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

0:00Ray Dalio welcome back to the Ellen podcast third times the charm. Thanks for being always a was 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 were 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% if you were building a global financial system from first principles today you wouldn't build it on 50 year old legacy rails you build air wallings it's the single platform for global accounts cards and payments that

1:18treats the entire world like a local market stop paying the legacy tax and start building the future at air wallets dot com slash all in air wallings build the future. 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 path than we were say a year ago are we moving too slowly study these big cycles in history going back 500 years and there are five big forces that are intertwined to determine the answer to your question which is there's the debt money one and I'll take you into that in a minute there is the domestic 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 water then there's technology all through the cycles there have been technology and then there's acts of nature droughts floods and pandemics.

2:42So 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. And then the but internationally they always change all orders change and the international geopolitical order going from a unilateral to a unilateral world orders changing and certainly technology is changing okay so getting that fact that they're all on them 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 country. The company or an individual except the government has a ability to print money look at it like a company or like your own basically it's projected to spend about $7 trillion take in about $5 trillion so it's running a 40% deficit 40% of it's 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's going to be in the money.

4:07That it takes in and we can project that number the problem with debt cycles and you can see them transpire there 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 cycle. It's a healthy process but what happens is that if the income the debt service grows relative to the income because it's not paying for it it's like a plaque in the system growing up and it squeezes out spending and so we now have that $2 trillion deficit half of that is interest payments plus we have to roll over $9 trillion

5:07of debt that has been accumulated in this maturing okay so now if you were to look at a company like that or an individual like that you have that problem so as a handy number 3% of GDP would sort of stabilize the situation very unhealthy condition it's not just unhealthy because it's squeezing out those 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 to and you have to sell 2 trillion more something like that okay so now you go to the buyers and the buyers who are the buyers there are some domestic buyers in their 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 they dollar denominated debt is already a large percentage of their portfolio larger than it would be if just decided on an 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.

6:33You can imagine that with China you can imagine that with Europe even and you know 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 so in other words I'm not just making this stop stop up if you were to see. A particularly you know in the 1929 to 45 period you saw this dynamic you saw it before so there is this financial piece which in and of itself is not healthy for the US government and it's but it's also problematic because of the other factors compounding the problem you highlighted this problem. You provided a diagnosis that if we could get to 3% we could soften the effects but it hasn't happened we were all very hopeful last year around this time when Elon Musk decided to lead doge the department of government efficiency was going to go in and there were going to be these kind of big sweeping changes to reduce government spending find fraud waste and abuse and so on did doge fail.

7:56Because the actions that were taken were wrong or did doge fail because the system itself cannot be changed at this point in the cycle that there's too much capital flowing economy is too dependent on it there are too many individuals and businesses are dependent on it and it's structurally impossible to pull our way out of it I mean does doge tell us something about what's possible at this stage yeah you're talking about taking an inefficient government and making it efficient. Okay and having to do it quick because there are elections and if people don't like it then you know you lose your mandate and in a society in which no matter what you do you're criticized and and torn down so you know we have the fact of the question of does democracy and our system lend itself toward the sort of executive leadership that both of us are going to do it.

8:56Both makes it efficient and makes it acceptable for all people you know there was a lot of cutbacks you know things like school lunch programs and things you know and then trying to do it surgically so it's how do you do that effectively quickly in a manner that doesn't because so much controversy that the government falls so if you look at history that's why deal with the political if you deal with history and you deal just even common sense think you know like are you gonna have the executive leadership that's going to be able to make this satisfactory with most people you know and do that quickly I think that's that's a hell of a hell of a trick to pull off right so it might just be structurally it's a little difficult at this stage what an understatement structurally a little difficult at this stage yeah well there is another big new story recently that there may be quite a lot of fraud going on with public dollars in Minnesota that there are these daycares that don't exist in billions of dollars of flowing to individuals to run these daycares and now there's a lot of this sort of citizen journalism going on across the country.

