The Most Eye Opening 70 Minutes Of Your Life — Warren Buffett’s Legendary Speech | Big Money Investing Review

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my job as the leader of berkshire hathaway is to have visions and goals for the company overall with a long time horizon attached to them and then to get those goals accomplished through other people that’s well that’s what it’s all about i can’t do it myself so i have to i have to know where i want us to get to i have to see over the next mountain if possible but then i have to get a lot of other people to look over that mountain with me and really do the job i mean they are the ones that get it accomplished so it’s getting things done through other people now berkshire is like some many large corporations in certain ways but it’s really quite different in many ways we have over 150 000 people now working for berkshire hathaway in dozens of companies throughout this country primarily and even abroad a little bit we have exactly 15.8 people in headquarters and debray came down with me today so we’ve only got 13.8 uh there today when we’re probably working just as well with those 13.8 as we would if deb and i were in the office but that’s an unusual organization we have dozens of operating managers ceos of their businesses out there running them today and they do it without any direction from the home office except for one very limited piece of direction that i give them which i’ll get to in a second but we have these people and they’re an unusual group of people running these businesses because most of them have sold their businesses to us and they’re very very wealthy three-quarters of our managers do not need to work financially you have no reason financially to work probably quarters of them are worth at least 50 million dollars and we have some that are worth in the billions and yet these people jump out of bed every morning and work and they work weekends and they love working and why is that and what’s the key to that the key really is the same reason i keep working you know i’m 72 i’m getting social security now so i’m you know i i should be in florida you know pushing shuffleboard around or something of the sort but but i do what i can do anything in the world i want to do but what i want to do is run berkshire hathaway now why do i want to rub it that way there’s a couple things you know a i get to paint my own painting you know i go down there every day and i feel like you know i feel like michelangelo there you know working on the sistine chapel or something nobody else may think it’s a great painting but i get to paint my own penny i do not have people second guessing me i do not have people saying why don’t you use a little more red paint than blue paint why don’t you paint a seascape instead of a landscape i get to do my own thing it’s a form of creativity it’s exactly like somebody feels it’s a professional golfer or somebody feels it’s a painter they’re not doing it for the money primarily they’re doing it because they like doing something well and that they it happens to be down the route of their talents and the second thing i like frankly is i like i like applause i like appreciation so i like having shareholders who feel good about what i’ve done i mean you know i have a 96 year old aunt and her husband went to university nebraska too and she has all her money in berkshire hathaway and she counts on me and she’s out in palm springs now and her whole net worth is in berkshire and i’ve got cousins and i’ve everybody in our family has got all their money in berkshire and so those people are counting on me and that’s kind of fun to have something where you can actually deliver for other people and change their lives in positive ways as a matter of fact we had a couple that nobody had ever heard of up until a few years ago the others in new york they came from omaha not sure which high school she went to an almost probably south high they left 750 million dollars when they died nobody ever heard of them and i think a substantial portion yeah went right here to the university of nebraska it was probably a total surprise to the university when they got i don’t know you probably got 150 million or so yeah yeah well you should thank the operators but nevertheless you know you see the money you see good things happening out of it so it’s fun i mean it’s uh it beats playing golf every day or something of the sort so i say if that’s what turns me on what’s going to turn on these managers that are out there running things like clayton homes or or we’ve got a company flight safety with trains more pilots than anybody in the world flight safety is run by an 85 year old man al ulshi al started the company with ten thousand dollars in 1951 it now trains four or five times as many pilots as non-military pilots as anybody in the world and he is there at 85 and it’s a matter of public record he’s got a billion dollars worth of berkshire shares he works seven days a week he loves it and he loves it for the same reason that i love what i do he gets to do it his way he buys these big simulators that you train pilots in he doesn’t have to check with me as to whether to spend 15 million dollars for a simulator he doesn’t ask me he knows so much more about it than you know that i do why in the world would he ask me well i can’t tell what kind of a plane i’m in you know when i’m flying around and and al is spending a couple hundred million dollars a year on simulators spending berkshire hathaway money and he never checks with alma he’s never had to come to omaha for any kind of meetings he runs his own business and that’s what he loves in life and i let him do it i mean that’s my contribution to it is is really turning loose his energies and you know they were properly directed before we bought the company seven or eight years ago why do why should i think that you know he couldn’t keep running it after that and like i say at 85 he’s still running it the second thing that our managers like in addition to this painting their own painting is they too love applause i report in my annual report accurately what they have accomplished but they accomplished a lot you heard susan jock i think some weeks ago uh here susan came to borsheims and she was making four dollars an hour four dollars an hour before she was 40 she became ceo of the second largest independent jewelry operation in the united states you know from four bucks an hour but it’s talent you know and and susan knows more about i don’t know about jewelry you know you could hand me a phony diamond or real diamond i couldn’t tell the difference but if i started telling susan what to order in the way of jewelry or if i started telling her what kind of terms to extend the customers or who to hire anything like that you know she doesn’t need that in life she really owns borsheims you know we have the stock certificate we get the profits we get accustomed to but it’s her baby it’s her baby she decides you know everything about that place and so it’s her creation and that feeling of ownership is really extraordinary and it’s so much better i mean it’s the way i like to work it’s the way susan jock likes to work it’s the way al yoshi likes work and susan like anybody else in this world loves being appreciated i mean it should be something wrong with her she didn’t and the truth is nobody appreciates her more than i do i mean she is a talent we are lucky to have her and we’re lucky to have all of these other managers so leadership at berkshire really consists of taking a bunch of people who in a baseball analogy would be 400 hitters and just handing them the bat and just telling them to get up their plate and take a big swing there’s very little to it beyond that one thing i do is i send them a letter we don’t have meetings in omaha some of our managers there aren’t any meetings and there are no catechism or anything else once every two years i send them a letter this is it one and a roughly one and a one and a half pages or so the only instruction they get from us they don’t they don’t send budgets to us we don’t we don’t care about them some of the companies use budget some don’t use budgets we adjust to them some of the managers i talk to a couple times a week because they like to talk frequently some of them i talk to literally once a year because they don’t like to talk to me and whatever you know it’s up to them i i adapt to them the only thing i tell them and this letter which went on january 20th 2003 it says it’s been two and a half years since my last memo now how many big companies have you have the managers out there been two and a half years since they’ve heard from the home office been two and a half years since my last memo here are a couple things to keep in mind and number one and this is number one every time this doesn’t change it won’t change two years from now or four years from now or six years number one we can afford to lose money even a lot of money we cannot afford to lose reputation even a shred of reputation let’s be sure that everything we do in business can be reported on the front page of a national newspaper in an article written by an unfriendly but intelligent reporter in many areas including acquisitions berkshire’s results have