Warren Buffett Interview #1 - Becoming Warren Buffett

i enjoyed it but it it started off uh the performance with my uh report card from my just about the middle of junior high school in washington and uh uh from there it gets better we we started at the low point or peter did and uh it he changes it a little every time i uh i watch and uh one time out in los angeles i performed with him uh i had my ukulele with with me and uh for some reason he hasn't asked me back to do that but i i look forward to attending any of his performances well i i probably i probably developed a great many of my ideas from my dad i that all three of the his children just loved him unconditionally as he loved us and uh he was not a preacher to us in any way shape or form but we uh we picked up things from a little bit of what he said but mostly how he acted and and the idea that all eyes have equal value is something that i think both of my sisters well as i felt since since i can remember i you know that i talk sometimes about the ovarian lottery and the truth is that that i'm here in my position as a matter of luck i mean that was the most important thing that happened to me was the the woman from which i came the parents i had the wiring i had and i didn't have anything to do with that my dad talked at the dinner table about that famous lynching that took place uh it was around 1920 plus or minus a couple of years and my dad went down and saw mob out of control there was a very famous editorial written in the alma world herald subsequently may have won a pulitzer i'm not sure uh about mob rule and my dad would talk to all of us at the dinner table about what happens when mob thinking takes over it it obviously applied in that lynching but it applied plenty of other places too i didn't really have memories of segregation in omaha but when we moved to washington uh i went to alice deal junior high school and uh just a few blocks uh uh maybe less than that no that uh away there was a there was a uh school for black children and and uh uh i had some good friends there actually who were black one of the paper boys i used to associate with and i caddied at the chevy chase country club i was the only white caddy there i wasn't worth beating up fortunately if there'd been more of us i think there'd been more trouble but uh i i i saw what was going on i saw a little bit in fredericksburg virginia too and in the movie theater there the uh the black set in a different section than than whites so it it never made sense to me well well i i helped a bit uh when uh that was in the 60s uh when there was fair housing legislation in lincoln my wife was more active than i was though i she constantly worked there was a a group she worked with where there was a jew and a black and she was the wasp and they they went around and made presentations at various clubs and that sort of thing and and so she was she was more active than i was but i was 100 percent with her mentally i was just working a little more on my own uh investments uh there was an incident at the end of the 1960s uh uh where i was going to join what had been an all-jewish country club and uh uh that created quite a ruckus there for a couple of months and and after it took place then everything straightened out the the club that i belonged to that turned down a jewish friend of mine which made me quite irritated uh and was the cause for me to join the jewish club um uh it what existed in whatever it was 1969 a few years later just changed dramatically in that respect but i remember one bob gibson who was the terrific baseball player and uh they had something in alma called the extarban ball which was a very very big deal in the past still is a big deal but it was a much bigger deal then and and eight or ten thousand people would would gather at the sarban auditorium for something of a of a civic nature and social nature and you wouldn't there wasn't a black face there and then finally they invited bob's two one or two of his daughters to participate and that was a big event that was a big change in the mid 70s uh there's been there's a lot of a lot of progress that's still needed but i've seen progress take place in my lifetime both more with probably more with females than than than with blacks i've seen anti-semitism drop dramatically and almost now maybe people just don't talk to me about it when they feel that way now but uh i was a member of the rotary club in the uh 1960s and and finally they put me on some secret membership committee and i learned what some of the people on that committee thought about how they made selections and it was it was amazing to me that normal nebraska in the 1960s that people would say well we've got enough jews or something like that well when i got out of business school at columbia uh i had a hero there named ben graham who did wonders for me in all kinds of ways in my life but uh when i got to school i said um can i go to work for you for nothing i was sort of hoping that if he said yes he would then decide to pay me but and uh and he told me that uh that his little firm which only employed about six or seven people that there was so much prejudice then in in wall street and wall street was divided then between jewish firms and and and gentile firms i mean there were a couple like low maybe that were known as jewish firms and there would be others that were no one totally is as as gentile firms and ben said that because that prejudice existed and he'd experienced it that he uh he felt that to the extent that they had any employment to offer with six or seven people that they would they had hired up to that point only jews so i came out to omaha and sold stocks and said but i kept pestering them for a while and a few years later they hired me i was the first gentile hired i remember that speech that that martin luther king gave i think was in the fall of 1967 and uh that was one of the most