We have not yet experienced a winter with COVID-19. And loosely speaking, if you look at outbreaks, if you look at hot zones, one of the key drivers and the key signals is when people have to spend time indoors ... When the Northeast, when the Midwest, when the Rust Belt, when it starts to get cold up there, this could get really fucking ugly. I mean really world-class ugly.

We are losing more people per day right now [as of late November 2020 due to COVID-19] than we have lost in any crisis. We are losing more people per day right now than we lost in World War II, the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam conflict. We have never had this velocity of death in any crisis in America.

San Francisco, right now, is a hellscape ... It is an ad for what happens when [the] far left takes over a municipality ... San Francisco is just a lesson in how not to run a city right now.

The key is not finding your passion but finding your talent and then committing to developing mastery. And if you can develop mastery in anything that has a 90+ percent employment rate... the economic accoutrements, the camaraderie, the prestige, the relevance, just the sheer joy of mastery will make you passionate about whatever it is.

We ignore the massive sacrifices that people have made such that we can say bullshit things like 'I'm not wearing my mask to Walmart because that's tyranny.' Jesus Christ, you want fucking tyranny? Go 70 years back and find yourself a 17-year-old boy in Germany, and then you're gonna find out what tyranny is.

I think GLP-1 is bigger than GPT-4.

Young, ambitious, creative people who want to make magic with their lives and their work go to a city ... Whether it was Louis Vuitton hiking into Paris barefoot; whether it was explorers going into Madrid or to Lisbon to raise money so they could get a ship, and take off, and try to conquer new worlds; the most talented people in the world are drawn to cities. And the best city in the world... is singular, and it's the city we're from: It's New York.

I'm gonna say the key to my success is rejection. I've had a lot of the marketplace, businesses, capital providers, women have provided a great deal of rejection for me. And my skill is my ability to endure that and move on and not lose my sense of enthusiasm.

Vaccine hesitancy has basically been a function of three group—and that is young people, people of color, and then hardcore Republicans. And we made a lot of progress on the first two; it's the third that is standing hard.

I've been thinking a lot about crypto, and I think the discussion around the environment, it's a worthwhile discussion... I think there's a much bigger concern around crypto that doesn't get nearly the attention it should—and that is its threat to the USD as the default currency.

The sexier the business, the lower return on investment.

These [COVID-19] vaccines are arguably, if you actually believe in data, arguably the most successful vaccines or the safest vaccines in the history of vaccines.

I'm still very anxious about money ... I like to be very open about money because I think that not talking about money is basically a decorum that is promoted by the incumbents and the wealthy.

If you're blessed with good relationships, if you're blessed with some level of economic security, if you're at a point in the trajectory [of] your career where you're on the back nine as opposed to the front nine, you're living your best life.

'08 to present is probably going to go down as the greatest extended bull market run in history. People don't understand just what an anomaly the last 16 years have been relative to the history of the market.

That would be my advice to people is be humble when you have wins—because a lot of it isn't you—but also forgive yourself because, you know, again, a lot of it isn't you.

If you're ambitious and you want to have influence or economic security, before you collect dogs and kids, you got to get to a city. Two-thirds of economic growth is going to happen in just 20 cities.

If I look at the nine businesses I've started and I try to find the signals to distinguish the winners from the losers, the only thing I can discern is when I started companies in recession, they succeeded, and when I started companies in boom times, they failed.

If I were just an economic animal, I'd want to be in remote healthcare or telemedicine. I think that is going to admit the first trillionaire. I think the startups there are going to be huge.

The ability to mourn and move on is key. And the wonderful thing about America is that we don't embrace failure—that's bullshit—but we tolerate it.

We have been tracking savings rates, the percentage of income Americans save by household for, I think, 40 or 50 years. It hit a new record this last quarter [Q3 2020]. Americans have never saved as much money. We're in a crisis, and Americans have never saved as much. Our savings rate is at an all-time high.

Our economy was dysfunctional, and it's gone dystopian. When you have an acceleration in wealth of a quarter of a trillion dollars among the wealthiest eight people in America, and then you have a situation where you could have record evictions... One in three people, supposedly, are more than 30 days behind on their rent.

This notion, the myth of balance, get over it. If you expect to be influential or economically secure, you're not gonna have a lot of balance for a long period of time.

No company that engaged in share buybacks should get a single dollar of federal help. That's ridiculous in my opinion.