A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.

'Crowd folly', the tendency of humans, under some circumstances, to resemble lemmings, explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior - like investment management practices of many foundations represented here today. It is sad that today each institutional investor apparently fears most of all that its investment practices will be different from practices of the rest of the crowd.

Of course you want to drive that out of yourself because you want to be wise, not foolish. You also have to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else because most people are not going to remove it all that successfully, the human condition being what it is. If you don't allow for self-serving bias in your conduct, again you're a fool.

The world is getting very much more competitive.

To finish first you have to first finish. Don't get in a position where you go back to go. What's interesting is that some guy whose grandfather was a lawyer and a judge-hurriedly going to Harvard Law with a wave of veterans-I was willing to go into so many different businesses. I was constantly going right into the other fellow's business and doing better than the other fellow did. The reason it was possible? Self-education- developing mental discipline, big ideas that really work.

For society, the Internet is wonderful, but for capitalists, it will be a net negative. It will increase efficiency, but lots of things increase efficiency without increasing profits. It is way more likely to make American businesses less profitable than more profitable. This is perfectly obvious, but very little understood.

It's a finite and very competitive world. All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return.