Ray Dalio - Creating a Culture Where the Best Ideas Win Out | Salesforce

Thank you all for joining this morning, Day three at Dreamforce and amazing conversation continues. And this morning's conversation with this best selling author is going to be nothing short of fabulous. I want to tell you a little about a bit about this individual before they come out here on the stage. So we know we have a best selling author here of principles. But what's truly amazing about this individual is, is that it really all started for them in the 70s in a two bedroom apartment. And in this two bedroom apartment, this individual started a small business called Bridgewater Associates. And while starting that business, principles were top of mind. What were the principles in which he would run this business? And he wrote those principles down. And Bridgewater Associates is now arguably one of the most successful companies in the world. And this gentleman is amongst the hundred richest people in the world today. He spends his time giving back. He's at a place in his life where he wants to share his learnings of his entrepreneurship, how to be an entrepreneur and what are the things to think about. He's going to share his practices around these principles. These principles created a very distinct culture in Bridgewater Associates. One in which he refers to as an idea meritocracy, one in which radical transparency and radical truth are pervasive. So without any further ado, please join me in welcoming best selling author, Ray Dalio.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah, Stephanie said, I'm really excited to be here because this audience are the people that I most want to speak to. I'm sort of in the transition from my second phase of my life to my third phase of life. I think basically life exists on three phases. First phase of your life, you're learning, you're dependent on others. Second phase, others are dependent on you and you're working and you're trying to be successful. And then in the third phase of your life, you know you're successful, people are successful without you and in this transition, you want to pass along. So I have this desire. Stephanie said, I formed a company, I'm an entrepreneur, it's in the investment business. I started it out of a two bedroom apartment and it became successful, Fortune said, the fifth most successful private company in the country. And in that process, what I did is I wrote down a lot of principles. So one of the things I want to deal with is your principles versus my principles. I'm going to get into some of my principles and the way that worked for me. But more importantly, what I would like to do is to give you some notion about your principles because I Think your principles are what is most important. I think that I went through an experience that my case, every time I would make a decision, first it started with a trade. I would write down my criteria for understanding why I made that trade so that when I would close out the trade, I would be able to look at how transpired while I was operating. And then what I learned is if I could write those principles clearly enough, I was going to be able to back test how they would have worked and know how if I followed those principles in the past, I would have worked. And that gave me a perspective on how my decision making worked. And then I began to learn that I could make decisions in almost any area by operating that way. In other words, by writing down my principles, which are essentially recipes for success. I believe everything happens over and over again. And if each time you encounter whatever's happening and you write down your principle, how would you handle that? And then you share it with other people that you're working with, particularly if you're building a business, then they understand the principle, and then you begin to build a culture. You could put those in algorithms, and then those algorithms themselves can mean that you could make decisions with the computer operating in parallel with you. I mean, literally, like, if you're playing a chess game, it's like playing a chess game with a computer that you have built that is going to make the chess moves with you and interacting in that way. And that has changed everything. So what I would recommend to you all and like, I think Mark Benioff, like, wow, this guy's a shaper, right? He's made this incredible conference, he's made this incredible business. He's operated that way. He needs to give you, and I think he wants to give you the recipes for success. Wouldn't you want to know how, like, Marc Benioff's principles, when you're in that situation and you're going to make a decision, how do you build a conference like this? How do you do that? What was the nitty gritty? And you want to get those principles. And if you write down those principles, I really believe that you have to have your own principles. And I think we're also in an era where your own principles is the equivalent of your own religion. You know, like, how do you want. What are you going after? What do you want to live your life? How do you do that? And that clarity that you're going to give other people and then you're going to operate in sync is valuable. So besides my principles, I just want to pass along those thoughts to you, to think about what are your principles. Not just take everything that's one thing at a time that's coming at you, but to realize that everything is another one of those. And when you encounter it, how do you handle those? And you write down those principles. Okay? So I'm going to also try to get into my principles. So the game that I was playing is running as an entrepreneur for starting a business and making it, you know, successful business. And then in the investment business, and in both of those types of businesses, you have to be an independent thinker, right? To be successful in the markets, since everybody's consensus is built into the price, you have to be an