The following is a conversation with Ray Dalio,
his second time on the podcast.
He is a legendary investor,
founder of Bridgewater Associates,
author of a book I highly recommend called Principles,
and also a new book called Principles for Dealing
with a Changing World Order,
that looks at the geopolitics of today,
especially US and China,
to the lens of history,
providing a fascinating model
for the rise and fall of empires
that can be applied to the analysis of our world today.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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And now, here's my conversation with Ray Dalio.
When you look at the history of the world,
as you have done in your new book,
Principles of Dealing with a Changing World Order,
what is more important, more impactful, money or power?
They go hand in hand.
They support each other and they compete with each other.
Those who have money have power,
that's a certain type of power.
That power has to do with all that they can buy,
but it also has the ability to influence
those with political power.
And so you see this throughout history,
this symbiotic relationship.
You know, for example,
between the royal families,
the nobility and the church.
So you see that group of people
supporting each other in various ways,
and then wrestling around with each other
for the money and power among that group.
So the dynamic that's quite classic
is you could look at the parties in power,
back in the 16th, 17th centuries,
you would look at royal families, nobles and the church,
if you're in Europe,
and then you would look at agricultural land,
and there was a certain dynamic.
And that varies over time, it changes.
As those people get thrown out and technology changes,
so when we evolved, when the society evolved,
so that it would produce goods and services,
and you have something like the industrial revolution,
the first industrial revolution,
they have machines,
and you have the talent of people that are off the farms,
and then you have a struggling for power.
You see that power mix change.
And so we don't see that same power mix anymore,
but you still see the same dynamic.
You see those with money,
dealing with those who have political power
around those assets that are considered most valuable
to particularly the productive assets that produce money.
And political powers usually centered around nation-state,
so the major locus is of powers, the nations.
Yes, in 1668, after 30 years of war,
there was the development of nation-states.
Before then, I was really the development of countries,
as we know it, that there were borders,
and that within those borders,
those who had control got to control it,
and there would not to be intrusions in those borders,
and that's how we established the nation-state.
And then of course, within each country, there is levels.
There is a central level,
and then there is a typically a province
or state level down below,
and then there's a municipal level,
so they each have different levels of power,
and it's the coordination of those
that determines how the country is run.
You write that the quote archetypal big cycle
governs the rising and declining empires
and influences everything about them,
including their currencies and markets.
The most important three cycles
are the ones you mentioned in the introduction,
the long-term debt and capital market cycle,
the internal order and disorder cycle,
and the external order and disorder cycle.
Can you describe this big cycle?
There are two orders.
There is an order by a system,
how the system works.
So there's an internal order
that is the internal governance system,
and it's usually set out in a constitution
or some agreements.
And then there's the world order, how the world system.
So for example, in 1945, at the end of a war,
which is basically a fight for determining the world order,
the winners of the fight got together
and created the world system as we now know it.
In 1944, they created the Bretton Woods monetary system
that determined the money pretty much.
And because the United States won
and had 80% of the world's money,
gold was money then and it has 80% of the world's gold
and it was half the world economy
and it was the great military power,
the order was built around an American world order
so that the United Nations was in New York,
the World Bank and the IMF were in Washington
and they built that new order.
So classically, you have a war
to determine whose rules were following
and then you have the new order being constructed.
After that, there is usually period
of extended peace and prosperity.
Peace suits prosperity and so there's not,
and the reason you have the peace
is because no one wants to fight with the dominant power,
you know you're gonna lose, you've surrendered,
there's been the surrendering, they carve up the world,
they say what it's gonna look like,
who's gonna control what?
And then you come into that period of peace
and then prosperity where then there's a working together.
Usually at that point, you've wiped out a lot of the debt,
you've wiped out a lot of the issues,
the class warfare and so on
and then there's good working together.
So those great periods such as the industrial revolution
in the late 1800s or what we've experienced
in the post-World War II period are peaceful
and prosperous periods led largely
by the dominant world power.
Over a period of time, since really 1500 and maybe before,
but really 1500 when the Dutch invented capitalism
and what I mean by that,
they invented the first capital markets,
the first stocks and the first stock market,
that since then capitalism has been an effective tool
for building wealth because it got resources
into the hands of inventive people.
That's when we move from agriculture
to the importance of inventiveness of people,
they got resources and then they built that prosperity.
In that process of doing that,
they create wealth gaps naturally.
Those who make a lot of money make a lot more
and then those that don't.
And it also produces opportunity gaps
because for example, those who earn a lot of money
have that wealth.
They have the power to educate their children
in a way that others don't and the gaps grow
and also the debts grow at that time.
When they go around the world with their competitiveness,
they earn a lot of money.
So for example, the Dutch, the Dutch empire,
learned how to build ships that would go around the world.
A key ingredient of this improvement in this cycle
is the improvement of education and by education,
I mean the skills that come from education,
but also civility, the ability to deal with wealth together.
So the Dutch invented ships that could go around the world
and they had military power,
but they were also very inventive society.
25% of the world's new inventions came from the Dutch.
And so as they went around the world,
they also brought their currency
and they brought their military.
They needed the currency, they paid for things
and that currency and then the more that happens,
the more that becomes a reserve currency
and then they have their military
so they need their military strength
and so you see it evolve in all of those ways.
But over a period of time as they become more successful
and more expensive, they become more expensive.
And newer countries come along like the UK
then learn to build ships from a lot the Dutch
and could do that less expensively.
And also when they become more expensive
so less competitive and also the work ethic
begins to change.
They believe that since they're richer,
they can enjoy life more.
They don't have to work quite as hard.
And so you start to see the tilt.
Now you started to see the development of the top.
And when you have a world reserve currency,
that allows you to borrow a lot of money
because those who want to save want to hold your money
and that means that they'll lend you money.
And so those countries get deeper into debt.
So you see that they gradually lose their competitiveness
and they get themselves into financial circumstances
which are not good and they have large wealth gaps
which set the stage for downturns.
And when they have downturns, the first question is,
do they have enough money?
And traditionally, money is resources.
So you classically see that the coffers are bare,
that they're spending more money than they are earning
and they run out of money in the coffers.
And their granaries are empty rather than stocked
so that they give them the buffer.
And as that deteriorates, that worsens conditions.
And if they have a rival power that's also challenging them,
they see greater internal conflict over wealth
and then they have the problems internally
and the problems externally
which usually results in an internal war
or an external war that leads to the change
in the new world order.
