Ray Dalio: We’re Heading Into Very, Very Dark Times! America & The UK’s Decline Is Coming!

Ray Dalio turned $5 into $160 billion by decoding how empires rise and fall. Now he warns: America is in decline, the UK is in trouble, China is gaining power…and your wealth could be in danger UNLESS you act fast. Ray Dalio is a legendary investor, billionaire, and founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund with over $160 billion in assets under management. He is also the bestselling author of 5 books, including:, ‘How Countries Go Broke: Principles for Navigating the Big Debt Cycle, Where We Are Headed, and What We Should Do’. He explains: ⬛ The harsh financial truth about Britain’s future and why millionaires are fleeing ⬛ The psychological trick billionaires use that most people never learn ⬛ The "Pain + Reflection = Progress" formula that changed Ray’s life ⬛ The dangerous wealth myth that’s quietly keeping most people broke ⬛ Why chasing success the wrong way could destroy your future ⬛ Why America’s decline is part of an inevitable 500-year cycle (00:00) Intro (05:34) Where Should I Be Living as an Entrepreneur? (06:30) What's Your Honest Perspective of the UK? (11:46) Are You Optimistic About the Future of the UK? (13:12) Are You Optimistic About the US? (15:19) How to Predict What's Coming (17:04) Will the US Dominate Global Power Soon? (22:06) How Would You Fix the UK? (25:28) What Happens Next in History? (29:00) Where Are We in the Predictable Timeframes? (30:33) How Should We Counteract These Risks? (32:53) Most Valuable Skills to Learn Right Now (35:43) What Games to Play in Different Life Seasons (37:55) The Most Important Strategic Decision I Made (44:08) Ads (45:11) The Best Way to Deal With Pain (49:01) How Do I Become a Principle Thinker? (50:42) The Power of Meditation (56:01) Are You Religious? (58:21) How Important Is Hard Work? (01:00:00) The Importance of Being Open-Minded (01:05:16) How to Be a Better Decision Maker (01:09:03) How Do You Find Honest People? (01:11:22) Why Companies Become Less Innovative (01:14:16) How Do You Find Exceptional People? (01:17:45) Ads (01:19:27) What's Your View on AI? (01:28:41) Top 3 Book Recommendations Follow Ray: TikTok - https://bit.ly/4ggWltw YouTube - https://bit.ly/4m5T9Cc X - https://bit.ly/3V8KTqc You can purchase Ray’s book, ‘How Countries Go Broke: Principles for Navigating the Big Debt Cycle, Where We Are Headed, and What We Should Do’, here: https://amzn.to/4perwK3 You can watch Ray’s breakdown of Principles for dealing with the changing world order here: http://bit.ly/4m6VbSw The Diary Of A CEO: ⬛ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ⬛ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ⬛ The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ⬛ The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ⬛ Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ⬛ Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Fiverr - https://www.fiverr.com/diary with code DIARY for 10% off your first order Linkedin Ads - https://www.linkedin.com/DIARY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Pay attention. Pain plus reflection equals progress. And from that principle, my company became the largest hedge fund in the world.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett?

  Managing how much?

• 0:09Speaker 00

  A hundred and fifty billion dollars. But I learned that history of things that never happened in my lifetime before were important things to understand in order to predict the future. And we can get into that if you want.

• 0:20Steven Bartlett?

  Please.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  So.

• 0:22Steven Bartlett?

  Ray Dalio is the legendary billionaire investor.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Who decoded the cycles of human history to predict financial crashes. Build the world's largest hedge fund.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  And now to warn us about what lies ahead.

• 0:34Steven Bartlett?

  Are you optimistic about the future of the UK?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:36Steven Bartlett?

  What about the United States?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:38Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Okay, in order to bet on what's going to happen on the global economy, I learned that there's five big forces that create a big cycle that's repeated through history, which lasts about eighty years. The first is the money debt force that creates wealth and opportunities gaps. And it's connected to the second force, the internal conflict where you don't trust the system, causing wars between the left and the right. And it's not easy answers like tax the rich, and we can get into that. But the third is geopolitical force. In other words, international conflict. Then there's acts of nature. And then number five is man's inventiveness, particularly of new technologies. Now, the question is, who wins the technology war?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Because the winner of that determine how the new world order works.

• 1:25Steven Bartlett?

  Is it something to be concerned about?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  No. The question is how you as an individual handle it.

• 1:30Steven Bartlett?

  How do I as an individual handle it?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  So there's building your financial strength, flexibility, importance of being open minded, how to get more out of the minute, not how to work harder. And I really urge your audience to learn all of this. So first of all.

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  Just give me thirty seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the twenty four percent of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to. And we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about the show. Thank you.

• 2:29Steven Bartlett?

  Ray, I want to describe to you who's listening right now. And the question I have for you is, what is the most important thing that this persona of person should be thinking about at the highest level right now? So the person that's listening is someone who is intent on improving their life, that they're really interested in business, potentially starting their own business. They care about where they're investing their time and energy and also where they're setting up their home based on, in terms of geography. They are aspiring to accomplish some goal. They're probably between the age of 18 and 50 predominantly.

• 3:10Steven Bartlett?

  And they are very, very interested in understanding what's happening in a world that feels incredibly scary, fast paced and uncertain at the moment. This is a very difficult question, but if anyone, I was going to ask anyone, it would have to be you. What's one of the first things they should be considering at this moment to safeguard their future, their family, their finances?

• 3:31Speaker 00

  I don't think it's a difficult question. I think it's very clear. They have to understand how the life cycle works. Okay. They have to understand how it works. We were just talking before, you know, in the book and there was the arc of the life cycle, right? And you have to understand that you're on an adventurous journey. Okay. And you have a certain nature, you know, those qualities that make you have your preferences and so on. And then you're going after the things that you like and you're learning and it's going to have the ups and downs and so on, and how you approach that.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  So you asked from the higher level, if I'm looking down, you know, like that life cycle, that arc, what's that journey like? How do you approach it? You know, what are your principles? How do you even learn how to approach it? That's why we're having these conversations, right? So that's clear. You know, what's your nature? How's the journey? How do you find the path that's suitable to your nature? And then you'll go down that path and you'll discover and you'll evolve. What's that like? That's what they need to know.

• 4:48Steven Bartlett?

  You said, what's your nature? What do you mean by nature?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  People are born with and then also their environment creates their different nature, you know? We have our preferences, our inclinations. We think in a certain way. You chose to be entrepreneurial. Okay, you're living out your nature. Okay, this isn't for somebody else. You know, some people have a different nature. Okay, they would like to have the stability of a job and clarity and so on. So when you have your nature, you want to know that and then find the path that is going to be good for your nature. Then there's the particular tactical stuff. So if you would ask me, should I be in the UK or should I be in the US? Well, that depends on a lot of things, but that's a tactical question.

• 5:34Steven Bartlett?

  So if I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to build a technology company, do you think I should be in the UK or the US?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  I think you should be in the US.

• 5:41Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  The US has a culture of entrepreneurship, inventiveness. This is a whole different culture, like in Europe, generally speaking, and in the UK. There's an establishment culture, right? And here you could be 25, have a blue streak in your hair and have the talent, but if you got the talent to pull it off, you can get the resources and you can be an entrepreneur. There's a culture of that. That means that it's happening more. That's why you even see the differences in the economies. Okay, where is the inventiveness really happening? Okay, it's happening here. So I would say if you want to be an entrepreneur,

• 6:26Speaker 00

  this is an environment that's particularly conducive to being an entrepreneur.

• 6:30Steven Bartlett?

  So what is your honest perspective about the UK at the moment?

• 6:33Speaker 00

  The UK has a financial problem, the government has a debt problem. It doesn't have enough money for what it wants to do and what it can do. And so what you see is the non-dom problem, people moving and so on and so forth. And throughout history, when you have these sorts of things, then there's great clashes in people. Okay, and the UK has been in decline since the war. Even the development of the capital markets, can you raise capital there? All of these things are much worse than they are in the United States.

• 7:12Steven Bartlett?

