The Secrets Of Ray Dalio and His Dot Collector Transparency Software — With Rob Copeland

Rob Copeland is the author of The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend and a New York Times reporter. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his new book, offering a revealing look at Dalio's business success and the making of his legend. We talk extensively about Dalio's Dot Collector tool, which allowed his employees to rate each other in real-time on attributes like believability. Then we ask why so many would subject themselves to this type of workplace, and whether the tool actually worked. --- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's go inside the secrets at Bridgewater and of its founder Ray Dalio in an interview with the author of a revealing new book. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience, and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:46Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:13Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Today, we're going to talk all about Ray Dalio, his fund Bridgewater, and his famous computer system that let his employees rate each other in real time called the dot collector. And we're going to do it with the author of a brand new book. Rob Copeland is here. He's a New York Times reporter and the author of the fund Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the unraveling of a Wall Street legend. Rob, welcome to the show.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks for being here. So let's talk about who Ray Dalio is and why you were interested in writing a full book about him. What sort of made him rise to that level?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  And sparked your interest?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, first of all, I think people should know that I've known you for a number of years, and that I once ran into you at an Alaska Airlines lounge in which

• 2:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  It's true. It's true. And neither of us were flying first class, but we both had credit card access and were filling up on their Waffle station before a cross-country flight. So that's some exclusive big technology news break right there. But

• 2:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was a great moment to bond. I feel like, yeah, it's important to give listeners a little bit of context of our relationship here. Let's be in the full disclosure moment. So

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Look, I'm not, I'm not a nobody here. I've seen you in a lounge. That's what I just want people to know.

• 2:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, I feel like it's the perfect setup to talk about the world's biggest hedge fund.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  There's a seamless Sieg here. And I will eventually, at some point this hour, answer your first question. What I'll tell you is I've been a business reporter for more than, excuse me, for about a decade and a half. And for some majority of that time, I've been reporting on and around Bridgewater Associates. It's the world's biggest hedge fund, but I'm not super interested in them just because they're a hedge fund. You know, there's a lot of big, important, frankly, boring companies. And Bridgewater is anything but boring. Its founder, Ray Dalio, has become world famous for supposedly inventing these principles, these rules. He calls them principles for life and work.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  And he wrote a bestselling book about it. Millions of people have viewed his TED Talk. They listened to him on LinkedIn. He was interviewed by freaking Gwyneth Paltrow. He's really become this sort of pseudo-celebrity.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  He's just become a figure far outside the financial world, and I think he's great fun to write about.

• 3:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so the principles are not just about like how to invest, but they are about how to live your life, how to conduct business within your organization. And to me, the thing that put Ray Dalio on my radar is that his company practices some of the most insane transparency I've ever seen, including this dot collector piece of software that people sit in meetings with iPads and rate each other's believability and other attributes, and they get a score to which, you know, supposedly they were then trusted within the organization to make decisions. Now, we're going to get into all of this and more, but that to me is like,

• 4:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  the fact that he tried to go outside of finance and become this business guru. Really is what makes him interesting and we don't talk a lot about a lot of hedge fund managers on this show, but it made sense to dedicate an episode because of that.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Well, and let's be, let's be honest, as a hedge fund manager, Ray Dalio was famous to people like me, people who are finance reporters at the New York Times, but as the inventor of the principles and this new way to live your life, and he literally calls it the Holy Grail. He says, if I, if you do this, you will be rich. That has made him incredibly famous and, and put him in frankly, a, a level that of no other hedge fund manager I can think of.

• 5:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And we'll get to the principles, but it's first important to note that Dalio got to where he was initially based off of some really good calls. I mean, it didn't, he didn't just apparate into thin air and become this like, you know, person sitting down with Paltrow and talking about, you know, how to live life. Like he made great calls, including about two significant economic downturns that he was able to profit off of, in particular, the 2008, 2009 crash where he himself pocketed something like $750 million. Talk about like, before we get into the principal stuff and the dot collector, I mean, talk about like what initially propelled Dalio to business success.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Sure. So there's, there's two versions of this story. There's the version that Ray Dalio would tell you, and there's the version that my book, I think breaks open. Let me tell you the Ray Dalio version, which is he starts Bridgewater. He's relatively unsuccessful, son of a jazz musician. He did go to Harvard Business School, but he starts Bridgewater in his apartment in 1975 and does incredibly deep economic research. He researches how nations, how governments work, how whether the currencies are going to rise or fall. And he begins to be pretty good at predicting economic trends. This makes him world famous in 2008, when he is credited with being one of the very few people to see that the subprime

• 6:41Speaker 01

  mortgage crisis is about to burst. And to his credit, Bridgewater's funds do make money that year, and that's a year when the stock market crashes. And that really propels him into another echelon of a figure.