benefited from its reputation and we don’t want to do anything that in any way can tarnish it last year berkshire was ranked by fortune as the fourth most admired company in the world this year we were third in the united states they just published it it took us 37 years to get there but we could lose it in 37 minutes and that’s the message i mean we you know we we can lose money it does you know nicer to make money but we’ve got we’ll figure out ways to make money but we can’t lose we can’t lose a shredder reputation because you don’t get it back and you can i said 37 minutes but you can lose it a lot faster than that you can lose it in five minutes and in fact i was talking to bruce coming in and he did some work around solomon brothers and i went back there 11 years ago because this firm it had the second largest balance sheet in the united states at that time it was a preeminent firm on wall street john good friend who who ran it had his picture on the front of business week as the king of wall street and in april late april 1991 he made a fateful decision it was reported to him that an employee down the line had flim-flammed the us treasury had broken some rules tried to play games with him and john did not report that fact to the treasury or to the federal reserve or to the fcc or to anybody else he didn’t do anything wrong himself but he just he got behind the curve he didn’t report it the president of the company tommy strauss didn’t report it if you saw that katie couric show on sunday night on the central park jogger tom strauss was on there but tom strauss ended up getting losing his he was president of solomon brothers john was chairman john good friend they didn’t do anything they dawdled and after a few weeks the same guy that had done committed the terrible acts earlier on may 15th he did the same thing again at a treasury auction and now they were in this terrible pickle because they’d known about this on about april 28 that this guy was a bad actor and they hadn’t done anything and now on may 15th he does the same thing again and now if they go they start feeling if they go and talk about it you know the people will say well why weren’t you in here before so they just kept trying to shove it out of their mind and do other things and it came within inches of destroying the firm it destroyed their careers i mean john good friend who had spent 30 years in wall street and had a fire fine reputation the king of wall street was brought down by one simple act of omission all he had to do was pick up the phone jerry corrigan was head of the new york fed he had to pick up the phone and say jerry you won’t believe this but this crazy guy in our treasury department delaney mosher has just done this thing and i’m terribly embarrassed and what can we do to make it right i mean you know and jerry corrigan being jerry corrigan would have turned red in the face and gotten very mad and issued a lot of language i couldn’t repeat here but in the end he would have said thanks for calling and telling us about it immediately you know and we’ll slap a fine on you or do whatever is appropriate and the next day the firm would have gone on fine but john good friend actually you know a perfectly okay guy but he just he didn’t act when it counted and tommy strauss who was number two the same way and later on they were fined and and a certain way kicked out of the securities industry and solomon barely survived 8 000 employees around the world had their future in real jeopardy because of that single act so just just apply the newspaper test that’s why i i tell our managers i could have a thousand page book of ethics i could have all kinds of rules and hundreds of you know but in the end just all you got to do is think about you know you really want what you’re doing put on the front page of the paper tomorrow to be read by your parents by your by your spouse by your kids by your neighbors by your co-workers and if you’re embarrassed about it you know just forget about it you know that you’re all going to do well financially you know the nice thing about it is you know you live in america in the year 2003 you don’t live in bangladesh you don’t live in america you know of 1790 when it would uh you live in a society which has a gdp of over 10 trillion and you can just pick up the crumbs and you’re gonna do great you know it’s you’ve all got the qualities it takes three qualities essentially to do well and extremely well actually in this country it takes intelligence it takes energy and it takes integrity now everybody in this room has the requisite intelligence you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t i mean it doesn’t take 180 iqs although i’m sure you all have those but uh it takes reasonable intelligence you’re getting a great education you’ve got the energy that’s why you’re you know you’ve shown up uh in school and it takes integrity and i say if you don’t have integrity we don’t want to hire somebody that’s got intelligence and energy if they don’t have integrity we’d rather hire somebody that’s dumb and lazy if they don’t have integrity because they probably will never get around to cheating as they’re doing something last thing in the world i want us is somebody that’s relaxing moser had intelligence and energy at solomon he was he was head of the government bond trading thing and he had lots of intelligence and he had lots of energy and he went to jail uh and he almost brought down the firm and integrity is absolutely an option you know you may not be able to throw a football 60 yards and you know you may not be able to run the hundred in in nine eight you know you may not be able to sink three pointers from but you can choose where you stand on the integrity scale you weren’t born wired one way or the other that is an absolute choice you make the heroes i’ve had in life have been the people that i felt stood out in that respect my number one hero was my dad but i’ve had other heroes tom murphy ben graham people like that the reason i admired them was not because they were the smartest people in the world although they were punishment and it wasn’t it wasn’t because they made the most money that meant nothing it’s really because i felt they were the classiest people that i ever met in my life i mean i saw them behave over year after year after year in a way that i could write their story on the front page of any newspaper and even in an unfriendly tone and i i could not do anything that would embarrass them in the least they they behaved extraordinarily well and having the right heroes you know is is terribly important you know you tell me who a ten-year-old’s heroes are and i can give you a pretty good prediction about about how they’re going to turn out you want to choose your heroes very carefully because you’re going to you’re going to look like them at some point and you’re lucky if you’ve got if you’ve got the right ones i’ll give you an aside and then we’ll get on to your questions but it’s something you know you’re not parent most of you but if you when you’re a parent you are the natural hero of your child i mean you know you’re this great big thing here there’s two of you great big things and there’s a little tiny child dependent on everything you are the natural hero and anything they get in school subsequently everything else they’re going to be shaped more by what they see in this behavior of of yours toward them than than anything that will impact them uh later in their lives and if uh they want you to be the hero you can destroy that of course and you know you’ve seen it done many many times but actually if the if the parents are proper heroes the the child is about ninety percent of the way home and uh you know you’re lucky if you’ve had parents like that and you can be that to your children or you can you can be something else and you’re shaping that person that it’s nice to learn accounting when you get to nebraska but the behavior model that you take on is is incredibly important you know i when i came down today it’s been 54 years since i drove down what was in the highway 6 the cornhusker highway to come to lincoln to school and even then there was a lot of nostalgia attached with it because my father had attended the university of nebraska in the 1920s he was editor of the daily nebraskan and one day a young woman from west point a student came in to apply for a job as a reporter on the daily nebraskan and my father not only hired her as a reporter but he married her shortly thereafter so both my parents attended here my grandfather on my mother’s side was here in the in the 1890s and so a lot of good things have happened to me because of the university of nebraska i received a terrific education here i was telling the dean the most valuable thing i learned here but i learned a lot but the most valuable was accounting and we had a wonderful professor named ray dean there may even be something named for him down here isn’t it yeah i mean he was uh i’d been to the wharton school i went to columbia graduate school uh subsequently but and i took a lot of accounting courses but by far the best instruction i received in accounting came from radian and and there’s nothing more important people ask me what they should take in business school