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Home » Ray Dalio: AI Is Eating Everything – and It Might Eat Itself (Transcript)

Ray Dalio: AI Is Eating Everything – and It Might Eat Itself (Transcript)

Editor’s Notes: In this episode of the All-In Podcast, Ray Dalio returns to discuss the accelerating global debt cycle and why the current US deficit poses a significant risk to the financial system. Dalio explains his 80% return on gold investments over the past year, contrasting its role as a stable reserve asset with the recent volatility and performance of Bitcoin. He also offers a provocative analysis of the AI bubble, warning that while the technology is “eating everything,” the underlying companies may face a profit crisis similar to the dot-com era. Finally, Dalio touches on the shifting geopolitical order and the urgent need for bipartisan leadership to navigate the “stage five” societal challenges facing the nation.  (Mar 3, 2026)  

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome and Introduction

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Ray Dalio, welcome back to the All In Podcast. Third time’s the charm. Thanks for being here.

RAY DALIO: It’s always a blast to be here. Thank you for having me.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: 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%. 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?

The Five Big Forces Shaping the World

RAY DALIO: I studied these big cycles in history going back 500 years, and there are five big forces that are intertwined to determine the answer to your question.

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 an 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.

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

The Government’s Finances and the Debt Cycle

So getting the fact that they’re all on there now, I’ll go down to explain the government’s finances and answer your question.

The economics of a country are basically the same as the economics of a company or an individual, except the government has an ability to print money. Look at it like a company or like your own. Basically, it’s projected to spend about $7 trillion, take in about $5 trillion. So it’s running a 40% deficit, 40% of its spending. It’s been running deficits for a long time. So it has a debt that is 600%, six times the amount of money that it takes in. And we can project that number.

The problem with debt cycles, and you could see them transpire, they’re almost like the circulatory system of the body. The capital markets bring credit to different parts of the economy. And if that credit is used to be productive and produces an income that pays for the debt service, it’s a healthy process. But what happens is that if the debt service grows relative to the income because it’s not paying for it, it’s like plaque in the system growing up, and it squeezes out spending.

And so we now have that $2 trillion deficit. Half of that is interest payments. Plus we have to roll over $9 trillion of debt that has been accumulated and is maturing.

Now, if you were to look at a company like that or an individual like that, you have that problem. So as a handy number, 3% of GDP would sort of stabilize the situation. Very unhealthy condition. It’s not just unhealthy because it’s squeezing out those spendings, but also because there’s a supply and a demand. In other words, you have to roll over the $9 trillion of debt that’s coming due and you have to sell $2 trillion more, something like that.

Now you go to the buyers. Who are the buyers? There are some domestic buyers and there are foreign buyers, about a third of foreign buyers. And now it’s a riskier situation. From their point of view, it’s riskier. First of all, it’s a lot to acquire. Dollar denominated debt is already a large percentage of their portfolio, larger than it would be if just decided on a prudent basis. But also we have political geopolitical risks that also extend to possibly the risks that the debtor and the creditor will have a conflict. You can imagine that with China. You can imagine that with Europe even. 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.

Now, the things that I’m describing have happened repeatedly through history.