The Fall of the US Empire (What Comes Next)

So I really did not want to make a video like this, but something feels off. You've probably felt it too. Like the economy doesn't add up. We just recently revised the job numbers again, and we learned that we actually had 900,000 less jobs than we were originally told between March 2024 and 2025. Stock market kind of feels disconnected from reality. I'm noticing people are angrier and more divided than ever. I've seen some really bad takes on social media about what's really happening, and every day the news feels like there's another sign that the world is coming to an end. Believe it or not, there's a name for this. Some people call it the fourth turning, and that this cycle happens every 20 years or so. Famous economist Ray Dalio says that it's the decline of the US empire, and we're in the last phase of it. But whatever we call it, we all feel it, I think. So today's video is not gonna be my usual fancy storytelling and cool editing. I'm gonna try to do this in as few takes as possible, and I'm gonna zoom out, and I'm gonna oversimplify a lot of very complex ideas and give you a high-level overview of what I think is really happening, because I don't think this is an accident of how we got here. If you look at what's happening to this country and around the world, not just in the US, but everywhere, and you look at it through the lens of incentives and money, you will understand what led us to this point, and you'll see that this is not random. But what I really hope this video does for you is that it helps you stay sane in a world that feels more and more insane. What we're seeing right now is the glue that held us together slowly coming apart. Things like faith, family, community, property. That's getting weaker and weaker. What we're left with is a system that's built on fragility, and that fragility shows up in two specific places that we see all around us, in economics and our attention. So let me break this down. On the attention side, we've created a system that is designed to find the most effective way to farm our attention. It's called the algorithm. It's all around us. It's on the internet, it's in the news, it's business, it's everywhere. And what data has found is that fear and anger are the two most effective ways to get our attention. They get us to participate, and the word is called engagement. Here's a chart of word usage frequency throughout the years by a popular media company. Pause it and take a look at it, because what you're gonna find is usage of words that are divisive and woke went way up. Words like triggering, hurtful, mansplaining. All of these words went up by 500 plus percent since 2010. Now ask yourself why that is. Is it because those events started to become more and more prevalent? No, it's because companies started to realize that in order to get people to subscribe and pay for articles, they have to pick sides. They had to pick a narrative, a story that would connect and get us to engage. Because being neutral does not sell. And there are countless and countless and dozens of very recent examples of how these algorithms use this information to get us to engage. And the more insensitive, the more outrageous, the more divisive it is, the more engagement it leads to. And the more engagement, the more it translates to revenue. I always like to think of this idea sort of like the shave and a haircut two bits. I'm sure you've heard this sound. It goes like, but I stop right before the end. It's incomplete and it's kind of triggering. That is journalism today. It is designed to bait you so you can express your fear and anger and engage. This is intentional because our fear and anger is primal. It's in our DNA. We wanna know about things that can hurt us so we can learn from them and avoid them. That's why we're addicted to watching them. It's why we stop at every car crash to look like we haven't seen one. And the algorithms have learned this. This is what I like to call a perversion of economic incentives. Meaning, there's more financial incentive to get us to click and engage than there is in just being neutral. If the news was, hey, everything is fine, go back to living your life. That's not exciting. I'm not gonna click on that. So after years and years of this divisive programming driven by financial incentives, society gets split. Those that can think for themselves and notice this pattern and those who don't. You get the haves and the have-nots. So we see this division, especially on the political side. If you look at data, you'll see that the Democrats and Republicans have never been farther apart. Pew research of partisan value gaps are the widest they've ever been since they started surveys in the 1980s. We have never disagreed with each other as much as we do today. And what's really interesting is that in the 1960s, about half of Republicans and Democrats said they wouldn't mind their child marrying across party lines. Today, only 4% marry across party lines. Once we've created an enemy of our neighbor, we no longer have discourse. There is no more conversation. So now the stage is set because that's the first piece of the puzzle. It's the psychology, the attention, which otherwise, by the way, would never work on people if the second piece of the puzzle wasn't missing. And that is the economy. The reality today is that most young people feel like they will never own a home. They're never gonna build any kind of wealth and they'll never find stability. So you get a society that's set up for radicalization and violence because when people believe they've got nothing to lose, that's when we hit a breaking point. That's when societies collapse, revolutions happen, we get fragmentation, tribalism, different social medias that appeal to different people and different ideas, and then empires fall. Now, all of these events happen to be right in line with where we are in Ray Dalio's debt cycle or the fourth turning, as some people call it. But I also wanna mention something else. This is not a new thing that's just started happening to my generation. These forces of perverse economic incentives existed way before the algorithms and way before computers and way before I was born. These incentives existed in traditional media, they existed in print, but there was one major difference that previous generations had that this one does not. That is economic circumstance. It allowed them to rise above and to see through it. It allowed them to thrive despite it. It was called the American dream. On one income, it's possible to start a family and to own property. And back when our parents were starting out, for example, the average home cost about three times the average income. Today, it's closer to seven times. The average age of a first time home buyer was in the 20s. Now it's 38. Rents when adjusted for inflation have skyrocketed. Now, it's also true that today it's easier than ever before to make money, but that money doesn't get us as far. So what this means is we've created a generation of renters instead of owners. At the same time that this has been happening, the economy has been feeding itself and poisoning itself with bad immigration policies and open borders. And that has