and and uh or even if they don’t go to business school what they need to know before getting in business and i tell them you know you have to understand accounting it’s the language i mean it would be it’s like being in a foreign country without knowing the language if you’re in business and you don’t understand accounting so it you want to get as comfortable with that as you are with the english language it it’s made me uh a lot of money because i i listened to what ray dean had to say 53 or 4 years ago and have been able to understand what i was seeing on pieces of paper what that told me about businesses and the limitations of what it told me about businesses i mean but that’s the way we invest uh yesterday i was in knoxville tennessee and we bought a company we agreed to buy a company called clayton homes about a week ago it’s a big company in the manufactured home business we agreed to pay 1.7 billion dollars for it i made that deal over the phone without ever meeting the people there but i had seen enough through reading 10ks 10 qs and your reports but looking at figures what they tell me in terms of the kind of people even running the place the kind of accounting decisions they make and so on i was able to make that 1.7 billion dollar transactions over the phone yesterday was the first time i met the people and their board of directors had actually approved the deal a week earlier you know i couldn’t have done that if i hadn’t have uh had a great time in ray dean’s class 53 years ago so if i’m if i’m going to tout one thing aside from this particular leadership class of course uh if i’m going to tell one thing i would tell you that get comfortable with it you know it may not happen the first week or the first month in the class but but get very comfortable with accounting so that i run into ceos periodically who really don’t understand it you know they try to bluff their way through you can just see you can see in their faces they’re frightened almost when they somebody hands them a balance sheet or an income statement they really don’t know what it means and they have to count on somebody else and that’s something you shouldn’t count on we make all our acquisition decisions ourselves i mean we don’t call in consultants or anybody we don’t call in investment bankers much to their disgust no investment banking fees in the clayton holmes deal because you know it’s my responsibility running berkshire to understand enough about our acquisition decisions uh to make them based on the numbers that i see and and what i see there this course however is about leadership and i’d like to talk just for a minute about that and then i’d like to really talk about whatever’s on your mind and i’ll we’ll get questions but you know leadership obviously is it’s a very simple thing in concept uh let’s talk about what’s on your mind now good morning when you were rejected from uh harvard business school is obviously somewhat of a failure in your mind how do you adapt to your failures in life to make you more successful yeah well that’s that’s a very good question you know how do you turn failure into a plus it’s true when i was at the university of nebraska one day i was reading the daily nebraskan and it said in room 300 or something at three o’clock there will be this panel of three professors here at the university and they’re going to award the nathan gold scholarship i don’t know whether you still you still have that room and at the time uh it said it would give you 500 to go to the graduate school of your choice i don’t know whether it’s changed in the amount but but that that was it so i read this and i went there to this room at three o’clock that day or whatever it was and i walked in the room and there were the professors and i was the only student that showed up i mean it really got to them i mean they they were stuck they you know they kept waiting and looking at their watch and hoping there would be more candidates but there no one came in so i won 500 by by default and those are usually my biggest triumphs when nobody else shows up and so here i was i had 500 to go toward any it wasn’t it wasn’t limited any graduate school for a master’s degree so i applied to harvard my dad wanted me to and i shortly heard from harvard and they said go to chicago and meet this fellow running that who interviews applicants from the midwest so i got on the train and that’s what you did in those days and i spent about 10 hours on the burlington going to chicago then i transferred to another little interurban train to go up to this country day school where this fellow was the headmaster and he was the big interviewer for harvard and i got there and after about 10 minutes he he said better think about something else that you know he uh come back later on i was i was 19 at the time and i looked about 12 you know and and i and i acted about eight uh it was not a great combination uh so he he said forget it so i spent uh took the little interurban train back to chicago and i took the 10-hour train back to oman all the time you know what do i tell my parents you know it’s kind of embarrassing uh but it was it was the luckiest thing ever happened to me i because if i’d gone to harvard i would have gone to a two-year business school i i instead applied to columbia where i could graduate in one year and get a master’s degree luckily by the accident of it and being in the nebraska national guard which did not get called up for the korean war i missed going in the korean war i got to meet ben graham and which had an enormous effect on me subsequently and i probably got my wife that way because she was going to northwestern and i was able to put on sort of a full court press because i got out in one year and otherwise uh she’d she’d have met some other guy i mean i i got her before the competition showed up and uh so it worked out wonderfully it couldn’t have worked out better that’s been my life basically i mean it the things you know you will get some disappointments you know but the future is what counts that’d be fun if i knew every decision i was going to be perfect it would not be as much fun be like playing golf and knowing you’re going to hit a hole in one on every hole you wouldn’t play golf if every time you got on a tee you just took a swing and the ball ended up in the hole you know be fun for a few days you get on tv but it the game would not be any fun so it’s failure you know and i wouldn’t even consider them failures but they’re mistakes or whatever you want to call it they’re they’re part of the game and in the end you know you go on and and we’ve made plenty of mistakes in business we’ll make plenty more and then you know the babe ruth and you know for a long time it subsequently got eclipsed by a few fellows but uh he held the record for strikeouts you know also the record for home runs and was highest played baseball player until the modern era came along so it’s it’s part of the game if you take big swings you know you you’re going to miss sometimes but you know the harvard thing you’ll get a kick out of this they invited me back to the 25th anniversary of this class to talk to them uh and i went back it was it was kind of embarrassing because this was the 25th reunion and and the class was talking about the next 25 years to these alumni that were back after 25 years and my job was to talk about the next 20 your financial future in the next 25 years this was in whenever it was in the mid 70s and right before me on the program masters and johnson were talking on the next 25 years of their sex lives so nobody stayed around for my talk but that night that night at the uh at the alumni meeting they uh uh the fellow was president of class we said you know we’re big enough to make admit when we make mistakes around here and we turn this guy down threw him back in the water and so now we’d like to make him an honorary member of the class uh so they did it and they voted and everybody voted for it and i stood up and i said i recited the story that i told you and i told them you know i said at the time i was kind of philosophical about this you know i was young and maybe my grades weren’t that good or something and so i took the took the rejection kind of well but i said now that i’ve met the people that got into class i’m really sore okay who’s next i guess my question for you is after you’re dead how do you want to be remembered and how do you go about it and how do you go about in your daily life ensuring that you’re going to be remembered now yeah well really i only want the the minister to say one thing at my funeral if he gets up there and they play a few little hymns and everything uh maybe they’ll play there is no place like nebraska that’d be great i just want him to stay up there and say my god he was old you know i’ll settle for that but the truth is that to some extent berkshire’s my creation so i would like to the extent that people regard that well that’s what counts i mean that’s my painting and and and i hope that people look at i’ve been running out for almost 38 years but just about 38 years exactly and that means i only got another 30 or 40 to go and uh i hope that we have done some things differently than other corporations we’ve operated on a different model and