independent thinker and be right. And in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to be an independent thinker and be right. So that's the nature of the game. And when I look at that and I think, here's what life was for me basically in that chart, and it basically conveys, oops, I gotta hit that. This is what it was like for me. I wanted to go after my audacious goals. I wanted my life to be as great as possible and do the greatest possible things. So I went after audacious goals. And I have successes and failures. And I found with time that the most valuable things were the failures. You know, when you have a success, that means that you're doing it right. And, okay, you don't necessarily learn, just keep doing what you're doing. But when you're having a failure, that failure. Failure is something that is extremely valuable if you pay attention to it and you try to learn a lesson from it. So people's reactions to failure, I think, are big difference in terms of what their outcomes are. I've developed a notion that pain plus reflection equals progress. Because pain is a cue that something might be wrong. And then reflect, if you can reflect in a quality way and learn that, then that failure then learns on how would you do it differently? And take in the best ideas from other people about how do you do it differently to improve? And then you will learn principles. And I learned those principles and I wrote those principles down, literally a log. We talk about what the book is like. It's just basically a compendium all these principles that I wrote down over a period of time. But that was going to change my perspective by being clear on that. And as a result of learning how to do things better, then I improve and I look at that cycle and then I go on for more audacious goals. And that's basically been the cycle. So the way I look at it is in order to be successful, you have to do these five things. You do these five things and you will be successful. Okay, first you have to clarify your goals. What are your goals? You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. So you have to decide what you're going after with focus. And then when you go at that, you're going to encounter problems, you're going to encounter obstacles. Okay? So that's step two, to encounter your problems, identify what your problems are, and then not tolerate your problems. And then it becomes a cleverness exercise. So number three, third step is that you have to diagnose the problems and get at your root cause. That root cause can be you. In other words, it can be a weakness. Often it is the function of weaknesses or mistakes that people are making, and people don't like to look at that. But whatever it is, in order to get around that problem, you have to get at the root cause of that problem, and that can be people's weaknesses. And then once you know exactly what the diagnosis is, then you have to have a design for getting around that and that design. Then once you have that design, you have to follow through. So step five is you have to follow through and do it, and you do that over and over a period of time. And that's how you learn and that's how you make progress. So to me, the whole life process, this whole evolutionary process, is the sequence of loops that keeps happening around. And that's what it looks like to me. And so what I want to do is take you into a real learning experience that gives you a flavor. So in 1980, 81, I had calculated that American banks had lent far more money to emerging countries than those countries were going to have to pay back, that they could pay back, and that we were going to have a banking crisis. And it was a very, very controversial point of view at that time, received attention, but a very controversial. And it turned out that as a result of that, it happened in August 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debt and we went into a big debt crisis where a lot of banks could not be paid back by the countries. And as a result of that, I had just a small company at the time, and I was then asked to testify to Congress to explain what had happened. And I was asked to be on Wall Street Week, which was a show of the time, to explain this. And I thought, basically, we're going to have this big debt crisis, and I could not have been more wrong, but here I want to give you a clip of what that time was for me. So, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mitchell, it's a great pleasure and a great honor to be able to appear before you in examination with what is going wrong with our economy. The economy is now flat teetering, on the brink of failure. You were recently quoted in an article. You said, I can say this with absolute certainty because I know how markets work. I can say with absolute certainty that if you look at the liquidity base in the corporations and the world as a whole, that there's such a reduced level of liquidity that you can't return to an era of stagflation. Wasn't I arrogant? Incredibly arrogant. I could not have been more wrong. That was the exact bottom in the stock market. Stock market boomed. I lost money for me. I lost money for my clients. I lost so much money that I had to borrow $4,000 from my dad to help pay for family bills. I mean, it was a very, very painful moment. And yet it was really one of the best things that happened to me because it changed my whole approach to decision making. It gave me the humility that I needed in order to overcome my audacity and to balance with my audacity. It made me think, let me go. I don't know if there's a back button on this. Okay. It made me. Thank you. It made me think, how do I know that I'm right? And that humility, that fear of being wrong while maintaining the aggressive pursuit of that changed my approach to decision making. It gave me a humility that I needed to balance with my audacity. I mean, I think that what happens for most people is that they think that in order to be successful, it's a process