• 6:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  How was he able to see the crash before it happened?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  He would say that he had studied for so many decades, how so many countries work that it was almost obvious in retrospect. He sends, he does have evidence, by the way, he's not just claiming that he did. He does write a weekly or a daily newsletter that he sends out to clients. So he was able to point and say, look, I was warning about this, sort of waved this letter around. And that got him a lot of attention, not just in hedge funds, but invited to the White House, became friends with Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner. These are, these were the top economic figures of that era.

• 7:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you're saying that the reality is a little different than the story that he's telling?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  The reality is a lot different. And to be honest, Alex, it is something that even I didn't know until I really started researching for this book. And I did something that I recommend no one ever does. I went back and I had a research assistant, she was amazing. I kind of plug her, her name is Abigail Somerville, she is truly the best. And we together read every single news article that Ray Dalio had ever been quoted in from 1975 onwards. And what we found was nonstop since the 1980s, Ray Dalio has been predicting economic calamity. Every, virtually every single year, he has predicted a giant crash. And so what happens in 2008 is he's not lying.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  He, what he did predict an economic crash in 2008. What he doesn't talk about very often is all the other years before that, that he predicted the same crash. That never happened.

• 8:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it's not like his fund lost money in the earlier years. And he was able to make a significant amount of money in the downturn. So.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 8:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Doesn't he, so, I mean, even the fact that he did cry wolf a lot, like the fact that he was able to take what he knew, put the strategies into place and avert the catastrophe and actually make money in it. I mean, isn't that exactly what you're supposed to do as a hedge fund manager?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Look, let's give him a ton of credit. In the 1980s, 90s, 2000s, most people on Wall Street and beyond still believe that you made money in the markets sort of through your gut, that you you could quote unquote, read the tape. They called it reading the the stock tape. And that was how many managers made money. People like George Soros, who becomes a famous billionaire. That's how they did it. Ray had a different outlook. Ray said, I will make, I will do research, and I will make these written rules, and I will follow these rules, even if my gut tells me otherwise. And he was fabulously successful at that. Look, he made billions of dollars before anyone really even knew who he was. And and that's a credit to him.

• 9:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. And so then, obviously, this stuff works. And he's like, Well, I have the investing principles down. Now I'm going to start applying them to management and life. And this is how the principles start to emerge. Is that right?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. So he he's made his billions. He's made more money than we could ever spend, right? And he begins to say, what what is out there besides wealth for me? And he realizes that these rules that he has for investing, they really come from his overall philosophical outlook. And his philosophical outlook can be boiled down to, you should just be honest with one another. You should just, we should be able to stop this interview right now. And I should say, Alex, professionally, that question didn't work. Here's how I would have said it. You should be able to stop me in the middle and say, Rob, you're rambling. And and that should be impersonal. And that if we could do that with one another, we

• 10:35Speaker 01

  would, we would come to a better outcome, because we would remove the emotions from it. And we would just, we would move on with our day.

• 10:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  I feel like there might be some spiritual kinship between you and Ray Dalio on that front. You're not one to hold back your opinion.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think here's the main difference between me and Ray Dalio, which we'll get into, is I'm not pretending that this is some high minded philosophy. There, I can just tell you what my personality is. And I can tell you on that at that waffle bar at the Alaska Lounge, I can tell you what your personality is. But I'm not getting in front of millions of people and saying, follow me into the abyss.

• 11:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, so let's talk a little bit about that abyss, right? So the principles are all about transparency. Like, is there anything else to them? Or does it really all boil down to like, tell people how you feel? I mean, what's your? Can you just give us some examples of what these are? How they're implemented in the firm? And what, you know, what type of ground they cover?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So his overarching philosophy is called radical transparency, which means that things that could be, that would normally be kept secret should be held out in the open. So for instance, any meeting at Bridgewater should be taped and anyone should be able to listen into it and to weigh in on it later. This philosophy basically comes down to we should find the most believable person, the most trustworthy person, and get them involved in every decision in their, in their remit. Now, the principles themselves, and, you know, we could talk about this for hours and we won't, but they, they basically boil down to seeing a natural order of things. He makes a lot of comparisons to the, to the animal kingdom.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  He says, for instance, when the lion, I might have the animals, you're wrong, but the meaning is true. When, when the lion eats the hyena, that's terrible for the hyena, but it's part of the natural order of things and it would fall apart if we didn't let the lion eat the hyena. So there, there is a, an appeal to that, right? You, you can't listen to what I'm saying and not say, okay, I, I see that.