inspiring speeches i i've ever heard and i just maybe in the last i tried to get a copy for many many years and finally about a year or two ago uh a fellow uh who now runs morehouse uh uh found a copy and sent it to me and when i read it today it uh i think it's even better than when i heard it i mean it's a remarkable speech no i knew about king i mean but it was it was it was different knowing about king and listening to king it was that he took me right out of my seat my wife was with me and we both had the same experience and of course six months later it was dead it was interesting he in that speech he talked about truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne but that scaffold sways the future well he was going to be dead in six months but that scaffold did sway the future the jeans must have gone bad i guess the i grew up we couldn't sit around the dinner table they wouldn't they wouldn't they wouldn't let me eat my hamburger until we'd we'd said a few bad things about roosevelt so it was uh it was a very republican household of course my dad got elected as a republican i campaigned for my sister's campaign for him so i i even ran for the uh as a delegate to the republican national convention in 1960 uh uh for reasons that were sort of unrelated to the normal political reasons uh i waited until after my dad died before i changed my registration i didn't see any reason to do it but i changed my ideas and not in one fell swoop but i changed my ideas in the years preceding 1964 when he died i was president of the young republicans the club at the university of pennsylvania and was going to ride an elephant down woodland avenue when dewey won but but there won my moment of fame when when the illinois returns came in civil rights change changed my views i just felt that that the democratic on balance the democratic neither party carried for kerry cared very much about it there for a while but but i felt that the democratic party uh was more likely to do something about it it just struck me as fundamentally wrong that almost 200 years after this country was born that uh you know in 1776 thomas jefferson wrote all men are created equal and then when they wrote the constitution they all of a sudden decided that no it was just three-fifths of a person if you were black i mean that struck me as kind of crazy and of course in article two section one they uh they they use male pronouns in terms of describing the presidency they don't do it with the house of representatives or the senator the judiciary but they sort of slipped up and their true feelings came out in in in that article which it's really remarkable that it's it's hymns and he's and all of that sort of thing uh 13 years after the the declaration of independence said otherwise i voted for jfk right i would i didn't actively campaign for him my dad was still alive then my sister and my older sister was working very hard for cold water so she started something or worked with it called gold for goldwater so i uh i didn't say we think we all have two branches of the family nullifying each other well there's an interesting story on president nixon and in that in 1940 my dad got first got elected in 1942 and and then in 1946 the republicans won control of the house representatives for the first time since 1930 and one night joe martin who was to become speaker of the house for the republicans came over to our house and told my dad that because of the republican majority there was an open hou open seat on the house on american activities committee and he offered it to my dad and my dad said no thanks he wasn't interested in that seat so then joe martin went to a newly elected congressman named richard nixon and offered it to him and that's the way history develops uh you know i've always been fascinated by politics and politicians fascinate me so nixon was a a very interesting guy he was a very smart man and uh you know but he self-destructed one of the interesting probably the the book i'd really like to read is is why smart people do dumb things i've seen it all my life i've seen it in finance i've seen politics i've seen it marriages all kinds of things why smart people do dumb things because you know nixon nixon destroyed himself i was able to purchase washington pilot nixon a great a great uh thank you because uh i was able to buy washington post stock very cheap uh because uh nixon encouraged bb rebozo i believe to challenge two licenses for tv stations that the washington post had in florida jacksonville and miami and washington post stock took a quick nose dive from about 37 a share down to 16. and even if those two stations had been taken away the stock was worth many multiples of of the price it got to and they weren't going to take it away anyway so president nixon did me a huge favor financially when he got baby to challenge those licenses well catherine game graham was a remarkable woman i mean she was the daughter of of eugene meyer who was a huge figure in wall street in washington i mean he went he uh he started in wall street uh with a very small sum and went on to become he was actually uh chairman of the fed he was i think the first head of the rfc i think he may have been the first half of the world bank he was a remarkable man and uh he had five children but but katherine graham uh ended up being the heir to the washington post eugene meyer bought it in the early 30s and it lost money year after year after year until it finally merged with the times herald around 1960 but katherine graham uh she'd been intimidated about her business ability and a lot of other abilities both by her mother and by her husband and she had this idea that that men were going to be better at business or anything related to it than than women but but she also had an inner strength that so when her husband died and and and she was had the responsibility for either taking over the paper or just sitting