And to you, the Dutch empire is a good example
that the British, what are some of the key examples
that you think about in the book of this process
that followed the big cycle?
Well, the leading reserve currency empires
but it applies to all the empires
were the Dutch, the British, the American and the Chinese.
But you could follow the same pattern.
In the book, it was very important for me
to not just use words and concepts
because that's subjective.
It was very important for me to use actual measurements.
So as you see in the book, you can see every level of this.
You can see where's the education level,
what is the military power, each one of those
and you could see them back going over the 500 years.
And so you can see the arcs and the composition
of those arcs and what you see is really
in most countries and most dynasties, you could see that
but you also can see through those numbers
the health of those countries.
Today, there are statistics that you could,
that are in the book that show what is the level
of education, what is the level of economic output,
what is the level of military strength,
what is the level of a number of different measures
of strength so that you can then compare that.
And I think that because they're objective measures
of strength that you could see change,
that shows the picture of where we are today.
And I think one of the most important things
about the book is that it allows people to monitor
how those things are transpiring.
I think for policymakers, are your policymakers
doing a good job and there's so much subjectivity in that.
But I think it's very simple.
If those lines on the chart are improving,
if your health index is improving,
then you're moving toward a better life.
So that's what the book works like also.
It was used to create a model for the future.
In other words, there are cause-effect relationships.
Everything that happens has reasons, causes,
that preceded it, that made it happen.
And so by having all those in numbers,
one can see the probabilities of certain things happening.
So that's what you see in the book.
It's not just raise interpretation.
I didn't wanna make it raise interpretation
because I don't know if I'm right.
Yeah, so one of the fascinating things in the book,
see I've listed these 18 measures
and there's like a little scorecard
for the countries of the world today.
So let's say US, China and Europe.
And what it was 20 years ago,
I'm looking at the change from 20 years ago
and that's another indicator,
the change itself to see where things are headed.
Maybe can you comment on, from a score perspective,
how is US and China doing?
And in the 18 measures, what are some measures
that stand out to you as particularly important
to think about today for the United States, for China?
Well, there are a number.
Financially, what you see in the United States
is that we're borrowing a lot more money,
creating a lot of debt,
and we're printing a lot of money.
And our capacity to do that is very much,
is limited, first of all,
because when there's a sale of a bond,
when the government borrows more than it borrows money
because it spends more than it takes in,
you have to sell a bond.
And the world right now has a lot
of US dollar denominated bonds
because as the world's reserve currency,
they sell, so on them.
And they have very bad returns, negative real returns,
negative real returns significantly and so on.
So that means that more bonds has to be sold
than are bought.
And that means that the Federal Reserve
has, is faced with the choice
of having to raise the interest rate
to curtail borrowing, which slows the economy
and hurts the markets,
or by filling that difference
and producing money, the debt monetization,
which produces an inflation in goods,
services, and financial assets.
So in that regard, that's the United States' position.
In China's case, its balance of payments is better.
China has displaced the United States
as the world's largest trading country.
In other words, more exports to other countries.
And as a result, it's economically competitive,
but it doesn't have the world's reserve currency.
It's a real blessing.
So the United States, it has the world's reserve currency,
but it is risking it because of this imbalance.
So if you look at history, you see that those go slowly,
but when they go, eventually, they go quickly.
So there's a risk of that financially.
Then there's the issue of internal order.
So I'm just giving you the major ones,
but I'll get into some of the other ones too.
Right now, there's a lot of internal conflict
in the United States, which affects how well it works.
In China, there's less internal conflict
because it's a more autocratic state,
but also they've created this bifurcation
of what is political and what is economic
in terms of producing that prosperity.
So if you stay out of the politics pretty much,
and then you're seeing entrepreneurship,
you're seeing the finances of new businesses and so on.
And so that internal working,
that's subject to different people's interpretations,
whether they like it or not,
but the internal conflict
in terms of those kinds of measures is less.
Sorry to pause on that for a second.
So these measures, I guess you don't want to sort of romanticize
any one measure or something like that
overinterpret any one measure,
but is internal conflict always a bad thing?
Is it a complicated calculation,
or do you kind of,
the way we think about these measures
that you've presented,
we should be thinking like the higher, the better,
the lower, worse, or I mean, of course,
depending on the measure.
In many cases, the conflict that produces the revolution
produces revolutionary changes
that lead to resolutions and lead to new starts.
And so their short-term,
a short-term civil war is a hellacious experience.
And at the same time,
it can be the transition to a new beginning.
Also, there are different types of conflict.
Competition, which makes things,
makes everything better is a productive conflict,
whereas destructive conflicts are not good
over the short time.
So that's how those go.
So within each measure, the story is complicated.
Yeah, but my measures are sort of clear,
meaning how much political conflict,
how much social conflict.
In other words, you can measure conflict,
you can measure fighting,
you can measure crime rates,
you can measure lots of different ways of conflict.
So the measures are a composite
of different types of internal conflict.
What are some other interesting measures?
Maybe if you could also mention that
for me in particular interest is education and innovation.
Yes, the classic cycle,
the most important leading indicator
is the quality of education.
Most importantly, broad-based education
drawn from the largest population
because you can never tell who the talent is going to be,
where they're gonna come from.
So for example, if you look at the Chinese dynasties,
the great Chinese dynasties and the Confucian approach,
it was meritocratic of everybody could sit for exams
and so on, broad-based of drawing in the populations.
And you see that if you go across societies
because that draws on the largest number of population
to get education.
And it also, that creates a reality and a perception
that the system is fairer, equal opportunity,
not just one of privilege.
And that helps to create social stability.
But education is not just education in understanding facts
and so on, it is education in civility
of how to behave together.
And so if they're smart,
they understand how to be productive
because they work well together and they're productive.
And then that leads to the next stage.
You could see in the lines in the charts,
I plotted these so that you could see in a typical cycle,
you could see that education is the long leading indicator.
And then you could see, as you mentioned,
that what you see is inventiveness
and technology measures then follow.
And you see then also competitiveness
and world markets follows.
For example, in the early stages of a cycle,
the industries that they go into tend to be
very basic industry because they have cheap labor,
something like textiles and simple manufactured goods
and so on.
But as the education rises,
then they move up the value chain to greater technologies
and so on, which raises incomes and raises productivity.
So yes, those and as you say,
there are 18 different measures like that,
but education and then civility and the inventiveness.
So you see it reflected in who's inventing what.
