It's human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it's terrible that managements go along with this.

The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.

Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

Even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they're fighting against other very bright, hardworking people. And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times.

All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there