back and and collecting dividends from it uh she gritted her teeth and stopped her knees from at least knocking so people could hear them and and said you know she was going to take on the uh the job of running the washington post company and uh she backed ben bradley the editor of the post uh in the watergate uh scandal at a time when uh politicians were opposing or other news organizations were not picking up on it the washington post was out there all by itself uh and uh you know it changed it changed the world uh that piece of journalism she'd earlier done the same thing actually with the pentagon papers a couple years earlier in 1971 when uh daniel ellsberg came to the post with the papers and the new york times i think uh had them first but they they were they were stopped from publishing to some extent and and catherine and graham kay uh said to ben bradley uh uh you know run the president you don't have much choice if there's a choice between looking to the past and looked at the future believe me look to the future i've i've really never been much for beating myself up over mistakes or anything of sort there's nothing you can do about the only thing you can change at the future and and i'm in a business where i'm going to make plenty of mistakes and uh that just comes with the territory and uh you move forward although when when k graham died i was really hit that was that was a that was a terrible time that's probably i i i never thought of it that way but i i think i i think i think it's fair to say that i'm an iolitis i i don't think people have any business thinking themselves as elite i mean they they uh they may have been born with the potential for more iq or for that matter you know able to kick a football further or dance better than somebody else but uh and they no doubt work to perfect their skills and all of that but but uh it really gets back to every every human has equal value and uh you know i could be i could have been born well when i was born in 1930 the odds were probably 40 to 1 against me being born in the united states i i did win the ovarian lottery on that first day and on top of that i was male and if i'd been female my life would have been far far different so put that down as another 50 50 50 shot and the out of the odds are 80 to 1 against being being born a male in the united states and it was enormously important in my whole life the fact that i was born in 1930 as a male in the united states so to think that that that makes me superior than anyone else as a human being is just to me it i i can't follow that line of reasoning women uh it's amazing that you know the 19th amendment was was passed in 1920 so we went a very long time before we even got around to codifying that but when i was born in 1930 uh i had sisters one on each side a couple years each way and they're just as smart as i am they did not have the same shot in life i mean they they were without anybody saying it uh my parents loved us all equally but they did not have the same expectations for us the teachers all felt the same about us in terms of wanting to help us and all of that sort of thing but they were delivering messages you know without knowing it that told my sisters that their job was to marry well and if they decided to go to work that they should be either retail clerks or nurses or teachers or you know maybe secretaries and that was it so he had to have to tell in the united states half the talent that uh was told to sort of sit on the sidelines and you know it it always struck me as it's totally wrong that it made me realize how lucky i was that i was male but uh on the other hand you can look at the flip side and say it's quite encouraging because if you look at what this country accomplished you're only using half of its talent you know just think of the potential for the future i'm enormously bullish on america over the future and part of the reason is that that we by some rather stupid decisions uh that probably weren't even thought out that much we sort of inherited from thousands of years of male behavior but we essentially put half our talent on the sidelines and uh we're making a lot of progress on that now but we've got a ways to go it really doesn't make any difference to me except for the fact that that since i feel that women have gotten the short end of the of the stick for a long time that if it's a 50 50 choice i'd rather give the opportunity to the woman i think that i'm lucky enough in life i know i'm lucky enough in life to be able to associate pretty much with whom i want to in business or socially or wherever and and uh i think it's sort of crazy i think the ideal thing is to focus with people that are better than you are because you will move in the direction of the people you associate with and i advise students all of the time you know marry up marry somebody it can't be done mathematically if everybody tries to do it but but you will you will your behavior will move in the direction of the people you associate with and uh so why not associate with the best i mean i i've had a number of heroes in life uh and associating with them has done wonders for me i wouldn't i wouldn't not have been the same person i would not have had the same fun in life if i'd been indiscriminate in terms of who i associate with over time well you started with my heroes you start with my dad you know you move on to ben graham you move on to my partner charlie monger kay graham was definitely a hero my my wives have been heroes in both cases they've all done wonders for me and and basically not expected anything in return i mean i have i have these friends that that they do 10 things for me and they're thinking about doing the 11th rather than whether they're going to get one in return for me and from me and and uh i've been lucky in life that i've never had a hero that's let me down and that would be a terrible experience to to really have