Modern agriculture has been accurately described as a way of turning oil into food. As the price of oil continues to rise, so will the price of food.

I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.

It is better to be lucky than good, but of course appropriate to aspire to both.

You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.

Everyone asks about gold. This is the irony: just as Jim Grant tells us (correctly) that we all have faith-based paper currencies backed by nothing, it is equally fair to say that gold is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded.

The potential for alternative energy sources, mainly solar and wind power, to completely replace coal and gas for utility generation globally is, I think, certain. The question is only whether it takes 30 years or 70 years.

I hate gold. It does not pay a dividend, it has no value, and you can't work out what it should or shouldn't be worth," he said. "It is the last refuge of the desperate.