Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Ray Dalio (Part 1): Turning His Investing Principles Into a $150 Billion Hedge Fund
Thu, 22 May 2025
If you started investing any time within the last five years, it’s probably felt like a steady stream of firsts—between a global pandemic, changing interest rates, inflation, war, and recession fears, it’s been one plot twist after another. But it’s not a new story—it’s the same economic movie on repeat. And if you understand the principles behind it, you can learn to master the markets. That’s where today's guest Ray Dalio comes in. He’s the founder of Bridgewater Associates—the world’s largest hedge fund with over $150 billion under management—and the author of New York Times bestsellers like Principles, that’s become required reading from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Ray literally wrote the book on how to invest through any cycle—and today, he’s here to teach you how. Pre-order Ray's latest book How Countries Go Broke here. Find all of Ray's books here.
Chapter 1: What principles can help you master investing?
gold is an investment that has been held by central banks that they can securely hold because it's in their hands there's a saying that gold is the only asset that you can have investment asset that is not dependent on somebody giving you something and so central banks i don't believe are going to hold
crypto in the same way because it can be monitored, who's owning it, what is being done with it, and also it can be taken in various ways legally. So crypto is less appealing to me than gold, but I have some crypto, a smaller amount, a much smaller amount than gold. But I think the important thing is to have, whether it's gold,
and or crypto to have some non-traditional money type of investments because of the diversification. If the credit system and the debt problems become real and there's a significant chance that they can become real problems, I think that it's very important to have that as a diversifier.
Stick to Bitcoin.
I have Bitcoin, but I'm not going to get into the particulars.
You are a legendary investor. You've invested since you were 12 years old. Was there ever a time that you needed money rehab?
Oh, I went broke. I want to tell you an enlightening, what I would say is my best experience. That was my worst experience.
You had to borrow money from your dad, right? Yeah.
In 1982, I had calculated... that Americans had lent more money to foreigners than those foreigners were going to be able to pay back. Very controversial point of view. It got a lot of attention. And then in August of 82, Mexico defaults on its debt. And then other countries start defaulting. I saw a lot of these problems. And I thought we were going to have an economic collapse.
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Chapter 4: How do economic conditions repeat over time?
So what do I want in life? What do you want in life? Tell me. Okay, I'll tell you. What I wanted in life and what I wanted for Bridgewater is meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truthfulness and radical transparency. In other words, I want the work. I have a passion.
I wanted all of us to have that passion and to achieve excellence in the work and simultaneously to have meaningful relationships, great relationships. And to me, great relationships and success requires truthfulness, radical truthfulness, the ability to talk honestly about how one's thinking about things. So I wanted that. That's what I want. That's what I love.
If you ask me for my life, I've now made far, far more money. I never used to really much work for money. It was mostly the game, but there's a point. But now and even beyond, I want meaningful work like I'm into my game. And I'm with meaningful relationships. If you can do that with fantastic people, you're doing it together.
And then you do that with real truthfulness and real transparency so that there's no ability to hide what you're thinking. You can be tremendously successful and have trust and beautiful relationships. So that's what I want. I think that everybody should think about what they want. And I would recommend that if you want your young audience that I'm speaking with. OK, what do you want?
I recommend meaningful work and meaningful relationships. That should be your environment. And I think to speak truthfully. to each other about difficult issues, like what your strengths and weaknesses are, to look at mistakes, to realize that the power of mistakes is great because they're your learning experiences. If you avoid thinking about them, I have a principle, pain plus reflection
equals progress okay the pain is a messenger so now if you reflect on that pain you'll understand how reality works better and you'll understand principles for dealing with reality to get better outcomes so my reaction function has changed in other words when these things happen and i learn how to get better so these are the things i want
And you have all the money in the world or access to all of the money in the world. We can agree on that. But you haven't been immune from pain. You and your family haven't been immune.
That's right. Every painful experience is a learning lesson. Yes.
And so that brings us to the age-old question, does money bring you happiness? To hear Ray's answer, and I promise it's a good one, tune into tomorrow's episode. Until then, check out clips from the interview on Instagram. We are at Money Rehab for the show, and I am at Nicole Lapid. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin.
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