  And it leads to clashes, you said?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Of course, you know, there are five big forces that create a big cycle that lasts about 80 years, give or take 50, let's say. And the five big forces are there's a money, debt, economy force, okay? Debt's their spending power. So what happens is when you give somebody credit, they can spend. And then, but it also produces debt. And debt has to be paid back. And so what happens is if there's not enough income to pay back the debt, then you have debt rising relative to income.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  It squeezes out spending, people don't want to hold the debt assets and so on. The UK has gone through that and has gone through that. And it's connected to the second force. And we're all going through this in varying degrees. The second force is the internal political and social force. In other words, like between the left and the right with wealth gaps and opportunities gaps. We have big wealth and opportunities gaps. So when you have big wealth and opportunities gaps, there's conflict. Okay, conflict between the left and the right. And when you get to the situation where you don't believe the system is working for you and you don't trust the system, then there are wars, there are internal conflicts over

• 8:40Speaker 00

  that and so on. So, the third force is the geopolitical force. In other words, there's a cycle that usually goes from one big war to another big war. So, the last war ended in 1945, 44, and we began a new order in 1945. And the way that works is that the winners of the war determine how the world order works. They draw borders, they say, here's how it's gonna work, and that's the new order. Okay? And that continues until there's a rising power challenging an existing power in the existing world order, which typically is deteriorating at that time. And then you have international conflict, okay?

• 9:23Speaker 00

  These orders, there's a monetary order, they all break down. There's an internal political order, they all break down. And there's a geopolitical order, they all have this conflict, and they work together. The fourth force throughout history has been acts of nature. Droughts, floods, and pandemics, for example, have killed more people than wars. And acts of nature, nature has a big effect. And then number five force is man's inventiveness, particularly of new technologies. Okay? Because if you see that inventiveness, that has raised per capita incomes, GDP per capita, any measures of the living standards over a period of time, and so on.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  But it is also related to the first four that I said. Those four forces interact. Now, when we go back to your UK case, okay, they have a financial problem. They and almost every country now is dealing with more of that internal political problem.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  For the same reasons, wealth gaps, opportunities gaps, what do we do? Who's got the power? I don't trust the system, kind of thing. Okay, number three is we are certainly in an international great powers conflict, right? And it certainly affects Europe and the UK as we're dealing with not only the Ukraine situation, but the Russian situation. And what does that mean? And that relates to the money thing because, okay, where's the money coming from to have defense or military expenditures and so on and so forth? So that matters, right? The geopolitical matters, climate certainly matters, and then of course, technology, man's inventiveness. So everything could be looked at through that lens.

• 11:10Steven Bartlett?

  And so what does this mean for the UK if all other countries are going through this as well? Doesn't that just mean that all countries are going to suffer equally?

• 11:18Speaker 00

  No, no, no, because they're not all equal. Okay, some are more in debt than others. Okay, some people are more willing to hold their debt than others. Some means they have more resources, some are bigger and more powerful, some are less powerful, they're different, okay? They're all go in different conditions. Some countries have surpluses, some countries, you know, are not in the middle of where there's having a war.

• 11:46Steven Bartlett?

  Are you optimistic about the future of the UK at the moment?

• 11:51Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:56Steven Bartlett?

  Because it has high debt, it has the social internal conflict, it's affected by the geopolitical factors, and in terms of inventiveness, it doesn't have the culture that other countries have, like the US, is that?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Yes, the culture and the capital markets to support that at a scale that it needs to be supported to play seriously in the game.

• 12:17Steven Bartlett?

  And for anyone that doesn't know, capital markets mean basically the investor markets, is a way of saying?

• 12:22Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it gets you the money. In other words, you're a guy with, you know, what happens is, we have to enable people. Okay, what works is finding great people, talented people, and identifying those who you want to bet on. And enabling them. And that works, that's the most important force, much more important than money. Okay. Because you can see, who's got the money and power and where did they come from? Where didn't the video come from? Where did they all come from? Okay. There are guys like you, entrepreneur in a sense, who's been enabled, okay, by, because you have the talent and people want to bet on you, and that's the capital market, so

• 13:06Speaker 00

  they give you money to help enable you because they want to bet on you and then good things happen.

• 13:12Steven Bartlett?

  But are you optimistic about the United States at the moment?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  The United States is very much a big picture. No, I think it's very much in this issue. So if I go down my list, it definitely has this debt money economy problem. We can get into that. Okay. It definitely has the internal conflict power in which there's a fight between the left, you know, the hard left and the right due to wealth and values gaps and people not believing that the system will work for them. And so democracy is at risk because they don't believe this, they're not going to follow the rules in the sense, they don't believe the rules are gonna. Number three, it's of course the leading one side in this great power conflict of the

• 14:00Speaker 00

  world, right? Between, in other words, yes, between the United States and the one side, let's say, and China and the allies, their allies on the other side. I mean, in the news, you just saw the meetings of Xi, Putin, Modi, and that group over there walking down, you know, and okay. So now it should be pretty clear how the sides are lighting up. Okay. It's always better to be in a place that's not in one of those wars. Like, stay out of wars. And of course, climate has an effect. And of course, then we have technology. The United States and China are in the big technology competitions. The others are really not in the game.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  They don't have the money, this innovation and talent, in a sense, to play at that scale. And so, so we have a great, you know. Technology war, which can be used to create great advances, but at the same time could be used for great conflicts. And so now the question is going to be who wins the technology war, because the winner of the technology war is going to win all wars. Okay. In other words, they'll win the economic war. They'll win the geopolitical war because technology. And I'm not saying anything that hasn't repeated through history.

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  Give me the historical context, if you can, just for.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  The technology, for example, nuclear.

• 15:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Nuclear won World War Two.

• 15:32Steven Bartlett?

  And does this cycle go back further than just?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Oh, no, it goes back. That book. Okay. In order to understand these things, because I have to bet on what's going to happen. I'm a global macro investor. I studied the last 500 years of history and it happens over and over again in all cases. So I could take the British Empire, I could take you through all the empires, the Dutch Empire before that and all this, and it happens all the time.

• 16:03Steven Bartlett?

  I watched your, I watched your videos about this and it's truly fascinating how predictable this stuff is and the work that you've done to uncover this trend throughout history. I mean, it's almost, for me, it was almost irrefutable, watching the evidence in, in, I think it's like a 40 minute video on YouTube where you show how this played out through empires. And it begs the question, you know, because when you live in the United States, when you're, when you're in the present time, you almost never assume that the empire you're in could fall. You just don't, you don't see how it could happen. We're so strong, we're so great, you know, we're so, doing AI over here, have money over here, everything's good, the sun's shining. It's inconceivable.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Of course. People always think that the future would be a slightly modified version of the present. And it's not. Okay. Watch over decades, but it's like watching a person grow.

• 16:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  You know, you watch your kid or you watch a person at your age, any age.

• 16:56Steven Bartlett?

  My parents.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  And that's what you see.

• 16:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Okay. And you don't see the life arc.

• 17:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Okay, but the life arc is irrefutable.

• 17:05Steven Bartlett?

  But you, do you think it's conceivable that in the next 50 to 100 years, the US could no longer be the dominant power globally?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, more than conceivable.

• 17:17Steven Bartlett?

  More than conceivable?

• 17:20Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by more than conceivable?

• 17:23Speaker 00

  I mean that these evolutions always take place. And they take place in a certain way. And that, um, if you look at the probabilities and the paths and the symptoms, there is a challenge, the United States is facing a number of those challenges. And we're at a moment where, um, it's a question of whether the system and the people could, can get control of the situations and deal with it

• 18:07Speaker 00

  strongly and well in a way where they are not fighting to the point of damaging each other and damaging the prospects for the future.

• 18:24Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean, the United States is very innovative. Got all these great innovative companies here, so surely...

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you can't make generalizations about the United States. And you can't make generalizations, by the way, about the markets either. What you see is, um,

• 18:42Speaker 00

  1%, a small percentage, 1% of the population. If you're looking at the breakdown of incomes and also you're looking at the innovation, the stock markets, which stocks are doing well, who owns those companies and all of that. About 3 million people in a country of 330 million people are really unbelievably doing great. And you could pick the neighborhoods they're in and what they're doing. And then there's the top 10%, let's say, which is the people around them. And they're really, really doing great in that world. At the same time, the bottom 60%, 60% of Americans have below a sixth grade reading level.