• 12:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And then how did it manifest itself in the firm?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Well, the problem is it's very different in practice than how he has described it in person. So at the beginning, in say, around that 2008 financial crisis, the principles were really just sort of like one man's word. It was just a few sentences written on a piece of paper and it was a few nice metaphors and no one took it all that seriously. Sort of like how, you know, you walk into an office, you walk into an office, an apartment building and, you know, it's written on the wall, have a sunny day. You know, it doesn't mean you have to like, put that into your heart and take that with you all day. The problem is he keeps writing more and more principles and they get less philosophical and more literally.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And they say things like if someone does something wrong, they prescribe for what he calls public hangings. So now we should learn from each other's mistakes by watching us metaphorically execute someone, which at Bridgewater would be firing them.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  He says that we should diagnose even the smallest problem. So if something goes wrong, if something as small as you know, the peas in the cafeteria are wilted one day, we should haul in the head of the cafeteria in front of video cameras. We should really probe, in his words, we should probe. What happened? What does the? What thought process led to those peas? And we should frankly, humiliate people.

• 14:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so that's gets us into this dot collector example where people basically hold iPads in meetings and start rating their coworkers based off of their believability and other attributes. And then apparently that's the way that they weight decisions in the firm. I want to talk about that at length when we come back to the break. So why don't we do that? We're here with Rob Copeland, the author of The Fund, Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend. We'll be back right after this to go deep into the dot collector and real time transparency at Bridgewater. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

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• 16:32Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 16:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Rob Copeland, author of The Fund, Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend. Okay, so before the break, we teased a little bit about the dot collector. Let's just go with an exec. Can you tell us a little bit about how this thing would collect feedback on people in real time?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Sure. So everything we've been talking about, all these ratings, what's happening is Ray and all the employees are rating themselves, are rating each other in categories like ability to think clearly, things of that nature. That's not a literal category. And each time I rate you, I'd be rating you right now, by the way, during this conversation, I might be saying, I might be saying, Alex, I'm not really feeling the critical thinking from you. I might be giving you a four out of 10 on critical thinking, literally right now. I just put it into, I'd have an iPad with that. That would be a dot.

• 17:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, come on, Rob. I read the book. I mean, at least give me a six.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  I mean, ability to read, I'll give you a 10.

• 17:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  But you could, by the way, do the same. You'd be able to see that I was doing that. And you could say, well, like, I'd give you a, I'd give you a five on ability to diagnose truth. So all of these ratings, which are called dots, they're all accumulated on something that Bridgewater called its baseball cards. So it's essentially every employee, all their ratings, sort of just like a, you know, a baseball player. You'd be able to see their stats, their, their RBIs. And this is something called the dot collector. So it's collecting all of your dots. It's ingesting thousands of ratings in all of these different categories. And the idea being that we've collected all of these dots and that I should just be able to pull it up and say,

• 18:38Speaker 01

  if Alex and Rob are having a disagreement, I should be able to say, well, I can see that in all these other meetings, Alex has actually been judged to be pretty good at XYZ and Rob has not. So I'm going to side with Alex on this one.

• 18:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  How did this not like incite very vicious internal politics? I mean, if you're walking out of a meeting and you have, do you see who's rating you what like?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Alex, it's cited the most vicious internal politics. You do see what people are rating you. You can rate them back. You can also take polls. So let's say, I really believe Alex, this conversation is going terribly. I think everyone agrees with me. I can stop this in its tracks and I can put up a poll on the dot collector. And I can say, do you think Alex is looking at this right? And people can vote. By the way, whichever one of us loses that vote, we're going to get a whole lot of negative dots.

• 19:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  I want to point one other thing that people might be thinking. Okay, so you've got this dot collector, but how can you force people to use it? You know, I've got a job. You've got a job. Maybe I just go throughout my day and maybe the peas in the cafeteria are wilted. But maybe that doesn't, I don't, that doesn't rise to the level of a dot for me. What Bridgewater starts doing is it starts telling employees, you have to rate a certain number of incidents per day. You have to put in dots. And not only that, but a certain percentage of your dots must be negative. So they are forcing you.

