Ray Dalio: What is Money?

Again, maybe another dumb question, but... There are no such things as dumb questions. There you go. But what is money? So you've mentioned credit and money. Another thing that if I just zoom out from an alien perspective and look at human civilization, it's incredible that we've created a thing that only works because of currency, because we all agree it has value. So I guess my question is, how do you think about money as this emergent phenomenon, and what do you think is the future of money? You've commented on Bitcoin, other forms. What do you think is its history and future? How do you think about money? There are two things that money is for. It's a medium of exchange, and it's a storehold of wealth. So money... So you could say something's a medium of exchange, and then you could say, is it a storehold of wealth? And money is that vehicle that is those things, and can be used to pay off your debt. So when you have a debt and you provide it, it pays off your debt. So that's that process. And it's a... I apologize to interrupt, but it only can be a medium of exchange or store wealth when everybody recognizes it to be of value. That's right. And so you see in the history around the world, and you go to places... I was in an island in the Pacific in which they had as money these big stones. And literally, they were taking a boat, this big carved stone, and they were taking it from one of the islands to the other, and it sank, the piece of this big stone, piece of money that they had, and it went to the bottom. And they still perceived it as having value, so that even though it was in the bottom, and it's this big hunk of rock, the fact that somebody owned it, they would say, oh, I'll own it for this and that. I've seen beads in different places, shells converted to this, and mediums of exchange. And when we look at what we've got, you're exactly right. It is the notion that if I give it to you, I can then take it and I can buy something with it. So it's a matter of perception. Okay. And then we go through then the history of money and the vulnerabilities of money. And what we have is, through history, there's been two types of money, those that are claims on something of value, like the connection to gold or something. That would be. Or they just are money without any connection, and then we have a system now, which is a fiat monetary system. So that's what money is. And then it will last as long as it's kept a value, and it works that way. So let's say central banks, when they get in the position of like they owe a lot of money, like we have in the case, it's increasingly the case, and they also are a bind, and they have the printing press to print the money and get out of that, and you have a lot of people might be in that position. You can print it, and then it could be devalued in there. And so history has shown, forget about today, history has shown that no currency has, every currency has either ended as being a currency or devalued as a currency over periods of time, long periods of time. So it evolves and it changes, but everybody needs that medium of exchange, and everybody needs that storehold of wealth, so it keeps changing what is money over a period of time.


Sean Carroll: What is Quantum Entanglement?

Can you say what is entanglement? It seems one of the most fundamental ideas of quantum mechanics. Well, let's temporarily buy into the textbook interpretation of quantum mechanics. And what that says is that this wave function, so it's very small outside the atom, very big in the atom. Basically the wave function, you take it and you square it, you square the number, that gives you the probability of observing the system at that location. So if you say that for two electrons, there's only one wave function, and that wave function gives you the probability of observing both electrons at once doing something. So maybe the electron can be here or here, here, or here, and the other electron can also be there, but we have a wave function set up where we don't know where either electron is going to be seen, but we know they'll both be seen in the same place. So we don't know exactly what we're gonna see for either electron, but there's entanglement between the two of them. There's a sort of conditional statement. If we see one in one location, then we know the other one's gonna be doing a certain thing. So that's a feature of quantum mechanics that is nowhere to be found in classical mechanics. In classical mechanics, there's no way I can say, well, I don't know where either one of these particles is, but if I find out where this one is, then I know where the other one is. That just never happens. They're truly separate. And in general, it feels like, if you think of a wave function like as a dance floor, it seems like entanglement is strongest between things that are dancing together closest. So there's a closeness that's important. Well, that's another step. We have to be careful here, because in principle, if you're talking about the entanglement of two electrons, for example, they can be totally entangled or totally unentangled no matter where they are in the universe. There's no relationship between the amount of entanglement and the distance between two electrons. But we now know that the reality of our best way of understanding the world is through quantum fields, not through particles. So even the electron, not just gravity and electromagnetism, but even the electron and the quarks and so forth are really vibrations in quantum fields. So even empty space is full of vibrating quantum fields. And those quantum fields in empty space are entangled with each other in exactly the way you just said. If they're nearby, if you have like two vibrating quantum fields that are nearby, then they will be highly entangled. If they're far away, they will not be entangled. So what do quantum fields in a vacuum look like, empty space? Just like empty space, it's as empty as it can be. But there's still a field. It's just, what does nothing look like? Just like right here, this location in space, there's a gravitational field, which I can detect by dropping something. I don't see it, but there it is.


