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Hello.
Welcome to Sleep.
Money.
Your guide to the business and finance news of the week.
I'm Felix Salmon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios.
Hello, hello, hello.
With Elizabeth Spires of here, Sleep, and you know, times and places like that.
Hello.
We are going to talk about Bridgewater this week.
The world's biggest hedge fund and it's founder Ray Dalio and the book that has been written
about it called The Fund and all of the crazy that it's been going on at that fund and
weather and how it works.
We are going to talk about the Axios strike, which is now over.
Well done, studios and Axios for coming to agreement on that.
We are going to talk about WeWork, which is now in bankruptcy.
We have even more Bridgewater in the sleep plus.
We will learn about dog walking services in the numbers round.
It's all coming up on sleep money.
Okay, so I think we should start by talking about this amazing new book by Rob Copeland
where he does all of this insane reporting about what goes on inside Bridgewater, which
certainly used to be and I think probably still is the biggest hedge fund in the world.
And Emily, you are kind of up to speed on Bridgewater, but I feel like someone better to talk
about the book.
Are you asking me something, Felix?
What I'm asking you is who is the best person to talk about this book?
Well, Rob is the best person to talk about the book because Rob wrote the book.
Okay, so let's do a quick woo woo woo sound and then guess who's here.
Hi Rob.
Oh my gosh.
It's me.
Rob Copeland is here in the sleep money virtual studio.
Welcome.
This reminds me of a Broadway show where you enter in very dramatically halfway through
the first act.
You get the big number and then you don't show up again.
That's exactly what's going to happen.
You're going to come in with the woo woo sound.
You're going to talk about Bridgewater and then you're going to exit stage left.
And then when there's a stage call at the end of the show, you're not even going to
be there because you'll have gone home.
You'll be at like Sardis at that point.
I'll be under the bar at Sardis, yeah.
So anyway, introduce yourself.
You are the author of The Fund, this big new book about Bridgewater, and you also have
a day job at New York Times?
Exactly.
I am the author of The Fund, Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the unraveling
of a Wall Street legend.
And I'm also a business reporter for The New York Times.
I've been at the Times for about a year, and I was at the Wall Street Journal almost
a decade before then.
And you're beat not to put too fine a point on it at the Journal and at the time.
The large chunk of it has been Bridgewater.
This has not just been a book writing thing.
This has been a long-standing sort of great white whale for you.
I've been writing about Bridgewater for close to ten years.
At the Journal and at the Times, I sort of have a reputation for writing gnarly, interesting
stories about billionaires.
I don't think there's a gnarlier, is that a word, or more interesting billionaire than
Ray Dalio, the founder of The World's Biggest Hedge Fund.
So the word unraveling is right there in the title, but it is still to this day The World's
Biggest Hedge Fund.
The hedge fund has not unraveled.
Am I right about that?
Well, the book's been out for a few days, so.
Are we expecting any unraveling anytime soon in the wake of the publication of this book?
Well, I'd rather not get sued by predicting anything.
What I will say is it unravels the backstory that he's told so many times and become world
famous for in TED Talks and YouTube videos and national television interviews, and there
really are two versions of Ray Dalio.
There's the one who appeared on your television screen for all those years, and there's the
one behind the scenes at Bridgewater Associates and what he's actually like.
So yeah, I remember watching a video where he was mentoring Diddy, and they were hanging
out and being very pally, and he seems like a friendly chap.
And that presumably is the real Ray.
Well, I did actually reach out to Diddy's representatives to ask if there was any further
details about the mentorship, and they did not get back to me.
But what I will say is he has been exceptional, and so has Bridgewater, at presenting this
version of Ray Dalio as this quote unquote principled person.
But for many years, behind closed doors at Bridgewater, he's acted frankly in a manic way.
And as the book points out, it's actually getting worse and worse as time has gone on.
He's a bully.
I think we have to sort of back up and explain for listeners, you're not super familiar
with Dalio.
What his mistake is about, and what his book is about, the principles, he has a whole kind
of what he refers to as a system for running your life in your workplace and so on.
