Howard Marks: 80 years of investing wisdom in 46 minutes

If you wait until you have nothing to be afraid about, probably the opportunity has passed.

[upbeat music] I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road less traveled, never looking back.

Howard, it's good to see you again. We had a lot of fun last time, and we were like, "Look, uh, I don't know if other people are gonna like that," but we loved that, and then over a million people listened to the last one. And so this morning, I was reading, you wrote this blog post about how you changed your mind about, uh, AI. [chuckles] You, you had written, uh, I don't know, a couple months back about the possibility of an AI bubble, and then as a good thinker tends to do, you got new facts, you sort of reassessed the situation, and you wrote a new post about AI. Do you wanna summarize the story of how you, you changed your mind on AI?

Uh, well, the story's very simple. I have this son named Andrew. He's a VC. He's dealing with A-AI every day. His companies use AI, some of them create AI, et cetera. Uh, I had written the first memo around December ninth, as I recall, and then in early February, he said, "Dad, so much has happened. You have to update the memo." And so I, I rewrote the memo entirely.

You-- I was read- I was rereading one of your old books, and, uh, you repeat, repeat this phrase a bunch, which is like, "It's important to be rational, and you can't get seduced into thinking something is a good idea," because that's when smart people can make bad decisions-

Right

... when you get emotional about something. But then when I was reading part two, I was reading it, and I was like, "Howard, you sound a little seduced. You sound a little seduced. You sound like you're into this." Are you at all approaching this in an emotional way, you think?

It, it, it depends on your definition of emotional. I upgraded my opinion of AI and its potential because its, um, ability to talk about its own strengths and weaknesses, to use humor, to put information in the context of me, to use what it knows about me. And you know, this is really, uh, uh, exceptional stuff. There's a quality to AI, uh, or more than one quality, which, uh, are unprecedented, in my opinion. The first, the obvious one, is autonomy. All the other technological innovations, from the railroad to computers to the internet, et cetera, were all tools or, uh, things to speed up, uh, and increase productivity. Th-there's never been anything with the quality of autonomy. The idea that it-- you can give it a job and not tell it how to do it, and it'll figure it out is really unique. And the, it-- what comes with that, of course, is this nagging concern that it may take over. So that's, that's really important. The other thing, and this is not, uh, kind of, uh, quantifiable, is there's never been anything, in my opinion, so unpredictable. I don't think anybody knows the shape of the future, so I, I have never had that sense before. I never say-- I never thought that, that the internet, for example, was, uh, beyond comprehension or beyond prediction.

Do you think that AI will be able to do what you do? And I know you talk about this in