• 19:27Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  And that population, in terms of the basics, being productive, you have to be productive and be prosperous. So what you need to have a successful society is to have broad-based productivity and prosperity. Okay, and that's a problem. Okay, so which America are you looking at? And are you watching the war that's happening between these?

• 20:04Steven Bartlett?

  It's a little bit complicated for me as a bit of an outsider because I see Trump saying he represents those people. But obviously, Trump is from the billionaire class himself. So I mean, is he is he a savior for inequality? Is he correcting inequality?

• 20:22Speaker 00

  I think I think he sees a lot of the problem. And I think he sees the debt problem. I think he sees the internal conflict disorder problem. And I think he represents the red, let's call it the red states. I mean, you look at a map and there's red and blue. And you see where they are. Okay, and he represents that. And they're united behind him in terms of doing some things. Okay, so he represents, let's call it the red side, which is located where the maps shows red. And then there are the blue. And and he's he views himself as somebody who needs to take charge and to do certain things.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Others in that population would say those who, let's say, are not getting or having the food stamp program cut off or having other programs cut off that they're dependent on would say, wait a second, that's not representing me. And so we have gone, that population has gone to significant number behind him. That are. Devotees, they're all in, okay? At the same time as we have the other side, which will have their devotees. If, you know, we're in New York City, okay?

• 21:48Speaker 00

  And the upcoming mayoral election will be an example of the two sides, okay? And they will try to use the system, but there's a question. Will the system have enough support to work? Okay, but that's what we have.

• 22:06Steven Bartlett?

  Just, just to close off on this point of the UK in particular, if, if you were to try and fix it, what would you be aiming at? I say this because we do have a millionaire exodus that's widely reported in the UK, where I think this year we're set to lose 16,000, roughly 16,000 millionaires. When you look at the big, big countries like China, America, the UAE, the UK, we're losing more millionaires than anybody else. And I was wondering if you think it's fixable? And if you were in charge of the UK, what you might aim at first?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 22:36Steven Bartlett?

  It's different, you know?

• 22:37Speaker 00

  First of all, if you go back to the basic problem, which is there's too much debt, there are deficits, there's differences in education and opportunity levels and so on. The most important thing that you can have is a strong middle.

• 23:04Steven Bartlett?

  Political middle.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Political middle. To be analytically strong and also strong enough to get the people to do what needs to be done, even if they don't want to do it, to get to be productive. Now, that's an easy thing to say. It's not an easy thing to do, but you do need that strong middle. And you do need to convey to people that you need to have this strong middle to change productivity. And, you know, and are you in it? Are you in it? Are you patriotic and in it and, you know? But you look at history. How did the United States come to be the United States?

• 23:50Speaker 00

  People will go to the places that are better than them than stay in the places that worse for them. This is fundamental, right?

• 24:01Steven Bartlett?

  Incentives.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Okay. So you have to make the place better. Okay. Now, I would say also you can take pockets and they go into the pocket and let it spread out. But you also have to have this equal education or, you know, you've got to strive for equal opportunity. But anyway, it's a difficult question and I'm afraid I'm incapable of solving.

• 24:29Steven Bartlett?

  It was unnerving to hear the tone of your voice drop when I asked it. You seemed slightly, um, as if you you've kind of given up on the UK a little bit. Your facial reaction.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  No, I'm I'm just a, I'm just a, I'm a practical guy. I'm a realistic guy. I made my money. I'm in the business and it's my nature to try to be realistic. And to bet on how things will transpire. And that's not healthy. The situation in the UK is not healthy. And the situation in the United States is very risky in many ways. It's what we're describing. So, you know, and then if you look where are people going? Then then you see the places that have the qualities we're talking about. They're civil. They're creative.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  The people aren't at war with each other.

• 25:28Steven Bartlett?

  What happens next in history?

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Well, usually there's a big fight for control.

• 25:35Steven Bartlett?

  Political revolutions and things like that.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  The system breaks down.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Because they don't trust the system.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  So will the legal system resolve that? Will the parliamentary system resolve that? These disputes satisfactorily to the satisfaction of those people and the other people who have different points of view? And the sides won't believe it. And this goes back, this goes back to Rome. It goes back to Caesar. You know, the Senate. You know, this goes back through history all the time. Right? And in the 30s, four major democracies chose to be autocracies. Okay?

• 26:31Speaker 00

  That happened in Italy, Germany, Spain and Japan.

• 26:35Steven Bartlett?

  What's autocracy for anyone that doesn't know the word?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it means a dictatorship essentially of a limited number of people at the top who are autocratic, which means that they are directing things rather than a democracy in which there's representatives of all different points of view that get together and follow rules to make decisions.

• 27:07Steven Bartlett?

  So the UK could become an autocracy, as could the US, I guess?

• 27:13Speaker 00

  You're going to see a lot of pressure for that strong leader who will get control of things and make it work well. And will, and you're likely to see two different views as to which side, you know, the red and the blue sides, so to speak. You're likely to see that type of clash.

• 27:35Steven Bartlett?

  You said the US is playing a risky game itself. Is that from a debt perspective or otherwise?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Well, from these things, from the debt, from the internal conflict, from the change in world order, the geopolitical world conflict. You know, I don't know, we're playing with nuclear weapons and.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  In wars in different places and then of course climate and then the technology war, how we're doing that, you know.

• 28:03Steven Bartlett?

  I saw that image the other day of Putin and President Xi in China together, walking together. If China does become the dominant force in the world, the dominant power, does, is that a smooth transition?

• 28:17Speaker 00

  First of all, I don't think either side is going to be the clearly dominant power for a very long time. And the quickest way to have it is some kind of a war, and that's a dangerous thing. And but maybe it evolves, hopefully, the way the Soviet Union evolved, that the worry of mutually assured destruction keeps everybody not having that kind of war. And then what then then the systems, one system or another system wins. But that's an evolutionary process. And, you know, I can't say in a.

• 28:58Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think much about timeframes? Because when I was watching, when I was going through the changing world order, there seems to be somewhat consistent or predictable timeframes when these these transitions happen. Do you think about where we are?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Well, they're long term, big cycles, right? It's like a life cycle. On average, they are about a life cycle, about 80 years. But it's not predetermined, just like your life cycle is not predetermined. Like if you take care of yourself and you, you know, I don't know, don't smoke, eat well, exercise, and so on and so forth, then you will probably have a longer life cycle than if you don't take care of yourself. And it's kind of like that, you know. And so you see them in history, they evolved. But you can see the symptoms. Okay, you can see the actions and the symptoms, which like taking a physical, then gives

• 29:55Speaker 00

  you a sense of where they are in their life cycles.

• 29:58Steven Bartlett?

  We're 80 years from World War Two.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Eighty years from World War Two, yeah.

• 30:01Steven Bartlett?

  And you're seeing the symptoms?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Symptoms are clear. They're all in that book. You can see the charts of all the systems.

• 30:10Steven Bartlett?

  Is it something to be worried about or concerned about if you're in the United States?

• 30:14Speaker 00

  No shit. Yes. And then the question is how you as an individual handle it.

• 30:22Steven Bartlett?

  How do I as an individual handle it?

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, I think I think you have to be aware of the situation and the risks.

• 30:33Steven Bartlett?

  For me and my family, though, in terms of risks,

• 30:37Steven Bartlett?

  and how I should counteract those risks, is it a case of me saving for a rainy day?

• 30:42Speaker 00

  That's part of it.

• 30:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  There's a saying in Hong Kong, a Chinese saying, which is a smart rabbit has three holes. And what that means is you can see, is it the UK or the US? And I can then move to the better place and get out of the place that's a terrible place. So can I successfully be an immigrant or whatever and change my location? Throughout history, that's been important. So the ability to go to good places and away from bad places. That's part of it. Secondly, building your financial strength is important,

• 31:28Speaker 00

  which has to do with how you earn, spend and save. That will determine the amount. And then what you do with that amount is invest. And so how you invest is also important. So if you have your financial ability and you can take the move, and then you have knowledge, you know, about what's happening, so that you can change things, those are the things you need.

• 32:03Steven Bartlett?