How to learn and master a new skill

First question is, you've reached a high level of ability slash expertise in a number of fields, martial arts, AI, music, et cetera. I'm curious to know how you think about the learning process when juggling all of these things. It takes a huge amount of time and dedication to master any one of these skills. Where do you draw the line between balance and obsession? Put another way, how deeply do you immerse yourself when learning something? How do you schedule your day for work slash learning? Is it appropriate to spend nearly every waking hour learning and developing a skill? Do you try to learn a number of things at once or narrow your focus to one thing? So first of all, obviously I have not achieved mastery in any of these things. And I should also say that I don't think I've figured out the art of learning very much, but I can give my two cents of the way I see it. So one passion I think is exceptionally important for learning anything. And if I look back at my life, I certainly have spent days and weeks and months at a time really obsessed with things. Now, to me, that's not necessarily useful on the long journey of learning a skill from the beginner to mastery. What has been useful to me, and if I have a philosophy on it, it's probably centered around the rigor of discipline. So making sure that every single day you do a minimum amount of that particular thing, and you do it for weeks, months, years. And also the way to remove motivation from the picture is to build a habit. When I'm first learning something, I try to set the goal of doing a minimum of two hours a day of that thing for a year to build the foundation. So that first year is really important. It's so easy to kind of skip out on a few days and then days becomes weeks and weeks become months and you lose completely that initial hook that pulls you into the depth of the particular topic. So I really wanna be a stickler of putting in, I would say one to two hours, but if I look at my life, successful things like music have been at least two hours a day for a year to build the foundation. Then looking out farther into, let's say a five-year range, you can lower that to about one hour a day. And that's to build the, what I would think of as expertise. I think you can get pretty good at something in five years if you just do it one hour a day. I don't know if this is true for everyone, but I think for me, not even an hour, just 10 minutes a day, it's been really surprising how good I can get at a bunch of little things from just doing every single day, not even 10 minutes, like one minute a day. Because it rarely becomes a one-minute thing, it usually blows up into a thing that takes an hour. But if you just set a hard lower limit and make sure you do it every single day, no matter what, no matter where you are, you end up forming this habit and there's an accumulation effect of skill that's just fascinating. So that's five years. And I think at that point, the skill is solidified nicely. I don't think it's mastery by any means, but there's a level of expertise that seems to persist for a long period of time. What I found with music for me, not singing, just music, I haven't actually practiced singing, I suck at singing, but the music part, I think I've achieved a minimal kind of understanding. And at this point, just even 10 minutes a day for the rest of your life is one way to, I think, take further and further steps into mastery. Again, I think mastery is impossible. But to increase the skill over time, I think a very minimal amount of time, but every single day is good. The other magic thing about it is you can, at this point, at least for me, take off months at a time. And when you return to it, you'll pick up almost right where you started. I don't think you wanna overdo it, but I think after you put in that first few years of every single day of an hour or two, there's something about the mind that's kind of solidified in there. You know, I've certainly had months where I don't play guitar at all, and I return to it. Maybe it'll take a day or two and you're right back into it. So, but still, if you really wanna grow, you wanna put in every single day. For me, 20 minutes is just the right minimal amount to give me time to get pulled into the task fully, get immersed fully, enough to where I can pick up little tidbits of new stuff, new ideas that kind of get going, ready for the next day. For me, there's always a kind of fascinating dance here between passion and discipline. I think passion goes up and down, and that's where discipline is essential to keep carrying you forward, to keep doing the thing every day. And I'm not a big believer of resting and then returning to the task. I'm a bigger believer in when you don't really wanna do it, still grinding it out. And days later, your passion for the thing will return. People are different, but that's how I am. Because the greater danger for me is when you take a break, when you rest, is you're going to destroy the habit that you've built. And once you destroy the habit, it's too easy to never return to the pursuit of expertise that you were on for many years before. Also, a related question was asked, I loved your video on recipe for success in AI. Do you have any advice for dealing with frustration slash difficulty in making progress? I'm learning high school math right now with a proof-based course, and sometimes it gets hard. I feel like crying. Do you have any advice for pushing past frustration at dead ends? Thanks. I personally think that struggle is a sign that you're on the right path. So all the things in my life that I've gotten the most meaning from learning, I've struggled through it. I think the biggest reward at the lowest level of your brain, like the things you actually remember, and just the self-satisfaction and happiness you feel about life is when there's something that's really hard, but you stick to it, and then you eventually succeed. That locks in the lessons into your brain that makes you feel good about yourself, that gives you more confidence for keep doing that in the future. Also, I think this is helpful for a bunch of people like David Goggins. It's not as helpful to me, but I'll just give it to you because I've tried it, and it doesn't really work for me. But a little mind hack, which is imagining that you're kind of a competition with everybody else in the world. And so if something is difficult for you, imagining that it's probably going to be difficult for a lot of people. And if you just stick by it, you're going to leave all those people behind you. And eventually, if you keep doing it long enough, you'll be the best person in the world at it. So kind of seeing struggle as a sign that most people would be quitting at this point, and it gives you motivation that like, struggle is a sign that you're on the path towards being number one. If you enjoy the kind of idea of you being at that top tier of excellence in a thing, then that kind of mind hack can help. I personally don't often like to think in that way, especially in competition with others. I just like the art itself. So I enjoy the idea of pursuing mastery, not in comparison to others, but just for myself. So in that sense, that mind hack doesn't really work for me. I kind of tend to believe that if I embrace the grind of habit of every day doing something, that months from now, years from now, as I've had many times in my life, I will experience these moments, these long periods of flow of truly enjoying the process of practicing that thing. So for me, music, now that I've achieved, the level that I've achieved, on my own personal, quiet, private moments, I can truly enjoy feeling the music I'm creating on the guitar, playing Jimi Hendrix, playing Stevie Ray Vaughan, improvising different blues, or even just like much simpler songs, like these crying melodic songs of Eric Clapton, Wonderful Tonight, or even just strumming in a way where I can also sing, just, it allows me to enjoy both the musicality and the deep meaning and the words and all that kind of stuff. And that was only possible because I put in that time in the early years of the foundation that I built. It allows you to enjoy life. And I believe in that if you form the habit, if you do the thing every single day, eventually you'll get to a set of activities that you enjoy partaking that are a source of a lot of meaning and happiness in your life. So you can think of it as a mind hack, which is believing that discipline eventually leads to a meaningful life. Hope that answers the question. Good luck.