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Home » FULL TRANSCRIPT: Ray Dalio on The Tucker Carlson Show

FULL TRANSCRIPT: Ray Dalio on The Tucker Carlson Show

Read the full transcript of investor and entrepreneur Ray Dalio’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “America’s Hidden Civil War, and the Race to Beat China in Tech, Economics, and Academia” premiered on Feb 21, 2025.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The State of Civil War in the United States

TUCKER CARLSON: So, I’ve heard you say that the United States is in a civil war, and I think most Americans don’t perceive that. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

RAY DALIO: Well, what I mean by a civil war, I should say a type of civil war, is that there are irreconcilable differences that each side is willing to fight for in order to get the outcomes that they want. In that environment, the issues of how the legal system works, whether it will stand in the way of that fight, or whether there will be a fight that will make the cause more important than anything, come into play.

That’s the type of situation that we’re in. We understand there are wealth and values gaps that are entering into this. We’ve seen this through history, so where that goes is a different question, but we are in that type of civil war, are we not?

TUCKER CARLSON: Clearly we are. How are they resolved? I mean, clearly they can be resolved through violence, but what are the other ways you resolve the kind of conflict we have?

RAY DALIO: Clearly they’re resolved through conflict, because you get to the point where both sides can’t reach agreements, both sides don’t even want to talk, both sides don’t want to respect the rule of law. So when we’re dealing with things like sanctuary city issues, and we’re dealing with enforceability, who has the enforceability, you almost have to play out, okay, enforceability means police forces and such things.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, people with guns.

RAY DALIO: Right, people with guns and causes. Just because the legal thing says they shouldn’t do that, that’s not going to stand in the way. We have that kind of situation. So we are probably past the point of being able to resolve that by compromise and empathy and all of that.

Normally it goes that way. The only thing that can be done is to have the fear of that create a necessity for having another path. You know, like we were talking about the debt situation. So can there be a fiscal commission that gets together and then achieves those things or not?

I think it’s unlikely. I think we’re going to see more fragmentation. There are some states, other states, I think we’re going to see more fragmentation. But you know, it’s like this dynamic through history.

This isn’t the first time this happened. This happens repeatedly through history, and usually, you know, it runs its course. So the way our leaders in the United States have dealt with it over the past 30 years has just been to ignore it, completely just ignore it.

The Evolution of Political Polarization

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there’s a cycle, you know. The cycle was, let’s say, I don’t know, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill together and they were operating in a certain way. And the manifestations of the circumstances, you know, the manifestations of debt or wealth gap or values gaps were not as great. So you didn’t, over that 30-year period, have as much polarity in many different ways.

RAY DALIO: So now you’ve gone to greater polarity. If you watch statistics, everything I do comes from measuring things, so I look at statistics. The gap in measuring conservative or liberal votes in the House and the Senate is the greatest gap since 1900. The voting across party lines is the least since 1900. So you see this gap.

You see it in the elections, right, the green and red, the blue and red. So it’s not just an evolution. It’s where we are, where we have gotten to. That is, the irreconcilable questions, does the Supreme Court, you know, we thought about the Supreme Court differently not long ago, right?

The Supreme Court was the Supreme Court. And so now it’s different. So what accounts, I mean, there are a million ways to measure this and all of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you agree?

RAY DALIO: Well, of course I agree. Of course I agree. And I agree with you that every measurement shows the same result, which is the country is polarized. Okay, so we know where we are. But what, completely, and we’re not sure how it’s resolved, but I think it’s also causing to ask what happened, what was the change that led to the polarization that was unimaginable even 35 years ago?

The Root Causes of Polarization

RAY DALIO: The change was in a combination of the system working well for the majority of the people and which has to do with the majority of the people not being productive. You have productivity equals income. Right. Okay. So now if you take education and you take measures of how productive or how well trained you’re going to be, you see, and therefore also income, your productivity, you see by all of these measures, great, great gaps that exist.

So by way of example is unicorns and the changes that we’re seeing, fabulous changes in what we’re seeing in technology. Yes. But it really comes down to, if you take the number of people who have been making those changes and now the unicorns in this wonderful world, they go to the best universities and they make these wonderful things happen.

That’s about 3 million people in a country of a little over 330 million people. And if you take the average, 60% of Americans have below a sixth grade reading level, 60% of Americans. So when we deal with education, you have to make that population productive and through productivity they become educated and they become productive, they earn money and you have a better society.

So a number of things changed that.