  So on that first point about a smart rabbit having three holes, is it therefore a better decision at this point in time to not to not buy a house? Because a lot of people end up buying a house and it anchors them to a place. And it means that they then have to pay into a mortgage. So a lot of the financial advice most of us have growing up is when you get enough money to buy a house, move in, pay that mortgage for 25 years. But if I'm in a new economy, in a new world, and flexibility and the ability to get up and go and move is there's there's value to that.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  The ability to move capital matters. And if you look at history, this has been an important consideration. Yes, so it matters. So if you're nailing yourself down and that's your primary capital and it's nailed down there, then that's does limit your flexibility.

• 32:53Steven Bartlett?

  And on the point of earning, spending and saving, I wonder what you're a, you're a father, aren't you?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:01Steven Bartlett?

  What advice are you giving to your children about earning money in the, in the current world? Where they should set up their shop, the skills that are most valuable to acquire, the technologies, the, we talked about the US being a place to, one of the better places to build your career for all the reasons you described.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  Well, that's, you know, that's kind of like the particular that you asked me for that's below the level of the higher level. Okay. The higher level is I have a principle. Make your work and your passion the same thing and don't forget about the money part.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Okay. If you make your work and your passion the same thing, so that you're really enjoying your work, you'll have an enjoyable, satisfactory life and you'll probably be better at your career. That as a result, you probably advance and so on. So you have a happier life and you will have a more, probably a more successful life. But it is true that the careers that you choose will have financial implications. And if you say, I want to be a poet or something along those lines, you better consider the financial implications of that. That doesn't mean that you have to go make a ton of money because I think that that's, I think a lot of people fall into that trap.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  That they think the money is like vast amounts of money is vast amounts of success. And that's not true. In other words, is your work and your passion the same thing? So I think that what brings people happiness is meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Okay. If you have meaningful work, you know, that you're into and you're, you know, your passion and your work's the same thing. And you have meaningful relationships, whether through that work or beyond, you're going to have probably a great life. Okay. And so you have to keep that in mind. And it doesn't have much correlation past a certain level of money, doesn't have much.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Correlation with that well being with the amount of money you have. And if you see studies across societies and you'll see that past that certain basic level, there's no correlation between the amount of money they have and how much happiness they have or well being, okay, that the highest level of correlation across societies and studies of happiness and well being is community. Do you have a sense of community? Do you have those around you who are your community? You'll live longer that way. You'll have a more joyous life and it'll be a better outcome. But anyway, so thinking about those things I think is important.

• 35:43Steven Bartlett?

  Based on your life cycle in this book, Principles, Your Guided Journey, Create Your Own Principles to Get the Work and Life You Want. Do you think you have to play different games in different seasons of your life cycle as it relates to generating wealth? And what I'm talking about here is really like risk profile or what I should be optimizing for. Should I be, should I be trying to hang around with Ray Dalio? Or should I be focusing on the job that pays me the most?

• 36:09Speaker 00

  First of all, the answer is yes. And the second question you asked, the answer is that you should be around the, the people who are the best people to teach you, to operate by the mentors and the learnings and so on. You should be around the best people. And when I say best people, I mean people of good character and good capabilities. Okay. And so you should be around the best, not the job that pays you the most. And I could explain why that is, but, and yes, in terms of that arc, you will play it differently at different parts of your life cycle.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  So in the early part of your life cycle, what you're going to do is, I mean, the more learning and experiencing is the most important thing that you can do in the learning in the early part of your life cycle.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  It's like you're gonna make your choices. What direction am I gonna be in? And so on and so forth. So learn, okay? That's, that's most important. And then what you're at the end of your life cycle, you're pretty much relieved from all of that. You're not gonna be working to earn. Okay? You're gonna be free of all of that. You're gonna have, um, and you have a freedom of choices and so on. And you're gonna be thinking about transitioning. How do I transition well-being? Or how do I transition my wealth? Or how do I transition? And so on. You know, that's, that's where you are. Still, learning is a joy. But at the same time, in terms of trying to accomplish, it's not the same at your late part of your life cycle

• 37:52Speaker 00

  as it is in your early part of your life cycle.

• 37:55Steven Bartlett?

  So I want to ask about your early life cycle and what the most important strategic or wealth generating decisions you made that you would encourage everybody to consider if their nature is aligned to yours.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Okay. My nature was I hated school. I didn't like the whole thing of remembering this and remembering this and then give it back to me. And there were these, uh, you know, history like there's William the Conqueror in 1066 and what did he do? And, you know, like all of that was what education represented. And when I was, um, 12, a kid, I earned money with odd jobs like, um, I had a paper route and, um, I mowed lawns and I caddied. And I took my caddying money. And when I was 12, I got, everybody was talking about the stock market.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  So I put some money in the stock market. I didn't know what I was doing, of course. But I, um, I picked, um, the stock. It was the only stock I ever heard of that was selling for less than $5 a share. And my reasoning was I could buy more shares. So if it went up, I could make more money. Okay, that was a stupid criteria. But it was a company that was about to go bankrupt. And another company acquired it and it tripled in price. And I said, I like this game.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  So I got, I got hooked on the game. I'm still hooked on the game, right? So I liked it. Okay, that, that affected me. So I barely got into CW Post College. And then I went to Harvard Business School. And that opened my eyes to the world in, in many ways because of who were there and what it was like and all that, you know, the best and the brightest kind of thing. But I always still traded markets because I always played the game. And I can tell you stories. Do you want a couple of quick stories? A hundred percent. Okay. So I'm clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange between graduating from college

• 40:09Speaker 00

  and in the summer between graduating from college and going to Harvard Business School. And that is nineteen, the summoner of nineteen seventy one. And on August fifteenth, nineteen seventy one, Richard Nixon gets on the television and says that, you know, the promise that, that you were going to be able to take your paper money and go get gold? You can't do that. And we're not, we're going to cut that off. He didn't say it in exactly those words, but money then was gold.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  And what we think of as paper money, fiat money, was claims on the gold. So I walked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange that summer. And I thought the market was going to go down a lot. And the market went up a lot. And I didn't understand why because I never went through a devaluation before. And I studied history. And I found that in March of nineteen thirty three, Roosevelt got on the radio and made the exact same announcement that you're not going to get your gold and they're going to print the money. And when you print a lot of money, you have that. Okay. So I learned. That history of things that never happened in my lifetime before were important things to understand, okay?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  I went back then to Harvard Business School for two years. And two years later, as a result of all the printing of money and the oil shock because of all of that, we had the, in 1973, oil shock. And now, because of my background, I'm hired to be Director of Commodities at a Wall Street brokerage firm. Okay? Which, and then all sorts of things happened, turbulence and so on and so forth. That firm went broke. I went to another firm and I was rowdy.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  I wasn't your typical good employee, you know, follow everything. So I got fired. And that was in 1975. And then I, but clients all liked me for things. And so they would pay me for advice and I continued to trade the markets. And that's when I formed Bridgewater. Okay?

• 42:40Steven Bartlett?

  And what is?

• 42:41Speaker 00

  That was 1975. I just passed along Bridgewater 50 years later.

• 42:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Okay? So there's a journey there that has failures and successes and learnings. You know, I have a principle. Pain plus reflection equals progress. Okay? Your best learnings come from the pain. It's a message. Pay attention. Learn how reality works and how to deal with it differently so you have principles for dealing with reality better. And I learned that process. And from that process, my company Bridgewater became the largest hedge fund in the world, extremely successful.

• 43:24Steven Bartlett?

  Managing how much?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  $150 billion. 1,500 people, $150 billion.

• 43:30Steven Bartlett?

  And that's made you a very wealthy man?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  It made me a very wealthy man, which by the way, was not my intention. Okay, I just wanted to play the game and to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships. That was paramount, but it happened to be the game I played. If you're good at the game, you make a lot of money. And now I'm at a stage in my life where I'm, I want to pass things along. I need to pass things along, right? So hence the books, hence our conversation. And here we are. That's the life arc. But I learned a lot. And so that's the journey.

• 44:08Steven Bartlett?

