Quote · My First Million
Howard Marks: how I make money while you worry about a market crash
Where this was said
AI Hurtles Ahead
At 0:00 · chapter starts 0:00
The episode opens with Howard Marks' most memorable line delivered cold: 'If you wait until you have nothing to be afraid about, probably the opportunity has passed.' From there, Sam Parr recounts reading Marks' new AI memo that morning and noting that Marks — a man famously disciplined about not getting emotionally seduced by ideas — sounded, in Shaan Puri's words, 'a little seduced.' Marks explains the origin: his son Andrew, a VC immersed in AI daily, told him in early February that so much had happened since the December memo that he had to rewrite it entirely. Marks identifies two qualities that make AI categorically different from all prior technology. The first is autonomy: every innovation from the railroad to the internet was a tool to speed up productivity, but AI is the first that can receive a job without being told how to do it and figure it out independently. The second is that the future shape of AI is, in Marks' view, more unpredictable than anything he has ever encountered — more so even than the internet. [1] — Howard Marks "Howard Marks wrote a skeptical AI memo in December, then rewrote it entirely in February after his son Andrew — a VC working with AI daily …" 00:49
Howard Marks argues AI's autonomy — the ability to receive a task and figure out how to do it without instruction — is unique among all technological innovations in history.
The previous My First Million episode with Howard Marks was heard by over one million people.
Howard Marks wrote a skeptical AI memo in December, then rewrote it entirely in February after his son Andrew — a VC working with AI daily — told him too much had changed. This is second-level thinking applied to your own beliefs: get new facts, update your view.
Every prior technology — railroads, computers, the internet — was a tool to speed up productivity. AI is the first technology with autonomy: you give it a job and don't tell it how, and it figures it out. That single quality changes everything.
AI will expose investors whose talents don't match their claims, just as indexation did to most active managers. But there will always be novel situations with no historical data to train on — and that's where human judgment with 'hair on its neck' still matters.
Howard Marks observed that the rise of index investing exposed most active equity managers as underperformers who couldn't beat the averages.
