From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. I feel like lately we've been having a kind of end of the American Empire moment.

In part, I think it's just the stalemated war in Iran.

In part, it's just the strain that Donald Trump is putting on American alliances. And in part,

I think, it's a sense that our biggest rival, China, is sitting back, biding its time, and waiting

for the collapse. My guest this week has been on this beat for a while now, and he has a grand

theory of history that predicts that America is headed

for a fall. He's kind of an unlikely Cassandra. Ray Dalio built one of the world's largest hedge funds,

Bridgewater Associates, from the ground up. But these days, he mostly wants to talk about our

imperial decadence,

and whether there's anything we can do to pull the American Empire back from the brink.

Ray Dalio, welcome to interesting times.

Thank you. It's interesting to be in interesting times.

So people say.

Yeah. to be in interesting times. So people say. So you're someone who spent your career making bets, and a substantial number of them have paid off over the last few decades.

And lately you have been arguing that the United States of America is maybe not such a good bet at the moment. So if someone is looking at America

right now, trying to decide, let's say, whether to bet on the American Empire as a dominant

force in the 21st century, what are the big forces or factors that they should be looking at?

Yeah, I correct that. I'm not saying that America is a bad

bet or a good bet. I'm just describing what's going on. And what I learned through my roughly

50 years of investing is that many things that are important that happened to me didn't happen in my lifetime before,

but happened many times in history.

And so I learned to study the last real of 500 years of history to find what caused the rises

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