And that corresponds then who's trading with,
who's a big trading country?
And where's the value of economic output
and what are per capita incomes?
They all follow those arcs.
Yeah, like you said, the fascinating thing about your book,
so there's philosophy, there's wisdom, but there's plots.
Yeah, you can see it.
So it's not just your opinion.
It's kind of like you can interpret it any way you like,
but you're just giving a lot of your own insights
along with the numbers.
If you were to look at the American nation,
the American empire,
and the trajectories looking into the future,
given these measures,
what is the trajectory that leads to the collapse
of the American empire based on these measures?
What are the concerning indicators
and if those break down further, what does that look like?
Well, all of those indicators are concerning,
maybe except for one, which is technology,
the technology niche,
although even in that area of the United States
is improving at a slower rate than is China
for various advantages that they have there.
They put out about eight times as many computer engineers,
they have free data and so on.
But if you look at them, so the financial is a concern,
the internal order, disorder is a concern,
then if you look at education levels,
the United States is in many ways,
is losing its educational advantage.
If you were to compare it with China,
if you take general public education in the United States,
it's deteriorated tremendously,
even in comparison to developed countries.
There are scores, pieces scores and so on,
and it's something like 38th in the world or something,
and that was a big plunge, average public education.
If you look at the best universities in the world,
the United States is unique
in having the best universities in the world.
So there are these privileged spots
that are excellent, uniquely excellent.
So when you look at the comparison,
education in China is improving rapidly
and the quantity is a quantity of educated people
in the areas that they're moving in is greater,
and the resources that they're putting behind it is greater,
and so you see the results are greater,
but it's sort of along the lines that I'm dealing with.
If you were to follow through in terms of actual productions,
I think you know in terms of technologies,
there are some areas that the United States is in a lead
at the moment, there's some areas that China's in a lead,
but China's gaining very quickly.
When I first went to China, 1984,
I would bring $10 calculators
and I gave them away as gifts to high-ranking people,
and they thought they were miracle devices.
Right now, in terms of areas like quantum computing
and AI and many areas, you have a race going on,
and so if you take the trajectory of the competitiveness,
not just look at the current level,
you have a situation where they're improving
at a much faster rate.
This is all good for the world if the world can get along,
and the main thing I think is,
in just how do you have a healthy world
and how do you have a strong economy
and how do you have a strong situation,
is be strong.
The United States' war is with itself.
That's the main war, you know, it's very simple in history.
Be financially sound, earn more than you spend,
and be strong in these ways,
and pretty much everything will take care of itself.
But you make it sound simple, of course,
because there's a momentum when things degrade,
when the education system degrades,
when you start borrowing,
when, I mean, all of these indicators,
once they start going down, there's a momentum to it, right?
So it's hard to reverse it.
Right, and there are circumstances that you're then in.
For example, indebtedness, you know,
it's politically desirable for those
to borrow money and spend because their constituencies
only look at what they get.
And when they get a lot, they don't pay attention
to the balance sheet and how much debt is on the books.
So it's always better to borrow, spend,
and then leave the cleanup to the next guy.
And so you inherit a lot.
You inherited, as a new president enters in,
or new legislators, they have a lot of debt,
they have a broken-down infrastructure,
they don't have enough money to fix that.
And so that's the lay of the land that the prior generations
put you in, and there you are.
And so that's right.
It's difficult because when you start to think,
okay, what's healthy, well, earn more than you spend.
Well, that's not so easy because, you know,
what does that mean?
Go earn more?
I mean, okay, that's not so easy.
Spend less, that isn't going to work.
So now what do you do?
Okay, you have this debt that you then monetize,
and that's why it's classic.
So yes, that's why these cycles occur
because what has created before,
what happened before created the lay of the land
that is then increasingly difficult to deal with.
So what can great leaders do in this moment?
I mean, maybe my sense is leadership is crucial here.
So for example, to do very large projects
that invest in the education system,
that sort of try to fix the fundamentals,
or maybe invest more and more into the innovation
and the development of new technologies and so on.
It feels like that just doesn't happen organically.
So you have to have strong leaders
that convince the populace of the importance of these ideas.
Well, I completely agree with your list.
What we have is a situation where everybody
has their opinions,
and they have to sort of get them exactly right,
and they all fight with each other
about whether their opinions.
So the most important thing is that we become bipartisan
so that we don't, and we get over our differences.
I would have a bipartisan cabinet.
I would draw upon both members of both parties,
the moderates, who are going to be able to work together.
So as then we have one country,
and then we deal with those in a means
that works for the majority of the people
in the middle rather than the polarity.
I think our greatest risk is in not being able to do that.
So I would say that's of paramount importance
because we have the resources,
wealth, real wealth, and science,
and everything has never been better than it is.
But the notion is that it has to work
for the majority of people,
and we have to keep it being productive.
So that group has got to calmly and knowledgeably
work together so that they increase the size of the pie
and they create broad-based prosperity.
So that is of paramount importance.
Whatever they do, if they do it that way,
I can say I'm happy about
because that other alternative
is the really scary alternative.
The scary alternative,
the different ways it has evolved throughout history,
some of it has led to wars.
What are the future trajectories
that lead to a potential war with China?
Cold war or hot war?
Is this something you think about?
Is this something you're worried about?
Yeah, I'd like to talk about both wars.
So the war with China,
as I say, there are five kinds of wars.
There's a trade war, technology war,
geopolitical influence war,
capital war, and military war.
As far as military war goes,
I think it's only a Taiwan issue,
but that's a big issue.
And we could talk about that for a minute.
But those others, there'll be rough competitions,
and we'll have that type of evolution over a period of time.
That's what that war looks like.
Taiwan has been, for a long time,
a sovereignty issue to China.
And it has its roots in what's called
100 years of humiliation.
From the 1840s to 1949,
foreign powers came in, took advantage of China.
They had the opium wars in such times,
and that represented the 100 years of humiliation.
And Taiwan represents their sovereignty
and their important thing.
And 50 years ago, starting 50 years ago,
there was an agreement that there is one China,
and Taiwan is part of China,
and that there would be peaceful reunification.
The peaceful reunification hasn't happened.
And in their view, that's a very big issue.
And so it's a big contentious issue.
And that could produce a military war,
could produce a military accident,
could produce, it's a very tense situation.
And if we had a military war, God help us
because of the capacity in all different new ways
to inflict harm on each other.
But anyway, that's that.