• 20:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Stack ranked.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. They are, if there weren't internal politics before, they, they're now guaranteeing there will be. Because I can't just walk around and say, great job, guys. I, I have, and, and I'll say, Ray Dalio's defense here is, remember, his whole philosophy is trust in truth, is to offer frank feedback. So if you're not offering a certain amount of negative feedback, then we're never going to grow. Then we're just patting each other on the back.

• 20:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, Rob, it seems like this was kind of like the, the distilled essence of the feedback cultures we've seen. Like, this doesn't exist in a vacuum. The idea of being harsh with feedback doesn't exist just in Bridgewater. You know, it's been the subject of books. It exists within Netflix to some extent. Meta has it, though I think a little bit softer than the Bridgewater, like actual constructive feedback, although everybody talks about feedback. I mean, do you see this as more of like a product of a moment? And, and, or did it influence that moment?

• 21:24Speaker 01

  I would say yes and yes, both. First of all, this is definitely the wildest, most extreme example of this, of this idea. Reed Hastings and Ray Dalio actually, there are a lot of similarities to their, to their culture. And Ray has talked about it inside Bridgewater, about how, how much he admires what Reed, what Reed has done. What I, what I would say is that technology, the ability to have this dot collector, the ability to rate in real time, has sort of poured gasoline on this. Because it's very different, remember, it's very different if you and me, we're not alone right now, unless this is the lowest rated episode in big technology history. But the, the, if we're alone and I'm saying, Alex,

• 22:07Speaker 01

  like, let me just look at you straight, straight on and just say like, what you said in that meeting, it. I didn't think that came in your mouth very well. Here's how I would have said it. Probably there's a shared trust between us. We can move on. It's very different when we start talking about doing this essentially in public on a huge scale. And Bridgewater had, you know, 2,000 employees at, um, at peak. When everyone can see what everyone else is getting rated for in real time. And then it's a snowball rolling down the hill to hell.

• 22:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Is it like an Uber driver where you get a certain low rating and you're booted off the app?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's, well, yes, first of all, literally, if you don't have high enough ratings in certain categories, you will get what Bridgewater calls sorted, sorted out. They don't call it getting fired. They call it sorting you.

• 22:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sounds like a mafia term.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Uh, you said it, not me. The, uh, what I would say is like an Uber driver. You know, if you get an Uber, if you see your Uber driver has, what's a bad rating now, by the way? It's like four, seven, five. I think I'd like, I get kicked off Uber.

• 23:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Anything under like four and 4.6 years, like might as well not be driving.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  If we run out of things to talk about, this ends up with you and me checking our Uber ratings together. But the, uh, and I, I better be higher than you, Alex. I, I don't even want to live.

• 23:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's a chance of that.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  There's no, no, there's no, I'm not the kind of guy who gets a high Uber rating. I'm the kind of guy who says, uh, who says, take the bridge, not the tunnel. Um, that's a New York joke for, uh, for our West Coast listeners. The, um, the problem is if I can walk into a meeting and I can already see that you, Alex, have a lot of red dots, have a lot of bad feedback on say,

• 23:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  You can finish me off.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  And I should finish you off, by the way, because there is very little incentive for me to go against the curve. Because if I stand up for you, now I'm putting myself out there publicly. And

• 24:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, yeah, go ahead.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Well, I spoke to someone, I spoke to a lot of people with this experience, but I spoke to someone who was there for only about three months. And she had a pretty rough transition at Bridgewater, but she wanted to stay. She wanted to learn to use the principles to learn more about herself. But she said it was just a negative feedback loop. She was said, if you, if you mess up in your first week, you are marked as the weak prey. And then it just gets piled and piled onto you and you can't stay. Now, I want to say something really important here, which is everything that I've just said to you. If I, if Ray Dalio were here right now, he would tell me that I was only talking to disaffected employees and that to many people, that many people love it.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  But I can tell you that for this book, I, I went and I got the internal HR emails.

• 24:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  I got the Their own memos.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Their own memos, people telling Ray, this is a self-defeating loop, that people are scared that at any moment they may be fired. And the real scary thing for me about Ray Dalio and Bridgewater is that he knew.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  He did know, he does know, and he will continue to know that this is the real impact of the principles. And he apparently does not care.