And part of what your book does so well is you sort of hold up what's actually happening
in Dalio's life and workplace against what he purports to believe.
And how would you characterize that?
How would you characterize the way that he advises people around him to conduct themselves?
So Ray's become world famous as the author of this book, which is called Principles,
Life and Work.
And it offers you nothing short of a roadmap for how to achieve success as the title suggests,
Life and Work.
And it comes down to what he calls Principles or Rules that are essentially how to fight
your suboptimal instincts and lean into discomfort.
You know, one of his favorite principles is pain plus reflection equals progress.
And he's really become incredibly famous for being someone who has allegedly conquered
this side of his brain, this emotional side of his brain, to be able to achieve incredible
success.
But in reality, and what your book is, I mean, it's so eminently readable for is none
of that holds up when you look at what's going on inside Bridgewater.
Ray Dalio comes across as a really petty bully who cannot be criticized.
They have to rejigger the algorithm for the Principles so that Ray Dalio is always on top.
It's kind of like what Elon must did at Twitter to surface his tweets the most.
It feels like that.
It's that on steroids, absolutely.
But I would say is if you were someone who spent all of your time acting in a very
unprincipled manner, probably the best thing you could do is convince the world that actually
you were number one top dog, Mr. Principles.
And that's what's really what's been going on here for a number of years.
There's so many dimensions to this story, but the thing that I like to tell people is
even the word Principles, the idea that he has principles is a misnomer.
There is no fixed set of principles.
They have been moving and evolving over time.
He's been weaponizing them and metastasizing them.
He gets rid of them when they don't work for him or when someone tries to, you know,
cite them in an inconvenient way for him.
He invents new ones at any moment.
There was at one point about three hundred seventy five principles.
And as someone in the book says, the Bible has ten and you have three hundred seventy five
right?
It's a lot.
So the idea behind the Dalio pitch is that the principles are what created this massive
fortune, made him billions of dollars, made rich water, the biggest hedge fund in the
world.
And successful on any sort of objective metric in terms of it still managed to persuade
a hundred and sixty one hundred and thirty billion dollars worth of LPs to give it their
money to in twenty or whatever he judges.
So if that's not true, if this is just some sort of ex post facto way of Ray Dalio reinventing
himself as a thought leader, then the obvious next question is, so what is it that was
the accounts for rich waters success?
And given that Ray Dalio is the founder of rich water, was there something that wasn't
the principles that he did that caused rich waters to be so successful?
Well, let's give Ray a lot of credit here.
He is a master storyteller and he was a master storyteller for years before anyone in public
really had heard of his name.
Ray starts Bridgewater in the 1970s and he doesn't start even talking about these things
called principles until the mid-2000s.
So he's already a billionaire by that.
So what the principles attempt to do with this whole persona he's created for himself
do is they retrofit and they say, because I'm so successful, it must have been because
of XYZ and that's been a really powerful piece of logic for him and it's what's gotten
him all of this attention.
Now the absolutely wild thing is that Ray Dalio, you know, already a billionaire by the
time he starts talking about these.
The more he starts talking about the principles, the worse bridgewater's investments continue
to perform.
So it's this amazing little two step which is he keeps getting more famous but Bridgewater
the hedge fund keeps performing relatively worse and worse and that's been as a journalist
in interesting dynamic to watch.
What kind of a hedge fund is Bridgewater?
Ray Dalio is famous for putting YouTube videos out where he seeks to explain their way
that the global economy works.
And so in light of those YouTube videos, I kind of get the impression that in terms of
the style of fund it is that he's looking with a gimlet eye at the entire global economy
and sort of making predictions about which countries and currencies and commodities and markets
are going to do well and which are going to do badly and he's going to go long-sum and
short the other and he's making big economic bets rather than, say, doing high frequency
trading or, you know, doing activist investing and stocks or anything like that.
Is that broadly true?
He'd love that description you just gave him, definitely.
That is Bridgewater is a macro hedge fund meaning it predicts big economic trends and changes.
And Ray for decades has done a ton of media where he will opine on pretty much any economic
topic.
And the important thing about this argument is it suggests that Bridgewater is a place
that is open-minded and that can make predictions about anything on Earth.