of knowing, the more you know, the better you are, the more you're going to be successful. And that's certainly true. The better you know, the more you know, the better you're going to be successful. But there are also paths to learning by knowing what you don't know. Whatever success I've had in life has been more due to my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than due to anything I know. And to be able to go out there and find the smartest people who are going to disagree with you and to understand their thinking. And so that's what I wanted. I want to go out the smartest people I could to understand their thinking and. And learn. And that changed everything. And so it built a certain culture that was based around that. So the Way I look, in order to be successful, I want to be with independent decision makers. Great. Independent decision makers. Okay, well, how are you going to make that work? So I wanted an idea meritocracy. The best idea is to win out. Just because I had the idea didn't mean it was going to be the best idea. So I wanted those ideas. So I had to build an organization that's an idea meritocracy. I'll explain it in a minute. And then in order to do that, you have to build protocols and you have to build systems and you have to be clear on that particular process. And then we have our successes, our failures, our learnings, and we have happier clients and we have happier employees and that attracts people and that's the cycle. Okay, And I want to explain how that works, but because this has worked for me and that's what took me from the two bedroom apartment to the recipe that took me to where we are. So, okay, an idea meritocracy. Do you want the best ideas to win? Do you want the best thinking? So what do I mean by an idea meritocracy? What do you have to do in order to have an idea meritocracy? First you have to put your honest thoughts, thoughts on the table. So when you're thinking of your organization, can people, do people honestly put their honest thoughts on the table? Can you put your honest thoughts on the table for everybody to see? Or are you too worried that somebody's going to think something badly or that'll be uncomfortable? But could you put your honest thoughts on the table? So you got to put your honest thoughts on the table. Second thing you need to do is you have to understand the art of thinking. Thoughtful disagreement. You know, a lot of people when they have disagreements, they have an emotional side of them that says a disagreement is like a fight. No, a disagreement is a fight. It should have your curiosity. Are you going to be, how can I learn from these believable people so that we triangulate to get to the best end? There's an art to that. I explain the art in the book. We don't have time to do that, but there's an art to that. And then you have to have clear, clear protocols for getting past your difference agreements if they happen. And if you do that, then you get the best collective decision making. And besides getting the best collective decision making, you get ownership by people. In other words, everybody's in it. They believe that the system is fair. Right? What happens in a lot of cultures is it's all Going behind the scenes and they say, oh, that's not. This guy is not doing the right thing. And they all gather by the water cooler and you have a highly political organization. If they say the game is fair in terms of an idea of meritocracy and they know how to play with that, then that's something that engages them. They can own the company, feel an ownership in the company, and that it's also a fair system. And why wouldn't you want that? You want the best ideas to win. So that's what I mean by an idea. Meritocracy. The other thing is knowing what people are really like. In other words, in order to have a meritocracy, you will have to understand the merit that people have, and they have to understand their merit. What do they know and what don't they know and how do you get at that? And so nowadays it's very easy. You know, you can collect data on people. And so when we have people going there, they say, do you want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are? Now think about that. Do you want to know what your strengths and weaknesses are? Can we speak honestly with each other? Because if you know what people's strengths and weaknesses are, you can have them play to the constraints and you can compensate for those weaknesses. So do you want to know that in a lot of organizations, that's uncomfortable to people, but do you want that so when you know what they're like, you can know what to expect from them. So I want to just take you into Bridgewater and give you an idea of how we operate by showing you this brief video that gives you a flavor for that. A week after the US Election, our research team held a meeting to discuss what a Trump presidency would mean for the US economy. Naturally, people had different opinions on the matter and how we were approaching the discussion. The DoT collector collects these views. It has a list of a few dozen attributes. And so whenever someone thinks something about another person's thinking, it's easy for them to convey that assessment. They simply note the attribute and provide a rating from 1 to 10. For example, as the meeting began, a researcher named Jen rated me a 3. In other words, badly for not showing a good balance of assertiveness and open mindedness. As the meeting transpired, Jen's assessment of people added up like this. Others in the room had very different opinions. That's normal. Different people are always going to have different opinions. And who knows who's right? Let's just look at what people thought about how I was doing Some people thought I did well, others poorly. With each of these views, we can explore the thinking behind the numbers. Here's what Jen and Larry said. Note that everyone gets to express their thinking, including their critical thinking, regardless of their