• 25:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, he's, he's also, there are plenty of enablers, right? I mean, if you looked at, he did that 60 Minutes interview, or it was either them or Ted, or maybe both. Where he's talking about the dot collector and the reporters like in the room being like, wow, they're like, really raiding? Based off of the system? And he's like showing it off and I just think that like in the popular imagination, there's like no feeling that like what is hap- or no like statement that what is happening is pretty messed up.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Look, and we've seen this, you see this in, in tech all the time. These, these, these tech heroes who are here to save us. I was blown away researching this book. You know, Adam Grant, very, very famous organizational psychologist, Wharton professor, writes bestselling books. He goes in and he sees Ray Dalio and he witnesses this and he writes that it's based in it. He devotes a whole chapter of his book to it. And he writes that it's basically one of the greatest things he's ever seen. Later, Ray Dalio hires Adam Grant to a paid job as a consultant. This is a, talk about a feedback loop. I mean, you can, you can decide that for, for yourself.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  But yes, 60 Minutes, CBS, CBS This Morning, so many interviewers. They, they just sat, heard Ray Dalio's version of things and said, well, this is fantastic. Listen, I like you a lot, Alex. I don't think you should run for president. I don't, like, I, it's just like, he got put on this other level and no one just stopped and said, hold on a second, how about we just switch the angle of it? Switch the aperture? Why don't we ask the people who work for him what it's really like?

• 27:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, anyway, did, um, did other companies try to embody this? Like, did the other companies try to build the same software?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  So this was Ray's great dream and he talked about it endlessly inside Bridgewater. And he, they spent more than a hundred million dollars on this technology. His great dream is that the principles and the Doc Collector would be adopted by other companies. And he went to other, to some of the most famous men in business. You know, he told people inside Bridgewater. He was talking to Elon Musk about doing this at Tesla. He visited Jack Dorsey when Jack Dorsey was running Twitter. You know, Bill Gates endorsed the principles. The wild thing is that all of these quite famous and successful people, they sat and they listened and they never said anything publicly against Ray. But most of them did not actually adopt these ratings tools, which should tell you quite something.

• 28:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So he had these like, what would you call them outwardly constructive? Relationships with Silicon Valley royalty, but when he tried to sell them on the actual product that he bet his whole life on, it was a no.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Well, and he did, he was successful with one company, sort of. So he was successful with Coinbase. I don't know exactly how, but he got Coinbase to do a trial program where they brought the Doc Collector to Coinbase. And spoiler alert, the reaction among Coinbase employees was quite poor. And when reporters asked Coinbase about this, Coinbase's defense was, it was not that, um, that-

• 28:44Speaker 01

  This was their defense. It was, this product was so unpopular that not enough employees used it to make it worth continuing. So they didn't, they neither defended nor insulted it. They just said, nobody wanted it. And I know that that was very devastating for Ray.

• 29:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I guess like thinking about the culture inside Bridgewater. I mean, Bridgewater knew that they were perceived as like cult-like and somewhat negative on the outside. And you know, being in New York at the like height of Ray Dalio's career and having people getting offers there, like I had friends, or even before the height, like I had friends who were very clear-eyed, telling me that I got this offer from Bridgewater and I don't know about it. It seems like the culture there sucks and it's very harsh. So I want to ask you a question because you've been speaking to the people that decided to take those job offers and work there. Why would people subject themselves to such an environment?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  And I, by the way, I want to add something. People, I, I talk to people who still work there. I, I didn't speak to just disaffected people. I spoke to a lot of people with very complicated feelings about Ray and about Bridgewater. Remember, this goes back to the principles and the principles say, if you follow these rules, you will achieve a higher level version of yourself. It's a challenge and it's, it is a way, it's, it's, it's one of the best pitches I've, I've ever heard. More than money is he's pitching you a chance to achieve a, a better version of yourself. So a lot of people, even people who otherwise are clear-eyed said, well, if I put myself through this gauntlet and at, at the end of

• 30:26Speaker 01

  a year, two years, 10 years, setting aside the money, I may literally figure out what I'm good at. This could change my life. And that's still what Bridgewater pitches to this day. Uh, they're still going out and saying, we, we operate on, on principles and we're a place where you can challenge yourself.