If you don't have that military war,
you'll have the competition between
those other kinds of wars.
And whoever is strongest in those areas will win.
Where do you put cyber war within the five?
Well, cyber war is a military war.
I'm assuming the type of cyber war
that you're referring to is that which it's used
to inflict pain on the other party through cyber.
So cyber wars, you'll see cyber war.
You could see space war.
You can see drone warfare.
You, new types of warfare,
not just the traditional and nuclear type of warfare,
but you could see any of the above.
What are the defining characteristics?
What are the interesting things about Xi Jinping,
the president of China, as a leader on the world stage?
His father was a early leader.
He was himself in the Cultural Revolution in times,
in the Cultural Revolution in times, treated brutally.
And during that period of time, it was very, very difficult.
And he came up through the ranks
and he's a very intelligent man.
When he first came to power,
as you know, they have two five-year terms
and we're now coming to the end of the second
of those five-year terms.
When he first came to power,
he felt that there should be a lot of reform
and reform meant moving to much more of a market
and open economy.
When that happened in him coming in,
I had some contact with economic policy makers,
but in the circumstances then,
where that five major banks lent to state-owned enterprises
and local governments with implied government guarantees.
And so there was not control of that
and the movement to aim more of a market economy.
And the development of markets was a primary
and also the dealing with the corruption issue.
There was a lot of corruption prior to that
and that was viewed as an existential threat to the system.
So that became the primary objective.
And then as time progressed over those 10 years,
there was a lot of changing
in the world, their financial circumstances,
opening many, many other markets.
They particularly getting money
to small and medium-sized enterprises
and developing a lending system
and then establishing controls on it.
So right now, there's
a vibrant capital markets.
You can raise capital, you can be an entrepreneur,
you can become a billionaire in the capital markets
and they developed the markets
to be the second largest capital markets.
At the same time, they had to deal
with their rising debt issue,
which they began to deal with really about four years ago
when the second term began
and then Lou Ha became
the vice premier responsible for that
and to deal with those issues.
So you see right now that what's happening
is the dealing with the real estate bubble.
There was a development in real estate, a bubble,
which produced a lot of unproductive lending.
And Xi Jinping said,
houses are meant to live in, not to speculate on.
And so that was wasteful.
So they established what they call three red lines,
which are financial ratios
that the property developers had to live within.
And that is then causing the adjustments
that are going on now,
which in my view are very healthy
because whenever there's bankruptcies
and so on in the public think, okay, that's a problem.
It's in many cases really a cleaning up
of bad debts and bad practices.
And so that's what's going on.
So that's, let's say economically.
At the same time, there is the changing relationships,
the changing world order,
the changing relationships with the United States
and other countries,
which is becoming much less cooperative
and much more war-like, much more confrontational.
Those two things, the domestic debt problem
and the domestic has led to what's called core,
what they call core leadership,
which means a leadership more around him
that is less challenging
because they believe in history
that during very difficult times,
a more centrally controlled decision-making process
lends itself better than to a more fragmented
political contentious project.
And that's basically what's going on now.
You said it very eloquently,
but you mean the leadership is surrounded by yes men
and there's a lot of centralized control.
That characterization is much more black and white
than it really is.
But it leans towards that direction.
Like for example, of the standing members
of the Politburo, four are more alleged,
a lot of them, three are less so.
You have to understand that it's kind of
a collective leadership at the top.
And then of course, there's just jockeying
for power in a highly political sense at the top.
But no one leader can be successful
against all those powers at the top.
So it's very politically negotiating.
It's very much more like if you put in the United States,
the Democrats and the Republicans
and they had to be in the same government
and they work it out.
It's kind of something like that.
And so that's that struggle, but it's an internal struggle.
Where do you put the importance of some of these ideas
at the founding of the United States
when then, now we're talking about that
at the context of China, the freedom of speech, freedoms.
What China is doing with the central management
of a lot of things, it's enabling a lot of growth,
but it's also limiting people on the very basic level
in terms of freedom, the kind of freedom
that I think can lead to entrepreneurship,
to starting new businesses, to having big dreams
and chasing those dreams and then creating
totally new things in whatever the space,
maybe in technology, in business and whatever.
How important is that as a metric for society?
Well, they have a view, which is the idea of a dialectic,
which means that two things that everything comes
with pros and cons and two opposites exist.
And you want the benefits of those two opposites
and how do you deal with the benefits of those two opposites?
So let's say you want the capital markets
because it gets money into the hands of the entrepreneurs
who are motivated, they build fortunes
and that drives an economy to do very well.
And at the same time, it produces the other problems,
the wealth gaps, the other problems,
then the debt cycle that we're talking about and so on.
And Deng Xiaoping, how do you reconcile communism
and the market economy and the capital markets?
And he famously said, it doesn't matter if it's a white cat
or a black cat, just as long as it catches mice.
In other words, if it works and making the country richer,
then that becomes the objective
and then they move that along.
So there are these conflicts.
And one of the leaders described it to me as follows
because it's confusion and it goes back over a period of time.
There's a hierarchy and it's an extension
of the family he described it.
And he said, the United States is a country of individuals
and individualism and that is its vibrancy that we see.
The individual rights to speak up,
the individual protection of the individual,
individual property rights and all of those things
is of paramount importance.
And we build our organization,
that's why democracy is from the bottom up
or even a company will get together
and we'll be partners to prosper together.
That is the American approach.
He was describing that in China,
it's an extension of the Confucian family, essentially.
And so it's almost like, there's a hierarchy.
And so what they think about is the common good,
not the individualism.
So for example, if they want a high speed rail
to go from one place to another
and that's best in the common good,
then the individual protections that would stand
in the way of doing that would be of secondary concern.
So that notion of controlling.
So for example, what they're doing with video games,
they control what type of video games
and how many hours a day kids can be on video games
operating in that way.
Because they believe that that's good for the society
and that's very controlling.
In the United States,
I think probably most parents would say, leave it to me
and it's a matter between me and my kids.
The same thing has to do with data.
In other words, in the United States, who controls the data?
Does the company control the data?
Do you individually control the data?
And so the inclination would be to figure that out,
but nobody would say that the government
is going to control the data
because of our inclination of really anti-government control.
In China, it would be that the government
will control the data
because that's going to be best for the society
and it depends who you trust.
But that's, so that difference in philosophy
is very much at the heart of that.
As far as your question in terms of effectiveness,
it really is, in China's case,
it's how you balance the things, right?