i hope two things about it actually i hope a that people realize that that model works and why it works and so on because it is it does conflict with certain management theory uh over the years and secondly the important thing is that it that it lasts well beyond me i was down at walmart six months ago and talked to their management group and it was i had a great time what is really astounding i voted for walmart as the most admired company in the in the country last year that was my that’s where my vote went it was astounding what sam walton built starting in bentonville arkansas with a pickup truck taking on jcpenney and kmart and sears and all of these people with no money you know no real estate no preference with vendors no credit card lists anything he just took him on and of course he just ran ran away from him but the really impressive thing about walmart is that sam died about 11 years ago and that there’s been no momentum lost i mean what he instilled in that company nobody else could have built it like sam but david glass first and lee scott now as the ceo they have kept that company with its special culture going at full steam ever since and that that’s really what i hope you know happens with berkshire and i’ve tried to think about ways to to make that happen but the real test will be if 10 or 20 years after i die that the special culture that i think is part of berkshire is not only just as strong as ever but even stronger we have a situation at berkshire where in 38 years we got all kinds of ceos up there running all kinds of businesses three or four of them in omaha we have never had one ceo ever leave us period uh to go someplace else i mean i don’t think i don’t know that there’s any place like that in the country so it’s it’s been a and we’ve never issued a stock option you know you know you’re reading the papers that you you know you got to have stock options to attract quality people that sort of thing i mean we never had we’ve never had uh how to share them and and and in the end i don’t know how many dozens of managers we’re talking about but no one has ever has ever left for another job and someone been offered way more money in fact the g jane who runs orange reinsurance operation probably could have increased his income ten times ten fold now he’s already making many millions but but tenfold but he doesn’t want to leave and that is the culture that i hope we can maintain and that’s what i’d really like to be if i’ve done anything to contribute to that uh continuing after i die that wouldn’t that would be terrific of course i i actually plan to keep managing berkshire after i die you have to understand that i i have given all the managers ouija boards you know and i’ve i’ve got these dark rooms they’re going to go into and i’ll be there mrs b at nebraska fernie park worked to 103 at berkshire and she’s she’s sort of our examples and and then she then she took off from work and she died the next year so it’s very dangerous to to quit as early as that how do you determine what where you make your donations oh well there’s a buffett foundation uh eventually it will have everything i mean basically everything i’ve made will go back to society america has been done it for me and you know it should that’s where it should go i’ve got about an eight-page letter that the trustees have already seen and so there’s very few trustees i don’t believe in large groups of people making decisions it gets to be you know it sort of descends to the lowest common denominator so there’s only what maybe five or six trustees uh interestingly enough not just by accident but i picked the people who i trust in the most in terms of both their intelligence but also their quality uh to run it after i know people i feel the surest of uh a significant majority will be women it’ll be a women woman controlled foundation and probably the largest foundation in the world at the time uh but with a very small number of manager trustees i have in my letter i tell them that i’m not going to give them any specific instructions as to what to do with the money i tell them that their judgment above ground will be better than my judgment six feet underground so in the end i want them but i want them to do a couple of things i want them to attack really big important causes i don’t want them to give a million dollars here at a million dollars there and everybody that you know that asks that they know and that sort of thing so i don’t want them doing things with an eyedropper i want them to swing take very big swings and then i want them to measure what they’re doing by the importance of what they’re doing as contrasted to the natural funding constituency for that now take in the health field i mean you got the national institute of health spending billions and billions of dollars you got all kinds of money going into medical research it’d be crazy in my view for the buffett foundation to be engaged in medical research it’s not that the subjects aren’t isn’t important but there’s already a huge funding constituency it would be crazy for the money to go to harvard or something of the sort it isn’t it isn’t a fine educational institution but you’ve got all of these people that give money to harvard and they’ve got a rich alumni base and all of that sort of thing so i want the combination of a terribly important program and the lack of a natural funding constituency well where do you find that you find that with unpopular causes to quite a degree rockefeller felt somewhat the same way it’s interesting he was the first major patron of any sort of of black colleges in the united states now if you think about it black colleges had no funding constituency i mean their alumni didn’t have any money basically if you go back 75 or 100 years so there wasn’t any money coming and people didn’t you know they didn’t build great businesses and then and then leave tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to the institution and it wasn’t it was self-perpetuating and so rockefeller stepped in and he he took a group of black colleges and funded them in a very very big way and i i admire that kind of a decision enormously when otherwise nothing would have happened and and that’s what i hope the trustees of the the buffalo foundation do i was with bill gates last week with it and i consider his foundation he and melinda together because they’re equal partners in it i consider their foundation to be the most logical big foundation in the world they’re giving away about a billion dollars a year now bill said and melinda said to themselves how do we save the most lives per dollar spent in the world and they decided that in certain major medical areas that what was being done abroad in many countries was zilch in terms of these things that were easily preventable by vaccines or various other things and they decided they could save huge numbers of lies per billion dollars spent but they’d be spending it you know in places like indiana and africa where they would get no credit in the united states i mean no buildings with their names no nothing but that was their metric and that’s that’s bill’s soul metric i mean he he doesn’t want to talk about you can go to him with some proposition to stick his name on something you know for 50 million dollars it doesn’t interest him at all he is it’s a totally rational one and he pours himself into it uh he he has educated himself on on medicine and particularly medicine outside the united states in a way that i’ve never seen anybody and i’ve got the good news of it this you should write down on may 2nd on public broadcasting there will be a program with bill moyers bill moyers is interviewing him and bill explains his philanthropic thinking i went there it was taped at columbia university in fact you may even see me in the audience sitting next to melinda but it’s going to be a great program they took about an hour and 20 minutes and it’s going to get edited down to 56 or 58 minutes but you will hear as cogent an argument of for rational philanthropy on that program as you’ll ever hear in in your life so i i it’s interesting that program came about because about two years ago i asked bill a question at a group i get together something akin to what you asked him i asked him to talk about the evolution of his philanthropic thinking and there were a group of about 60 of us there and he talked to us and i mean it was a fabulous talk and i i just i said you know you got to get that out in the public domain somehow so so this thing with bill moyers does that if i die tonight all my berkshire shares which are 99 of my network plus go to my wife uh she dies first hers go to me and then it all goes to the buffett foundation and it will then be active on a on a very big scale and those are the guidelines and who knows what those problems will be i mean it probably it might well have been civil rights in the early 60s i mean at the the civil rights organizations you know we’re not being funded by anybody and i mean it money wasn’t the big problem but it was a problem in the civil rights arena and there was no natural funding constituency for that it was an important and very important issue but it was an unpopular issue in many respects uh and seems to me that’s where the money