• 30:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  It reminds me of, I don't know if you've seen these TikToks of these like, you know, fake military camps for men who want to toughen themselves up and they pay like thousands of dollars to be yelled at by, you know, former Marines, like going up muddy hills and becoming quote unquote, "men" after that.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  So I haven't seen those TikToks because my TikToks are all shirtless men giving me advice on weightlifting. I don't know why the algorithm thinks that, but the, I'll tell you that Ray actually compares Bridgewater to the intellectual Navy SEALs. These are, these are his words. So he absolutely would agree with that, that comparison. And those people, remember, you're in your TikTok, which apparently you have a little bit of a sadomasochist thing, which I think we should explore on a, on a future episode of this, of this program.

• 31:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  We'll have you back, for sure.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  We'll have you back just for that. I'll interview you. But the, remember, you're paying them. This is even better. Bridgewater pays you. So, you know, maybe you're having a terrible time. And for many of the people who are in the book, you, as you follow their, their way, you can see how difficult this is for them. They are getting paid a lot of money. So I'll skip to your next question, which is, a lot of people ask, you know, is it a cult? I would say, I can't answer that question for you because Bridgewater has threatened me with many, many lawsuits. And I'd like to, you know, keep my one bedroom apartments. But I will say, if it's a cult, it's a cult where you get paid a lot of money

• 32:20Speaker 01

  to stay. So that's just another way to, that's another reason to stay.

• 32:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Money notwithstanding, do you think people actually get that benefit out of the experience that they're looking for? I mean, do you think Bridgewater, you know, iron sharpens iron, so to speak? Do you think Bridgewater can turn people into like the essential form of themselves by dealing, by, by living within these systems?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  So for this book, I spoke to hundreds of people, people still at Bridgewater, people who've left Bridgewater. And I truly tried to find those true believers. And I will just tell you that even people who Ray considers his closest acolytes, don't necessarily fully buy into the principles. I don't-

• 33:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  But everybody who leaves say it's not, says it's not worth it?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Not everybody says it's not worth it, but everyone says it's nothing like what he says it is. That the principles and this dot collector are weaponized tools to be wielded principally by Ray and those in his favor against anyone who is out of favor. It's not-

• 33:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, there's a lot of crying. Yeah, there's a lot of crying in your book, obviously. I wonder what it is about our work culture today that makes people... I mean, yes, I understand that people want to become this distilled version of themselves and want to go through this, but it's work. You know, it's crazy to me. It's just your job.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I know, but-

• 33:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think it is about our work culture that makes people say, "Yeah, that sounds okay"?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Well, I'd like to talk about the crying for 10 seconds because probably my favorite thing I ever heard back from Bridgewater, you know, I fact-checked this book, I offered them a chance to comment. We spent years going back and forth with Ray and his lawyers and Bridgewater's lawyers. One of my favorite things I've ever heard from a Bridgewater PR person is we have no record of people crying regularly at the office because there's-

• 34:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's a scene, the opening scene of your book, somebody, it's not even regular crying, it's the display of crying for learning purposes that struck me. There's the opening scene of your book is someone just absolutely breaking down, that being recorded and put in the transparency library, and then Ray encouraging people to watch it.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. This is where I'd like to pause just to say, the book is actually a lot of fun. I didn't want to write a downer of a book. This book is a ride. It was a ride for me to write it and report it. But yes, there is a real darkness here and people, it's not just crying. They're being broken down in front of the cameras for everyone for what many people would say, pleasure. But I do want to get back to your question because I really love this idea that our job has to be our identity. And that is central to Bridgewater's pitch, is that the principles are for life and work. Now-

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Look, Google, what's Google pay for the laundry for their employees? All these, all these, uh, all these tech companies encourage you to stay more and more at, at the office. Bridgewater does, did even more than that. They made sure their headquarters was so far away from New York that many of their employees lived with each other during the week. This became their whole life. And it, it really does become a closed society off of the grid. And with, with, I think some really upsetting results. I'm gonna keep talking about this because I, I love it because I, I, so I work for the New York Times. It's my, it's my day job. Um, this is my real job. This, this book is my passion.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  And people ask me all the time, you know, they'll, they'll point to something in the Times that they didn't agree with, or a reporter's tweet they didn't like. And they'll, they'll not just ask me about it, but they'll basically say it's my fault. And I always try to say to people, you know, I don't walk around with a New York Times tote bag. This is my job. This is not my identity. I love my job. I'm very lucky to work here. I'm proud of this news organization, but I'm not going to reflexively defend everything the New York Times does. At, at Bridgewater, you have to be fully in. You are 100% believe that the principles, or you have to say you believe in the principles.

