Grant Williams: Massive Once-In-A-Century Change Is Underway. Don't Be Blind To It!

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**Grant Williams** (0:56)
The change that we're seeing now is enormous in scope. And it is a once in a hundred year change. And the sooner you understand that and the sooner you create the space and the capacity to entertain the kind of change and the kind of outcomes that we simply haven't had to think about or deal with for most of our adult lives, the better equipped you're going to be to try and figure out on the fly how to navigate your way through it.

**Adam Taggart** (1:33)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. The pace of change in the world order has accelerated notably in 2025 The era of globalization is being fast replaced by nationalism, protectionism, and a shift towards regional trading blocks. In America, there's suddenly a recognition that runaway deficit spending in the accumulating pile of debt and unfunded liabilities is an existential problem that needs dealing with. So how are these accelerating developments changing the outlook for the future? For Insight, we're fortunate to welcome macroanalyst and interviewer extraordinaire Grant Williams back to the program. Grant, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Grant Williams** (2:13)
Adam, always a pleasure, my friend. It's lovely to see you. How are you doing?

**Adam Taggart** (2:16)
I'm doing great. And it's great to see you too. And as we jokingly said before we turned the camera on, I'm not sure what we're going to talk about. It's been such a dull year so far.

**Grant Williams** (2:24)
Well, and as I said, and I wasn't joking at all, we could talk about soccer for an hour because, you know, we had a fantastic Champions League semi-final last night. I could talk to you about that for hours, keep everybody entertained. But we have weightier matters to get to probably.

**Adam Taggart** (2:37)
We have weightier matters, but I'm suspecting that maybe the majority of the audience here would love it if I just said, sure, let's just talk about the football game. All right. But to what I said there in the intro, there does seem to be an accelerating sea change underway in the global world order.
I think you can make arguments on both sides. You could say, look, a lot of this is addressing long-term unsustainable trends, and whether that's the way geopolitics and economic relationships between countries have existed for the past several decades, or whether it's the way in which America and other nations are starting to do some house cleaning here. So I guess without asking a leading question on the good or bad side, just how is this changing the calculus, if at all, in terms of your macro outlook from here?

**Grant Williams** (3:38)
Well, it's interesting because your point is absolutely correct. People spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out the nature of this change and the driving forces behind it. That to me is wasted energy. It doesn't matter why. This is change, and this is not necessarily change that's driven by this policy or that policy or Donald Trump or Xi Jinping. This is the kind of change that's much, much bigger than that, I believe. And because of that, it doesn't really matter that Trump is in the White House right now. It doesn't really matter that Xi Jinping is in Beijing. It doesn't really matter that any of the players on this kind of geopolitical chessboard are on the squares they're on.
These cycles are enormous, very long in nature. I was listening to an interview recently with a guy talking about how this is the end of a 5,000 year cycle.
And there are all kinds of cycles, but a lot of these cycles have been identified over the years of differing lengths. And it just happens when you do overlay these cycles. There's a war cycle and you can look at Condratio cycles and debt super cycles. And if you overlay these cycles, there are plenty of overlays that show that a lot of them come together around now in this last 10, 15 years and into the next 10, 15 years. And you throw into that the framework of your last guest and my most recent guest on my podcast with Dimitri, Neil Howe, and this idea of a fourth turning. And it's very difficult not to come away with this sense of real change. And I don't mean Democrat to Republican, and I don't mean low tax to high tax, and I don't even mean globalization to localization. We're talking the kind of secular change that only really occurs every couple of generations. So it's very, if you take Neil's framework, for example, you've got a one in four chance of being one of the generations that live through these times. And that's a hundred year cycle. So you've got one in a hundred years of chance to actually be living and try to operate in the times we're in now. And because of that, it means that this change is completely unfamiliar to everybody that's going through it. They haven't lived it. They may have read about it. The lucky few have read about it. The lucky few still have maybe talked to their great grandparents when they were alive, well, the grandparents when they were alive, but those generations necessarily are all gone now. So the visceral memories of these periods, the periods past is all gone. They live on in the stories. They live on in the history books. And of course, you don't have to go searching for stories from your grandparents, but you do have to go searching for stuff in history books that's not presented to you. So if you're not interested and curious and keen to understand this stuff, you're not going to because it won't be fed to you. And that's where that's where I think we are. You know, I think we're in one of those periods. And so the change that's happening is going to feel incredibly uncomfortable. It's going to be terribly confusing. It's going to be significant in its scope and its range, and it is going to affect everybody. And when you have changed like that, the difficult part is trying to find a way to step far enough back from the daily noise and the on-the-ground change that people are seeing in their portfolios and the way stocks perform and the way currencies are moving. You need to step much, much, much further back to be able to see that those things are a tiny, tiny part of the change that's going on. And it's not the change in the stock market are not going to affect the broader changes. The broader changes are going to affect the stock market. So the better handle you can get on those and the better understanding you can get of them, the better chance you're going to have of being able to navigate your way through it from an investment perspective. And that's, again, another important point, that we have put the stock market and asset markets at the center of our universe for multiple decades. Now, it's all been about the stock market. It's all been about the bond market. It's all been about your performance every year and how much money you're making and how much you're compounding. It's been all about that. And that is another big change here. It's not going to be irrelevant, but that is going to be driven by these big changes. And you are going to see things happen in the financial world that seemingly make no sense because you're judging them on the last 40 years and how such and such an item of news would have impacted things 10 years ago and suddenly it's not. And that's going to be difficult for a lot of people. So I think, I don't want to get on the soapbox, but I think the important thing for people to understand is the change that we're seeing now is enormous in scope. And it is, it's a once in a hundred year change. And the sooner you understand that and the sooner you create the space and the capacity to entertain the kind of change and the kind of outcomes that we simply haven't had to think about or deal with for most of our adult lives, the better equipped you're going to be to try and figure out on the fly how to navigate your way through it.