10:20That federal spending is actually being fraudulently abused do you think that this is a symptom of the stage of the cycle what's your view on how this relates to this problem that we're generally kind of talking about yeah it's both the stage of the cycle and if you're going to have something well managed are you going to have the government well managed it I mean how how well managed you know go to the department of motor vehicles for your it's so big and complex and such a you know such a mess like you know what when you think is this a surprise to you that there's all of this stuff going on all over the place in terms of beneficiancy is that a surprise to you no but you know I guess the question is are people waking up to this because last time we spoke you highlighted that a piece of your portfolio was in gold you invested quite a bit in gold since we spoke I think gold has climbed from 2,900 an ounce to 5,200 an ounce

11:32what has happened with gold over the last year is it that markets are waking up to the point in the cycle that we're in that you've been highlighting for a number of years at this point or is it because China is structurally abandoning the US dollar and treasuries and moving more into gold and other central banks are moving into gold is it because individual speculators and market participants are getting bubbly with gold what's your view on what's gone on with gold and how it relates to the market acknowledgment of the stage that we're in it's the big cycle and what 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 on it is the most established money that it's the second largest reserve country currency that central banks all and so what we've seen is for various reasons that I pretty much covered the economic supply demand the book political the geopolitical for those reasons central banks themselves have acquired

12:44gold to build that up and individuals and others are looking for an alternative money the question is what is money so when we're thinking about this money mechanistically money is debt what I mean by that is that if you're holding money you're holding it in the form of a debt instrument and if you do are holding a debt instrument what you're getting is a promise from somebody to deliver you money okay and what as I mentioned in the beginning the power of the central banks when they have too much debt is to print money okay so if you've got that down okay then you can understand what's happening okay the cause the question is Dave what money do you think is safe right given what I've just said

13:49okay which yeah yeah act asset back right I want an asset I want to have something that's got some physical known limitation to it and particularly what you want is that can be transferred from one place to another because money is both a medium of exchange and a storehold of wealth so in other words if you have one country's central bank or government wants to pay another gun of government it can't just be in fixed assets like buildings okay if you want to transact you have to transact in something that you can transfer to them and so on and gold is the only asset it's a long term historic asset for for reasons that means that it can be transferred they can't print a lot of it and it is not dependent on somebody giving you something in other words most money most if you hold debt or you hold stocks or you hold something you're holding a promise from somebody to give you buying power okay so you can like wealth is important to think to distinguish wealth from money okay wealth is in stock it's you know it's in buildings it's in companies and so on

15:12but you can't spend wealth you have to when you want to spend it that's the purpose of money you have to sell it and then you get money to spend and right now we have an awful lot of wealth relative to money and the question is what is that money and there's the risk that you go to get convert your wealth into money that they're going to print money because that's what they've always done since we've had fiat currencies so as you look out and have conversations with all the market participants that you know and you know everyone that's of size and scale where are we in terms of folks converting their wealth into gold or their money into gold like how much more do we have to run in terms of the dollar denominated value of gold in the market cycle as this great rush for the doors rush for the exit happens two things to come to mind what I what I look at is literally who has what assets including like central banks what is the money in and so on and and what is that mix and I look at the amount of wealth relative to money or I look at the amount of wealth relative to gold and what we've seen is that there's an enormous amount of wealth

16:39and there was an enormous amount in central banks of the other money relative to hard money gold and so we've seen about what I would call it go from an extremely small number to something that is a less small number that price increase and that change in composition has brought it on the market almost not quite but almost toward the average of what it's been over a period of time so being out of balance however because the wealth is total wealth is still so large relative to money that's a real issue so let me give you a practical example of this wealth taxes and wealth being a risk one question that might be asked out