money should go particularly if you have it on a big scale where you can really do something depends when i die but but you know 10 or 15 years from now the foundation could really i mean they could have a lot of money and and uh so they could do some things that nobody else could attempt and it won’t be what people want them to do you know that’s the nature of it and it was what people wanted to do it’d already be being done interesting thing the contrast between business and philanthropy is interesting in business i swing at easy pitches i stand there at the plate and if i like pitches one inch above my navel right in the center of the plate i can wait and wait and wait because there’s no called strikes you know as long as that bats on my shoulder nobody’s calling a strike if the pitchers throws me general motors at 36 ibm at 82 microsoft at 25 and i don’t swing it’s not a strike it’s not a hit either but it’s not a strike i only when i swing is it a strike so i wait for easy pitches i wait for things i understand they’re exactly in my sweet spot philanthropy is just the opposite you’re looking at the toughest problems the world faces and they’re intractable to some extent i mean these are tough tough problems they have resisted the utilization of money over the years and that’s what makes them tough problems i mean the problems you can solve with money are the easy ones it’s the problems you can’t sell with money so they are very tough problems one one thing i’ve gotten involved in just a little bit recently is something that sam nunn is heading senator the former senator called the nuclear threat initiative and sam nunn who was who is as well informed as anybody in the world on the subject and articulate and everything is working on the problem of the nuclear materials and or nuclear talent that exists around the world that might become available to terrorists or to to governments uh to impose on the rest of the society and and they’re vast amounts of uranium and lesser amounts of plutonium and there’s a lot of unemployed russian scientists and so on so this is something that ted turner actually set up a couple of years ago and got sam to handle and because aol time warner stock which was being used to fund it from ted has gone down a lot in price they run short of money so that’s that’s something i’m involved in it doesn’t you know it’s not something that has any popular appeal you can’t raise you can’t send out something get hundreds of thousands of people to respond but but uh that’s the kind of thing that i think you know the foundation should be doing the question is with the government uh considering eliminating the double taxation on dividends would that change our attitude at berkshire toward paying dividends and what sort of decision-making uh framework do we have about whether we pay dividends or not uh berkshire i took it over 1965 and we paid 10 cents a share one year happened in the late 60s i can’t remember it i blocked it out of my mind i must have been in the men’s room or something but because that was the only dividend we paid the determination is very simple on dividends is can we retain a dollar or a billion dollars or whatever the amount is of earnings and have that dollar become worth more than a dollar uh in immediate present value now even though it may not get used for a few years or something this in other words our week is that dollar worth more than a dollar if kept in the business forgetting about taxes entirely let’s assume a total tax free society uh in terms of dividends and the answer to that so far has been yes we have kept the dollars that we’ve earned and we have created more than a dollar of market value for every dollar we retained and as long as we can do that it’s silly to pay out a dollar even if it’s not taxed and put it in my pocket where it’s still only worth a dollar if i can create more than a dollars worth of value in the stock so we have done that now for a lot of years it doesn’t mean we can do it forever but we’ve done it for a lot of years and that that is the test and you will find in the back of the berkshire hathaway annual report which we’ll be glad to send to any of you uh it’s on the internet also but you’ll find in the back of the berkshire report something that isn’t in any other report that i know of it’s something called the economic principles of berkshire hathaway that’s been in the report every year now for at least 20 years and those principles don’t change that’s why they’re principles you know and and it’s why i’m willing to lay them out i mean if i act in conflict with those principles i expect the owners to you know to call me on but i look at the investors in berkshire as my partner now i’m the managing partner they can’t because i own so much stock they can’t do much about me uh so they ought to they ought to know what the game is when they if they join us and that doesn’t mean everybody wants to join us but they ought to know what the rules are just as if you and i were starting a partnership but i was going to run it you’d want to know you know how we were going to conduct business and what my thoughts were and what my time horizon was would we ever sell what would i make distributions all that kind of thing so those principles cover this point you raised i don’t forget whether it’s a third or fourth one or something like that but but it’s it’s explained there and i want people to unders i want our owners to understand it i mean i i look at every owner when i write my annual letter to shareholders which takes me an ungodly amount of time it’s miserable but uh nevertheless it’s important because it is the one time of year i’m talking to my partners and when i started out i actually mentally put dear doris and birdie because those are my sisters and they have all their money in berkshire they’re smart they’re but they’re not financial types i mean they’re not spending their time on that and i essentially want to be talking to them as bright people who don’t know a lot of financial jargon necessarily you know but they’re but they’re interested enough that they’ll read a lot because they got all their money in it so i don’t have to worry about keeping it short or anything like that if i if i’m talking about their money i’ve probably got their interest and i take that off at the very end and then i take off dear doris and bernie i put to the shareholders of berkshire but i want to tell them exactly what they’re in i want it to be just as if our roles were reversed that’s always the test if doris and bernie were running the place and i was living in carmel california like bernie is what would i want to hear from them the managers and i one of the things i want to hear is just exactly the question that you asked you know what is the what is your attitude about distributing money from the from the company because i get to make that decision along with the board of directors and they don’t and some managements withhold money that really belongs to their owners because they like building a a kingdom some of them you know do it out of fear or anything like that i think i’m doing it for a rational reason and i want to explain that reason but i tell them how to test me on that too because i think i should be tested and and it’s a very important relationship that really has deteriorated over the years in my view between management and owners i mean you’ve seen in the last 10 years a slippage in my view of the behavior of american ceos i mean obviously all kinds of exceptions but uh it’s very interesting because they’re not crooks or anything also there’s a few and they’ve gotten a lot of publicity lately but nevertheless they have behaved as most humans do they’ve sort of picked up the behavior of those around them that’s why it takes pays to hang out with people better than you are i mean you know if you hang out with people better than you are you’ll become better yourself everybody behaves better that’s around my wife you know i mean even including me starting from a low base uh but the she just has that effect on people and other people pull you down i mean you know when i was in the national guard and we would go to camp you know in about an hour i was reading comic books you know pretty soon everybody’s reading comic books and the language you know every other word becomes some form of profanity everything you just you sink well what happened to american ceos in the in in the 90s is that they the behavior the situational ethics sort of caused behavioral norms to sink i say is a little like how may west described her career she said i was snow white but i drifted and american management drifted to quite a degree during that during that period i think it’s very important you know what that relationship is people have given you their money at berkshire hathaway or any other company and i’m a trustee for them in effect and then the question is they ought to since i control the place they ought to know the yardsticks so if you do go to our website go to the back of the report and there’s something that says economic principles and we try to discuss everything that’s important and i tell them i’m going to put them in there every year so that they can you know they can hold me accountable yeah and and