In the face of great uncertainty, how do you make decisions? Can you really apply the lessons of the past to the present and the future, to navigate seemingly new situations and get what you want out of business and life? By deeply understanding cause-effect relationships -- clearly expressed, shared with others, overlaid with data, back-tested, modified -- you can build a set of principles for dealing with the realities of whatever situation you're in, observes Ray Dalio, in this episode from 2018 and in conversation with a16z's  Alex Rampell and Sonal Chokshi,  Dalio's book Principles: Life and Work originated as an internal company document that was posted online years ago and has been shared widely since. His insights on how to create your own recipe book to draw upon in moments of great change is as relevant as ever. The conversation covers everything from the differences between private and public investing, and between startups and big companies -- to questions of getting timing right, how people, teams, organizations, and even nation-states can evolve through principles like "believability-weighted idea meritocracies," and more.

original episode notes and transcript here:  https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/textiles-technology-science-math-cultures-civilization/ Longtime podcast showrunner (2014-2022), primary host, and editor Sonal Chokshi shares three best-of episodes as she shifts gears and the show goes on hiatus until relaunched with a new host.  The third of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place in October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic – and perfectly captures the signature identity of this show until now, and Chokshi's work, which is at the intersection of technology and humanity. In it, she and Virginia Postrel, author of the book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World cover everything from science and math across several fields, to commerce to management & measurement, to the always-meta narrative of HOW innovation happens…  As a reminder: the a16z marketing & Future team will be putting this feed on hiatus while they relaunch it with a new host; in the meantime, you can continue to follow Sonal's work both here at a16z and other projects on Twitter @smc90. Thank you as well to our brilliant audio editors, expert guests, and several others here -- but most of all, thank you to YOU: for listening, sharing, engaging, and coming along with us on this journey the past decade! Stay tuned for more.