Tom Bilyeu

predictable from a historical perspective when you look at that big cycle and you see how it repeats.

And so as you went through the last 500 years, one thing that you make very clear in the book is that the rise and fall of empires, the rise and fall of a reserve currency, they go in this six cycle trend.

And the part that I always find unnerving

is phase six is basically war and collapse.

And so you have that previously dominant power loses its position, loses its status as a reserve currency, and it loses it for pretty predictable reasons in the three forces that you were talking about in the beginning.

discounting the fourth force, which I don't think in every cycle you always had, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but you didn't always have a pandemic or anything like that.

But the fact that we're living in a moment right now where we have all of them.

And so we've got, you know, not only is it a moment of massive technological disruption right now, good and bad, but we've got the money printing, the meme on the internet is money printer go brr.

So we've got printing because of COVID.

We've got printing coming off of printing because of the 2008 collapse.

And now we're, again, seeing this cycle repeat itself.

So I've heard you say that we're somewhere in phase five, which is as the empire begins to decline, as you have a rising superpower, as the debt bubble is getting out of control.

With that perspective was...

What happened with the SVB bank collapse?

Was that something that you knew, okay, something like that is coming?

Or was that a surprise to you?

So they're broke.

Let me put a fine point on that.

Sorry, before you move on, I don't know that people really understand this.

Is this a...