Self-driving cars are here (the future is here just not evenly distributed) - every week one quarter of a million Americans take a Waymo (in SF, Phoenix, Austin, LA).

A self driving car will be the safest car on the road (every year 1.2 million people die in car accidents - Waymo has had far fewer crashes and no fatalities). 

AI may be used in the medium term to generate on-demand personalized ads 

Morgan Housel:

• “There are two topics that will impact you whether you are interested in it or not: health and money. They are interested in you. You can have a good life without knowing anything about chemistry or meteorology if you’re not interested in them. You cannot have a good life without knowing anything about finance and health.”
• “In the 50s, 60s, 70s we were building so many new houses that houses were way cheaper. An entry level house used to be 700 square feet, 2 bedrooms, and 1 bathroom for family of 5. Now it’s 2200 square feet. House expectations have expanded tremendously. So the advice to get a house early in your career was more broadly applicable back then.”

David Senra:

• “Mediocrity is invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.”
• “‘Overpay’ for talent, because you can’t really overpay for talent. Per Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Jim Simmons: once you identify the smartest and best talent you do everything in your power to bring them in with you.”
• Senra’s top lesson from making 300 biography podcasts: “Focus -  do one thing relentlessly. Focus is a superpower. Harnessing our energy on a single goal for a long period of time is the simplest, most consistent formula for greatness. Read any biography of a great leader, inventor, or pioneer and you will typically observe a monomaniacal obsession with a single cause or goal. Warren Buffett has read 10-Ks for 7 hours per day for 60 years. Walt Disney spent 3 full years working on the animated feature film Snow White.”

Jeff Bezos:

• “The world wants you to be typical. In a thousand ways it pulls at you. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. Don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it. Never let the universe smooth you into your surroundings.”

Timing of when you do and don’t get light has surprisingly large impact on sleep, mood, and overall quality of life. 

1.1) Time is the crucial variable in compounding

• 'Approximately 99% of Buffett's wealth was accumulated after his 50th birthday and 97% came after his 65th birthday…let’s say by age 30, his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let's say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he's been able to generate — 22% annually — but quit investing and retired at 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandchildren? What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $80+ billion. $12 million (99.9% less than his actual net worth). Effectively all of Buffett's financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years.' (Morgan Housel & Yahoo Finance). See the charts below for visuals of how the effects of compounding led to explosive absolute growth for Buffett once given enough time.
• "Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant."

1.2) Volatility is part of the game

• Importantly, you don’t have to be extraordinary every year, it’s about lasting an extraordinary amount of time: "There's been three times since we acquired Berkshire that Berkshire has gone down 50%. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the company at any time...Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a fly epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497."
• “All of Buffett's best value investing peers had exceptional records over long periods. And all underperformed the S&P 500 in 30-40% of years studied.” Said Buffett’s long time business partner Charlie Munger: “I think it's in the nature of long-term shareholding with the normal vicissitudes in worldly outcomes and in markets that the long-term holder has his quoted value of his stock go down by say 50 percent. In fact, you can argue that if you're not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50 percent 2 or 3 times a century, you're not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you are going to get - compared to the people who do have the temperament who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations.”

1.3) Durability

• 'Once you accept that compounding is where the magic happens, and realize how critical time is to compounding, the most important question to answer as an investor is not, "How can I earn the highest returns?" It's, "What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?" Most people underestimate this because the effects are imperceptible at first and explosive later.' (Morgan Housel)

2.1) Protect the Downside

• According Buffett, margin of safety are the three most important words in investing. This means you buy at a discount and leave room for error, misjudgment, and bad luck. Buying only when you have a big margin of safety means you don’t lose much if you’re wrong. It means you never have to start over or take material steps back. "When you build a bridge, you insist it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000 pound trucks across it. And the same idea works in investing."
• Buffett first looks for the probability of having catastrophe: “I would rather be 100 times too cautious than 1% too incautious — and that will continue as long as l'm around." Buffett followed an investing philosophy that stays away from the hot flashy investments and focuses on never losing big. “We probably leaned very much toward things where we felt we were certain to get a decent result, as opposed to where we were hopeful of getting a brilliant result.”

