The Most Important Lesson: Humility

2025-11-21

The most important thing is that you have the life that you want to have. So, how you define success is important. There isn’t one path that’s right for everyone.

I was lucky in the sense that I fell in love with markets and playing the investment the game, which is what I’ve done for 50 years.

I recommend that people think about their own nature and what game they’d love to spend years playing. It’s okay to explore different paths—not everyone knows right away. Think of your journey as a process of discovery.

If you’re interested, you can find my full conversation with Bloomberg here. We discussed life, debt, global crisis, and the importance of investing in our oceans:

2025-11-06

History shows us that having too much debt during an economic downturn leads to a classic, self-reinforcing cycle where:

1) The empire can no longer borrow the money to repay its debts
2) It prints a lot of new money, which devalues the currency and raises inflation
3) Living standards decline, leading to the rise of political extremism
4) Turbulent economic conditions undermine productivity and there is conflict about how to divide the shrinking resources
5) Populist leaders emerge pledging to take control and bring about order

2025-09-04

I’m doing an AMA on @reddit today, starting at 1pm ET.

I always enjoy hearing from you all, and discussing whatever’s on your mind.

So, if you have any questions for me, go check out the Reddit thread linked in the comments. I’ll get to as many as I can.

2025-09-03

I’m looking forward to doing another AMA and answering whatever questions you have on Thursday, 9/4 from 1-3pm ET.

For over 50 years, I’ve been in the business of studying the cause/effect relationships that drive how reality works and developing principles for dealing with reality well. I then programmed these principles into computers as decision rules to bet on them working. Because the causes come before the effects, this principles-based approach worked amazingly well for me.

Since I’m 76, I’m now at a stage in my life that I want to pass along what’s of value. So far, I’ve passed along my perspectives and principles about how to approach life, work, the changing world order, debt, and markets in my books, videos, and social media. But I think that what is most important is

2025-08-11

My view is that buying and holding real estate is not an effective investment strategy in our current economic environment, for a few reasons.

1) Real estate is more interest rate sensitive than it is inflation sensitive, so given our current circumstances it is likely to go down in real terms

2) It is a fixed asset that is easy to tax, which limits its impacts on your ability to diversify

3) Real estate is nailed down, so investing in it makes it more difficult to move money from one place to another

That’s my view, in a nutshell. I’m curious to hear if you agree.

#GovernmentDebt #debt #principles

2025-06-30

Everybody I speak with on both sides of the aisle agrees that we need to get our spending down to 3% of GDP.

But politics is standing in the way of making good decisions. The idea of compromise is out.

I think we all agree that we’re in need of a big renovation. The question is how that renovation gets done — and there’s a lot of fighting over what that renovation might look like.

My advice: Politicians on both sides need to agree on a mutually acceptable “worst case scenario” that cuts spending to the level we need, if a broader agreement can’t be reached in the near future.