Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q I don't know how this went to me running for president. I'm just a humble podcast host, Rob, but, um, did, did all your podcast hosts, but we can argue on the humble. Well, anyway, did, um, did other companies try to, uh, embody this? Like did the other companies try to build the same software?
A 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 dot 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. Um, 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.
AI assessment note: “most of them did not actually adopt these ratings tools”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So you're saying that the reality is a little different than the story that he's telling?
A 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 19 eighties, 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. He was, 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 happens.
AI assessment note: “The reality is a lot different, and to be honest, Alex”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q 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?
A 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 there should be impersonal. And that if we could do that with one another, we would, we would come to an, a better outcome because we would remove the emotions from it. And we would just, we would move on with our day.
AI assessment note: “Exactly. So he, he's made his billions.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Yeah, and then how did it manifest itself in the firm?
A Well, the problem is it's very different, um, in practice than how he has described it in, 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. Um, sort of like how, you know, you walk into an office, you walk into an office, uh, 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. 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. 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. You should, one of…
AI assessment note: “if someone does something wrong, they prescribe for what he calls public hangings.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q 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?
A Like, Alex, it 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, uh, 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. Really? I want to .1 other thing that people might be thinking. Ok, 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. Yeah, 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 fran…
AI assessment note: “it cited the most vicious internal politics. You do see what people are rating you.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q So is your belief that all this data collected in the dot collector Was it used for investment purposes?
A So there, what, I believe the dot collector is, is 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. And to the contrary, people have given me many, many, many examples of when, what Ray wanted, Ray got.
AI assessment note: “it all had to do with nothing to do with investments”