2.2) Rigid Filters

• “At Berkshire we have certain filters that have been developed. If in the course of an evaluation an idea hits a filter, then there is no way | will invest.” Buffett Biographer: “Typically, and this is not well understood, his way of thinking is that there are disqualifying features to an investment. So he rifles through and as soon as you hit one of those it's done. Doesn't like the CEO, forget it. Too much tail risk, forget it. Low-margin business, forget it. Many people would try to see whether a balance of other factors made up for these things. He doesn't analyze from A to Z; it's a time-waster.”
• "He only did his analysis after first identifying that catastrophic risk was off the table" (Saber Capital). He was not interested in putting capital at risk if there was any chance of cat risk. He didn't care about the potential upside if he perceived there to be a major reason that the business could fail. This is much different than how most investors think. Some investors are willing to take positions in stocks that have significant risk, but even greater upside. Buffett was not.

2.3) All that's left if the Upside

• "You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong"
• Buffett's key takeaway from ‘The Intelligent Investor’ was this: If you eliminate the downside, then all that remains is the upside. After that, the key is to keep emotions in check and be patient. It really is that simple.

3.1) Emotional Discipline > IQ

• Buffett and Munger underlined that temperament is far more important than IQ. “The results are prodigious, because we have a temperamental advantage” (Charlie Munger). “You have to be willing to have the discipline to say, ‘I’m not going to do something I don’t understand.’ When I look at our managers, I’m not trying to look at the guy who wakes up at night and says ‘E = MC 2’ or something. I am looking for people that function very, very well.”
• “Markets fall fast. Wealth builds slow. Most people can’t handle either.” (Motley Fool)

3.2) Independent Thinking

• “I read annual reports, but I don’t read anyone’s opinion about what’s going to happen next week, or next month, or next year.” Buffet consistently focused on the intrinsic value of a business ('in the long term the market is a weighing machine') over the prevailing market sentiment ('in the short term the market is a voting machine). Buffett sticks to his investment principles year after year, regardless of the prevailing environment. Buffett has "the willingness to be lonely, the willingness to take a position that others don't think is too bright, an inner conviction that a lot of people do not have." (Michael Lipper). 
• One of Warren Buffett's most-famous catchphrases: "Investors should be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful...To be a successful investor you must divorce yourself from the fears and greed of the people around you, although it is almost impossible. The herd mentality causes all these IQs to become paralyzed. How can people who are bright, who work hard, who have their own money in the business, how can they get such a bad result? … If you had to pick one thing that did it more than anything else, it’s the mindless imitation of one’s peers. You need to divorce your mind from the crowd.“

3.3) Don't make the one-moment-mistake

• Buffett wrote that Tom Murphy (former CEO of ABC) taught him an "indispensable" lesson about the importance of recognizing and controlling your emotions. "He said, 'Warren, you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow,'" Buffett recalled. "It was one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received."
• “The big things are not just what you do, but what you don’t do…It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

4.1) Patience is critical

• "Munger subscribes to “Barron’s“, which is a weekly magazine related to the stock market of the Wall Street Journal in the United States. He has read this magazine for nearly 50 years. Of course, the main purpose is to discover investment opportunities. In the entire 50 years, how many opportunities has he discovered? One! There is only one, and this opportunity was only discovered after more than 30 years of watching it. 20 years after that, he never found a second opportunity. But this does not affect his continuous reading, I know he still reads every issue. He has extreme patience and can do nothing, but when he really discovered this opportunity, he dared to make all the heavy bets, and this investment has made him a lot of money. This is a must-have for a good investor, you must have extreme patience. When the opportunity does not come, you just study hard, but when the opportunity comes, you have a strong determination and ability to act." (Investor Li Lu on Charlie Munger, an example of Munger and Buffett's uncommon discipline to wait for the right opportunity).
• "The stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient."

4.2) Direction > volatility

• Between fast growth or a more certain growth, Buffett will always choose the latter. One example: Buffett bought $11M in shares of the Washington Post Company in 1973. By 2008, his stake had grown by more than 10,000% and was worth $1.4B. But in the first years of owning it, Washington Post's stock price fell by 20% and stayed at that level for three years.
• "There's been three times since we acquired Berkshire that Berkshire has gone down 50%. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the company at any time."

4.3) Wait for your pitch

• “He doesn't invest—take a swing of the bat—unless the opportunity appears unbelievably good." (Bill Gates). “The trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot. If people are yelling, 'Swing, you bum', ignore them. You don't have to swing at everything - you can wait for your pitch. I call investing the greatest business in the world … because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it...We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely" (Buffett)
• "In 50 years I found one investment opportunity in Barron's, out of which I made about $80 million with almost no risk. I took the $80 million and gave it to Li Lu, who turned it into $500 million. So I have made $500 million out of reading Barron's for 50 years and following one idea." (Charlie Munger on the above Barron's story from Li Lu).