17:39are we in a bubble another words are I stocks and other such stocks in a bubble that's a does if you want to get into that will get into that but one of the things that we know from that is that one of the characteristics of bubbles is that there becomes a need for money that requires people to sell their assets to get money to meet that need now quite often that need comes from borrowing money to buy those assets okay and then the assets go up in price and so on but what happens is it can't be sustained because you have to make the debt service payments and they're not throwing off the cash to make that and so they have to start to sell that and then you and when you have to sell it because you need money in a cash to pay your debt service or to pay nowadays wealth taxes okay so now we have a dynamic the bubble will burst as that dynamic takes place there are a number of things we can talk about about the bubble if you're interested but just imagine if you put in wealth taxes everybody can talk about where they like or don't like wealth taxes or something but anything that if you put in wealth taxes and there's a lot of

19:06fear of wealth taxes in and of itself that can drive money the wealth to cash and and there's only one way you're going to get the cash with the wealth and that's either sell it or to borrow against it which causes it's his own cash flow issues and we have a dynamic having to do with the social part of this you know the wealth gap that makes that politically an issue so anyway all I'm saying is people should worry and and companies should worry or country should worry do they have enough gold I mean if you didn't know what the if you didn't know what gold was likely to do and you had no view on gold once you have between five and fifteen percent of their portfolio in gold because of the fact of how it works with the other components in other words it's a diversifier when when the shit hits the fan okay gold does well and the other things don't generally speaking and because of that correlation depending on what else is in the portfolio if you put it through an optimizer

20:22you'd have something like that so I'm not trying to tout people on buying gold but I would say what is safe what is safe and it's safe is somewhere if you had no view between five and fifteen percent why hasn't Bitcoin performed in the same way in the same period that gold's climbed 80% since we last talk 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 access there there's an important differentiating characteristics of Bitcoin and then there's also you know like who owns it and why they buy it why they're bought and sell okay so Bitcoin does not have privacy trade any transactions can be monitored and then indirectly perhaps controlled central banks are not going to want to buy Bitcoin and being able to hold it so it's not just individuals it's institutions and so on but most you know and central banks so that their attributes of that there has been some question or thoughts of the development of you know new technologies like quantum computing and so on can there be issues regarding that

21:40and then there's you know who owns it and what are the other exposures that they have in their portfolio it tends to have a pretty high correlation with the tech stocks so from an ownership you know just the supplied demand is affected by if somebody gets squeezed in one thing they sell something that whatever else they have so there are those dynamics it's a long way and it's a relatively small market that's a relatively controllable market I think a lot of attention has been given to Bitcoin but as a money you know it's small in relationship to gold and so you know those are the dynamics there is only one goal what about silver i mean silver has had a big run up in the past year as well is that a derivative to gold and it's effectively people playing off of the wake of gold yes silver in its production is a residual commodity the supply of it is difficult to increase and through history you know like the pounds sterling silver was perceived as a monetary item but it has also taken on a speculative life of its own

23:03so you know people are you know hot in it because it's been hot I just want to shift year a little bit back to something you touched on but the last time we met you also talk about the importance of making sure that interest rates remain low for us to kind of manage the effect and the impact of the stage of the cycle that we're in what's your view I guess today on where rates are and how the Fed has acted over the past year relative to what needs to be done to soften the effects of the stage in the cycle that we're in because we have so much debt federal debt interest rates are one of the three main considerations there's the taxes there's spending and then there's interest rates are on the debt but you can't make interest rates severely artificially low because one man's debts are another man's assets and if you make those interest rates too low

24:03for the creditor you will produce the dynamic that we understand in other words you'll produce a lot more borrowing you'll put it into things and you can fuel a bubble and so at the same time you can't have them so high that the debtor gets squeezed uneffectively so there's a balancing act you know keep them high enough that they're adequate for the creditor but not so high that the debtor and so when you have a lot of debt assets and liabilities because for every debt asset there's a debt liability and when you have a lot of those that balancing act is very difficult this made more difficult you know because of what's called the K economy you know another words there are bubble elements that are going on in the part of the economy you know where um you know the question is who will be the first to be a trillionaire and and and that you know that top