  I think B two B marketers keep making this mistake. They're chasing volume instead of quality. And when you try to be seen by more people instead of the right people, all you're doing is making noise. But that noise rarely shifts the needle, and it's often quite expensive. And I know, as there was a time in my career where I kept making this mistake, that many of you will be making it too. Eventually, I started posting ads on our show sponsors platform LinkedIn. And that's when things started to change. I put that change down to a few critical things. One of them being that LinkedIn was then and still is today, the platform where decision makers go to, not only to think and learn, but also to buy. And when you market your business there, you're putting it right in front of people who actually have the power to say yes. And you can target them by job

• 44:51Steven Bartlett?

  title, industry, and company size. It's simply a sharper way to spend your marketing budget. And if you haven't tried it, how about this? Give LinkedIn ads a try, and I'm going to give you a hundred dollar ad credit to get you started. If you visit LinkedIn dot com slash diary, you can claim that right now. That's LinkedIn dot com slash diary. Just for context, people don't like talking about money, and I understand it. But you're a prolific philanthropist. Also, Google says that your net worth is in the tens of billions of dollars. And I'm sure there's some people that have clicked on this conversation and aren't aware of the scale of wealth you built up and the scale of bridge water capital and how prolific and famous it is in the investing world. In that 50 year life arc,

• 45:32Steven Bartlett?

  one of the things you mentioned is pain. All of us will encounter pain. And you said, pain plus reflection equals progress. How have you learned to deal with pain? You've had a lot of pain in all facets of life because you've lived the life arc, and you continue to. What's the best principle for dealing with pain?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  First of all, to calm yourself down.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  And to get centered, meditation has had a big beneficial effect on my life. We can get into meditation in a minute of how it has. But the ability to, you know, in a sense, calm yourself down. And when the time is right, to reflect on what's happened. Both to understand how reality works. You know, you want to be a hyper realist. I understand how reality works. Therefore, I need to do this under this set of circumstances, which means developing principles. And so what I did, when I would do that, anytime, whenever I would think, what, what should I do?

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Whether painful or not, I would pause, reflect on, you know, what should I do if that happened again? And that's how I would write down my principles. And what I did was I wrote down a lot of principles.

• 46:56Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of principles.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  A lot of principles. If this happens, that happens and whatever. And so I wrote these principles down. And then I found that in investing, if I can computerize those decision rules, I could back test them, see how they would have worked and so on. So I built systems, decision making systems. And computer would make decisions. So it was AI before LLMs, but it was AI to have decision making criteria. So it would be like I would make a computer chess game that would play while I am playing my mental chess game, what moves we would make.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  And it's completely automated and so on. But I'm, what I'm trying to say is that reflecting on how does reality really work? And what do I do when this happens to that happens? Is the development of principles. And that has been invaluable. And it also makes me see things differently. Because a lot of people, and if I didn't do this, I would be, seeing almost as a blizzard of things coming at me.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Instead, I see everything as another one of those. So let's say, for example, it's a species. So it's like seeing, okay, that's what kind of species is it? And how do I deal with that species? So it's one of those rather than just a lot of things coming at me.

• 48:35Steven Bartlett?

  Patent recognition of.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, but let's say if you think of us, it's a duck.

• 48:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, okay.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, it's a duck. How do I deal with the duck? Or it's a lion. Okay, how do I deal with a lion? Okay, rather than just a lot of things coming at it. So this principle thinking and seeing it that way had a big effect on the quality of my decision making and that helped.

• 49:03Steven Bartlett?

  Two questions I had there is to become a principle thinker, I need to do more reflection, right? And then the other thing is.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, think about how does, how does the machine? How does, how does life? How do these things work? So that's what I mean. Okay.

• 49:20Steven Bartlett?

  And to write that down.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, write down your thoughts. I find sometimes what I would do is I dictate them into my iPhone.

• 49:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Okay, I'd say, okay, ah, this is how. When you're making a decision, why did you make that decision? So not just make a decision, but think about the criteria you're using to make the decision.

• 49:44Steven Bartlett?

  Also my emotions, my trauma, my insecurities, my anxiety.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Right, and you might say when reflecting on that, is that helpful? Is that harmful? And what do I do about that? Like, for example, when, what you're referring to is, yes, that emotions and the things and all of those. You have to understand that basically the brain's got two parts to it, right? It has the logical part of your brain, reasonable, tries to reason things through and that, which is conscious. And then it has the subconscious mind, which is the subliminal that is really driving you.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  And so, when you can reflect, okay, how are my emotions entering into it? What do I, you know, and so on. And you can think and you can align that. That's very powerful. And meditation, by the way, naturally does that. Because what you do when you meditate, and maybe a time's coming I should explain meditation, okay, how it works.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  What you do is, it's a process by which you sit quietly and you repeat in your mind what is called a mantra, which is a sound, that it's a word that has no meaning. Let me say the most classic example of that would be om. Okay, so you're quietly there and you go, with your breath, you go, you know, om, om, like that. But you need to be taught, but anyway, om. When you're doing that, because your om is in your mind or your mantra's in your mind, you're not able to have other thoughts.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  You'll see yourself wavering between doing that and staying on the mantra and then having thoughts. But, and then you go back to your mantra. When you are in the mantra a lot, then it disappears. The sound disappears and you go into your subconscious mind. That's what they call transcending, transcendental meditation, that's how meditation I do. And so you go there and you're not in a conscious state and you're not in a subconscious state. You're in a conscious state. So it's subconscious state. It's not, unconscious is you're sleeping. Conscious is that you're awake, like we are. You're in this. So it's a different state. Like if you hear the noise, you would hear that noise.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  It would be big, and not when you're sleeping. But when you're in your subconscious state, then it's relaxing, it's helpful. And this process helps to bring your conscious state and your subconscious state into alignment.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  In other words, you recognize both and it calms you down. It's like the ninja in the ninja movies, you know, they're fighting, but it seems in slow motion, the camera shows them in slow motion and they're doing whatever they're doing along that. It kind of makes you in that kind of state of mind so that you're dealing with what's coming at you in that way. And so what you referred to is this, these things that happen and how you deal with those is really important to the quality of your decision making.

• 53:13Steven Bartlett?

  How influential was transcendental meditation in your success?

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Oh, enormously successful, enormously significant, very, very significant. In other words, that way of seeing things.

• 53:25Steven Bartlett?

  And how?

• 53:26Speaker 00

  And by the way, there's, you know, there's, I would say, there's a serenity prayer. The serenity prayer is God give me the serenity to accept that which I can't control and give me the power to control that which I can and the wisdom to tell the difference. Okay? And so to how you approach these things, we're talking about reflection. You asked me reflection, okay? If you can reflect in that quality way, then you deal with anything. And I've, I've dealt with the worst possible thing. I lost a son, okay?

• 54:11Speaker 00

  And I would have rather died. I would have rather lost everything to lose my son. So it's the worst possible thing. And then to see what it did, you know, the damage and the harm from the family, terrible. Okay. Then to go through that with meditation, with reflection and so on, was invaluable. And people have their own challenges, but to be able to do it that way, I really urge your audience, I urge you to, to learn that. That's very helpful.

• 54:45Steven Bartlett?

  How, how did that tragedy change your, your perspective and your, your principles in any way on life, on, on happiness, on success, on all these things that you've written about?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Well, it's, again, I, you know, I go above it and you reflect on the life arc.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  And I realize at that higher level that that's what the life arc is like. If you'll, in all my books, there's this ar- um, arcing. This arcing here, there's a bigger version of it. Uh, yeah, there's this arcing. Okay, I don't know if your camera sees that. Okay, whatever it is. And that's what life and evolution is like to me. Meaning you make advances. You will have setbacks. Okay? If you reflect well and you learn how reality works and how you will deal with it.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  You will get past that and go on. And that's just what it is. That's just the way life is. And if you do that well, then that's your best possible life.

• 56:01Steven Bartlett?

  Are you religious? Are you a religious person?

• 56:04Speaker 00

  I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.

• 56:07Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  The Dalai Lama, who I had the pleasure of meeting, told me, uh, and I agree with, um, that religions are typically, um, a mix between superstitions and spirituality. There's half of it is that element that nobody knows, but there is the way people should deal with each other. There is karma. Okay? All religions. There's a part of them that says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or what goes around comes around. And then you get to the particulars. Okay?

