May 6: People by WTF, the podcast hosted by Nikhil Kamath, this month released a conversation with Howard Marks, co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management and one of the most widely read voices in global investing.
Marks brings a rare combination of intellectual range and biographical honesty. The son of parents who never attended college, adults shaped by the Depression and its ethos of frugality, he built a career that took him from a public school upbringing to Wharton and eventually to managing one of the world’s most respected credit-focused investment firms. Along the way, he studied Japanese and encountered Mujo, the concept of the inevitability of change that continues to shape his thinking on markets, leadership, and life. “Change is inevitable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable,” he says in the episode referring to his well-known memo, “and we have to accommodate it and make the most of it, rather than think we can control it.”
Asked about game theory and predictions, Marks is direct, “I believe in strategy. What I really don’t believe in is predictions.” People, he argues, pursue predictions because of a dislike for ambiguity, and in doing so “theorise about a world which is not as likely to obtain as they think.”
On Cycles: Excesses and Corrections
Marks has studied cycles for nearly sixty years. Two-thirds of the way through writing his book on the subject, he asked himself a question he considers fundamental: “Why do we have cycles? If the average growth of GDP is two, why isn’t it always two?” His answer, “Excesses and corrections.” Cycles, according to him, are not ups and downs but fluctuations around a trend line, driven primarily by human behaviour. Optimism leads to overbuilding and overspending, followed by corrections when the excess becomes apparent. The S&P 500, he notes, has returned about 10% a year on average for the last 100 years, but the return is “almost never between 8 and 12.” The norm, he argues, is never the average.
On AI: Pattern Matching and Its Limits
Marks approaches AI with characteristic caution. He acknowledges a personal transformation, having changed his mind on AI after extensive engagement, including an extended exchange with Anthropic’s Claude. He describes the experience of changing his mind at 80 as “very exciting.” When asked whether the current AI construction boom could be unwarranted, he is candid: “I don’t think anybody can tell us that. We certainly know that it is an area of boom.” He looks for construction cranes when he visits cities to gauge whether a building boom might precede a bust. In the case of AI, he sees them everywhere.
His deeper reservation concerns what AI cannot do. “If what AI does is pattern matching,” he asks, “then how will it deal with something where there’s no pattern, something that’s brand new?” He concludes that there is a role for exceptional people, even in an AI world.
On Entrepreneurship, Leadership, and the River
For the episode’s audience, the most resonant thread may be Marks’ account of his own relationship with intentionality. By his own admission, for the first 35 years of his career, he was, in his words, “adrift.” He did not make proactive decisions. He let the river take him. “I’m very lucky that it took me to some good places,” he says. “But I don’t consider it thoughtful or intentional.”
Starting Oaktree changed that. Leadership, he argues, is by definition proactive, “Entrepreneurship,” he says, “is the epitome of intentionality, where the entrepreneur naturally, innately, does the opposite of drifting down the river.”
On Ego, Change, and the Generational Tension
Marks is precise about the kind of ego that destroys relevance. When asked how someone can trigger the realisation that they need to constantly evolve, Marks is honest about the limits of advice: “The really hard questions are the ones that start with the word ‘how.’” He describes the importance of second-level thinking, of superior insight, of staying sharp. “You can’t coach height,” he says, borrowing from basketball.
At 80, Marks still reads across fields he knows nothing about, does puzzles, and actively pursues new ground. He describes this not as leisure but as survival. Marks frames staying relevant as a practice, a hunger to learn and to stay stimulated.
On the father-son dynamic, Marks is candid about what he gained from living with his son Andrew during the pandemic. “Speaking with young people is how you learn,” he says. “They know stuff you don’t know because they are still learning, and they learnt more recently.” Andrew’s observation that readily available quantitative information about the present cannot hold the key to investment success because everybody has it is described as “almost revelatory.”
Why This Episode
Nikhil Kamath, reflecting on the conversation, noted: “What struck me about Howard is that he does not separate the investing mind from the entrepreneurial one. He talks about going into fields nobody else likes, about serendipity, about being at the front of the line and then shares, with complete honesty, that he didn’t figure out where the front of the line was. Somebody put him there. That kind of candour about luck, combined with the discipline he brought once he was there, is what makes this conversation valuable to young entrepreneurs today who are navigating AI cycles, credit conditions, and market psychology they did not create.”
Marks closes the episode by describing investing as “a puzzle, a challenging puzzle”. He cautions against the need to be right all the time. He draws on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s distinction between investing and dentistry: the dentist fills a cavity the same way every time and succeeds every time; the investor deals with a puzzle where no laws work absolutely. “You’re never done,” Marks says. “And that makes it interesting.”
The episode is now Live on YouTube and was released on May 5, 2026. Listeners and readers are invited to engage with Marks’s thinking on debt investing and credit, AI and its limits, the discipline of staying relevant at 80, and the values; frugality, intentionality, the courage to abandon what has always worked, that underpin both sound investing and sound entrepreneurship