So what they're attempting to do
is to create a lot of freedom and creativity
in areas that are not political, let's say.
And so you see a lot of entrepreneurship,
you see a lot of product development,
you see a lot of creativity happening in that way.
So the stereotype that you don't see creativity happening
is an old stereotype,
whereas a lot of creativity is certainly happening.
And the system can work well
if they can achieve that kind of balance.
It's proven to work well.
Since I started going there in 1984,
per capita income, real per capita income
has increased by 26 times.
The longevity rate has increased by 10 years.
The poverty rate has fallen from 88% to less than 1%
in terms of basics like starvation and things.
And if you read history, Plato's Republic,
he talks about the cycles, democracy and autocratic
and the benevolent despot and all of that.
Each has their own vulnerability.
The vulnerability of democracy,
which has been a remarkable, remarkable system
and I don't have to extol the benefits of it,
but the vulnerability of it has always been
the internal conflict that produces itself as anarchy.
In World War II, four democracies
chose to be autocracies
because there was internal disorder
and the belief will somebody bring about order
and get control of the situation.
That was in Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain.
There were parliamentary systems
that turned themselves over to that.
So both systems have vulnerabilities.
I think the main thing that we need to think about
is those vulnerabilities.
Democracy is an amazing system
because the adherence to the rules and the system
and the checks and balances is quite amazing
and it gives it a flexibility to change without civil wars.
But there has to be the respect of the rules
and when you see something like they will not accept elections
or they will not accept rules, history has shown,
when the causes that people are behind
are more important to them than the system.
The system is in jeopardy.
So we have a situation that's very much like that
in terms of let's say the 2024 elections.
I believe that there's a very high chance
that neither side will accept losing, for example.
And so we have that kind of a situation.
So one would hope that one could rise above
the disagreements and rely on the system
for resolving disagreements
because if that doesn't happen, then we have our own chaos.
So the kind of the trend that started in 2020
or I mean, I suppose it's been there, it's been growing.
One representation of this internal disorder
has been the growing trend of being skeptical
about the results of the election.
Well, it started before that.
There was the emergence of population
before President Trump was elected.
He was basically elected as a populist
because there was a large percentage of the population
that felt that the system didn't work for them.
And he tapped into that
and he was largely elected as a populist leader,
first populist leader in a developed country.
And so populism began that then.
And that was a battle of one group against the other group.
And so since then it's been like that
and it continued to grow.
You've mentioned the vulnerability of democracy,
the internal disorder is the vulnerability of democracy.
What's the vulnerability of a system like China?
Maybe one way to say is put China aside
and look at history, look at Soviet Union.
What's the vulnerability of a communist type system?
Well, I'll call it both communist and autocratic,
depending on how much autocracy.
Is that it lacks flexibility, it lacks the ability.
So, but I should deal with them differently.
In other words, there's the economic system.
The economic system threatens motivation and productivity.
So communism or socialism has to be done in a way
where you can threaten productivity.
Capitalism has, and what I mean by that,
I mean free markets and capital markets
have been an effective way of allocating resources
and also creating the incentives and the resources,
providing the resources for the inventiveness of new ideas.
And so if I compare that, what the Chinese have done,
to a large extent, is to recognize that
and have made a move, that's why the seeming dialectic
or the conflict between those two things exist.
But anyway, that's it, as far as an autocratic system,
rather than one man, one vote from the population up.
The risks of the autocratic system
is that there's enough discontent that arises
that the system doesn't have the flexibility
and that rather than bending, it breaks.
That's the big risk.
The notion of trying to control a population
if there's that, rather than giving it the flexibility.
So that would be the big risk of the autocratic system.
What's the human,
because you mentioned like the top gets bigger
with the empires and you start to get things for granted.
Is some of this just human nature?
So the concern with China, with the autocratic nations,
the concern with the Third Reich, the Soviet Union,
was that fundamentally at the individual level,
the humans involved at the top, they start becoming,
they're starting to lose touch with the reality
in a way that no longer makes them.
I guess that's the representation of the flexibility
that you're referring to.
Well, I mean, in a democracy, you could change.
You can go as far left or as far right.
You can change the leaders easily.
And so the people don't become,
they pretty much only have themselves to blame.
And one of the problems of that
is they may not choose the best leaders,
but they have that flexibility.
So vote and you get what you wanted.
In the case of the autocratic, let's say leaders,
and then the movement from democracies to autocracies,
what you see normally that movement
is that one of the systems is not working.
Let's say the democracy is not effectively.
Everybody's arguing with each other
and nobody's getting anything done.
And like Mussolini, the trains are not running on time.
And that would be the example.
Geez, this place has gotten chaotic.
Well, somebody get to control.
And then you get the autocratic,
and then he's autocratic enough to boss people around.
And then you follow those kinds of orders.
And it's like maybe a CEO in a powerful company
ordering around and that could work well
or it could work badly.
You know, most companies are run
as like autocracies in a sense.
You know, there's the hierarchy and the command economy
and that kind of thing.
And that can work well or not,
but then quite often when you get the populist autocratic,
their personality is something that they wanna fight
and they become more nationalistic
and they tend to become more militaristic.
And human nature at that stage
lends itself to fighting.
There's an arc here that when we think of a country
and we say we, and we think of a country,
it's not true, it's not like that.
There are individuals who change.
One generation dies and another generation comes along.
And one of those arcs is that the ones
who have been through war don't wanna go to war
and are more happily willing to abide by
whatever the rules are.
As you get farther along into that cycle
and you get a new generation and they forget about wars
and the horrors of wars,
then they want to fight.
And so you're seeing right now the emergent of fight for right.
And what that means is you see it internally,
where are you in fight for that thing?
And they mean fight.
And then externally, fight.
Are you going to be the strong one who will fight and win?
And that develops on both sides, this fight and win.
And each side is cheering each other on into a war.
But that comes by those who really have not experienced war
because it comes in their part of their lifetime.
Humans are fascinating.
Humans are fascinating.
And by the way, human nature has not changed
over the thousands of years.
So it's so interesting,
because like in doing this study,
and it comes across in the study,
it's like watching the same movie over and over again.
You see the arc and you see it happen over and over again.
The only things that seem to change
are the clothes people wear and the technologies.
Knowledge you say this.
Yeah.
And then somebody probably will disagree with you
about the clothes.
Maybe there's also cycles within fashions.
Maybe we're not even creative there.