uh the question is about the personal quality we look for in the in the executives we place at our various companies the first thing is we don’t usually place them i mean they come with them uh we don’t have anybody to place so i have the problem occasionally if somebody dies or to replace a ceo but most of our ceos came with the deal clayton holmes which we’re buying comes with kevin clayton running it we will put no one in there he will run the place just as before but in terms of the personal quality when a seller comes to me with a business whether it’s clayton or any of those and the others ike friedman at borsheim’s mrs b at nebraska furniture mart when they come to me the first question i have to ask myself because i’m counting on them to run the place i have to decide what do they love the money or do they love the business now there’s nothing wrong with liking the money i mean they all like money but but they’ve got to love the business they’ve got to have a passion for it because if i give them a whole bunch of money and they love the money and they don’t love the business no matter what they tell me six months from now they’ll be gone you know i mean that they’ll just all of a sudden say why am i getting up at seven in the morning just so i can send a lot of money to omaha you know i mean it it just it won’t work so they have to love the business i mean i want people with a passion for the business i used to say that i had a one-line employment form one question employment form the question was are you a fanatic you know if you answered yes you got the job because i want somebody’s fanatic about their business you know i mean you want people that love teaching if you’re in a classroom you know if they don’t have a passion for it it doesn’t work very well so i now if they’ve got the passion and our managers do but but not everybody wouldn’t uh the financial operators don’t we’ve never bought a business from an lbo operator a financial operator because they don’t they don’t give it i mean all they want to do is make sure your check clears and and they’re gone and it isn’t going to work if we try to buy from them so we buy from these people who love their businesses and really my job is just to make sure that i don’t mess it up and create conditions that cause them to quit loving it for some reason because they come in loving and only i can mess it up and they care about being treated fairly on compensation but they don’t measure it against everybody else they don’t have a lawyer they’re negotiating with me i mean i don’t have a compensation arrangement with any of these managers that can’t be put in one paragraph you know and then i go to other companies where they have a lawyer come in and there’s 80 pages you know and it tells what happens you know how much they get paid in severance if they end up going to jail you know and i just i won’t deal with somebody that thinks that way and you know that’s fine there’s a self-selection process in terms of who comes to us there’s this invisible filter out there that causes the clayton’s of the world the al yoshi’s of the world the ike fragments of the world the mrs b the world to come to us when i made the deal with mrs b in 1983 mrs b had another offer from somebody else that was somewhat higher and she just said i don’t care she only owned twenty percent of the company that she had four children the age on twenty percent she told them you know i’m selling to mr buffett she always called me mr bubbitt until once she was 104. in fact when i’d walk in the store she said here comes my new young boyfriend which i didn’t i don’t i don’t get that a lot of places i can tell you the uh she built this thing she came over here in 1921 or two she landed in seattle with a tag around her neck she couldn’t speak a word of english said fort dodge iowa she couldn’t communicate she just had the tag the american red cross got her out to fort dodge and for two years she got no place because nobody spoke uh russian and or yiddish actually and and so she moved to omaha just to be around some other russian jews who she could at least talk to she learned the english language when her oldest daughter francis would go to school and come home at night and teach her the words and she started out and she started sending 50 bucks at a time over to russia to bring her siblings she had seven siblings and her mother and father to get them over here after 16 years she brought all the family over she’d save five hundred dollars in 16 years you know peddling used clothing whatever and she started the rest of furniture with 500 and it’s now the largest home furnishings complex in the world and it all came from the 500 and a very you know special woman and can you imagine building something like that and selling it you know to some financial operator who’s going to resell it you know try and go public with a couple of years later and it you know it meant something to her she wanted to continue like it has continued those are the kind of people we want to attract it isn’t so much me selecting them it’s them selecting berkshire i mean that’s that’s the key and and frankly we’ve gotten to that position in this country where the people that do care about their businesses good size businesses there’s no second choice beyond besides berkshire we we get them you know they they come to us we had a woman doris christopher come to us last year doris christopher in 1980 had two little girls lived in chicago lived in a probably twenty thousand dollar house and she and her husband both work she’s looking for something to do to make a little extra money she thought about catering and decided that it would take her away from the kids too much so she decided that what she knew best though was she’d been a home equity teacher she knew cooking and she knew the kitchen and what was useful to people so she borrowed three thousand dollars in our life insurance policy that’s all she had she went down to the merchandise martin chicago and said what’s the least amount of this utensil or that utensil a manufacturer would sell usually a dozen and she took them home and then she got the idea that she would hold these parties essentially in people’s homes and so she arranged with a woman in suburban chicago to hold the first party she almost turned back she started driving there she thought they’ll laugh at me and i’d lock the stuff over and they won’t buy you know what she do she’s very unsure of herself but she went there she sold i think 175 worth of goods that i she sold me her business last year that business made 140 million dollars pre-taxed from this 3 000 investment you know that woman had a passion for her business and she understood her customer and she loved her customers she loved the people that worked with him she got 67 000 associates it’s called the pampered chef some of you may have been to a pampered chef party almost one woman out of 10 in the united states bought something from us last year and unfortunately i have to acknowledge that she probably didn’t understand accounting that well but she understood her customer and she understood people she likes people you know i i met her one time but when she wanted to sell her business there wasn’t anybody else to sell to as far as she was concerned she just she came to omaha we made a deal in a few minutes uh we made it the compensation deal took us you know 15 seconds she’s running the business i’ve never been there they’re in chicago i hope they’re there i mean we paid a lot of money for this i mean someday we’ll buy a business and they’ll just be some guy in a closet somebody’s saying you know what figure shall i send warren this month but but uh i’ve never been there you know i’ve i’ve met her and i’ve seen the results of what she’s done and she is in love with the company how do i value the business as berkshire acquires well the first thing i have to decide when somebody calls me is valuing this business within my circle of competence i don’t know how to value microsoft i don’t know how to value oracle i mean if you know larry ellison calls me or bill gates calls me and they don’t but if any of those i don’t know or biotech or anything i wouldn’t know how to value it i just you know i’d wish them well and tell them you know i think it’s worth twice as much as they think it is but i’m just not in the mood to buy today uh i don’t know so it has to be within my circle of confidence my circle of competence you know businesses i can understand and when i say understand i don’t mean to understand how to use a computer and not use a computer in terms of a computer company i mean understand what the economic characteristics of the business are and what the company’s really going to look like in 5 or 10 or 20 years bill gates will tell you that if you hear investing he would buy berkshire rather than microsoft because it’s so much easier to understand what our businesses are going to look like whereas he’s in a business where you’re going to really have to be doing things differently over time so i know that wrigley’s gonna be the number one chewing gum in the country i know stickers are gonna be the number one candy bar in the country 10 years now it’s been the number one candy bar for 40 years you don’t have to