25:08one percent of the population and all of that at the same time as you have the other part of the economy where for example 60% of all Americans have below a sixth grade reading level and and to bake them productive particularly as we are also having AI have replacements for them is a particularly difficult thing to achieve in other words when you have so much that assets and liabilities and then you have such a disparity in conditions between those that are at the top and let's call it the bottom 60% of the population what that's like that's you know another Patrick that's another difficult thing to pull off so this is a challenging situation as far as monetary policy

26:09exists the idea of setting an interest rate and having a fiscal policy and a monetary policy that's for the economy as a whole and doesn't deal with the differences in the in the circumstances maybe more if I is more challenging well so taking a look at Fed action and market activity there's been a lot of reporting over the past year that a number of global central banks have stopped buying US treasuries and are shifting to gold does this mean that the Fed in the US is going to have to start buying treasuries and expand their balance sheet again is it inevitable that we see a re-expansion of the Fed's balance sheet in this phase in the cycle given what's going on with global market action I think that it's likely down the road right now there's

27:14the shortening of maturities as a means of trying to deal with that of course that increases the debt rollover risk but the you know cell less long debt try to hold the short rate down so that the longer rates attachment to it doesn't get you know helps to hold the long rate down and then try to use the government's power of persuasion on other countries to either buy the debt or to hold the debt or to have other forms of capital enter the United States how do you like Kevin Worcesters pick for Fed chair what's your view on how he's going to guide interest rate policy for the central bank when he assumes his term it's a very very big challenge I think he's a practical man he understands both sides of the pros and cons I think it's a tough job one of the

28:16other things that I would say was pretty surprising over the past year is how adamantly against tariffs for fear of inflation and reduced consumption which would mean a negative effect on GDP growth perhaps tariffs might be the president and the administration put in place a number of tariffs under the emergency economic powers act which the Supreme Court in the last week or so overturned but looking back on the economic effect of tariffs what do you think economists got right and wrong about their predictions about the effect tariffs would have on the economy on consumption on inflation and are there things that economists fundamentally missed or didn't understand and why yeah I think so first of all there's the tax revenue part of them I mean

29:17thinking of it just as revenue and I think that people don't all economists make the mistake of not including taxes in inflation and what I mean by that is if you're if your taxes go up that's inflation it I mean why should it be any different than if your cost of housing goes up why shouldn't it be part of the inflation calculation number it's taking it's taking money out of your pocket I mean it's probably the you know for a lot of people the biggest expense and so when they say inflation is something separate you know I think it's changing the form of inflation in a sense so what I mean is you know through history tariffs used to be the biggest source of

30:19revenue for government throughout most history and in most countries okay so it is a I think it's viewed it's a totally valid way of raising money and it should be kept in consideration for that and and you get the foreigners paying a portion of it but there's also as part of the big cycle question is the problem that we have that we are not independent okay we've had a hollow wing out this is the big question you know that we've had a hollowing out of manufacturing the middle class and so on now are we going to try to build that and what is the plan to build that or are we going to continue on with large trade deficits and so you have unsustainable trade deficits that the United States has and which are capital surpluses in other words the dependence

31:26on foreign capital is the other side of those trade balances and that's unsustainable so because that's unsustainable you need some way of rectifying that okay so what is the plan to rectify that partially that plan can have trade tariffs I think they're totally valid but it all has to be part of another greater plan which is to develop the industries that we need to have developed which we're seeing happen in a much more proactive way in other words you're seeing more government activity to create infrastructure to bring in industries and so on you need that not only economically but you need it geopolitically because you can't have dependencies in other words we're entering a world of greater conflict we've moved from a multilateral world order to a power

32:29base confrontational world economy and in that environment everybody's threatening to cut off everything from you know the goods and capital wars that we can have are threatening and so you have to build independence and so that's part of a plan to try to build that independence so I think when I look at that I don't think that's the problem I'd say and it's misunderstood so yes I think people are misunderstanding that and the important thing is we get the other things right you know like let's get down to three percent and by the way there's a bipartisan bill that on this and the three percent doesn't as has come out in favor of it I'm in favor of it and I mean lots of people are in favor of you know what I'll call the three percent three parts solution three