your belief in somebody that you sort of worshipped shattered and it's never happened to me loyally and yeah my partner charlie munger in business for example we don't keep score you know who's done the most work or anything of the sort and and in the marriage that's important i mean it uh uh but it's i literally i had a fellow named romer davidson the geico was who spent four hours with me on in a january day in 1951 he changed my life he had no expectation he was going to get a thing from me but i came there on a saturday and banged on the door of what was then called government employees insurance now called geico and a janitor finally let me in and he was the only one in the office this follower davidson and he spent four hours with me giving me an education that literally did change my life and uh you're very very fortunate in life when you run into people like that ben graham i mean he never asked anything of me i mean he just basically gave i mean he was he taught for 25 years or so at columbia and he was creating future competitors i mean i'm sure he didn't if he took any money for it he gave it right back to the school but he just he basically was somebody said he was planting trees that other people would sit under and uh and i've had a number of them like that and it's been wonderful well i like teaching so it's a little unfair feel like i make me sacrifice when i when i do it i i i'm still at 84 i'm i've got uh 40 schools that will come out this school year uh from all over including outside the country i've won one school from brazil that comes and another one uh came from uh china a week or so ago you know i had harvard but at the same time i had western ontario and so i enjoy but i enjoy it and uh at the start of every year i kind of feel i'm not sure whether i want to do this again as soon as i start talking to the students i get energized because it's so much fun uh just looking at a bunch of people who got their futures ahead of them they're forming ideas they're forming behavior patterns and and they're eager to learn and they come a thousand miles or 1500 miles to talk and and uh i probably get more out of it than they do i i let them ask any question they want to ask i tell them you throw them at my head it'll be much more fun for me than if you deliver up softball so you can we can talk about investments or business but we can talk about philanthropy or we could talk about marriage or we can talk about career and uh i remember sometime back uh there was a young woman from the university of chicago and the very first question i got from her was do you have to be a on wheels to succeed and i i i think i convinced her that she didn't and my guess is she's succeeding now so it you get a lot of good feelings out of out of uh teaching i started when i was 21. well i i really want to talk to students and and uh if i talk to a bunch of 50 or 60 year olds what they want two things they want predictions and to be entertained they're not going to change their behavior patterns at all it's too late for them somebody once said the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken and by the time you're saying you're not going to you know there's there's no great change that's going to take place but with the students it actually makes a difference and i get letters from them telling me how it makes a difference it makes a difference maybe in who they marry or what or how they go into marriage in terms of the discussions that they have with their proposed spouses the all kinds of things about what they'll do in careers or whatever maybe who knows what comes out of it but i do know uh because i i hear from them uh i do know that they it changes their lives in some way and i have a good time too well the toughest thing i have to do is if i have to fire a manager and we have no retirement agent berkshire so uh it isn't like at 65 i can say you know you're just terrific but we've got this rule so when i tell somebody it's time for them to leave they know i'm making a decision about them and these people are my friends and i do it myself in most cases not all cases but most cases certainly if they're friends of mine i do it and and most of them are i do it myself and i would give a lot of money not to have to do that sort of thing but that is my job and and capitalism at times can be very tough and and the market system can it it's a wonderful system and it produces way more goods and services that people want than any other system will but with given individuals given industries given companies it it can be very it can be brutal and it's up to me to have the right person running a business and and sometimes that right person runs out of gas for one reason or other sometimes i mean i've had cases of alzheimer's and other debilitating uh situations and and i get on a plane and flying one way or another tell them that their time is up and it's they usually get toward the end they're consoling me usually because i feel so terrible about it but but uh you know it's not pleasant but you have to make other tough decisions there's no question about it it's painful and it'll always be painful and and then i have to do it and uh and somebody will have to come and tell me but i'll understand what they're going through i i tell my kids you know tell me when i'm going gaga but but all three of you better come in because it's just one of you you're out of the will oh i think it's largely a blessing i mean that is that is when you you know that's when you're making decisions i mean i i like to sit and think and i spent a lot of time doing that and sometimes it's pretty unproductive but but i i find it enjoyable to think about particularly about about business or investment problems they're easy it's the human problems that are the tough ones sometimes there aren't any good answers with human problems there's almost always a good answer with money well i think uh