Three Clocks, One Midnight
Ray Dalio, The Fourth Turning, and the Exponential Curves That Confirm Everything
When a billionaire macro-investor, a pair of generational historians, and the exponential technology curves all point to the same moment — maybe it’s time to pay attention.
I’ve been called a lot of things over the past nine years. Alarmist. Futurist. Optimist. The guy at the dinner party who won’t stop talking about exponential curves.
In October 2018, I stood in front of an audience at the Harvard Club in Boston and presented seven disruptive technologies I believed would reshape everything we knew about real estate, commerce, and how humans live. IoT. 5G. Artificial intelligence. Autonomous vehicles. Mixed reality. Blockchain. Data as the new currency.
Most of the room was polite. Some nodded. A few checked their phones.
I get it. I’ve been the person at the edge of the construction site pointing at storm clouds while everyone else keeps pouring concrete. That’s fine. Pattern recognition is a lonely business — until the storm arrives.
Last week, the storm arrived.
The Billionaire Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
On February 14, 2026 — Valentine’s Day, of all days — Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates and one of the most successful macro-investors in history, published an essay titled “It’s Official: The World Order Has Broken Down.”
Not “may be breaking down.” Not “showing signs of stress.” Has broken down.
Dalio wrote this from the backdrop of the Munich Security Conference, where nearly fifty heads of state gathered and collectively pronounced the post-1945 global order dead. The conference’s own annual report carried the title “Under Destruction.” Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the assembled leaders that the world order as it has stood for decades no longer exists. France’s President Macron said Europe’s old security structures are gone and that Europe must prepare for war. America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared we’ve entered a “new geopolitics era.”
This isn’t speculation from the fringes. This is the people who run the world telling you, in public, that the operating system they’ve been running on for eighty years just crashed.
Dalio frames what’s happening through his “Big Cycle” theory — a framework he laid out in his 2021 book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. The idea is that great powers rise and fall in cycles of roughly 75 to 150 years, driven by the interplay of debt, internal conflict, and external rivalry. He identifies six stages. Stage 1 is the new order, the fresh start after a major crisis. Stage 6 is the endgame — the period where there are no enforceable rules, where might becomes right, and where great powers clash.
Dalio says we’re in Stage 6. Right now. And he’s not just pointing to geopolitics. He identifies five types of warfare being waged simultaneously: trade and economic wars, technology wars, capital wars, geopolitical influence wars, and — the one everyone hopes stays hypothetical — military wars. Look around. Tariffs are weaponized. Semiconductors are national security assets. AI is being called the new nuclear weapon of economics. Capital flows are being redirected by sanctions and asset freezes. And the defense budgets of every major nation are surging.
His investment advice was blunt: sell debt, buy gold. Because wars are financed by borrowing and printing money, and when that happens, the currency and the credit system that holds it all together start to dissolve.
But here’s what Dalio didn’t say — at least not explicitly. He didn’t connect his Big Cycle to an even older framework that has been quietly predicting this exact moment for nearly three decades.
The Historians Who Saw It First
In 1997, two researchers named William Strauss and Neil Howe published a book called The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. Their thesis was audacious: Anglo-American history moves in recurring cycles of roughly 80 to 100 years, a span the ancients called a saeculum — approximately the length of a long human life. Each saeculum has four seasons, or “turnings.”
The First Turning is the High — a post-crisis era of institutional strength, collective confidence, and social cohesion. Think post-World War II America: the suburbs, the moon shot, the shared national purpose.
The Second Turning is the Awakening — a period of spiritual upheaval and rebellion against the institutions built during the High. Think the 1960s and ‘70s: counterculture, Vietnam protests, the consciousness revolution.
The Third Turning is the Unraveling — individualism surges, institutions weaken, culture fragments. Think the ‘80s through the early 2000s: culture wars, political polarization, the dot-com bubble, the erosion of shared truth.
The Fourth Turning is the Crisis — the winter of the cycle. A decisive era of secular upheaval where the old civic order is destroyed and a new one is forged. The last American Fourth Turning began with the Great Depression and ended with the atomic bomb.
Strauss and Howe predicted the next Fourth Turning would arrive around 2005 to 2008 and extend through approximately 2030. They were right about the timing. The 2008 financial crisis was the catalyst. Everything since — the political polarization, the pandemic, the institutional distrust, the rise of populism on both sides, the AI revolution, the geopolitical fracturing — has been the Crisis deepening.