• 36:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it is something that it's like, it's not surpris-, it's maybe shocking, but not surprising in our work culture. Like, I'm glad you have this disassociation in some ways, or you're between your identity and your job, but our work culture does have this sort of like, you know, willingness to put ourselves through hell for employers.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And your employer now, it feels like they, they almost don't want an employee who treats it as a job. They're hiring you for a job, but they want you to say, no, I would do anything.

• 37:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  One of the, you know, I, you know, I used to live in San Francisco for a few years. This is one of my favorite.

• 37:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, here's another story. I helped you move a dresser out of your apartment. So it wasn't just that, uh.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  It is, it was.

• 37:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  It wasn't just that Alaska lounge, but go ahead.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Well, but let's, let's really be honest. You actually helped me move that dresser out for a third friend. You are such a good friend that you, it wasn't even, it was a CB2 dresser. Um, um, this, this episode is now sponsored by Crate and Barrel. But the, uh. I will say this whole Silicon Valley mentality, which has now taken over the workplace like writ large, just act like an owner, you know, everyone should act like the owner of the company. You should treat the company's money like it is your own. That's all well and good if if you're the owner. But I don't think we should all act like the owner of our workplace because our workplace can disappoint us, you know?

• 38:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. Did this stuff work? I mean, I actually like, we've been talking about this all throughout about the dot collector, about how brutal it could be. And the one thing that would almost excuse it, well, not even excuse it, but rationalize it, shall we say, is if the people who were rated highest on they were super believable and, you know, they were given wide leeway to make investments and they made those investments and it worked. So what they mean, obviously, it's got to be a closed loop system and a successful one to say, okay, this this thing is real and effective. What actually happened?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is really the the fateful piece of logic that links Bridgewater and the principles together, which is that Ray's Ray would say that he built this whole investment system. He became so rich off of these rules and these rules led to the principles. So that just got me thinking, what is this investment system? When he talks about it, it is so absurdly general. He'll say, I could be long or short anything in the world, you know, that basically means at any point I could I could hold or any asset. It's it's, you know, just mumbo jumbo. And I watched many interviews with him talking about the investment system where he just never

• 39:37Speaker 01

  said anything concrete. My my career as a business reporter is talking to really successful, really smart people, or at least people who think they're really smart. And they they don't usually have trouble as expressing like, oh, yeah, we think that the eurozone is in trouble. So we're going to short the euro. That's their job. Good on them. It's it's my job to to to tell people about their perspective. So for years, I tried to crack the secret of Bridgewater's investment system. What are these rules, these timeless and universal rules that Ray talks about? And as I kept investigating, this remarkable thing happened is that Bridgewater's main fund,

• 40:21Speaker 01

  it just kept doing poorly for years upon years since from the end of 2010, almost uninterrupted for a decade and more. It was just falling so far behind the markets. And when I started talking to investment staffers, they said, you know, you know, what Ray thinks is a rule isn't what you or I think is a rule. A rule to me is if X happens over here, Y happens over here. To Ray, if Ray thinks of it, it's a rule. If it's Ray's opinion, it's a rule. And that just got me, then I just, it all clicked for me that there is no investment secret. There is no secret sauce.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  It's just Ray. Here is where my lawyers would like me to tell you that lawyers for Bridgewater Associates say there is an investment system. They just won't tell you about it. Full stop.

• 41:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  So is your belief that all this data collected in the dot collector, was it used for investment purposes?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I believe the dot collector is, as my research would tell me, is just a giant distraction. That it all had to do with nothing to do with investments. But it was a metaphor. It is a metaphor for how Bridgewater deals with investments. That Ray and Bridgewater would like to say that we have a similarly data-driven approach for our investments. What I can tell you is I've spoken to people intimately involved with those investments, people still intimately involved with those investments. And not a single person has ever been able to identify an actual quantitative, what I would consider to be a 2023 level quantitative rule.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And to the contrary, people have given me many, many, many examples of when what Ray wanted, Ray got.