somebody i think for most people it's a pretty good to remember i think it was bertrand russell's words oh i tried to look it up one time and i couldn't find him but he said that that's success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get and uh i would say the best measure of success for many people uh comes from astoria there was a woman here in omaha a polish jew who uh went into concentration camp during uh the war wanted the uh a german uh uh operation where her some of her family went in with her and she was in one line and then her sister was in another line and they didn't all come out i mean she went through terrible times and when she was maybe 80 so i probably would have been 70. uh she said to me one day she said warren she said i'm very slow to make friends because when i look at somebody i say to myself would they hide me and i would say that if you get to be 65 or 70 or 80 and you've got a lot of people that would hide you you're a success and it's really another way of saying a lot of people will really love you uh and i would say that you get to be that age and people are holding testimonial dinners for you you know if you write them a check or naming business schools after whatever it may be and nobody will hide you i think you're a failure and i know plenty of very wealthy people that their own kids wouldn't hide them so i think i think if you're looking for one measure of success just say to yourself how many people would hide me and there's a lot of people that that have never accumulated a lot of money or anything but there's all kinds of people that would would do anything for them and i feel that way about some people and and and have felt that way and you know your success then no i don't i i used to when i was about 10 years old i used to think about it a lot but now i i've had a terrific life i feel uh you know it's going to happen and and i have no idea what happens after it i'm an agnostic so i you know it may be terribly interesting it may not be interesting at all we'll find out but it it your body gets kind of tired after a while and mine isn't quite there yet but but i i think in another 20 years i'm not sure i would want a lot more days after that i am having you know i'm having as good a time as 84's i've ever had but but my body can't do the same things now that it could before but fortunately it doesn't make any difference in my activities uh someday it'll make a difference and i don't uh i would not want to stick around in a paralyzed state or not i mean just take you know joe kennedy for example i would not want to exist that way so i i do not want to survive just to survive and i've i've told my kids and my wife that that uh you know just don't don't keep me alive just to just keep a heart beating keep me alive as long as i'm enjoying life well physically uh you know i i'm pretty well depreciated i'm getting down to salvage value but it doesn't really make any difference i mean i don't need hand-eye coordination i don't know i don't need i don't need balance particularly or or strength like and so i'm i'm not as strong as i was five years ago i can't hit i i've gone out to do it but i probably had a golf ball and i'm at best half the distance i could have hit it 10 years ago but it really doesn't make any difference at all it doesn't interfere with my work it doesn't interfere with my happiness doesn't interfere with my thinking doesn't interfere with my friends so i literally can say at 84. i may not be able to say it in a few more years but i can say in 84 that i the fact that my body isn't the same as it was early it wasn't that great to start with it you know you're not looking at some guy that was you know was a candidate for the heisman or anything in the past so uh i don't feel any diminution in my enjoyment of life or enthusiasm for life at all to this point in fact in a sense the game gets then i'm in gets more interesting all the time my it's the one part about growing old that's particularly tough is you lose more of your friends i mean that is and that is tough i just lost one last week and uh keo was a wonderful friend but aside from that and that's important but aside from that i wake up every morning as excited about the day that's coming as i ever have in my life i would not do as well on an iq test as i would have 50 years ago i can't i can do mental rhythmic still pretty well but i'm not as good as i could when i was in my 20s or 30s i i i i read faster when i was younger i could i i my memory is still pretty good for uh business facts and that sort of thing but if i read a book when i was 25 i'd remember it better than if i read a book now on the other hand i've learned more about people over the years so so i have i'm better actually at things that involve people judgments than i would have been when i was in my 20s but but in terms of learning a new game i wouldn't learn it as fast now it used to be a game called simon that you that you press various buttons and things out well i was pretty good at that 40 years ago if i took that up now and spent the same amount of time practicing on it i wouldn't be nearly as good i've learned all kinds of things about human behavior it's very hard to describe all the various aspects of it but i have seen you know when i was 20 i hadn't seen that much of human behavior but uh but now i've experienced a lot particularly in sort of a specialized field and and and uh uh so i think i think i'm quite a bit better in terms of of of particularly with the extremes of human behavior if you give me a hundred people i can't pick out the best one to run a business and take a hundred graduates of a good business school or something i can't pick out the best one but but if i hear from people who are selling a business or i associate with some other way i think i'm reasonably good at picking the ones that are predicting how they'll behave if after they sell us the