33:34percent of GDP three parts a bit from one thing a bit from another taxes spending and hopefully interest rates and just to take the inflation question to its conclusion at the state of the union this week president trump shared his vision which is that tariffs can completely replace an income tax in the United States do you think that that's a feasible path is it makes sense at some point for tariffs which are effective I don't think it's I don't think it's going to know 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 app or if to me the wealth gap the biggest problem of the wealth gap which is a big social problem is also the productivity gap and you have to make most people productive

34:38and you have to do that through infrastructure and so on and I I don't think I think that needs to be addressed it's a really important point you just made I think my analysis indicates that nearly half of Americans either work for a government agency or a government service provider or contractor the data over the past year is the federal workforce declined by 317,000 employees roughly 14% of the total federal workforce as this administration has reduced the size of some of these agencies reduce 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

35:45government is extremely inefficient it has a role it has an important role but even that role it's handling very inefficiently other governments handle that role of maybe education some of these things in a better way we need fundamental we need you know best thing you could invest in is education but anyway where they go and what they do from the government and you know the other inefficiencies is a problem the one thing that's good about the system that the capitalist system in a sense is it doesn't live if you can't if somebody either won't bet on it or it doesn't make a profit so yeah so I think wherever it goes it's wherever those people go there's just so many inefficient people and inefficient systems is there not enough productivity driven economic growth

36:51in this nation at this time to give more people the opportunity to improve their income improve their wealth improve their livelihoods is that the fundamental issue we're dealing with at the moment or is it that you know people aren't prepared or educated to be productive and therefore the system itself has failed them there are three things basically that you need to do to be successful you have to first educate your children well and so that they are capable of being productive and also educate them in civility so that they are civil with each other the second is then they have to come out to an environment that is an orderly civil environment that people can compete and work with with and compete and work with each other to be productive that that works for the most people and the third thing is you have to stay out of wars you have to stay united

37:53to have no civil war and no international war if you do those three things right you will have a successful country that's all throughout history okay we're having problems with those and are those three things the antidote to some of the rising movements that we're seeing in increased unionization and effects that unions are having on the political process which is also leading to these rises in socialism and support for socialist movements in the United States as well as the wealth taxes which from the view that's shared by those participating in those movements they are meant to solve income inequality wealth gap issues that we're seeing in the United States about their solution is the solution to those movements education and civility creating a civil environment and staying out of wars is that all we need to do to make this successful or is there more to the question that's what we need is to stop fighting okay we're now at a stage where we

38:59have irreconcilable differences another words when 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 they people will not accept the system or the alternatives and so they're going to fight you know I think I think when we have we're going to have the midterm elections you're going to go pass the midterm elections with probably that Democrats will take the house and be it and maybe I don't know it's going to be difficult and you know what nobody can succeed because everybody's going to be fighting they're going to all be fighting okay so how does that affect productivity okay and then when you deal with things like how do you get a good education system so you have now almost the

40:05mob disorder mob disorder and inefficiency nobody's allowed to take charge of this if if you go back in history Plato you know I think it was like 350 BC wrote about the cycle you know democracies and the threat to democracies what's happening now is similar to Julius Caesar and Rome and being you know stabbed in the Senate and what you need is you need a bipartisan you need you need to country to have a strong almost a strong leader we do need a strong leader to get the reforms done to make the country work well but I mean so how do you force this mob of people who are behaving this way including in the elections and so fragment to create order so you need a tough leader

41:12will force them to do different force things to difficult things and not fight with each other and focus on being productive that's what you need I think it sounds a little like there may be this inevitable path of the choice that no one wants to make between some form of socialism and some form of fascism is that where this goes I think you were we're moving toward that war we're in that war we're in what's state what I call stage five of a cycle okay in the book I describe the pattern that's happened over and over again and when you get to this position when there are a bad finances combined with large wealth and values gaps and irreconcilable differences and you have external threats as well as domestic threats you have this dynamic I think that's where

