#181 - Tom Bilyeu - AI, Bitcoin & the Rigged Economy

**Tom Bilyeu** (0:00)
Every empire in human history has failed the test of can you hold the one ring of being the reserve currency and not print your way to oblivion. We will literally be in a race against AI to see if AI can bring in the age of abundance before we drive off a fiscal cliff. The average person does not map this to debt and money printing.
We have just absolutely decimated the working and middle class.

**Peter McCormack** (0:25)
We're getting poorer, and people are starting to feel that middle class is getting squeezed. Small businesses are closing, high streets are dead. There's potholes in the streets, there's rubbish everywhere.
Nothing works in this country anymore.

**Tom Bilyeu** (0:38)
The game is rigged. This is exactly how it's rigged and how you fix it. While it's the way that it is, invest like this. You have to remember you have agency, that you can do things. The pain and suffering that you feel right now is because the economy has been knowingly rigged against you, knowingly, knowingly.
It's done through debt and money printing. And unless you solve that, nothing else matters.

**Peter McCormack** (1:04)
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Tom, hi.

**Tom Bilyeu** (1:29)
Hello.

**Peter McCormack** (1:30)
Great to meet you.

**Tom Bilyeu** (1:31)
Same, man.

**Peter McCormack** (1:32)
We get to the edge of civilization figuring out what's going on, and then have to kind of try and process it. And so I'm really intrigued broadly to ask you where you think we are as a civilization and where we're going.

**Tom Bilyeu** (1:46)
Okay. I'll speed run it and then you can sort of press on it.
The world moves in incredible cycles that are basically tied to economics. If you, once you understand how much is controlled by the debt cycle, then it really starts to get scary. In the West, we're in a really bad place from the big debt cycle. So I'm a big, I'm mapped to what Ray Dalio talks about in terms of the debt cycle and how it impacts things.
Every empire in human history has failed the test of can you hold the one ring of being the reserve currency and not print your way to oblivion? And everybody prints their way to oblivion. So I think we're at that point. And so if we could back off, like if we could get some discipline and actually get to the point where we have balanced budgets, we're not punishing the working and middle class by devaluing the dollar, we'd be in great shape. But alas, I think that we will literally be in a race against AI to see if AI can bring in the age of abundance before we drive off a fiscal cliff. And so I think these are highly consequential times that matter tremendously what people do. And so that's ultimately what drug me into talking about economics, politics, never in a million years that I think that this would be something that I would spend the amount of time researching that I do now. But it just became the most consequential thing, not only in my life, but when I look out at trying to actually help people, I was like, oh yeah, it's basically all about economics right now.

**Peter McCormack** (3:23)
Yeah, amazing. I mean, the last 10 years of making this show, nine and a half years of it was just on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin gave me the lens for this. I met some incredible people who introduced me to the ideas of Austrian economics and how money works in the debt cycle as you have done. And I have done everything I can, Tom.
Just to try and help people understand the political game of promises lead to votes. Votes lead to power, power leads to control of the money printer. Money printer leads to money printing, and you get them poorer through inflation. And I cannot get people to connect those dots.

**Tom Bilyeu** (4:02)
I am here empathizing with you so hard, I'm gonna get a cramp. That the fact that you can't get people to really spend the time to think about just the cause and effect in the economy is so brutal. If you care and like you wanna see things go well for them. And if you're thinking about your kids, which I imagine you are, and you're just like people have to get this at scale or we're toast. And it is just complicated enough that they won't.