led to division and a lack of common understanding. So what do we do? We look for distractions because we don't have in-person real life social cohesion. And when people stop talking, when they fragment into their own echo chambers and they don't own anything, there's no property, no assets or any stake in society, why would they defend it? What is it anymore? The only thing that seems to bind modern society together is the pursuit of stuff, the material, money, the dollar, which is also declining. That's why so many people are turning to things like BNPL or buy now pay later, which I did a whole video about. You can literally buy a pizza on credit and over half of BNPL users have missed payments. That's not normal. That's how distorted the economy and reality has become. And when you combine all that with the psychological aspect of the new cycle, which is driven by financial interest, and you get social unrest, distrust and a decline. Now, if you look back throughout history though, this happens again and again. Ray Dalio calls it the long-term debt cycle and historians like William Strauss and Neil Howe call it the fourth turn. Every 20 years, we enter a new cycle. Great nations and empires rise, they prosper, they overextend and eventually they decline. And the decline always kind of looks about the same. Debt goes up, the wealth between the rich and poor gets bigger and bigger, politics turn bitter and trust in institutions collapses. Now, while all of this is happening though, the empire wraps itself in a cocoon of protective policies that isolate itself from the rest of the world. Some of those policies are things like when the US government just took a 10% stake in Intel, effectively kind of part nationalizing it, which is weird. Then there's the tariffs. And while they're not necessarily inflationary, but they are protective regulations, which I think are done in good faith to protect the empire and buy it some time, but instead, they make the empire weaker and less competitive on a global level. You can see this in the fall of the Roman empire when decades of overspending and 98% inflation made their currency worthless, which is what we've seen in this country since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. You can see it in the decline of the British empire when the cost of the two world wars left them buried in debt, forced them to hand over the leadership over to the US and they gave up the reserve currency status. And now you can see the same pattern today. The US dollar is still the world's reserve currency, yes, but every year that status gets weaker and weaker. The national debt just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Interest payments on that debt are now bigger than what the US spends on the entire defense budget. Now, while all of this is also happening, the system of perverse economic incentives weaken our psychology by dividing and distracting us. Kind of like a magician that asks you just like, hey, pick a card, right? Pick a story. The algorithm will poison you with it. And we've seen throughout the years how this has progressively gotten worse and worse. We get the left versus the right, the right versus the left. It's the immigrants. It's the foreign nation that control our governments. It's the deep state. It's the globalists. Pick a story. Whatever you believe, the algorithm will send you down that rabbit hole. And that's not to say those are not real issues that we need to talk about, but when you mix the psychology of incentives that are purely designed to make money, thanks to pieces of paper being created out of thin air, this is what it leads to. Social unrest and a reality where no one can agree on anything. That's what we're living through right now. And I know all of this sounds really dark and it kind of is dark, but history shows that societies do go through these new cycles every 20 years. And every time it feels like the world is gonna end. But life goes on. Now, I've been seeing the news a lot lately. And the question I had for myself is, how do I stay sane? And one thing that recently helped me is, I went to dinner with my friends and I asked them, do you guys feel like the world is about to come to an end or is it just me? And they're like, nah, it's just you. That's just your algorithm. It's your bubble. I don't feel that. And I hope they're right. But if this is really happening and you notice something is happening as well, for me, the answer is, I'm gonna go back to the basics. I'm gonna build real things, own real assets, build a family and a community and focus on what I can actually control, which is doing what I love, staying informed and understanding why this is happening so I don't become bitter. Also things like taking care of myself, going to the gym, eating well and trying to stay off of social media, which is really hard to do because this is what I do. But I don't think it's productive to feel what Charlie Kirk described as economic nihilism. It's this feeling of, why try if nothing matters? That's dangerous because once a generation stops believing in the possibility of a better future, they start looking for ways to tear the system down and then laugh about it. And that's sad. But it's also true that people who own homes, who have families, who have a stake in society, don't burn it down. They protect it. And that's something I can work toward. Because the truth is, you and I can't control the Fed, we can't control Congress, we can't control the media, but what we can control are our own decisions. That means things like being careful with debt, investing for the longterm and then not letting the algorithms turn us into angry, bitter people that lack empathy, that can't have a conversation with someone who disagrees with us. So if you look at this from the lens of these cycles, maybe we are in some fourth turning moment. I'd also like to think that on the other side of that is a first turning, a renewal, rebuilding, optimism. So if you feel like the world is falling apart, just remember, it always has been. But it's the people who stay informed, who stay focused on what matters. I think those are the people that come out stronger. That's why I always say, if you wanna understand the world, look at it through the lens of incentives and economics. Now, all of this was a very dumbed down version of some really complex ideas and concepts that are happening around the world. And I'm only looking at it through a very limited scope of money and psychology, because that's what I love. I love investing and I love magic, but there's more to this story. If you wanna get a lot more detailed, I'd recommend a video called The Collapse of the West with Balaji and Peter McCormick. It's an incredible video and it goes into a lot more detail about what's happening. You can also read the fourth turning and you might wanna check out Ray Dalio's book as well. In the meantime, sorry for the depressingly sad and boring video, but I hope you got something good out of it. And I hope it's just me. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Smash the like button, subscribe if you haven't already. I'd love to see you back here next week. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.