business or how they'll be even other situations in the future you still make mistakes i have no regrets at all that i focused on i got interested in stocks when i was probably seven or something like that i got interested in business when i was six or seven and and uh you know what it would have been better if i'd focused on chess now bobby fischer would have killed me you know if i focused on golf you know be a joke uh so i i happened to very early on learn sort of stumble into an area that i wasn't going to be naturally good at and i was better because i did stumble on to it early and i was better because i focused on it but and obviously if you're going to spend x hours a day on on some particular activity you're not going to do it on something else but uh you know i never learned to ice skate i don't miss it at all and there's all kinds of things uh and i you you get to pick what you spend your time on if you're lucky you get to pick and and and i've been able to really decide my own calendar for the last 60 years probably to a degree that almost be hard to top it anyway and and i'm glad i made those choices i get every day and i've been doing this for decades i get to work at what i love with people i love you know if you take my assistant debbie masonic i mean there's nobody in the world you know i'd rather work with than than her you know and uh and and charlie munger my partner even though he's in los angeles there's no one i'd rather work with than charlie the managers we have so i i get to select the game sort of how the game is going to be played and i get to select the people i get who are going to be on my team and if i if i do if if i'm associating with somebody that causes my stomach to churn it's my fault because i don't have to do it and i've i've arranged things that way to quite a degree and i'm in a field where i can do that if i was in government i wouldn't be able to do it or politics or all kinds of things but but fortunately i'm in i consider it the sort of ideal game well i like things quiet i uh i i uh i shut the door actually at the office because i i don't want to hear anybody talking outside and and i just i like to i like to read a lot i can't read as fast as i used to read uh so uh but i still probably spend five or six hours a day reading and and and or or thinking while i read the uh you know it's it's the kind of life i like somebody else with a different different personality might like something much different but but i do know what i like and i've managed to create an environment where i maximize it well over the years you develop a lot of filters so you don't waste a lot of time i think i always worry about sounding rude when people call me about a business because usually in a minute or two i can tell whether it's going to make it through all the filters is something i'm interested in and i don't like to tell them that because they feel that if i just listen to them for an hour then i'll understand why they like it so well or something of the sort so uh there are these there are various shortcuts that you get but i i probably don't retain you know i uh i'm retaining a particular uh set of in their collection of information but other people are doing it in different ways i mean when i was a kid i could have told you who was a starting lineup for you know 16 major league teams but there there were only eight teams in each league and they and they didn't trade their players around or anything i can't tell you anybody now but there are all kinds of people that can that they're just collecting different information that i'm collecting and and and they're they're people that are carrying around absolutely as much information in their head as i am but i happen to have it pretty well concentrated in a few areas and i do know what i call my circle of confidence so i i stay within that circle and i don't worry about things that are outside that circle that other people may be able to capitalize or evaluate it doesn't bother me that other people have skills that i don't have well my circle of confidence which has grown to some degree but a circle of competences is the area uh in which certain kinds of industries for example i can understand the future economics of other kinds of industries i can't and and i have to i have to know where that the perimeter of that circle is now over the years i may be able to enlarge the circle somewhat but the circle never gets to be all-encompassing and tom watson senior who built ibm said i'm no genius but i'm smart in spots and i stay around those spots well he was talking about a circle of confidence and i see all of i you know my partner charlie says you know it's wonderful to have a iq of 180 as long as you don't think it's 200. and i have seen all kinds of very very smart people self-destruct one way or another in business or particularly in in the stock market and they they stray outside of their circle of confidence just because they know they're they know they're very very smart but that doesn't mean they know everything and and defining what your game is where where you're going to have an edge is enormously important and i think both my partner charlie and i have gotten reasonably good at that over the years well green takes around that but i would say envy does it probably as much as anything else i mean the reason they get greedy is because you sit there during an internet boom or something and your next-door neighbor who you know is not as smart as you are has just bought a new car because he did something he didn't understand but it worked and you say to yourself well you know i if he can do it i can do it and i'm i know i'm better than he is or maybe your spouse says to you you know what's going on with the joneses next door you know he you're smarter than he is but they're driving newer cars so envy is envy's a big i i ran a firm on wall street for a short period of time and uh