Now it's certainly not the only macro hedge fund but it's by far the largest, the most
successful and probably the most well-known.
This raises a really interesting tension which I've seen at other hedge funds which is
that there are two equally important things that any hedge fund manager has to do.
One is invest the money and the other is sell the hedge fund and raise money and persuade
investors to give you their money to invest on their behalf.
And it turns out that talking about your investments and talking about your positions and talking
about how you see the world and talking about your predictions for where the world is going
is in many, many cases one of the most effective ways of raising money.
Even though that's really a marketing function rather than an investing function people love
the idea that they're getting a window into the investing function.
And famously Anthony Scaremucci was the guy who really perfected this right he never
made investment decisions really but he would go out on TV and play a hedge fund manager
on TV and talk about what he think thought was going up and going down and people would
give his fund of funds money because he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
And then there was this good performance and people were like well there has to be some
connection between what you're talking about on TV and the performance even though there
really wasn't.
So does it make sense to think about Ray Dalio's YouTube videos and prognostications on
the economy and you do a really good job of going through them all and saying well he's
always seems to be really bearish.
Is it sensible to think about all of that as basically his marketing of the fund positioning
himself as someone very intelligent about the economy that people want to give money
to rather than as being any kind of a window into how bridge water invests?
By answers yes and yes and yes and by the way Anthony Scaremucci is one of my favorite
figures because Anthony Scaremucci didn't even run a hedge fund.
He did very briefly run a hedge fund you've never heard of but for he became famous for
not making any investment decisions himself but people kept calling him a hedge fund manager.
So that's just a wonderful side note in Wall Street for me.
Now one of the big reveals for me in the years that I spent talking to people and researching
this book is that Ray gets a lot of credit for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.
But in actuality if you go back and you do what I recommend that no one on earth does because
I already did it which is you read the thousands of media interviews that he's given since
the 1970s in which he claims oh gosh I don't really like talking about myself but if
you're asking me to I guess I will.
This man has been predicting economic doom and gloom pretty much uninterrupted for his
entire career and everything comes in cycles and every time there is a major downturn he
is able to accurately say I saw it coming.
What he doesn't talk about is all the time he predicts recessions that never came and
that's an incredibly powerful marketing push because if you're someone with a lot of
money and you don't know what you're invested you don't necessarily need to invest with someone
who's taking the biggest swing someone who says they're going to make you more money.
What you want is the guy who says oh my gosh there's danger I'll help protect you and
that has helped make bridgewater the world's biggest hedge fund and it's helped make
Ray Dalio one of the richest men on Wall Street and beyond.
And you say that insight came to Ray Dalio because he married into Vanderbilt wealth but
it was in decline and he realized that rich people just want to hold on to their money
and they don't want to take big risks and that was like his big insight which I said.
That was definitely an insight of his and it's so interesting he did he marries into
the Vanderbilt Whitney family and then never talks about it.
He still talks about his rags to riches tail and of course to my knowledge has never
spoken about you know his wife's family wealth and that's no shot on her by the way the
book this isn't a personal thing between me and Ray and for God forbid his wife but you
know he had huge advantages that he married into.
Well he's in this part of the personal brand that he's built around himself I mean Felix
is talking about the story the economic story that Dalio tells but I think at this point
just as important you know his book The Principles is a big best seller even outside of finance
circles he seems to be positioning himself as a kind of high-end more cerebral Tony Robbins
and what's astonishing about your book is that you get so much into how that culture that he
built around that really filtered into the everyday operation of Bridgewater and all the just
really strange stuff that happened there I've always thought of it as kind of a cult but then you
have these antidotes where you have employees who are raiding each other on a dot system and they
suddenly spending more time adjudicating you know petty conflicts then worrying about the fund
or the investments or anything like that you have Dalio nitpicking you know whether the peas
and the cafeteria were wrinkled or not can you just give us some examples that probably surprise you
in the reporting of the book.