In 2023, Neil Howe published The Fourth Turning Is Here, confirming what many of us already felt: we are deep inside the Crisis era. The question is no longer if a Fourth Turning is happening. The question is how it resolves — and what emerges on the other side.
Two Frameworks. One Diagnosis.
Here’s what stops me in my tracks.
Dalio’s Big Cycle and Strauss-Howe’s Fourth Turning were developed independently. Different methodologies. Different disciplines. Different vocabularies. One comes from macro-investing and economic history. The other from generational demographics and cultural analysis.
And yet they describe the same thing.
Dalio’s Stage 6 — the period of great disorder, no enforceable rules, and clashing great powers — maps almost perfectly onto Strauss-Howe’s Fourth Turning — the crisis period where the old civic order collapses and a new one is forged through upheaval.
Both frameworks identify debt spirals as accelerants. Both point to widening wealth gaps and internal political polarization as preconditions. Both observe that external conflict intensifies when internal cohesion fractures. Both note that the people in power during these transitions often don’t recognize what’s happening until it’s too late.
The convergence is almost eerie. It’s like two astronomers on different continents, using different telescopes, pointing at the same comet — and telling you it’s heading this way.
But I’d argue there’s a third clock running. And it’s the one that changes the math entirely.
The Third Clock: Exponential Technology
In January of this year, I published “2026: The Year Everything Changes” — my synthesis of over 85 reports from frontier AI labs, venture capital firms, research institutions, and consultancies. The thesis was simple, and I stand behind it more firmly today than when I wrote it: 2026 will be the most disruptive year in modern human history.
Not because of any single technology. Because of the architecture of disruption — multiple exponential S-curves all hitting their steep ascent at the same moment. Artificial intelligence. Humanoid robotics. Autonomous systems. Gene editing. Nuclear energy resurgence. Blockchain infrastructure. Agentic commerce. Each powerful alone. Converging together? Civilization-altering.
And I’m not alone in this assessment. Marc Andreessen — the man who co-created the web browser that ignited the internet age — declared in January that AI is the biggest technological revolution of his lifetime. Not just bigger than mobile. Bigger than the internet itself. Comparable to electricity and the steam engine. And his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, just raised $15 billion to back that conviction — with over a billion dedicated specifically to what they call “American Dynamism”: defense tech, AI infrastructure, and sovereign resilience. In other words, they’re investing as though the old order is already gone and the new one needs to be built.
Peter Diamandis calls this the convergence of exponentials. Jensen Huang called it the “iPhone moment for robotics.” Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate running Google DeepMind, sees a “new golden era of discovery” emerging within 10 to 15 years — what he calls “radical abundance.” And Fortune pointed out the fascinating tension: while Dalio warns we may be returning to 1933, Hassabis envisions a renaissance. Both may be right. Perhaps the darkness Dalio foresees is the necessary passage before the light Hassabis imagines.
Whatever you call it, it’s here. And it fundamentally changes the character of this Fourth Turning.
Here’s why.
Every previous Fourth Turning played out at the speed of human institutions. The American Revolution took years. The Civil War took four. World War II took six. The crises were profound, but the pace of change was bounded by how fast humans could manufacture, communicate, mobilize, and rebuild.
This Fourth Turning has a technological accelerant that no previous crisis has ever had. AI systems that can process information millions of times faster than human cognition. Autonomous agents that can negotiate, transact, and execute without human intervention. Robotics that are moving from lab demos to factory floors in months, not decades. Energy systems being reimagined from the ground up. And as Andreessen pointed out, you can’t download electricity, you can’t download plumbing — but you can download AI. This technology distributes itself at the speed of light to five billion connected humans.
The old world isn’t just ending. It’s being replaced — in real time, at a pace that previous generations couldn’t have imagined.
This is the part that most commentators miss. Dalio talks about the geopolitical order collapsing. Strauss and Howe talk about the generational crisis unfolding. But neither fully accounts for the fact that the tools available to rebuild are exponentially more powerful than anything humanity has ever wielded.
The Builder’s Paradox
In 1995, I was sitting at a desk at Nortel Networks in Research Triangle Park, building SQL databases on a Macintosh, when I saw the cover of Wired magazine featuring the Mosaic browser. Something in my gut fired. Not a thought — a recognition. I’d seen this pattern before, the same feeling I had when I first understood that technology moves in waves, not lines. That cover was the beginning of a cycle, and I could feel it in my bones before I could articulate it with words.
