Substack, at Crypto Haze as well. I write my monthly, bi-monthly newsletter. And yeah, you'll hear me on programs like yourselves and others across the, uh, the interweb.

• 1:04:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. I love it. All right, everybody. If you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient-dense superfoods,

• 1:05:02Tom Bilyeu?

  everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.