be very bright to understand that when people lay out 50 cents for something that they stick in their mouth that they’re not about to experiment you know i mean it’s so we try to look at businesses we can understand now i i got a call a year and a half ago from a fellow i never heard of him in denver his name was craig ponzio craig called me up and never heard of him and he said i’ve got a business that’s your kind of business i want to sell it here’s the reasons having to do it with health although i don’t pay much attention to the reasons uh and he said it’s the leading company by far in the custom picture frame business and he said let me tell you why it has what i call durable competitive advantage that’s what i call durable competitive energy so let me tell you why it has it he said there are 18 000 people that frame pictures in the united states little mom-and-pop operations every time lincoln will have a half a dozen you know almost have a dozen and they frame pictures i go over to get a picture frame i hand it to somebody i say you i follow their judgment i say you know biggest thing i want is i want a good looking frame i want it back soon i want quick delivery well with 18 000 people in that business and a zillion kinds of picture frames nobody can carry a big inventory because they don’t do that much business i mean it’s not walmart or something of the sort craig ponzio graduated from a little school up in wisconsin went to work in a tiny little firm that made these things five or six years later bought the place when it was doing three million dollars a year now does 300 million dollars a year and it totally dominates the wooden custom frame business why does it dominate it it dominates it because it calls on these 18 000 people has a sales force calling on them six or eight times a year and it has 22 plants around the country that can get the frame that the custom framer orders 85 of the time if they order by 5 o’clock today they’ll have it by 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon now think of that coverage that’s what the customer wants they don’t care whether they pay 83 or 88 to get the thing framed they they you know you’ve got something you want done and you want it done fast and that little custom framer those 18 000 people they want happy customers and that means speed of delivery uncertainty and all that you couldn’t build a distribution system to compete with us i mean just think of trying to build a distribution system starting from scratch that would take that business away from us it can’t be done well craig explained that to me in about 15 minutes i’d never thought about the custom frame business but i you know i’ve framed pictures or had people frame before me and i understood the power of that that was a monday i said i think we can make a deal so he came on wednesday he came at nine o’clock and he left at 10 o’clock we’ve had a deal i’ve never seen him since you know he got the money promptly thereafter he wasn’t going to come the annual meeting last year but his wife was sick he’ll probably come this year he’s a good guy and no one can knock us off in that business every time i buy a business i say to myself if i had a billion dollars and i want to go and compete with these guys could i knock them off you know if you gave me a billion dollars and you told me to dislodge snickers as the number one candy bar in the country i don’t know how to do it if you tell me i’ve got a billion dollars i got to make it or 5 billion and i got to make it so that wrigley’s spearmint you know double mint juicy fruit all of those get knocked off the top gum list i can’t do it now if you give me you know if you give me a billion dollars and tell me to knock off all the ladies apparel shops in lincoln you know i’ll make mincemeat of them very fast i mean i have a very good business myself but i can destroy them and the real test is something you know can some idiot with a lot of money destroy the business you’ve got if he decides to compete with you and we we try to buy businesses where no matter who comes along they’ve got this durable competitive advantage those are the three words that come and you can make that you may be able to make that decision about companies that i can’t make that decision about they have to be pretty simple for me but we buy things that you know we have fruit of the loom underwear you know are people going to quit wearing underwear well who knows but we we sell 44 of all the men’s and boys underwear that goes through walmart and all of the mass merchandising chains we got the lowest costs around fruit of the loom is a name that’s been around since 1850 or 60. you know you if you can buy three pairs of shorts from us or six pairs or whatever it is for five and a half bucks and nobody’s gonna sell them cheaper why are you gonna buy anything else yeah so we’ll own that as unless we mess it up somewhere we’ve got a very potent advertising slogan there we cover the asses of the masses that sort of gets to it doesn’t it yeah up there okay yeah the question is since why don’t since i say one or two years doesn’t make much difference in business but longer term does how do i apply that in my life well you know i could probably give you some terribly philosophical answer on it but the truth is i get up every day and just do what i love doing and and you know i want people around me to have good experiences but you know i i the truth is i don’t spend most of my time thinking about that i mean i really i spend most of my time thinking about what can i do to keep berkshire going the way it has gone but i will tell you how to apply that and and it works reasonably well i think at berkshire because we get this self-selection of people to join i mean we have created a working environment where in 38 years nobody’s left that runs it so i you know i do feel good about that obviously i feel good about the results of the investors and you know the others and those people i mean actually i think a fellow may write a book about what’s happened with all the money that all these different people have made in berkshire but i’ll tell you the test on that and it’s a terrific question when you get to my age you will not measure how well you’ve done by how much money you’ve got i guarantee you that you’ll you’ll all do fine on money anyway i mean you know think about it seven hours a day you’re in a bed you’ve got exactly the same mattress i’ve got if you don’t whistle it to it the furniture mark you know i mean so so that when we’re on a parody i can’t i can’t outdo you you know in terms of my sleeping enjoyment you can you can match it by by buying this mattress which we’ll give you a special price on just mention my name we eat at the same places you know we eat a dairy queen particularly if you’re in my position because we own it but but we eat at dolls and burger king and and when i leave here i’ll stop by a fast food place so our eating experiences are the same we travel the same i mean i had a 10 year old car up till about a year ago you know and it just doesn’t make any difference to me and they they all work we live in a place that’s warm in the winter and it’s cool in the summer and we watch the super bowl on big screen tv you do it i do it you know we dress more or less the same i mean i pay more for my clothes but they look cheap when i put them on so we’re really we’re on a parody yeah so so the money isn’t going to be that big a deal everybody in this country is going to you know that with the intelligence this group has the energy you have you’re going to do well so what’s the difference you know what really counts well i would say that you will measure health is enormously important and that’s a matter of a fair amount of luck i mean you know i’m not shortchanging it i’m just saying you can’t do too much about that but you will measure your success in life by how many and extent whether it’s the people you want at 70 or whatever the age may be you’ll measure by how many of them really love you you know in the end you can’t buy love i mean it doesn’t work you buy sex you can buy testimonial dinners you can buy your name on buildings you can do all kinds of things but the you know love is to be lovable it’s kind of irritating actually you’ve got a lot of money it’d be more fun to just write out a check for a million dollars since everybody you know from now on loves me but it doesn’t work that way and in fact the only way is to be is to be lovable and you know i’ve got this friend who came out of auschwitz and had at least one member of the family die there what is it now 60 years later you know she still when she looks at people it’s a bullish jew the question she asks herself in determining who she really trusts his friends the one question in her mind is would they hide me now when you get to be 70 if you’ve got a lot of people that would hide you you’ve had a successful life i know people who have a tremendous amount of money no one would hide their own kids wouldn’t hide them i mean they really wouldn’t i mean their business associates wouldn’t or anybody else if it really came down to it they don’t have anybody’s respect they’ve got their attention maybe with money or something that sort but they nobody loves them my