What do you make of Russia and Vladimir Putin?
What do you think about Putin as a leader,
as a human being on this world stage
within the context of the cycles of empires
that you think about?
Well, Putin came to power
at the failure of Russia's last order.
So there was the end of communism.
And there was the development of the market economy,
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And at that time, he was appointed by Yeltsin,
who was an alcoholic and had problems managing
and was put into power.
And the conditions in the Russian were,
there was anarchy.
There was no money.
It had the classic end of cycle ingredients.
It was broke.
It was three people were fighting with each other.
It was in the anarchy.
And that's when he came to power.
And there were not institutions.
The whole thing had collapsed.
And it was not effective ministry of education,
ministry of anything.
And so the idea was that they needed 25 years of stability
and they needed a democracy
and they needed the improvement of capital markets.
So he's been in that position as a,
as I guess I would call him a semi-autocratic leader
in that, from all indications,
he would respect the democracy and he's very popular.
He's won democratic elections
because he's been a strong leader
and he's brought peace and stability to the Soviet,
to Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
And he's a strong leader in pursuit of the country's interest
in a way where Russia is not a significant economic power,
but it is a significant military power.
So the issues, and then there's a strong alliance
between Russia and China now.
So that's kind of the lay of the land.
And then there are sensitivities.
The Ukraine issue is a sensitivity
because there are a lot of Russians who live in the Ukraine
and there's also the issue of NATO on their border.
So there are those kinds of things and he has military power
and he has a strong alliance with China.
And I guess that's my best summary
of what his position is.
Strong leader, popular.
These are not subjective interpretations.
These are objective interpretations.
Yeah, it's interesting just in this conversation.
You're not sort of doing the,
sort of doing the usual criticism of any one particular system.
You're looking at these systems from the perspective of history.
You're just describing how they work.
It's often times when you talk about what Russia is today
or what the Soviet Union was or what China is today,
is you start to criticize while they do this kind of censorship
or they do this kind of, they limit freedoms in this kind of way.
But you're just kind of describing this as a nation
with ideas what they think is right.
This is how they hope to get it to work.
This is why it's working.
This is what's not working.
Here's metrics that show that it's not working.
I think that's a refreshing way to think about it.
It's easy though, I mean, you got some criticism
saying that I think China is a strict parent.
You know, some people criticize these countries for doing,
so for violating human rights.
I suppose there's some people that criticize the United States
for violating human rights.
But what are your thoughts on the world stage today
about some of the behaviors it has governed
in terms of respecting the rights,
the basic rights of human beings?
You described accurately how I just tried to look at things in a non.
I don't want to impute my values on anybody.
I mean, there are intolerable things,
so I'm not saying there aren't intolerable things.
But one of the great things of being an American here
is that I grew up with all different nationalities
having all different points of view
and all different religions
and all different ways of operating.
And I've come to treasure the fact that that is
what's their business is their business,
and then the question is where do you cross the line
under what circumstances
that others have got to do it my way.
And then when you do it internationally,
the issue of what is a sovereign state,
which as I say in the piece of Westphalia
and you have borders,
and then when do you cross the line,
that my way of doing things
has got to be their way of doing things
or what are the various rights.
And so that's a very delicate question
or a very difficult question.
And we all have responsibilities to different parties
and we all have different levels of knowledge
about those particular things.
So for example, as an international investor,
I have a responsibility to my investors.
Those who run companies have a responsibility to theirs
of how do they run that.
So if you're taking Nike or sneakers and so on,
and Americans can decide whether they want to buy Chinese products
or not buy Chinese products,
we are all faced with those types of choices.
So you have what do you want to do in your constituency
and you have your choices.
And then beyond that, in many cases,
the issues are quite complex like there are geopolitical questions
that enter into it.
And then I believe that if you disconnect it,
if all those entities like myself,
the businesses doing business with China disconnected,
I think that that would be disastrous,
economically disastrous,
but it would also be reduce the understanding
that comes from working together that helps to reduce wars.
And so these are all complicated.
So what we do is, and who makes it,
my opinion matters the most.
Why should it be my opinion that matters the most
in making that decision?
So I largely look at the government guidance
that I get not only from my own government,
but from the other governments and I follow the rules.
I'm in 40, we invest in 40 countries
and we want to do that in the best way
to provide the diversified portfolio
and we sort of need that.
Every one of those countries has similar complexities.
There are always one issue or another
and there's only so much that we really understand
about all of those issues.
So we rely largely on the guidance that we get.
Yeah, you have to empathize and show respect
to the culture of the place, the way things are done.
You don't necessarily...
The way you heal relationships between nations,
like you said, you work together.
And that requires kind of to listen maybe more than you talk
and I think people in the public sphere
talk a lot about China without really listening,
without understanding much about China,
but one of the things that makes me really sad
because I know how to speak Russian
and I know how much is lost in translation,
it makes me sad that I'll never really get to know
the Chinese culture because I'll never really
get to know the language, the literature,
just talk to regular people.
It's not just the government or officials or scientists,
just regular folks can get the culture.
I think if you don't understand the culture,
just the basics of the human nature,
what people love about their country,
about their family, what kind of hopes they have,
what kind of values they have without that,
you're not going to be able to fully connect with them.
And you have to do that first,
to have a chance of building a good world.
I couldn't agree with you more.
I was very lucky because, as I say,
since 1984, so for more than half of my life,
I've been going there and the common people
and all sorts of people and I've got to meet them.
I don't speak the language,
but a combination of through translators
or them speaking English and being in situations,
I had my son go to school, a local school,
and we developed those kinds of understandings.
I think that...
But the not wanting to know the other perspective
is the thing that's most scary.
Like I'm right now in the middle
and all I want to try to do is to help a mutual understanding.
You're right.
If there were questions probing me,
asking me, what is it?
I'm not on one side or another.
I don't want to be on one side or another.
I believe that each has their right
within there to approach their different culture
in their own way.
So many ways you gave an example.
If they're not doing harm to others.
But that issue of trying to understand
is so much better.
That doesn't mean agree with.
If you are wanting to out-clever
and out-compete somebody,
it still pays to understand what they're thinking.
So to achieve understanding of what they're thinking.
Even if you want to go to war with them,
that understanding is the best thing to have.
What we have now is a situation
in which there's an enemy mentality.
And that means that anything that serves
seems to be like understanding
or conveying understanding
seems to mistakenly create the notion
of I'm on their side in a war.