We’re doing the same thing now, but at an exponential doubling rate. The difference between 1995 and 2026? The internet took a decade to rewire commerce. What’s coming will rewire civilization in years.
Here’s what thirty years of building and rebuilding has taught me: demolition precedes construction.
Every builder understands this. Before you can pour a new foundation, you have to clear the site. The noise, the dust, the chaos — it looks like destruction from the outside. But if you know how to read a blueprint, you see what’s actually happening: the ground is being prepared.
That’s what the Fourth Turning is. That’s what Dalio’s Stage 6 is. Not the end of the story. The clearing of the site.
The Strauss-Howe model is explicit about this: every Fourth Turning in Anglo-American history has ended with a new First Turning — a High. After the Revolution came the Era of Good Feelings. After the Civil War came Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. After World War II came the greatest period of shared prosperity in American history.
Winter comes before the spring. But spring always follows winter.
The difference this time is that the builders have tools that previous generations could only dream about. AI doesn’t just accelerate the crisis — it accelerates the rebuilding. The same technology that’s disrupting every industry is also creating the infrastructure for what comes next: decentralized energy, personalized medicine, transparent governance, tokenized ownership, and economic systems that can be more equitable by design rather than by accident.
That’s why Andreessen’s a16z isn’t hedging with gold. They’re building. $15 billion in building. That’s the builder’s answer to the Fourth Turning.
What This Means for You
If you’re reading this and feeling the vertigo — good. That means you’re paying attention. The ground is shifting. The old order is ending. The post-1945 framework that most of our institutions, supply chains, investment strategies, and career assumptions were built on is being dismantled in real time, confirmed now by the very people who built it.
But vertigo is not the same as falling. You can feel the earth move and still choose where to plant your feet.
Here’s what I’d offer from thirty years of building, breaking, and rebuilding:
Read the blueprints, not the headlines. Dalio’s Big Cycle, Strauss-Howe’s Fourth Turning, and the exponential technology curves are blueprints. They don’t tell you exactly what will happen, but they tell you the shape of what’s happening. That’s the difference between being swept away by the current and navigating it.
Diversify your resilience, not just your portfolio. Dalio says sell debt and buy gold. That may be sound financial advice. But the deeper diversification is in skills, relationships, and adaptability. The people who thrive in Fourth Turnings aren’t the ones with the most resources — they’re the ones who can build with whatever materials are available.
Choose abundance over fear. This is the hardest one. When every headline screams collapse, choosing abundance feels naive. It’s not. Abundance is the builder’s mindset — the recognition that when the old structure comes down, the materials don’t disappear. They’re reorganized. The question is whether you’re organizing them or watching someone else do it. Hassabis sees radical abundance. Diamandis sees it. Andreessen is investing billions in it. The doom-scrollers see only the demolition. The builders see the foundation being poured.
Build now. Not tomorrow. Now. The window between the old order and the new one is where the most consequential building happens. The people who founded institutions after previous Fourth Turnings — the ones who shaped the new High — were the ones who started building before the dust settled.
The Three Clocks Are Synchronized
Dalio’s Big Cycle. Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning. The exponential technology curves that I and others have been tracking for years.
Three independent frameworks. Three different lenses. Three different disciplines. And they’re all pointing at the same moment — right now — and saying the same thing: the old world is ending, and the new one is being born.
The last time forces of this magnitude converged was 1939 to 1945. And what emerged on the other side of that crucible was the most prosperous, innovative, and transformative era in human history.
I’ve been watching these patterns since I saw that Wired magazine cover in 1995. I’ve been sharing what I see since my presentation at the Harvard Club in 2018. And I wrote in January of this year that 2026 would be the most disruptive year in modern human history.
Ray Dalio just confirmed it from the world’s most important security conference.
The only question left is the one every generation faces at its Fourth Turning: What will you build?
Read my full 2026 forecast: “2026: The Year Everything Changes”
Further Reading:
Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (2021)
Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023)
William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning (1997)
Munich Security Report 2026: “Under Destruction”
Marc Andreessen, “2026 Outlook: AI Timelines, US vs. China, and The Price of AI” (a16z Podcast, January 2026)
Demis Hassabis on “Radical Abundance” (Fortune, February 2026)