Sure and what you're talking about there is by the way over the last 15-20 years there's been
the whole apparatus inside Bridgewater where you rate each other and you basically encourage
to say that there's no such thing as a small problem and this is sort of darkly funny it's
darkly comic in parts of the book for instance Bridgewater like many firms has buses for their
employees to commute in and the bus drivers were getting raided sometimes during the same ride
for the bus being too hot or too cold so the bus drivers are just there's there's the end
if they do Dan if they don't you know if there's not a diet coke left in the refrigerator the
facilities people are getting raided down because they're out of diet coke the parking passes are
the wrong size the there's pee on the floor of the bathroom all these this is my favorite one a
woman literally gets fired after she doesn't bring in bagels after promising to bring them in
on a particular day and her employees get together and say we can't trust you because you didn't
bring in the bagels now this is fun let's be honest like this is there aren't a lot of financial
firms like this but it's also these are real people you know this is you this is a woman who really
did lose her job over this so it's both been very fun to talk about it to write but it's also
been a little sad for me too so Rob there are two contrasts I'd like to put to you here because
this just feels incredibly weird and improbable to me on a couple of different levels one level is
that someone who's permanently bearish could end up doing so well in terms of both performance you
know suddenly in the early years and also accumulating money the big contrast there I think would be
Bill Gross at Pimco who raised even more money on an absolute basis by basically just being
more bullish than everyone through a period where the global economy surprised everyone in terms
of bullishness and the interest rates surprised everyone like continuing to come down when everyone
thought you know on a sort of you know bearish level they wouldn't and his big structural bullishness
kind of explains how he became such a giant in the world of money management and then the other
thing is later on early next year we're going to talk to to Carrie Sun who worked at Tiger Global
which is another like hot bullish hedge fund but one of the big messages of her book is that you
know that fund is incredibly efficient and everyone is amazingly overworked and overstretched and
there's this thing and I've seen this at many hedge funds where they kind of pride themselves on
efficiency and everyone doing free jobs at once and to the point at which they won't even
have an HR department because they're like we don't need that and the contrast with again with
Ridgewater is that this is a company with like 1600 employees and no one has a clue what like
1400 of them are doing that in terms of the core basis of what a hedge fund does which is either
investing money or raising money like most of the employees at Ridgewater do neither of those
things and there are points in the book where you have various outside managers like Larry
Carlpool you know John Rubenstein being brought in and they're like well we don't need half of
these employees because they don't actually do anything for the hedge fund and in both of those
respects one like how do you outperform if you're structurally bearish in a market that was
up and to the right for most of the period of the book and two what how and why do you let your
fund grow when the vast majority like internally when the vast majority of hedge fund managers seem
to pride themselves on being really lean and sleek and efficient so Ridgewater and Dallio have
threatened me and my publisher with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit so I can be sort of knowingly
careful about what I say but I'm not I'm perfectly comfortable saying this there's nothing
efficient about the operations of Bridgewater associates the amount of work being done on things
that have nothing to do with investing is shocking period full stop now so far as the idea that
Bridgewater has outperformed it is true that since inception the fund and which includes years
in which the fund was very small if you look at it on a percentage basis if the fund has outperformed
a lot of other hedge funds however over the past 10 or so years it has done very poorly compared
to other hedge funds and I don't think it's a coincidence that coincides with the period in which all
of these other wild things were happening in which Ray became sort of obsessed with growing the
principles that investigating everything and investigating everyone for everything under the sun
now I told you earlier there were two versions of Ray Dallio there was the one you see in TED Talks
and there's the one behind closed doors there's also two versions of Bridgewater's investing
and a big reveal for me was no matter what Ray goes on CNBC and says or whatever economic doom
and gloom he's pitching today you know he's literally called for a civil war a few weeks ago
that doesn't really have much of an impact on Bridgewater's actual investing the Ray Dallio you see
on TV the predictions that he makes that's a marketing move and a highly effective one
so when I'm watching CNBC and I'm seeing Ray the Ray Dallios Jamie Dimons whoever else is on
there none of that is real is that a big takeaway from your book it was it is kind of for me I mean
all that stuff is just noise right it is breathlessly covered by business media but these quotes
from these dudes like they're basically meaningless Ray Ray Dallio Jamie Dimon is not a good example of