position in the company. Jan, who's 24 years old and fresh out of college, can tell me, the CEO of the company, that I'm approaching things terribly. This tool helps people both express their opinions and separate themselves from their opinions to see things from a higher level. When Jen and others shift their attentions from inputting their opinions to looking down on the whole screen, their perspective changes. They see their own opinions as just one of many and naturally start to ask themselves, how do I know my opinion is right? That shift in perspective of going above it and seeing the full range of views shifts the conversation from arguing over individual opinions to figuring out objective criteria for determining which opinions are best. Behind the dot collector is a computer that is watching what all these people are thinking, correlates it with how they think, and communicates back to each of them based on that. Then it draws the data from the meetings to create a pointillist painting of what people are like and how they think. And it does all that guided by algorithms. Knowing what people are like helps to match them up better with their jobs. For example, a creative thinker who is unreliable might be matched up with someone who is reliable but not creative. Knowing what people are like also allows us to decide what responsibilities to give them and to weigh our decisions based on people's merits. We call it their believability. Here's an example of a vote that we took where the majority of people felt one way, but when we weighed people's views on the basis of their merits, the answer was completely different. This process allows us to make decisions not based on democracy and not based on autocracy, but based on algorithms that take people's believability into consideration. Yeah, so we really do that. So highlights again, what's happening is everybody gets to express what their thinking is about everything on a meeting, all the time. And then also that collects the data, and it makes people think about each different perspective. And when it collects the data, it interacts with, with the people. Because you can have algorithms that are now like coaches so that it will understand you and your circumstances and operate that way. And that's how we sort of have an idea of meritocracy. Okay, so what is. Do you want these things and in what degree? This is. This is sort of the question that I would ask everybody. Do you want to have idea, meritocracy, decision making or not? And in what degree do you want to know what people are really like? And in what degree do you want to have this radical truthfulness and the radical transparency? By the way, what I did is we recorded everything for almost everybody to see, almost everything, so that they could see it happen. And, and then what I would do is, when I was in the meetings, I'd write down the principles of when I'm handling something, why I'm handling it that way, and then we could have exposure and there could be communication on to whether that's a sensible way of operating. And those principles then made a cohesiveness. Yes, we should operate that way together. And then do you want to make algorithmic decision making? Look, the reality is knowing what people are like right now, it's so easy. The data is all over there. You're going to be collecting data. It's easy to collect data. People agree that you want to collect data. You can so easily, with algorithms, know what people are like, and you can build algorithms in terms of decision making. So this is something that's going to come at you anyway. You're just going to have to make the choices. So what is the. Okay, I guess I missed a slide, but that's okay. So what we've done is we've built up a bunch of tools and protocols for operating this way. What I want to say is, what is the problem with operating this way? Because it's not for everybody. I'd say probably something like a third of the people don't want it and they're gone. But we've come down to why it's a difficulty for some people and why other people can't do without it. And that has to do with that. There are in your heads, really sort of two you's. There is the intellectual analytical you, conscious analytical you. And then there's the emotional, so largely subconscious you. And they're at odds with each other. And you encounter that dilemma every day in various ways. And so when you ask people, would you like to know your weaknesses? Would you like to know what I really think about you? Would you like to be free to tell me what you really think about me and tell me my weaknesses? Intellectually, of course, you'd want to have those things. How could you not want to know that somebody thinks you're an idiot or that you're doing something wrong or even that you're doing it right? I mean, it's good to know. And why wouldn't you do that. And disagreement. Should disagreement be a fight or should be a discovery process? There is an emotional part of us. We're hardwired down there to have those emotions. And there is a struggle between our upper level us's and our lower level us's to make those decisions. And so people who, like, who come into our culture say, I want to operate this way. This is the good way to operate because it's more productive. It's certainly more productive to get at the best ideas and also to eliminate the politics and the, you know, water cooler talk where everybody's operating behind the scenes, everybody got the opinion and nobody actually knows what's going on and even has opportunity to discuss it so that you can pursue your goal together. Of course it's a better way, but it's emotionally one of those things. So it takes usually about 18 months. If people go at 18 months through it, they don't want to work anywhere else because they don't have it. So that's been my experience. Those are the tools. I don't have time to take you through those tools, but I do have time to answer your question questions. So I welcome your questions.