42:13we are I'm like a mechanic my goal I'm not ideological I'm just a practical guy try to make money in the markets and try to describe things and that's what it looks like I think when we look at the bubble question on AI well a lot of people don't realize in bubbles is that through all technologies they think that they are betting on the technology when they buy the stocks in the companies that's not true okay there's a giant difference between the behavior of the companies and the behavior of the technologies and that the norm is in these is that a lot of companies won't survive in the start it very small percentage and they'll all fight and so on but the technologies will go on and it'll be great the technologies will so I want to emphasize to people that dynamic and I can go on and describe you know what it's like of course we've seen it to some extent with

43:20the 2000 bubble in the technologies and what went on but even if I describe what it was like in the late 20s but you know it's just it was unbelievable but the technologies will go on but the companies won't necessarily go on and so when I'm looking at that that has big implications right now it looks to me like AI basically is eating everything and it might ease itself and what I mean by that is not produce adequate profits we can't take just a domestic view of that we have to look also what's happening in China and make interesting distinctions there you know there's a difference in philosophy that's carried through in the economy of how the economies of the United States and China work in that we have basically primarily a profit-based system

44:22they have a system in which they might believe that profits are a second consideration they're not necessarily needed in order to achieve the best results for example in China they would say usage of AI is fantastic so it should be like electricity or something and let's make it free for everyone and let's make it open source for everyone okay and they might get much higher usage and they'll get their productivity gains through the usage and we have a profit system to pay back okay well now we're in one world how do you compete in that world what do you do with that another would just imagine that their technologies are almost as good as ours because they are they're not far behind and and then but that you could get them for free open source

45:22okay now you got to pay it back okay so I just want to emphasize that these are also systematic risks that enter into the picture of of AI but you certainly yeah there are a lot of unknowns here as we wrap looking back on the history of this nation I ask myself the question a lot how did we get to the point that we've gotten to in terms of the amount of death the amount of government spending the role that the central bank has played and the risks that we find ourselves in today that all seem largely avoidable if we hadn't taken or made the decisions we made along the way you've highlighted that they repeat over and over again but if you could go back and restructure the United States and be a founding father and write the constitution yourself what are one to three things that you would have done differently what would you have written into the constitution that may have prevented us from getting into the situation that we're in today well the I mean

46:24it's like the Marshmallow test you know the Marshmallow test yeah you want to see it is a kid going at early age you given the choice between one Marshmallow now and two Marshmallows in 20 minutes and the kid that chooses the two Marshmallows in 20 minutes is going to have a better life and make better decisions kind of thing I mean that therein lies our problem the immediate gratification and also the not knowing if things are going to be productive but the system has been remarkably adaptable too in other words we've gone through crises we've wiped out debts and we've gotten past it and there are certain ways of getting past it but you know it's a tough question to balance financial prudence with innovative inventions you know because you like particularly take AI now nobody knows what's going to come of it and what what way right and

47:27is it going to pay is it not going to pay and all of that and so what do you write into the law that is going to get you financial prudence and controlled and do you when you write it into the law does that lessen the experimentation and you know the entrepreneurship and all of the things that you know so it's tough to do this with with rules I think maybe the main thing is I would say read history read history and know these things and try to get that balance right you know everything's a matter of the balance so the balance of the pain of failing or the pain of putting money into a something that fails well Ray I want to thank you once again for taking the time to be here with me it's always great to catch up here your perspective obviously so much have changed in the last year and yet so much hasn't it's been great to to get your view on it

48:28and I think it's really helpful to do this so so thanks so much and and thank you for what you guys do I'm I'm riveted to your program and I think you make a great contribution so conversations like this are are really practical helps for a lot of people so anyway thank you for letting me participate and thank you for what you do for a lot of people thank you