And that's kind of a dangerous thing
because there's a momentum here to fight.
Henry Kissinger praises your new book
and you thank him in it in the dedication.
What's your relationship like with him?
What makes him interesting?
Maybe what makes him controversial?
What makes him such a central figure in history?
First, most importantly,
he's unique about seeing things through
all the other's eyes.
So if you were...
It's like there's a chess game.
I think geopolitics is like a chess game,
but with multiple chess players playing the same game.
So imagine there are six people around
playing the chess game
and he could sit in each seat
and he could know how they see it
and see it in a calm way of how they see it.
He's unique in that way.
He's 98 years old and he's equally able to do that.
And he has a background in which he's a historian,
so he really understands history.
Super terrifically.
He doesn't understand economic history as much,
so that's why, to some extent,
we enjoy having a conversation,
because he's interested in the economic piece
he doesn't know and I'm so interested
in the geopolitical piece that I don't know as well.
But anyway, he's able to do that,
but not only a historian, but a practitioner.
So when you go from an academic
to a practitioner who has that talent
to see things through others' eyes in an objective way
and to be strategic rather than just tactical,
that's a very special person
and that's why Henry is, to me, a very special person.
Yeah, he's lived a fascinating life.
Just all of the world events he's been involved in
is fascinating.
And like you said, that's such an interesting skill
that I have to consider what are the concerns,
the hope, the dreams, the fears of all the people at the table.
What are they thinking?
I find that people once again don't do that enough
when it's the obvious thing you should be doing,
whether it's business deals or political negotiation
or geopolitical negotiation.
I'm often surprised again, sorry, to go to the Russian thing,
I hear Putin talk in Russian
and you start to infer certain intentions,
not the trivial stuff, like the human being.
What is that human being hoping for himself,
for his country, for his close in a circle, for the bigger?
And I just see that that's often just lost in translation.
I just see American leaders talking to Putin
and it's just not a connection.
Absolutely.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
It has never failed that in my listening to a conversation
or even reading a speech and you see then it reported.
Inevitably, the reporter picks some headline characterization
that has very little to do with what was really happening
but might be a headline grabber that's at some kind of distortion
and there's a lack of understanding of really what's going on.
If it's okay, let me ask you a couple of questions about cryptocurrency.
You've had a few opinions about Bitcoin over the years.
What are your thoughts about Bitcoin today?
Its role in the global financial system
and just in human society in general?
Well, the evolution of Bitcoin over the years is one of the things
that has influenced changes in my view.
It has proven itself something like 10, 11 years ago.
Imagine the programming of this and you throw it out and that's the idea.
It has not been hacked.
It has operated.
It has built. It has come an amazing way over that 11 years
to be maybe probably the most excited topic among a lot of people
and has been used and is now has obtained the status of having imputed value.
At the same time, it is one of those assets that is an alternative money.
I think we're entering an era where there's going to be a competition of monies
because of the printing of fiat money and the depreciated value.
There will be a competition of monies and Bitcoin is part of that competition
but there'll be many monies, not just crypto monies but there'll be central bank crypto monies
but there'll be different kinds of monies.
Even monies are things that you buy and sell.
NFTs can become a money, a type of money.
You own it and it's an investment and you could say I'd rather own it than own Bitcoin.
Has Ray Dalio bought any NFTs?
Not yet.
Only just because I definitely want to buy NFTs to just experience them.
I think I should produce one.
I should have asked that. Have you minted an NFT?
You probably should just to know what it's like.
Yeah, that's right. This stuff is happening.
This stuff is real and how it operates.
Like all new real things, some are going to go and it's like in the internet in the year 2000,
Pets.com could have been a great but maybe Pets.com doesn't make it and who knows.
That's the beauty of the competitive system that it'll evolve and some things will be
treasured and some things will be trashed.
When I look at it, I think we are in an environment of what is an alternative money?
A money has two purposes, a medium of exchange and a storehold of wealth.
We are looking for and it's portable and it's best if it's recognized in other countries.
Gold is one of those.
I look at it as an alternative gold but I look at a number of things as an alternative gold.
Gold is still my favorite because of certain qualities.
For example, you can't trace it.
In Bitcoin, you can trace who owns it, where it's going and so on.
Governments can't have that ability to trace it and so on.
A gold piece of coin, it's not connected.
I think not connected has benefits, particularly in a world where maybe connections can be
more risky.
Also, gold has been for many thousands of years universally recognized as a source of
money and central banks, it's the third largest source of money in central bank reserves.
I don't think Bitcoin is going to serve those types of purposes and so on.
For various reasons, I prefer gold to the other but it's a little bit part of my mix.
Then you look at it, I think 69,000 this year is the high Bitcoin hit.
Do you think it's possible, you mentioned gold, do you think it's possible it reaches
very high numbers like 1 million that some people talk about?
I don't think that's possible because the way I look at it is there's a certain amount
of, a certain amount of it and there's a certain amount of gold.
I'll use gold as a benchmark.
The amount of it is worth about $1 trillion.
Total crypto is about $2.2 trillion but let's say Bitcoin, it's $1 trillion.
If you take the amount of money that is in gold that is not used for jewelry purposes
and not used by central banks and I assume Bitcoin won't be used for jewelry purposes
or central bank purposes, that amount in gold is about $5 trillion.
Right now, if you were to have a portfolio that has gold and crypto, gold and Bitcoin,
it's worth about 20% of the value of gold.
Do I think it's going to be worth more than gold?
In terms of that mix, I don't think it'll be worth more than gold but let's say it became
worth as much as gold.
I don't believe it will be.
I think the 20% sounds kind of about right.
I really don't know what the right answer is and then there's the question of what is
all of that pool of money that let's say gold and gold equivalents relative to everything
else.
Does it go from, let's call it $6, $7, $8 trillion to $16 trillion?
Maybe it could double.
It depends what it is in the world environment but basically if you use gold as a measure,
it just makes no sense that it's going to be used that much more.
Am I sure about that?
I'm not sure about anything but logically, it seems to me that there's a limitation on
its price in relationship to other things that are like it.
Let me ask for your deep financial analysis on a very important issue.
I just talked a couple of days ago of Elon Musk.
He wants to put a literal dogecoin on the moon.
What are your thoughts about dogecoin and do you think it'll be the official currency?
Maybe reserve currency on the moon and on Mars.
My reaction is that's cute.