• 56:52Speaker 00

  And it is true that if we work well together.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  That even little things I can do to help you can make a big difference in your life. And little things that you can do to help me make a big difference in our lives. And so it's practical and it is also joyous. Okay, that creates a relationship. And we talked earlier about how that meaningful relationship is like the source of great happiness. But when you have a community and you do that, you have a better society. And almost all religions will tell you that, there'll be elements of those. And when I believe in spirituality, what I also mean is we're all part of this greater whole. Okay?

• 57:42Speaker 00

  We're all part of the greater whole. And if you could see yourself as part of the greater whole and love the greater whole and whatever, that is spirituality, really, okay? And so I will go through my life arc, okay, and I will die and I'm comfortable with that, okay? In that, okay, it's all part of the greater whole, you know, nature and whatever it is. That's true. I can't tell you about other things, but I do believe in the things I just told you.

• 58:19Steven Bartlett?

  When it comes to living a successful life, we've talked about having dreams and understanding your nature and aspiring for things and then understanding reality, which transcendental meditation is a great mechanism and vehicle to do. And in your, in your book about a successful life, you talk about plus determination. Plus determination. Hard work. If I want to be a successful man or woman, how important do you think hard work is?

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Well, it gives you power. It's very important, right?

• 58:52Steven Bartlett?

  Some people, some people, you know.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I'm not saying they want to choose it, but the irony of things is there are first order consequences and there are second order consequences. This is like a rule of life, okay? And most of the time, the first order consequences.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Whether they're likable or not,

• 59:15Speaker 00

  has the opposite second quarter, second order consequences. What I mean by that is, like eating or exercising, okay? Eat the food you like.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Second order consequence is probably not going to be good. Um, you know, I don't want to exercise. Um, second order consequences won't be as good, okay? Working hard, which gives you strength, where does strength come from? I mean, strength comes from working hard. So, working hard will, will give you power. Power will make things easier and make things better. That's just the way it is.

• 1:00:00Steven Bartlett?

  And being open minded while you do it?

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, open minded, yeah. And I say, uh, the importance of being open minded and assertive at the same time. Um, I, I, I watch

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  people becoming so

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  tied to their own opinions. Like, this is the greatest tragedy of mankind.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  The greatest tragedy of mankind, because it so easily can be fixed, is

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  holding a strong opinion that is wrong,

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  that you could have made right, better, if you were open to learning more. If you were said, I want to be stress tested. I want my thinking to be stress tested. I want to make sure that I'm making the better decision. And so I'll be challenged. But a lot of people view that challenging like a fight.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  It's not a fight. If somebody holds a different opinion, it should prompt a curiosity. You know, I don't know, am I wrong or is they wrong? There's a 50% chance. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. So it should prompt curiosity and an exchange to try to make sure that you're seeing the whole picture and so on. But subliminal instincts are, I'm going to stick with it and I'm going to have a fight. That's a problem.

• 1:01:29Steven Bartlett?

  Because there's too much on the line for so many people to.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  It's subliminal. It's, it's, it just goes back to the mind thinking that the intellectual challenge is a fight. And it's egotistical, you know, ego. I must be right.

• 1:01:47Steven Bartlett?

  As an, as an investor and entrepreneur, that's obviously particularly important because you're constantly dealing with your information and feedback, which you need to be flexible.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  That was one of the two things that changed my,

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  my, my, my whole direction and made me successful. I could, I could explain it if you want.

• 1:02:05Steven Bartlett?

  Please.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  1979 and 80. I had calculated that American banks had lent more money to foreign countries that they were going to be able to pay back and that we were going to have a debt crisis. Very controversial point of view. In August of 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debts. And over the next decade, many other countries did, and it caused bank problems. However, at that time, I thought things were going to get bad and that was the exact bottom in the stock market, August 1982. So I couldn't have been more wrong.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  I lost money for me. I lost money for the clients. I lost money. I was so broke that I had to borrow $4,000 from my dad to help to pay for family bills because I was faced with the choice, what am I going to do? And, and do I, do I go back to work on Wall Street, get a,

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  tie, get on the train and go back to that, which is again, in my nature or whatever. And, and two things changed me. Okay, reflection.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  First of all.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  I learned what we were just talking about. I learned humility and fear of being wrong and open mindedness. So I wanted the smartest people who could I could find to stress test my opinions. Cause I'm always realize I could be wrong. And then I learned how to diversify my bets. So that I could dramatically reduce my risk without reducing my returns. Okay, that was the bottom. Okay, from that point all the way over that following those principles took me to the biggest hedge fund in the world, the most successful and so on. Cause I applied it to the market, applied it to what we did and so on.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  So that notion of reflection and then how do you deal with what reality is like? And then, you know, okay, they learn, learn radical open mindedness. In other words, like there's a principle in the book. You have to take in before you put out. Or that decision making is a two step process. First take in, then decide. Okay, so yes, open mindedness. You don't, doesn't in any way minimize your ability to decide. So you still have the freedom to decide, but it's crazy not to be open minded.

• 1:04:43Steven Bartlett?

  You recognize that the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions. And that two step process is first learn and then make the decision, which is funny because it sounds simple. But when you said it, I think about all the worst decisions I've ever made in business and I missed step one. I forgot to, I forgot to take a minute and do the evidence gathering or the like information gathering process.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, just smart people care about your decision, say, stress test me.

• 1:05:09Steven Bartlett?

  Why don't we do that?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  That ego and also instinct that that's a fight.

• 1:05:16Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any advice you would give me on becoming a better decision maker? So I have a fund, I have many businesses. Is there any sort of practical, simple foundations of becoming a better decision maker that we haven't talked about? Get smart people to interrogate my thinking and be open minded.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  I think we've talked about almost all of them. I think then you have to then know about how to leverage yourself.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Okay, in other words, as you do more and more, uh, how do you do more and more when your brain has a capacity limit? Okay, and there's only certain number of hours in the day or the week. Okay, you have to know how to do that.

• 1:06:00Steven Bartlett?

  Is that focus or is that something?

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  No, no. It's knowing how to do it through others. Okay, it's knowing how to pick others and orchestrate well. It's like, uh, running a symphony or whatever. Okay, get the best players. Okay, when I say, uh, you know, um, good character and good capabilities and orchestrate them well. And then provide that, um, that leverage. Like, uh, um, when I was doing the most, I had thirty direct reports. Whatever the number is, it's all, uh, uh, it, the process is how to get more out of a minute or a day. Not how to work harder.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Okay, it's how to leverage yourself. And you're gonna leverage yourself by picking the right people who you can trust. They're not gonna screw you, they're gonna operate in your interest, and they're going to be capable. And so a lot of people, what you can do is you can deal with them and then you can say, uh, like, I, I would deal with them on this thirty reports. I'd have maybe, um, an hour meeting with them once every two weeks. And, and they'd go off and do things. And when you do that, you can even find people who are much better at things than you would be if you did them. Because if you have these different things, okay, you're better. Because otherwise, you don't have the capacity.

• 1:07:31Steven Bartlett?

  You have these two key challenges to, to overcome as an entrepreneur, which is find these great capable people that have great character. And then like bind them with the right culture to make sure that they do the best work.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Right, uh, uh, in other words, it's meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truthfulness and radical transparency.

• 1:07:52Steven Bartlett?

  Radical truthfulness and transparency.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Okay, first, if you can have, um,

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  meaningful work and meaningful relationships, the people are on the mission with you.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  Wow, that's fantastic. But you better be truthful and transparent. That'll show that you're honest and you better, because you have to get a truth, including what people are bad at, and how to deal with all those things. And most people hide them. They don't bring them out into the open. Okay, everybody's worried about hurting each other's feelings or, you know, that. And then, so they're not honest with each other. And that's the barrier. We talked about the barrier of disagreement. There's, it's like that. Okay, you know, I don't know. Are you good at that? Are you striking out?

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  If you're striking out, and what is it? How do we deal with it? You better talk about that clearly, because you need to have an A-team of players. You know, you have to work yourself so your team is an A-team of players who are tight.

• 1:09:03Steven Bartlett?

  How did you do that, Bridgewater? How did you make people honest?