someone who regularly comes out and says things which are opposite to what his economists are saying
a JP Morgan and he has a whole big stuff of economists and he's like well I have economists but
I also have a gut and when I go on TV I'm just going to speak from my gut and basically a JP Morgan
is big enough and it's much bigger than Bridgewater and it can happily operate regardless of what
Jamie Dimon says on the telly I feel like Bridgewater from what Robert you're saying it sounds a
little bit like that that mostly in terms of the investment decisions that Bridgewater makes
they just politely keep on doing whatever they're doing and don't really listen to Dallio that's
true and actually I would disagree with you Felix I think that Jamie Dimon actually is an okay
example so Emily cheers on that I've met Jamie Dimon a few times we're not personal friends obviously
I'm a reporter for the New York Times he's not speaking to me because he actually cares about my
personal opinion nor should he but when you when you meet these very famous investors and
business leaders in person you have to remember that they're not speaking to you they're speaking to
the audience that they think that you represent so when you're watching CNBC and you see Ray
Dallio you need to remember he's looking at a camera and that's been a big reveal for me and
in fairness to Ray that's that's true of Bill Gross too you know Pimco true of Jamie Dimon
I doubt there's anyone on CNBC who's saying what's really in their heart except maybe the anchors I guess
right and so the reason they're on there is to just get people to invest money in their funds
basically it's just marketing absolutely and it positions them as as a thought leader you know it's
not that you're going to watch CNBC and pick up the phone and invest in Bridgewater Associates or
buy JP Morgan stock or open but it's part of this larger narrative that we all participate in
and it's it's something we should all be conscious of right it's just like brand awareness
basically exactly it's but it's brand awareness wrapped in this patina of hey we're here to help you
I don't I'm trying to help you invest your money Rob Copeland that was amazing thank you so much
for coming on that was so much fun
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okay rob has been yanked off stage by a whopping great hook never to return at least until
it's late class so but Emily we have some big actual financial well a couple of big pieces of
financial news this week but you're the union person yeah big union deal with the actors yes
the act of strike is finally over after a hundred and eighteen days and about two months longer than
the writer strike they announced this week they finally had reached a deal we don't know a lot
about the deal we're talking on friday so we don't know a ton about the deal yet
um boost minimum pay increased residual payments for online streaming low low low some kind of
deal on AI creates residual payments for online streaming which is a big thing like these things
never really existed before and now they finally agreed for at least some of the most successful
shows and as you say we don't know the details these things will exist Netflix famously
has been incredibly resistant to the idea that it would ever pay any royalties to anyone ever
so that's a big change and then the other big change of course is AI and Henry Farrell has a
really interesting take on this which is that often you need oppositional
fights like this like a strike in order to come to some kind of an agreement on how something
like AI should be used if you just allow a company like open AI to come out and say we want to
listen to our stakeholders and then we will take their you know cognition under advisement and
we will try and work out what the best way to implement AI in a harmless and democratic way is
like that is not actually democracy democracy the way the democracy works in practice is you have
big fights and you have winners and you have losers and it looks like this is the first real
sort of labor action whereas AI was central and they have come to some kind of an agreement
and by all accounts you know the studios did not get the kind of rights to use AI access that they
had had here on to yeah yeah it's a big deal I think the reason one reason it took so long as the
studios didn't realize how much leverage and bargaining power the actors had or the writers I mean
before them so there was come to Jesus kind of thing for the studios just realizing oh we can't
just bulldoze our way through this and I think that's why a lot of these negotiations and strikes
have been taking a long time you know this year it's just because the balance of power has really
truly shifted and it's it took some time for the studios to kind of wake up to that and we really
don't know yet that much about these AI deals right are these AI provisions but we know they exist
which is but beyond that we don't know a lot about them right I think we we know what the worst
case scenario is that the members are worried about which is that they do one day of taping and then
studios can do whatever they want with their images indefinitely yeah no I think it's really true
though what I guess you're saying Henry barrel said which is that like changes in in laws and
it really comes from that tension no one's gonna fix something if no one's complaining that it's
broken or has a fight about it or has done something really egregious there's no regulations or
laws that just come up because people are doing things out of the goodness of their heart so
