It took almost exactly two years of radical open-mindedness (Principle 1.3), identifying and diagnosing problems (2.2 and 2.4), paying attention to people’s track records (8.4), not getting hung up on how things “should” be (1.4a) and synthesizing the situation at hand (5.2) for logic, reason and common sense (5.5) to finally overtake Ray Dalio’s initially somewhat optimistic view (itself almost certainly the result of the aforementioned radical open-mindedness) of the Trump era and lead him to write a book about World War III, which he still thought was probably not imminent but also: He wrote a book about World War III. Since embracing our extremely depressing reality (1.4), however, the drumbeat of increasingly dire Dalio takes has grown louder and more frequent.