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Oh, well, first of all, I had a policy. Talk behind another person's back critically. If that happens three times, you're out. And then I would have radical transparency so everybody could see everything. So you could see why I'm making decisions and I would reflect. But the main thing is, you know, you know if it's happening or not. Okay, and I made that comfortable, because that's ordinarily uncomfortable. We talked about the fact that there's an intellectual you and there's an emotional, subliminal you.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Okay, I made them understand, like if I had a team, a football team, and so on, that this is going to be better for the team, it's going to be better for you, and you'll have your evolution. Because what do you want to have dishonesty? Do you want people to think one thing about you and really say something different? How is that going to work? So there's an intellectual, okay, we believe it. And then also by having the meaningful relationships. I mean, I'm not, I don't force them. I create a culture of meaningful relationships so that they have known each other for a long time. They go to each other's parties, or they go to each other's...

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  There are funerals, there are baby showers, there are these things. Not that anybody's fought, I created clubs. I said, any club that you want to create that has more than 20 people, whatever it is, up to $500 per person, I'll pay for half. So, so I don't care what it is. If it's play softball or play chess or whatever it is that you're enjoying each other's company, or you want to go to ball games or something, I don't care what it is. I'll pay for half up to that, up to $500. So I, to, nobody has obligations to or something.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  But if I have that kind of meaningful relationships, so you can talk honestly with each other. I found that very helpful.

• 1:11:22Steven Bartlett?

  And you've built a, famously built an idea meritocracy, which in my understanding means where the best idea ends up winning in the company versus just your idea because you're the most powerful person in the business.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, I want, what do I want? I want the best idea to win.

• 1:11:38Steven Bartlett?

  This sounds simple, but, but again, it's, it's not how businesses operate. And one of the fascinations I've always had is that when businesses get bigger and they have more intellectual horsepower by, I mean, if you just added up how many brains they had, they sometimes get less innovative and it feels like the CEO.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Well, because they've become more bureaucratic and more fragmented.

• 1:12:01Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  Okay, there's, I found it to be true and it's well established fact that if you get a group of people past a certain size, which is 75 to 100 people, they don't know each other. Okay, they, they, they start to become different. And then you lose those relationships, you lose a lot and so on. I found it because at the holiday season every year, what I would do is I would write everybody notes, long notes in their cards, and I would pick an individualized holiday gift for them. And when it got to be the 67 people, I remember the year, it broke my back.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I just couldn't do it. Okay. And I realized that at that point, I was.

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  Going into another frame, okay. And so it's an organizational reality that you can keep that group. And then what you have to do is then you have different, those different areas. And you have to create cohesiveness between those different. And cohesiveness, common mission. And how do you do that between that? So like, for example, when we would have our holiday party, where it used to be, everybody would be, you know, sort of go in and you have a holiday party and everybody together. What I found out is we had a big arena that we would go to. And I'd have both. I'd have, okay, that department is in that area and whatever. And then they come out and they all mingle together and so on.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  So there's an organizational thing that you've got to realize in terms of culture and management of that.

• 1:13:45Steven Bartlett?

  It's like villages in a city, I guess. Like you basically keep build the villages and then.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Good example, yeah.

• 1:13:50Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting, okay. Yeah, our media company is at that exact point now. It's at, it's at that ninety, ninety odd people.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  Okay, there you are.

• 1:13:59Steven Bartlett?

  When you said seventy five to a hundred, I was like, ah, interesting.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking about all the things I should be doing now to counteract some of those adverse effects of this culture splintering or relationships breaking down. But I guess you've described it there. Uh, interesting. And I have to say, one of the things that I found to be most, I'm thirty three years old. I just turned thirty three last week. It's crazy how, how often people say that hiring is the most important thing. Yet when you look at how, what entrepreneurs are spending their time on, it's usually like the product, the marketing, et cetera. And it's maybe like one or two hours, in some cases, if they're lucky, on finding truly exceptional people. They often just outsource it to someone else, the recruitment team. When you think back through your career, how important was it to find truly exceptional people?

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Of course, well, I systemized it. First of all, I think. That anything I do or one does can be systemized. So I would think, what are the personalities? What are the backgrounds of the people that I'm hiring? What are the choices? How do I specify it? And I've, and I got it by also maintaining a lot of data with people. There's, um, there's a TED Talk I did that explains how like data. Everybody's going around and they're operating in a certain way. So I know what people are like. If you know what people are like, you know what you can expect of them. And then I would then say, uh, in a very data way,

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  those people who are successful in these jobs have the following attributes that would create a job spec, specifications for that type of job. So I, I knew that in that type of job, there would be that type of person I'm looking for.

• 1:15:50Steven Bartlett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:15:51Steven Bartlett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  What works? They work. Okay, data. And then I would find, that would be my job spec. And, and so we had the systems. And then we had some people who are responsible for doing that. Because you're right, it takes time. How can I interview all those people and so on? But who can you trust? And you're operating that way. And then evaluation process doesn't stop when you hire them. Okay, the evaluation process continues from that moment. And you still learn more about what they're like. And you do that same process and still think, would I still have hired them? And, and if I wouldn't have hired them, you know, in the first place, then they shouldn't be there.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  And so I have a process and people, people and process.

• 1:16:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do people change after a certain point? So if you've hired someone in six months, in 12 months, and they haven't changed, is it worth giving them another year? Is it worth a performance review?

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  I found out that for me, the big question mostly, there were two big questions, but, um, the big question is, how do you adapt to my culture?

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  And that would take about 18 months to find out like, can you speak honestly about what can we have thoughtful disagreement? Do you like this evolutionary process where you're challenged and all of this kind of thing? That culture, that'd take about 18 months. And then roughly speaking, then learning about the people, their strengths and weaknesses would take 18 months to two years, maybe something along those lines. And so then, you know, you could pretty much decide, but always being open every day by day. So nobody's surprised that you're always talking about things, you know, how's it going?

• 1:17:44Steven Bartlett?

  Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released and so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000

• 1:18:26Steven Bartlett?

  people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private close community, head to the link in the description below or go to D O A C circle.com. It's a really interesting time to be leading a business. New skills are constantly being invented and ones that didn't exist a few months ago are now all of a sudden essential. Our team at Flight Story thrives on staying ahead of emerging tech and innovation. So whenever we need to plug into those skills of the future, like vibe coding, AI agent development, generative engine optimization, all of the technical things we've talked about on the show before, we always go to the same place, which is Fiverr, our show sponsor and the place where that future focused talent quietly shows up before the rest of the world catches on. Their freelancers are reliable, high performing and also highly

• 1:19:09Steven Bartlett?

  vetted and you'll find them in over 750 categories. Fiverr isn't just for quick jobs. We use their talent more on complex, long-term projects, ones that require an expert to take charge. And you can tap into tomorrow's talent at fiverr.com/daily and for 10% off your first order, use code DAILY. AI is a bit of an alien that seems to have entered the room and has is going to change more almost every every industry.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Great.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Steven Bartlett?

  I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  No, truly. If you are working with it, controlling it, if it's a good partner, to be able to get a lot of leverage, it's truly fantastic. As I said, in almost everything I did, we had the criteria, we had the systemized, would you do that, would you not do that, how do you know, how does reality work, what are the principles? And and so it's a fantastic leveraging, like I described, you know, I would make the decision making model like the computer chess game that would make it. Well, now it's better than ever, those those resources. So it leverages you enormously.

• 1:20:21Steven Bartlett?

  What about having a strong middle? We talked about having the strong sort of economic political middle.

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  Political middle. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:28Steven Bartlett?

  Is it going to drive inequality?

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Yes, it's going to that's like all good, like all things, it's going to be, it has good things and bad things. And we were talking, let's say, first about managing and doing that. I think in managing and knowing what people are like and how they're all, it's going to be very valuable, mostly very valuable. In terms of changing, there'll be a limited number of winners and a bunch of losers. And I think it's going to create much greater polarity, which, as we're seeing through the system, the ways that we talked about, you know, that top one to 10% benefiting a lot.

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  And then, yeah, so that will be a dividing force, I think.

• 1:21:19Steven Bartlett?

  Got to pose the question, with robotics accelerating at the speed of of light with Optimus and Tesla and all the things they're doing and all these other companies, humanoid robots, and then with artificial intelligence, having trillions of dollars plowed into it and accelerating, we're in this crazy boom at the moment. With these two things combining, you're going to be able to have a humanoid robot that can navigate human spaces, but is also smarter than I am. Lawyers, accountants.