it's interesting that of all places where AI regulation and strictures are happening it's in union
contracts who would have thought that you know it just seems so anachronistic unions versus
artificial intelligence right have it come out of AI is like well until the robots start unionizing
then you know exactly one of the other interesting wrinkles to this was that there was a super
interesting thing at the very end the production side the studios gave an ultimatum to the
union and said we have a deal you have until 8 p.m. to accept this deal and then the union wound up
saying yes because there was this like deadline and I was like wait what this doesn't make any
sense like the union can say yes whenever they want but it turns out that the studios was super
into just saying like we need to do this now because it's going to take us basically the rest of
the year between Thanksgiving and the holidays and all of that kind of stuff to ramp up we want to come
out of the gates in the new year early 2024 be shooting and have all of our production schedules
working for 2024 so that we can make a big you know summer movie season and all of that kind of
thing and basically what they were saying to the actors was if you let this go on even another
week that could screw up all of 2024 that's going to hurt all of your income for 2024 and of
course the income of all of the you know support stuff in Hollywood all of the people who make
sets and do production accounting and all of these other people who've been out of work for the
past 118 days and the unions sort of do care about those folks but there was this weird sort of
discontinuity that going on strike for an extra week wouldn't just mean losing another week of
income it could mean losing like another eight months of income and then at that point they
were like okay it's not worth it yeah and you believe the studios here well I think that it's not
so much that I believe the studios but I think the unions I think particularly for TV production
these things work in cycles and you know they sell ads against them and things like that and it
would be very difficult to completely reconstruct their process when it involves so many players
that are not just the studios and young and members it's been fascinating to see what's happened
at the movie theaters in the wake of this strike there's so many old movies you can go see right now
it's it's an interesting time go go see movie go see old movies in movie theater people this is
something that I can't remember the last time I saw an old movie in a movie theater and didn't
love it and I you know I remember not too long ago I went to see like women from like 1934 or something
and it was so good if you get the opportunity to see old movies and movie theaters especially if
it's the princess ride go and do it it's so good in theaters we took the eight year old to a CET
and an iMacs theater not too long ago wow
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we should also talk about we work I mean this is this is the story that keeps on giving
but it is a kind of headline it did officially file for bankruptcy it has gone through
a series of cap structure restructuring over the years you know various different
investors put new money in restructured debt people have taken losses and this is on one level
just another one of those restructuring but it comes with the word bankruptcy which has
you know a lot of salience and it does feel like the end the final end to a story that we have
loved to talk about on this show many times in the past even though we all know in our hearts that
you know we are still going to be walking around cities with lots of we works in them and people
are still going to work and we work and the brand is going to exist and you know it is not the
end of the company or the business model. This summer apparently we work was running more
office space than any other company in America just to give you a sense of how big it still is
I think you see that in New York but it wouldn't be intuitive necessarily if you're outside of
a big city. Yeah that's that didn't impress me because I'm like that's what they do no company is
you know renting out office space to as many people and companies as possible but that's
we works business. It does mean they're bigger than their two big competitors who are
richest and industrious. Right. They did manage to grow to a much bigger size than
companies that have been around much longer. It's sort of interesting because you would think that
the post-pandemic office environment would lend itself to we work being successful because you know
people are coming into the office less often so maybe more people would want we work and we
work would be more relevant the business model would be more relevant but because fewer people
are coming into the office the whole sector the whole commercial office real estate sector is
struggling so the price of office space has gone down there's lots of it available sort of like
we work and industrious and we just they all have lost their edge because there's just a lot of
cheap office space available and company and the companies that lease it out have to make deals
to get anyone to use it. One of the interesting things that I think changed profoundly during the
pandemic is that there are two different ways of slicing up office space and we work is very good
at one of them and very bad at the other. Historically what it did pre-pandemic was it would take very
large chunks of offices multiple floors and it would break them up into tiny little mini offices
and small companies could rent a tiny office which might only have like two desks in it or