I remember Elon, when he first got his money from PayPal, I think he said to me it was,
he got $180 million, $90 million, he decided to say, why aren't we going to outer space
and he wanted to take a spaceship that would be modified using Russian technology to put
a plant and a watering can on the moon or on Mars, I think it was and he said, first
life on Mars or first life on that as an inspiring notion and so then there's always what's
behind it.
I have a lot of respect for Elon's ability to do other things behind it and so I would
take that as symbolic and I'd be asking him what's behind it, what's next?
I'm also just on the topic of dogecoin and memecoin and there's some aspect of humor
and lightheartedness that's really interesting about the way we communicate what ideas become
viral, how to captivate people with ideas, there's something about taking things too
seriously that somehow slows it all down and it's interesting.
You're right.
That's part of human nature somehow.
Humor is part of this whole thing.
You've talked about the importance of writing ideas down and you have the fascinating principles
in particular.
You have this really nice thing in your book where you actually, I think there's such
a brilliant way of highlighting which parts are extra important and you make them bold.
That's a brilliant idea.
Let me just ask the high level question of what's a good system for taking notes?
Well, I find that almost everything happens over and over again and we're in the blizzard
of these things happening and what I found is that if I'm making a decision that after
I make the decision usually or right at the time, if I pause and reflect and I write my
principle down, in other words, principle is sort of a recipe, how would I make that
decision and what are the criteria around it?
I find that I make it much more clear, it becomes clear and it applies to the next thing
that comes along.
It'll be that way because everything happens over and over and over again and I think people
make the mistake of looking at just the one like it's the first one.
They have the, I don't know, they have the first problem of this sort of the first child
or whatever it is and this has been happening plenty of times and so if you have the principles,
I found that that helped me think more clearly about it and it helped me communicate better
like why and so over the years, over the last 30 years or so, that's what I've done.
I did it originally to communicate very well with the people I work with, you know, I set
up my company and it was very important to have good communication and then we could
debate the principles and so that's the process.
I urge people to do that.
There are many excellent decision makers and I just wish that they wrote down their principles
when this set, so for example, we were talking about Henry Kissinger and his new book is
going to come out with a book on leadership and don't just describe the leaders, describe
then what about them were the essential elements to make a good leader under what circumstances
and so if we think about that, then also then you begin to think in a principled way and
then when you start to think in a principled way, life becomes, it's so much easier to
make decisions and it's so much less confusing because it's like coming up on a species and
you say, okay, well, what species is it?
Not just another, it's a thing, no, what species is it and how do I deal with that species
effectively and so that's what that is and so I encourage people to write it down.
I wish anybody who's successful wrote down their principles or their recipes for making
those types of decisions.
So the events of interest here happens over and over and over in similar ways as you're
looking for the patterns and you're defining the process, that's right to respond to those
patterns and you call that the principles and that allows you to deal with the future
effectively.
So like that codifies the lessons from the past to be able to deal with the future.
What advice do you have for young folks today?
In high school, in college, thinking about how to live, have a career they can be proud
of or maybe have a life they can be proud of.
Know yourself, follow your passion, make your work and passion the same thing while considering
the money part because money will get you freedom and choice and be able to bank that.
But if you know yourself, feel the pull and pursue that passion.
And along those lines, by the way, I found that using personality profile tests has been
very helpful.
I've used those for about 25 years for people to help to understand themselves and understand
each other.
I've created a free one that is called Principles You, it's online, it's had remarkable loving
people who've taken it, learn about themselves, but also you can put in somebody else and
it'll tell you about your relationship with them.
That's like 30 minutes is a quick discovery, but the main thing is to understand on your
journey, your hero's journey, that you will have mistakes and you will have weaknesses
and to understand those, not fight those, because by understanding mistakes, you will
learn not to make mistakes again.
I have a principle which is pain plus reflection equals progress.
And so that reflection is important to know yourself, know your pulls, know your weaknesses.
And when you also know your weaknesses and the strengths of other people, there are people
who have strengths where you're weak and you have strengths where they're weak.
And to be able to work well together is the most effective way of achieving success.
So yeah, it's that journey and there's a life arc and there's a journey and you want
to make it the best that you can make it and it's like a video game.
It has the challenges and the obstacles and the learning experiences and the temptations
and all of that and the maximizing learning to go where you want to go to achieve the
life you want is the most important, that's kind of maybe a long-winded way of seeing
it.
But to learn, I think I'll try to say it simply, there's a five-step process.
Step one is know your goals, know what you're going after.
You could have almost anything you want, but you can't have everything you want.
And so you have to prioritize and you move in that direction.
On the way to your goals, you're going to encounter your problems and your obstacles.
So step two is understanding your problems and your obstacles, identify them.
Step three is to diagnose them to get at the root cause of the problem.
And that could be many root causes, but it could also be your weaknesses or weaknesses
of others, but you have to be objective about them.
Once you diagnose them, then you go to step four, which is to design a way to get around
them.
And then after you have that design, you implement that design.
So you have to follow through and do it.
And you do that and that will then produce its new results, which should be better results.
I have, I call this kind of a looping process, it's the evolutionary looping process.
And you do, you just keep doing that and you learn over a period of time and you move in
the direction that you want.
Last question and you only have one minute to answer it.
You dedicate the book, quote, to my grandchildren and those of their generation who will be
participants in the continuation of the story.
May the force of evolution be with you.
So let me ask, where's this force of evolution taking human civilization and what in this
story that evolution is writing gives you hope?
Evolution is in a direction toward improvement.
And the greatest force is man's capacity to adapt and invent.
And so you see in the charts in the book, you see that this upward movement, life expectancy,
health, all the things that we think are better, you see the, there's a chart and it shows
that over a period of time and you barely see the downturns from depressions and wars
in that.
That is the greatest power, man's ability to invent and adapt is evolution.
And that's the greatest power.
And that is what gives me justifiable hope.
And a continuation of that, like we mentioned with Elon, maybe we'll become a multi-planetary
species.
So not only will we keep creating amazing things here on earth, we'll keep expanding
out into the cosmos.
And my time horizon doesn't have me analyzing that yet, but I hope so and I agree that that
would be in the natural.
So I'm not going to ask you for the best financial system on Mars.
I think we'll focus on earth for now, right?
Thank you so much for your brilliance, for the books you've written, for the works you'd
done, for the inspiration of millions.
And thank you for spending your valuable time here with me today.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ray Dalio.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words from Ray Dalio himself.
Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture
in your life.
You have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable
delusion.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.