i would pay somebody in their late 20s a couple million dollars and this is 20 years ago when a couple million was even more than now and they would be fine until they found the guy next to him you know got to 2.1 million and then from that point fourth they were unhappy so envy is a terribly destructive guy greet greed and andy get mixed up together but and then think about envy of course is as my partner charlie says of the of the seven deadly sins i mean there's no there's no upside to it and you talk about gluttony and at least it's kind of fun while you're eating and you can talk about lust and we know you know there's some fun there but but you envy you make yourself feel terrible and the other guy that you're envious of doesn't even feel it well it's it's it's a game i mean it's a it's a competitive game it's a big game and i enjoyed the game a lot the money has utility up to a point but that point was reached probably when i was in my early 30s you know beyond that point money had no utility but the game was a lot of fun and the games continue to be fun and it does benefit other people uh but uh you know my i was born with wiring that in this kind of economy at this time in our history uh i'm gonna make a lot of money if i work at it you know it doesn't mean that i'm a superior human being or anything but but i wasn't born you know so that i can i can you know when dancing with the stars i mean i can't come in second or third or fifth or ten i can come in last and you know it it it was pure accident and but i was in the right place at the right time with the right wiring if if you were going to make money and and i realized that at at some point and and i enjoyed it the game uh and it is a game that you don't have to you know it's not like being a heavyweight boxer or you know or a baseball player or something i mean you can play that game a long long time i wouldn't i would i was i was smart but i wasn't that smart you know i was i was good at what i ended up doing but you know i got a nickel a week allowance and and a nickel a week wasn't enough to satisfy what my wants so that i i went into business very early and and i wasn't going to make more than a nickel a week unless i unless i started selling coca-cola door-to-door i sold gum door-to-door or so saturday in post liberty magazine ladies home journal you name it and i enjoyed it well i like omaha but i i'm comfortable when i'm other places but because i have friends a lot of friends i'm particularly on both coasts and and and almost very convenient flying uh either way i can be almost any place in three hours and i like to see my friends and i like i like action but uh i like omaha it's it's uh you know i i i live five minutes from where i work and that's been the situation now for for 53 years and and uh i work with people that i mean a great group of people that make my life very easy and take good care of me and and my my grandchildren uh went to the same high school that that my children went to my wife went to my dad went to and my grandfather went to same public school inner city uh integrated and integrated for 75 years charlie munger went to the same school and so there's a lot of continuity to it there's a lot of friendships uh the medical center's five minutes from the office and at 84 maybe that's a little more important and and i know ever you know i know the doctors they know me i i knew their fathers probably and uh so everything everything works and uh and it's just it's a pace it's it's relationships uh continuity that that i like but i i'm i'm very happy when i'm other places too with uh seeing my friends there well a typical day hey i don't have any special time i get the odds but normally i get up a little before 7 i have to get up at 4 30 this morning so sometimes i wake up early and i do a lot of reading then too but but i'll get up but i'll read the papers at home some almost always so i may get to the office this morning i happened to get here at 6 30 because i got up very early and i read all the papers and still got here early but it doesn't really make any difference because i can think about the same things at the office or i don't i have very few appointments i i am i'm the least scheduled guy you'll find in my position and i i like it that way but i get here to the office and uh i've read some of the papers i read more papers i read mail i don't do email myself but it comes from my assistant and that keeps it down and and i sit and read all that we don't have any committees at berkshire we don't have a commitment we don't have a powerpoint we don't don't have any of that sort of thing we don't have a public relations department we don't have investor relations we don't have a general counsel we don't have a human relations department we've got 300 and some thousand employees around the world and we're probably third or so in market value maybe fourth in in the world but but we just don't go for anything that that people do just as a matter of form and i've got i've got an office i like and uh that goes on and some days i go home at five sometimes i go home 5 30 or 6 and i come down on saturdays usually but but i come down mid morning maybe and and and usually go to lunch with somebody in the office and there'll be four or five people in and uh if there's a football game i may watch it on tv at the office and i watch a lot of football games or whatever it may be sports events uh maybe in the afternoon while at the same time thumbing through other things and it's it's exactly the life i like i think it was about 1992 that shortly after i met bill gates i was out at a uh with his parents and they had some other guests and bill's dad asked each of us and there were probably 20 or so to write down on a piece of paper one word that would best describe uh uh what had helped us the most and uh bill and i without any collaboration at all he's wrote the word focus and and