Thank you. Can we give a round of applause to Ray. So we're going to open up to a Q and A. We have two microphones here in the room for people to come forward and ask questions, questions. And since I'm here in this chair, I'll be selfish and I get to go first. So thank you for your presentation and for your book. How do you think about ego in the equation? Because as you talk about knowing and humility, as people ascend in their careers, in their work, often their ability to know, it's harder to get across a large surface area. So they're knowing. They have to rely on specialists, people who are subject matter experts, and humility. They tend to become more surrounded with people who don't always tell them. You know, they just get told, you're great, you're great, you're great. So kind of, how do you, how do you, you know, you seem like you've really kept your feet on the ground throughout all your success and you've kept grounded on knowing and humility. And often we see people who don't have that, they become execs and are successful and their ego takes over. How do you balance that?

So what do I think about ego? I think ego is a very human giant impediment. Okay, so now the question is how people choose to deal with ego.

Perfect.

And then I think that it Just sounds so stupid to. When you paint to operate the way that you just described. Like, you bring it in and then you don't have those people, so they're bottling it up and you're not getting the information. That's so dumb. So that's my reaction. So I say, why wouldn't people operate the way that we're doing and why are they operating that way? And I think it's like to some extent it's become the norm. So it's habit. People get in that habit and you can break that habit, like any good habit. And sometimes if you don't break the habit, it'll be beaten into you because it'll produce. You're not going to get the best. I mean, I could tell you all the really successful people I know, I know the most successful people in the world and I could tell you. And they are meeting other people who will be the smartest people that they know who might disagree with them to try to get those opinions. It's not just because they know. It's because they are curious and they're worried about being wrong and they bring it in. They don't operate the way you're talking about the most successful.

So you gave us the answer, which is to continue as people ascend in their careers to surround themselves with being challenged. If they're not actively being challenged, then it's sort of you have to.

And then notice the punches in the nose that you get from making the mistakes and learn from. Okay. And experience instead the joy of the curiosity of learning.

That's right. I'm going to ask one more question and then we'll open up for you. Talk. How do you work with people to tease out or. I don't know if tease out is the right word, but identify their principles. I know when I read your book, I first in my mind had an idea of these are my principles. But the longer I read the book and went through it challenged me that maybe what I thought I wanted to say my principles are and what my principles actually are, two different things.

So good.

How do you deal with that? With.

Well, just. I would recommend to everybody that you start with like that diary and you write down that principle. And then when you come to another one of those, you'll recognize it's one of those again. So you'll start to look at everything. You'll ask yourself, what species of challenge is it? And now I'll go to handle that species. And when you do that, you'll refine and you'll Evolve. And you'll evolve in a conscious way. It won't just be subconscious. Could be quite literal. And then that communication with others. And by the way, this is not just a company thing. This is a personal thing. You have to agree on how you're going to deal with the people around you that could be a family member or family members. You have to step back and say, how am I going to be with you? And you're going to be with me. Your rules of engagement. And so if you're clear with your principles and also how you should interact, like, can I be totally truthful with you? Can you be totally truthful with me? Can we be transparent? Can we talk about things that might be uncomfortable? These are the same questions we have to face. So I think that if you do those principles one at a time, like you're looking at it and you reflect on it and you exchange thoughts, like, is that right? Somebody might say, oh, that doesn't make sense. And you can listen and say, what would it do that creates the refinement of those principles?

How much do you have to refine your principles for context for each situation? Because you're showing up in front of somebody else who has different principles than you. So there's people, I would say, for example, in my own life that I think, my prince, our alignment and principles are much closer than others. You're not going to shed your principles, but you know that maybe you're standing in front of someone that isn't likely to have those shared principles and be willing to interact with you.