you could have a six desk office or a 10 desk office or a 45 desk office so you could have whatever
size you wanted without having to be like we need an entire floor how many floors do you want
and that gave companies a lot of flexibility that actually they never really had in their past
you could you know have a nice office of your own without having to you know be in a way that
like landlords would never talk to you in the past if you didn't want a certain amount of square
so that kind of way of slicing up offices is what we work was good at what we work is bad at is
the new way that people want to slice up offices which is by days people want to be like I want to
come in Tuesday Thursday and Friday or I want to come in on you know Wednesdays or whatever it is
and it's really hard to set up an office such that you have an office on Wednesdays but not on
Tuesdays is you know you can create some kind of a hot desk system but we work hasn't really
done that in terms of like come here we have like a monitor in a keyboard and you know everything
you need to do your work in an office we just you will let you have it on Wednesdays and you can
book it on Wednesdays that is not a that is not a product that I see them offering the closest
they have is coming with your laptop and sit on a couch or sit at like a coming or table and find
the space to yourself but it's not the same one other factor here too which is that the popularity of
we work was partly juiced by the fact that startups were having trouble finding corporate leases for
office space because they were at least until you know the I want to say the 2010s if you wanted
office space in New York you had to sign a 10 year lease and getting out of that lease was very
complicated so and if you're doing a startup even a five year lease is onerous when you don't know
whether your company is going to succeed or how you're going to scale and I think now if you're
start up if you're especially if you're very small you know three to ten people you're trying to
do all this stuff remotely now in a way that you just weren't pre pandemic so I think that's
knocked out a lot of their primary customers yeah and those startups do want a place to meet on you know
at certain points they're like let's do an off site and have a meeting and meet up at an office
and we work will you know rent them a conference room for a day but that is that's not a business
for we work really you know that's just like an ancillary revenue stream but that's not a core
business you I haven't seen anyone be able to make that work as a core business yeah feel like
I was going to ask you if you know of any real estate companies that are really have adjusted their
business models to the way people work now you know if that's you know I mean I I haven't but
I do think there is a weird gap in the market you know if you could provide something genuinely
office like and allow companies to take advantage of intro week pricing and you'd be like if you
want to come in on the Friday it's a lot cheaper than if you want to come in on a Wednesday
then that I think would be super interesting I just haven't seen anyone sort of crack that
nut yeah and where startups are all moved remote and they don't need we work anymore some of the
bigger more established companies are moving to like class A buildings like there's there's
still demand for like the fanciest most expensive most prime pieces of commercial real estate
that's where like all the action is basically well yeah I mean it's also partly because they're
downsizing right and they're like if we're going to have less space then we want the space we do
have to be really really nice yeah and so the rents for the best office space are not coming down
at all as far as I can see but yeah the class C office space and actually we work if you look at
the places it found itself most we works were actually in those kind of class being class C buildings
and those are the ones that are suffering the most yes there's the most vacancies and the most
yeah struggle struggle is real for class struggle is real we should have a numbers round Emily
do you have a number mm-hmm yes my number is 26.4 that is the number of minutes in the average one
way American commute in 2022 up a little bit from the year before but down from pre pandemic levels
there's a nice story in the New York Times sort of analyzing this data from the census the American
community survey looking at the way speaking of we work in offices looking at the way that commute
has changed for people it's not just that fewer people are commuting it's like there's like less
traffic at rush hour times but that means people are driving faster so that means that fatalities
are up there less people are taking public transit but that means there are fewer trains going
into the city so it's like still not so great and it's sort of interesting how just everything has
kind of changed and rejiggered in all these interesting weird little ways and there's even
they mentioned like a psychological hit to anyone who's still commuting into the office or into work
because they have friends and family who are you know at home living their best lives going in the
gym in the middle of the day and you know it feels kind of bad to go in it does make intuitive sense to
me that commutes are down from pre pandemic just by dint of the not the end of the rush hour but
certainly the diminishment of the rush hour there's intraday work flexibility and you can come in
at like 10 30 now and people don't really mind and so that ability to time your commute to when
