PURSUE PASSION

“So I got up there, and I looked on the dais, and I was like, 20 people over 50 or 60. How many do you remember your college commencement address? None of them. Not one of them can remember. I love to hunt and fish. So I go through and I talk about the normal challenges they're gonna face in life. And I also talked about how going through this process, I wanted to make sure I was gonna say something that was memorable. So right there at the end, I said, so whatever you do and I pulled out my bow, and I knocked an arrow. I said, so whatever you do, aim high and shoot straight.”

“My new, new thing, I love to find peak spring and peak fall. It doesn't have to be Africa. You can find that day in a neighborhood and in Peak Spring when the colors are vibrant and when the fragrance is just overwhelming, you can find it to the minute in the right place. And I've never felt so alive in my life. And I look for that. I now travel United States for that moment because I know when Peak Spring is in Georgia. I know where Peak Spring is in Tennessee, and I know where it is in New York City. And I know when it is North Of New York City because New York City's normally a week behind, this place I go to in Upstate.”

“Let's start with boxing because you have an opponent. In this case, it's the market. You know you're going into the ring with this opponent who's after you the whole time, and I'm thinking more of a classic one as opposed to a Mike Tyson one. But you're kind of pairing, jabbing, feeling each other out, looking for an opening. And then every now and then, you'll have a great opening, and you take a big shot. And you may land one. If I think about big shots, Bitcoin 2,020, a knockout, two year rates, 2022, knockout. You have these incredible opportunities at times if you just sit and wait.”

“Bunker says, well, I think this silver here is the most valuable asset and resource on Earth. Someone asked him, what are you gonna do with all that silver? And he goes, I'm a bury it. I'm a bury it. In fact, what I'm a do is I'm a buy 20,000,000 more ounces, and then we'll bury that too. So he buys 20,000,000 ounces at $35. And when that happened, it just woah. It just roofed. Goes to $50. So at $50 now, he's worth about 11,000,000,000, and he's got a multiple of five or six on the next closest guy. I just couldn't even believe what I'd seen and how much money that this guy had made anyway.”

“It's such a great question because the kindest thing was also my very, very, very first childhood memory. I was probably two and a half or three. It's probably 1957, and I was with my mother at this place called the Curb Market. I got separated from my mother. And, boy, you can imagine being two and a half years old and separated from your mother. You're terror stricken. This elderly black gentleman came up, and I was sitting there bawling my eyes out because I thought my mother had left me and said, what's the matter, little boy? And I said, I lost my mama. And he said, hey. Don't you worry. We're gonna find her.”

“I was listening to the acquired podcast on Berkshire Hathaway. And for the first time, I learned that at nine years old, nine years old, he understood the power of compound interest. And, actually, when I listened to that podcast, I just went, oh my god. This guy is a genius, and I have been the greatest fool. I've always wanted to write a book called what I realize now, which should go through the success of mistakes of beliefs that I've had in my lifetime. What I realize now is what an idiot I was. That guy is a flipping genius because he understood the power of compound interest, which I somehow managed brilliantly to avoid my entire career.”

“The biggest problem with AI is that if you think about the way AI is being practiced and deployed right now, it's the build, break, iterate model. Build it, break it, fix it, and iterate. That's been the invention model since the beginning of man, build, break, iterate. But we've never been in a situation where the tail event could be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives. What's so scary when I was at this conference, which is only about 35 or 40 people with one modeler from the four biggest model companies. When I was able to ask them pointedly, how do you think that AI safety gets resolved? Pretty much the consensus answer is, I think we'll finally do something about when fifty or a hundred million people die of an accident.”

“I have long maintained that better than a business school degree, journalism one zero one should be a mandatory subject in every college, which is newspaper running in particular. It was so important to my development. So my father had a really small trade finance legal paper in Memphis, 2,500 person subscription. I would be the copy editor, the front page editor, and then I would write for it and took journalism classes. And what newspaper writing does is it teaches you you have to write where the conclusion comes first.”