Well, that's why the beauty, the clarity is the beautiful thing, right? In other words, like, for me, I could sort of give anybody a book, or I won't literally give them a book, but I could say, in order to interact with me, these are the things that are important to me. And then you tell me what your principles are in terms of those things, and then you get at, how should we interact, given that. Right? But if you don't know, there's so much connection, confusion, because everybody's sort of sitting down and they're looking at each other and they don't know on the basis of what they're interacting, how they should interact. And that's probably the biggest misunderstanding, because there's not alignment of principles. Ultimately, the people you're going to have good relationships are those people who have aligned the most important principles. Like, for me, in order to deal with me, there's only two things that are really, really important to me, and that is that a person is reasonable. That means able to reason. I'm not big on temper tantrums. You know, reason. Can we reason well, even have others judge whether we're reasoning well and be very considerate. In other words, I'm going to be very considerate for you. I want to know what's important to you and I want to help you get that and I want you to be considerate with me. If we could do those things, I mean, talk about anything thing and so on, that is important to me. If we can't do that, I can't have a relationship. I'm not just. I'm not capable of doing that. It's very difficult. So by people knowing those things. But their principles, they can be clear. And it's also, who do you want to be around? Like, if you're going to have a culture, you have to be around people you want to be around that you respect. That's what a culture is. It can't be just a collection of people who have all different values. Now that doesn't mean. Mean it has to be all the same. Doesn't have to be exactly. There are some big deal principles and then there are the little things, you know, like you don't want to argue over details.

Right. It's very powerful. If everyone you could show up with and just say, hey, I need you to be considerate. I need you to be able to reason. We think that in all of our.

Meetings you will get it yourself.

Yes.

And you'll be clearer than you ever were. You will develop your religion, in a sense, your approach to. To life and that they will be able to communicate and you'll have that clarity. And then you say, how should we be together? And then you're on the mission together. Because I'd say that the thing I wanted more than anything was meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Okay? Meaningful work means I want to be on a mission together. I know Salesforce. That's what you guys do together. You're on a mission together. And so that's the meaningful work. And then the meaningful relationships are a fantastic reward for me. And that's a reward in and of itself. That's what I personally want. So when I have the meaningful relationships and the meaningful work, we can also have tough love because there's love and there's toughness, but we understand it. And that brings us to another level. And that's our culture. And it's important to have a culture. Whatever you guys choose, you need to have a culture that you feel aligned with based on your Principles.

We have a very strong and powerful culture that I like very much. All right, I've been a little bit of a hog here. Let's start with the questions. Right over here, sir.

Ray, thanks so much. Read your book and really find it very challenging. So I run a technology company and one of our core values is humility and awareness. But we're nowhere near just the level of this idea of meritocracy. So how many other companies have you seen that have successfully implemented at the level that you've done at Bridgewater? And is the software proprietary or do you actually have that available for companies that are interested in kind of the way you've laid that out? On the second question. I'm going to make all those tools available. Yeah. And. Sign me up. It's such a joy. I'm so glad that you feel that they would be helpful in changing it. It's been a fairly new experience because I built the tools and run the company and I didn't make them public because we were just doing them internally. And now as I say, I'm at this stage in my life that I want to pass along. Things have been valuable. So my experience has been that there is a tremendous interest from big and small about operating in this kind of way. And then there's the experience of it. So we have too many companies that want to do that and we are now thinking how do we go about satisfying that need? We're going to take a number of the tools and we're going to make them public and available, free for everybody. And then there are those that are enterprises that need more coaching and all of that. And we're trying to figure out how we're to going. Going to do that. But that'll be done. I'm passing it along to others to be able to do that. So that's what our plan is. And it's so far with the ones that have done it, it's been like shockingly favorably received. Awesome. We'd love to be signed up when you get. I'm sure you have a bunch of companies already in line. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, we'll take a question over here. Great. Thank you.

My name is Jaron Chu and I'm from opfocus because big fan of yours, Ray. Thank you for speaking with us today. I have a two part question. The first part is related to the video you showed earlier around the dot collection. And in the video you describe basically people meeting and collecting data at the same time. My first question is how does the Alignment on the definition for something like tenure or definition of some of the qualities they're rating for. How do you ensure everyone has the same expectation on what that means? My second part of the question is I work in a company with probably three dozen folks. When it comes to your toolkit that you showed on the stage, what are, I would say the top one or two most impactful tools that you would recommend a smaller team like ours to be able to implement right away and if you could share a little bit more about what those tools are.

Thank you.

Okay, I have a terrible memory.

Give me the first question again around data collection. How do you ensure that the standards are the.