• 1:21:47Steven Bartlett?

  Lots of people in the medical profession. Why would you, why would one need them? If we had a humanoid robot that is smarter than all of us and has a PhD in everything?

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Well, we will not need a lot of those jobs for the reasons that you're saying. Okay. And then the question is what our society does.

• 1:22:09Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you think we do in such a world?

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  I think we fight over about what we do, unfortunately. But as I say, I don't think we have escaped a world where most people to have a healthy society, most people have to be productive and prosperous. I don't, I think people need to be now certainly. There, and there certainly needs to be a redistribution policy. I don't think that's just a redistribution of money policy. Because uselessness and money may not be a great combination. So I think that you have, that has to be figured out.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  And the question is whether we're too fragmented to figure that out and agree on it. And I'm worried about that.

• 1:23:06Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting times. Is there any historical precedence for this in your view? Someone that knows history, is there any historical precedence for something like AI and robotics converging?

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Well, through

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  evolution,

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  we have gone from a period of time, which was called the dark ages or the agricultural age, in which basically there was land, it's agricultural and so on. And people were treated, they were essentially like oxen, most people. And then there were the landowners who were nobles and then there were the royalty, who were the families that control most things and so on. And then in history, with the invention of the printing press, there became more knowledge.

• 1:24:01Speaker 00

  More intelligence. And we see an evolution in which you start to see new ages emerge, and thinking emerge, and power change. And I won't take you through the whole history, but you start to see that individuals can be clever enough to earn money. So you begin the age of exploration and the industrial revolutions, in which machines replaced people. And it's almost like, they first replaced them physically, that, in other words, they didn't have, they were not like oxen doing the thing, so you get a tractor or something.

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  And it's almost like from the body up, in terms of the mind. And so you've seen that evolution through time, and the rise of intelligence in its various forms, go through this arc of rising in intelligence. And now you see that intelligence matters more than anything, okay? It matters more than money, it matters more than anything, because intelligence will attract people, those with money, to invest in the development of that. And so we have seen this arc through history develop in that way, right? And we've seen people replaced.

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  Now, the question is, as we get higher and higher in thinking, okay? Whether we've run out of capacity to shift, or whether we're just gonna be totally replaced. Our muscles have been totally replaced. But, okay, as this is happening, our best thinking may be totally replaced. And we're gonna have to deal with that question. Are you hopeful? I'm excited. I'm... I think it all comes down to human nature. Okay, I'm excited in that...

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  Fast forward, make the most of it, jump on it, woo, you know, I'm excited. I've also watched the evolution of species. Almost all species have come and gone for certain reasons. And they, one of the reasons that they come, have come and gone is because almost their strengths are not in all respects, great strengths. You can use these things, intelligence, to your detriment. And I believe that the things that these technologies and so on bring us, while very

• 1:26:48Speaker 00

  important, it extends life expectancy and all of that, is not as important as human nature. And so if you were to go back in time and we're in different societies, do you have happier societies, is the well-being greater? Okay, so you can go 50 years ago, and you might say the well-being is greater 50 years ago, not in all ways, not in, in many ways, the technologies and the consequences of those are much better, but you may have had a better life. And it's human nature of how people are going to deal with each other. So I think the real question is, can people rise above this?

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  And which, it goes back to the spirituality question, can people then rise above it so that they think of the collective good? And they think of, you know, collectively, how do we make the best? And also karma, you know, in other words, the realization that if I help you in ways that can be so simple for me to help you make such a big difference in your life, and you do the same, and we have win-win relationships, it'll be good. But if we don't do that, and I worry about human nature, and I worry about this process.

• 1:28:10Steven Bartlett?

  Especially when you've got geopolitical tensions and...

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  It's because of human nature.

• 1:28:16Steven Bartlett?

  I've had a lot of conversations on the podcast about AI and I just can't seem to get to my own solid conclusion about this because when I look at human nature, as you say, I see greed, I see power, hunger, status.

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, some problems, just just accept the fact that you may not be able to be confident about a prediction in the future. So it'll always be a question and just get on with the fact of using it for yourself in the best way that works for you.

• 1:28:40Steven Bartlett?

  That's what I'm doing. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. You know this person, because I've seen you with them. The question they left for you is what is a book or books that you've recommended or gifted more than others and why? Can't say your own, but.

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  Right. There are three books. There's a book on evolution written by Richard Dawkins, River from Eden, I think it's called. Then a book by Will and Ariel Durant, which are maybe the greatest historians in time. And it's called Lessons from History. It's a very short book. I think it's 104 pages. They wrote massive amounts, about 5,000 years of history and so on. And they sort of condensed their lessons, lessons from

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  history. And then Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey.

• 1:29:50Steven Bartlett?

  Is it the hero with a thousand faces?

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yes, that's it. Hero with a Thousand Faces.

• 1:29:55Steven Bartlett?

  And why Dawkins' book? Why did you say that one?

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  Oh, he understands evolution. Everything is evolving. Okay, all species. Man is one of 10,000 species.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  I mean, and they're and they're all structured similarly. There's a structure they, you know, like two eyes, a brain that has a structure to it, and the same parts of the brain. There's the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the prefrontal cortex. There's this structure that makes you think differently and so on. There's evolution. There's all evolution. So it's not just limited to human evolution or what humans are like. It's the force of evolution. Man is only mankind's only about 200,000 years old. That's in history. That's short. Okay. And the species and all species evolve. Okay. And it's very interesting. So

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  that's, you know, that's what his books are about. And, you know, I think they're very good.

• 1:30:57Steven Bartlett?

  And Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, the hero with a thousand faces.

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  It's about human nature and and the evolution of life and the life journey that we're talking about.

• 1:31:06Steven Bartlett?

  What I find so interesting, Ray, is how you draw on principles from other domains, whether it's from nature or biology, as you were talking about there, to tie into your work in business and investing and everything else and life and happiness. And it really says something to me about being more eclectic and broadly curious in order to be successful in my more narrow domain.

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just, see, I don't, is that to me maybe too much of a specialist kind of mentality, but the world is being interrelated to these things. If you want to understand how reality works, you can't say, I'm going to be just a specialist. I mean, these are all affected by each other.

• 1:31:53Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you so much for writing these books. They are iconic. And the YouTube videos that explain these books are iconic. I don't know who you have on your team that makes the animations and pulls it all together, but not only is the content. So important because they are principles. So they're enduring through time, but they're so unbelievably accessible to all people of all ages. And if you, if people haven't read this book, I'd be shocked. But all of these books are fantastic. The, this book Principles by Ray Dalio, which I'm going to link all of them below for anyone that wants to read them. I suggest you read them all. Will be formative in your life, even if you're not interested in business or investing, because as, as it says on the book, they're principles. And the, the economy affects us all in ways that we might not understand. We're all trying to be successful or happy in our own right.

• 1:32:38Steven Bartlett?

  And that, and that's interwoven into all of these books. So thank you. I hope you write more books.

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  Well, and thank you because yeah, I'm at a stage in my life. This is a symbiotic relationship. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

• 1:32:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  Okay. And my, um, my benefit is that I want to pass along these things and we're doing it together. And I have found, and it's joyous to me to know that these things have made a big difference in people's lives. People come up to me and they say, thank you for the difference you've made. And you know, at this stage in my life, that's what I want to do.

• 1:33:07Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's an understatement. I think it's had a profound impact. In fact, every person I know, all of my best friends have taken something from your work, which has had a profound impact on their decision making, which has led them to be happier in some way. And when I told my friends that I was interviewing you, I'm interviewing 16 people while I'm in New York over the, over the next month. When I told my friends, my best friends in the world that I'm interviewing you, all of them were telling me to pass on a message of thanks. Because there's something in one of these books that's helped them. And they're all young people in that first season of their life. And there's, there's something in all of these books that's pushed them closer to their success and their happiness. So thank you for, on behalf of me, because you've had a profound impact on me, but thank you.

• 1:33:43Speaker 00

  Thank you for giving me that joy.

• 1:33:45Steven Bartlett?

  I know, I mean it.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  Knowing that, thank you.

• 1:33:47Steven Bartlett?

  I really, really mean that. Thank you so much, Ray.