it's not a peak rush hour time has really helped everyone and it's really helped transit systems
actually because transit systems always needed to be built to be able to accommodate
to very short rushes and then for the rest of the day they had way more capacity than they needed
and now if you can sort of spread a lot of that ridership out throughout the day it's a lot
easier for the system to accommodate it yeah it's still not better somehow because when I take
the metro north now I mean it's it's maybe you get a seat more often but the trains take longer to
get to the city now and there's fewer of them yeah I think we can have a whole segment on the
metro north in particular because it's own dysfunctional thing but for the rest of us yeah better
commutes that's good my number is 60 which is the market share of Chamberlain which is Chamberlain
group in the garage door market you didn't realize there was a market in garage doors well there
is a market in garage doors and Chamberlain owns a bunch of companies in the garage door space like
liftmaster Chamberlain itself Merlin Griffco and altogether it controls 60% of the market and it has
now come out and basically stopped all of its customers across its whole portfolio from being
able to use whatever technique they want to open their garage doors people used to like by
there are lots of different ways of opening a garage door different types of remote control
different apps on your phone that kind of thing and they're like no we are going to disable all of that
and if you want to use an app to open your garage door now you're going to have to use our app
from the app so you can't use any other app that's infuriating because I have a lift master garage
door we just bought it like one or two years ago and I have never been able to get the app to work
like I tried to get the app to work because the guy you know who sold us the garage door was like
it's really amazing like you could boop boop if the lift the powers out you can just use this app
and no no no it's so great and you can time it no you could do it remotely but it doesn't work
up until a couple of weeks ago Emily what you could have done is just downloaded any one of any
number of other apps and use a different app to open your door and now Chamberlain has disabled
that because they want you to use their app because their app has ads in it and they want you to see
their ads before you open the garage door that is infuriating on multiple levels we need an
antitrust campaign specifically for the garage door industry yes they're making a look at ads
after you spend all that money on the garage door yes how dare they Lena can't get on this
there is we need to crack down on big garage door I mean I mean you don't need the app is the
thing that you just press a button and the door comes up and they like to sell you on the the
fact that like if you're away from home and you realize you've left the garage door open you can
close it remotely so that's like the big selling point of the app but like most people close their
garage door it's not a big deal you can just go back to analog garage door reuse push it up
pull it down yeah yeah I live with you remember yeah my name is 250 and that's a dollars and for
$250 a day you can send your if you live in New York there's a company called shape up your
pup that will take your dog hiking in upstate New York I know I this is like that's a pretty good
price and I really I really want to just quit my job and join shake up your pup and just I want
to be that person who takes dogs for walks in the Hudson Valley for a living like what an awesome
job but you have to get the dog to the Hudson Valley from the city so you have to commute with the
dog and not I think they take the they commute with their dog oh yeah no yeah yeah I don't want to
be the person like putting the dog in the back of the van and driving it I just want to be the
person who like letting it out on the trails saying go enjoy the egg do yourself this was in an
article from the New York Times and the you know usual for yourism of rich people kind of vain
about high end services that people can get in New York but to take a person from New York City
and go hiking in the Hudson Valley I feel like would cost around the same amount of money so it
seems like a great deal but if you were packing a bunch of people in the back of a van and taking them
all I can say to the slate money listeners is if you have a dog who wants to go on a hike in the
Hudson Valley let me know and let's work something out because I would be happy to walk your dog for
you. On which note I think we should probably wrap this up thank you to the absent Rob Copeland
for coming on thank you very much to the very present Jasmine Molly obviously playing our
matter for putting this whole show together we have Rob coming back with slate plus we have a
very exciting slate money travel episode coming up on Monday with the one and only
Lydia Paul Green who has traveled more exotic and amazing places than you can possibly imagine
so yeah it's all coming up on further slate money is
this show is brought to you by discover you know in today's world it seems the best treatment
is reserved only for a few well discover wants to change that by making everyone feel special
that's why with your discover card you have access to 24 seven live customer service
as well as zero dollar fraud liability which means you're never held responsible for unauthorized
purchases finally no matter who you are or where you are in life you'll feel special with discover
learn more at discover.com slash credit card limitations apply
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