Oh, it's just like a language that once you get used to the particular terms, then everybody is acquainted with the language and they understand what it means. It's just like speaking any other language. It's not a. So we will use a term like being able to be assertive and open minded at the same time and then nobody would understand that until we got used to it. So it's a language. Regarding the second question, regardless of the number of people, the tool will work equally well. The one that we will make available for the public won't maintain the same kind of database behind it so that you can then do all the algorithms in doing that. We'll be able to do that to some extent, but it'll be something where any group of people at all can use that, whatever the size of the organization is. And that'll give you all that transparency and so it'll give you most of that.

And I guess to quickly clarify, for small company like ours where resources are limited, what is the most impactful but also attainable set of tools for us to implement? If you could just name one or two.

Well, it would take me too long to take you through all the tools. You know, they're in the back of the book. So you could read in the appendix what all the tools are and we're going to make the easy ones available for free to most people.

Great. Thanks for being here, Ray.

Thank you over here. Thank you so much for this talk. I've recently gone through a major life change and it's enforcing a time in my life where I'm defining, refining and.

Trying to follow my principles.

What I'm encountering is a lot of trade offs and I'm curious, did you encounter trade offs while trying to follow your principles, while trying to build your principles? And how did you struggle with them if you did and how did you feel about that? Struggle.

Oh, of course, you always encounter the trade offs and that's what helps you clarify your principles. Because when you're encountering that trade off, you're forced to decide, I'm going to have to weigh this one against that one. And then you have to think, well, how will I weigh that one against that? And it becomes a newer, refined version of the principles. I always encounter those trade offs and I always realize like there were so many times where I thought I couldn't have both and how do I approach that? And what I began to discover is that if I took the time and I followed the open mindedness, I was able to get most of both, but I wasn't able to do it beginning and whatever. So the pausing and the reflecting and the taking in from others will mean that you're going to be able to face those trade offs better.

So the trade offs help define the principles.

That's right.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

You can't have everything you want, but you can't have almost anything you want if you're really, if you do it right, you could have almost anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. So you have to make those choices.

We're going to have time for probably one or two more questions right over here on the right.

Felipe here from Brazil. And my question is when I hear you, I thought I would see on the book you talking about technical terms and actually market knowledge, but you talk a lot about actually the principles and how do you interact with your team, how do you outweigh how much knowledge you're getting from the market and technical knowledge and those leadership skills and managing people and getting the people principles right. How do you weigh them and what do you prioritize on your day to day life? I think we just go about life pursuing our goals and then encountering things and then learning. So it would be like being a chef or anything else. So when I look at that, the things I learn are the things that I need to learn in my accounting, my going after my goals. So in my particular case I learned how to run a business and I have a culture and do this and then I learned how to invest and so on. And I just did a book that I'm giving away free if it's online and it's about understanding big debt, the principles behind big debt crises, because we have debt crises over and over again. And so I studied all the debt crises and I've been through a bunch of them myself and I developed principles for how these Debt crises, work and how to deal with them. So when the next one comes along, I know how to deal with it or I know how to anticipate it. And I needed to do that because that's the thing I do. But at the same time, the way I did it is the same way I did it for running my business. In other words, encounter, realize the same things happen over and over again. Run, write down the principles, have a template in your mind, you know, so they're the same things I just needed to do. Awesome. Thank you.

We have time for one more question.

All right, perfect. So you have a very unique culture that you've built at Bridgewater, and you talked about the importance of sharing values with your employees. And I was wondering if you could give us some insider, shed a little bit of light on how you go about finding those people that fit into the culture that you're looking to build. Well, finding them is first of all, first being clear about what the culture is and everybody so that they can sort of semi self select. And then we show them videos because we record everything for everybody to see so we can show them in real time what it's like to be there. So that helps them self select. Then we do something, things like we have conversations, we do personality tests, we do a lot of things to try to make sure it's the right fit. And then we explain to everybody else like it's an adventure. So go on the adventure. I guarantee it'll be an interesting adventure and you'll start to learn about yourself and you'll start to learn whether you like operating this way. And then we do, we go into it with a trial and error. We have a boot camp that we call, that's about three weeks that people go through until they understand what it's like and the culture and those types of things. And then we do it with coaching and so on. And that's how we do it. That's how we select people.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

I want to say one thing. Do head over to the Dream Store. We have Ray's book there, and he will be heading over there for a book signing and maybe a couple more questions. So thank you very much.

My pleasure. Thank you.