• 42:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, it struck me in an excerpt you published in The Times, you know, talk about a whole firm that rates itself this way. And then you would imagine if everybody's rating each other this way, that everybody would be able to make investments. But you say that at Bridgewater's peak, which was 2,000 employees, fewer than 10, 20% were assigned to investments or related research. And something like 10% were in an inner circle that was actually making these investments.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Even fewer. So this. Even fewer.

• 42:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So this whole notion that this was being, these rankings were being used to weight people's ability to invest just on its face seems ridiculous.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  There was something, is something called the circle of trust at Bridgewater. It's about 10 people. They sign lifetime contracts and Ray allegedly lets them in to see the real secrets of Bridgewater. They have to swear not to work anywhere else. Everyone else at Bridgewater has functionally no specific idea of what the firm is doing with its money.

• 43:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Sounds like Scientology.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  I'm really glad that those words came out of your mouth, Alex, not mine.

• 43:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Well, that's just my perspective. I don't know. Anyway, uh, so you tried, you tried to work at Bridgewater. That's what Ray Dalio was saying.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh.

• 43:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tweetstorm directed at you a few years ago. So talk a little bit about your history with it.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  It's great fun. Okay. So in, uh, I graduated college in 2009, right after Ray Dalio, you know, made a fortune predicting the financial crisis. Couldn't get a job anywhere. I was moved back home with my parents and I applied to so many jobs in 2009, 2010. One of them was a hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates. And I, I was living in a three bedroom apartment with four people. It was, I was actually having a lot of fun, to be honest. Um, I was an absolute wreck back then and I applied. Had no idea anything to do with them. I think I had one or two interviews. They didn't take me. I never thought about it for, I didn't think about it again for a few years.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  And then a few years later, actually they reached out to me and they tried to hire me for a job, editing their economic research. I had another few interviews. I turned them down. None of this was too extraordinary to me. I've, I have unsuccessfully applied Alex to many jobs in my lifetime. I don't know if you have too, but I don't, I don't bet a thousand on this. And once I started writing about Bridgewater, that around 2015,

• 44:53Speaker 01

  uh, it became very clear to me that Bridgewater had no idea that I had applied there. They had no idea that I had any history there. And so I, I mean, I didn't know anyone there. I, I had interviewed, what, on the phone or in person once or twice. And then eventually Ray figured out that I had interviewed there and he just, he just went ape shit. Um, he started attacking me, calling my bosses, saying I was a disaffected person who couldn't, who couldn't make the cut there. You know, one of my, this is, the book that I wrote is not a book about how journalists are heroes. I am not a character in this book. I don't figure out some great thing and swoop in and save the day.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  But I will say there is, at the very end of the book, there is a chapter about my history with Ray. That was enormously fun to write, um, because it's been enormously fun, to be honest, tussling with this, uh, super charismatic, I'll put it, billionaire for the last better part of a decade.

• 45:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Let, let's end here. So we've spoken through this entire conversation about a way of working and a way of investing. And we've talked about how it's framed in high-minded terms and it's, we've talked about people trying to achieve their, uh, essential or their, their greatest possible condition by working at a place like this, using the principles. And how Dalio was trying not to just be a businessman, but in some way a guy who guides people's lives. After Sam Bankman-Fried's whole situation and the movement where they were trying to be effective altruists, make all this money so they can improve the world.

• 46:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm starting to get a little wary of business people who talk about anything else than, and of course, okay, if your product solves a problem. But if you're talking about how you're trying to improve the world through your company, that's when I start to get a little bit concerned. Uh, do you think we're going to start to look at this stuff differently? Are we going to continue to allow people to use this language to cloak what's going on behind the scenes?

• 47:00Speaker 01

  I think for better or worse, we're all looking for a hero. And for the last decade or so, maybe longer, business people have stepped into that void for a lot of reasons that that could be the subject of probably another whole podcast. And I hope that our experience with not just Ray Dalio, but you know, Adam Newman and Travis Kalanick and Sam Bankman Fried and all of these people who said they were going to quote unquote disrupt for the better our lives. I hope we realize that the hero does not is not always the guy with the biggest checkbook.

• 47:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  The book is The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend. The author is Rob Copeland, also a reporter for the New York Times. I enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed speaking with you, Rob. Thanks so much for coming on.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  I'll be back.

• 47:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right. Thanks, everybody for listening. Thank you, Nick Watney, for handling our audio and LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. Always great to come to you here today, here every Wednesday. So thank you for listening. We're back on Friday, breaking down the news with Ron John Roy. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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