friend tom murphy at camp city’s tv i mean dozens of people would hide murph you know all kinds of people would hide my wife you know ben graham a lot of people would have my my dad it would have had a number and then like i say that i can i can tell you people that uh you know everybody may pay homage to them and the kids may put up with them and hope they don’t change their will or something but the truth is that nobody would hide them and if you’ve got a lot of people that would hide you when you get to be 70 you will have a very successful life you know the truth is the main goal i’ve had has been at berkshire i mean you know it might be more admirable to say than i was feeding the poor or something someplace in india but it isn’t true i mean it’s been the focus of my life most of the time the money will be i think used for very good purposes later on i don’t use any real amount of myself but actually somebody else is going to do most of that and and i’ve picked good people to do it and i i’ve got three kids of which i’m enormously proud and they they like each other they get you know they they do things together they work you know the the family unit works extremely well but my wife gets 99.9 of the credit for that i mean if you didn’t turn out well under her there’s something really wrong with you uh and it’s a life that’s a lot of fun but it’s i do what i enjoy doing uh you know it uh i play lots of bridge on the internet because i you know i’d like to do that more than anything else i used to do way more reading i do a lot of reading but i i used to just read all the time now i spend 12 hours a week on the internet playing bridge and i you know it’s it’s great i i will talk to the microsoft summit here in about a month and i tell this group and there’s always high-powered internet types and i tell them look at you know you guys are all failures because here i am i’ve got all kinds of money i’ve been fooling around with the internet now for 10 or 12 years i spend 12 or 14 hours a week on it mostly bridge but i do you know the google searches and if i’m writing a talk i look up all kinds of all kinds of information on it and i read the new york times the wall street journal 10 o’clock the night before and all these things and you guys are getting exactly 120 bucks a year out of me you know i mean that is a failure i they have not figured out how to get any money out of me and and i gave this talk last year and this year i’m gonna go back there and say you’ve made no progress at all you know i’m it’s 120 bucks last year’s 120 bucks this year and in between i’ve had 600 hours of enjoyment and learned all kinds of things i enjoy that more than anyone now when i was young i thought i had a lot of money i you know i i’d own a professional sports team and i play golf all the time maybe have my own private golf course all kinds of things just doesn’t mean anything to me you know i i have something where 365 days a year everything is good i work around terrific people one was here today that came with me and drove me down and i get to select the people i work with that’s a huge huge luxury i mean literally just think of if you had to work for a boss you couldn’t stand you know or work around people to cause your stomach to churn it’s just what i mean it’d be miserable so the ultimate luxury really is doing something every day that you love doing with people that you love doing it with and and i’ve got that uh by accident for some extent i say if you if you take on a job just to make a lot of money and it causes your stomach to churn you know and you go home at night and kick the dog and all that sort of thing you know that that’s a little bit like marrying for money you know it’s it’s probably a bad idea under any circumstances but if you’re already rich it’s crazy right i mean if i marry for money i mean i would have my head examined what’s it going to do you know and we’re lucky in this country i mean we won what i call the ovarian lottery when we were born in this country it was four times or likely you would have been born in china just about as likely you’ve been born in bangladesh you know you’re born in the greatest society in the world so make the most of it and have a good time yeah it’s a good question why do i stay in omaha well i love it and uh my grandfather went to central high my dad went there my wife went there my kids went there and now my grandchildren are there my grandchildren say they they have the same teacher that my grandfather had the uh there’s continuity there’s friends there there’s all kinds of things i mean there’s no disadvantage to being at home i mean i like new york when i’m there i’ve got a house in california i get around some but i can’t imagine anything better i mean i i what doesn’t it have i have a home i’ve never sold a house in my life i have a home i’ve moved into a 1958’s i’ve been there what 45 years or so i’m five minutes from the office i moved into the office in 1962 i’ve been in there 41 years we’ve just gotten so we’ve taken we take a whole floor second is 41 years to where we can use a whole floor kind of discouraging but there there i am five minutes from the off everything’s easy and it all works i’ve known the doctors all my life i’ve known everybody that i feel connected my aunt taught in the public school system in omaha i’ve named a scholar i’m the prize that i give after her but i mean it all means something and i’ve lived in new york for a couple of years i lived in washington dc for some years i never felt that kind of connection at all so and there’s absolutely no disadvantage i get the same information actually with the with the internet and you know and bloomberg and all of that i no one can get any information any faster than i can get it and uh there’s just no downside and i think it’s been a terrific environment for my kids to grow up in i mean my kids have grown up in a neighborhood perfectly normal neighborhood i mean you know no fences around it no you know no golden ghettos or anything of the sort they’ve gone to an integrated public school school has probably had between 20 and 30 black students for 75 years they have great teachers part of education is a total life experience and i think it’s great that we have a good public school system in omaha if i lived in washington or los angeles or new york i’d have to send my kids to private school and i wouldn’t want to do that i do it because i wouldn’t send him to a vastly inferior school just to prove some point so but the nice thing about is i haven’t had to make that choice no more i’ve got classy public schools the same kind i went to you know 50 or 60 years ago and they get more out of that experience in my view they have a better balanced view of life going through that experience than you know if i send them off to some private school i was with actually last week there were six couples um bill and melinda gates arranged it and and they had the headmaster of a private school in seattle that the bill went to and it’s a classy school but i gather from the in terms of the public school system that you’re making a conscious decision to hurt your kid if you don’t send them to a private school if you can afford one you know and that’s why these people do it and i don’t blame them i mean i do the same thing but the nice thing about it is that omaha and i’m sure lincoln as well and throughout nebraska we have kept a good public school system and frankly i think that’s one of the most important things in america because one of the things made it has made america what it is think about it 1776 three million people in america 300 million people in china and 100 times as many people they had the same iqs we had you know they had the same physical abilities and all that sort of thing they had a culture that went far back they had lots of natural resources we didn’t know about it then because we didn’t have oil and they didn’t have oil but we both had oil in the end coal all these things educational institutions that far surpassed ours at the time and now we end up you know 230 years later we end up with i don’t know 36 or 7 percent of the world’s gdp you know from those 3 million people something about this system really works now i think one of the things that works about it is we come closer to equality of opportunity than any major country in the world but be one of the keys to having equal opportunity is a good public school system you know if you have one public school system for the rich and one for the poor you do not have equality of opportunity and and i so i it’s really one of the top things on my list and what i got asked about you know what you can do with money i think that anything that creates equality of opportunity right from the word go i’m talking about from when you’re five years old and actually my daughter’s working on something that goes back before that but but anything that creates equality of opportunity is what’s going to keep you know america what you know the kind of america that we we have now it’s it’s vital and there’s nothing more important than that than having a first-class public school system and unfortunately this communities where they’ve lost it don’t get it back

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