i would say my partner charlie mugger is an extreme example of focus uh uh but you know that's why tiger woods had ten thousand putts too or you know or roger federer's but spending three or four hours a day hitting a golf ball or some pianist has been spending five hours a day practicing i mean focus is just bearing down on something that in my case and i think probably the case of most people that are reasonably good at what they do that they enjoy i mean you can you wouldn't be able to do it if it was work uh so it's it's it's it's a natural it is not it's not i say to myself i'm going to focus on this or do anything it's just a natural behavior and it's it's been that way ever since i was a kid but it but kids focus i mean the you know the best the best kid in baseball and you know in eighth grade is is taking a lot of swings out there or you know or he's i think bill bradley told me i used to shoot baskets five or six hours a day because they figured some of the guy was doing it four hours a day and but he enjoyed it too and and i it's the same way with me yeah i can't tell you the color of the walls in my bedroom or my living room or the color of the carpet in my living room uh one time i uh when i worked at home i worked in this little sewing room sort of off the bedroom and and at one point my wife put in this wallpaper with this bright red and had dollar bills on it or something she found it someplace and a couple of years later i i said to her i said that new wallpaper is terrific and she said it's been there a couple years i i just don't i don't see things like that that uh uh i'm not color blind or anything but it's it's just not something that that grabs me and and uh on the other hand i'll remember a number sometimes a long long time uh it's but yeah my like my partner charlie munger would be the same way i mean it uh uh and bill gates would be the same way i've got a lot of friends that that they just they guess they get darned interested in what they're they're working on they just don't they don't see other things that makes me easy to live with in subways sort of get away with anything around me well it's very difficult to say but uh i grew up in a middle class family basically uh my dad well my dad lost his job in 1931 a year after i was born i lost all his savings and only the fact that my friend his father had a grocery store kept eating it nevertheless my father went on to have another child a year or two later i mean he was an optimist uh he he believed very much in having an inner score card and i never worry about what other people are thinking about you you know just just uh if you know why you're doing what you're doing that's good enough and he he read a lot uh he was an introvert to some degree he liked people but he but he also liked just sitting and reading like talking with with the kids and uh so he he was he was a sensational teacher um over the years uh uh but we were learning you know we were learning how he saw life and it made a lot of sense to us so we started seeing life the same way and he always emphasized that it's your inner score card that counts don't worry about what the rest of the world thinks he was probably a little bit better than that than any of his kids were but but it it sunk in my mother was very smart and cared a lot about her children but she'd had a very very tough childhood her mother ended up in a mental institution and one of her sisters joined it the other sister committed suicide her brother who was a superstar died at about age 30 so that she'd had a she'd had a tough life and uh so she she was very dutiful about taking care of the kids but you didn't get the same feeling of of love it was there but it didn't come out the same way as with my dad she she she would have i think i think she would have what what the you know would be known as migraines now i don't think they even call them migraines in those days but she would she would experience terrific headaches and you didn't want to be around her when she was having the headaches and she would she would lash out more she would never do it in public but and uh my and she worshipped my dad so so he was a calming force if he was around but of course he was he wasn't around during the day when you were a little kid so so you you want to do you didn't want to be around when my mother had a migraine but you probably you know i i could be sympathetic to that well she certainly was concerned in the sense that she had one exterior oh well we she had one personality one other people were around and and sometimes she had a different personality when they weren't around i mean she did not show that other personality one that other people were around but i'm not sure how much you know i don't know what kind of pain she was actually in so it's it's hard to evaluate uh uh precisely you know what was the motivation for the the behavior i think it had a lasting impact on all three of us sure that uh it it may have helped i may have compensated in some other ways i mean i you know i'm i i've often thought that i've had so much luck in the world that most of the things i did that were wrong turned out pretty well including you know when i went to a period where i got very rebellious in when i was 13 or so but i may have compensated by going on delivering 500 papers a day and and if you translate that to the present day every i made a penny of paper but in terms of compounding that penny's turned into something else well i never saw him do anything that you couldn't put on the front page of the paper and and and i i uh now he was he was probably the best teacher without attempting to be a teacher you know with with all three of us kids so it uh we all grew up knowing that we had unconditional love from my dad that doesn't mean he thought we could get away with everything there were times when i felt was just approved but he had a trivia way of showing his disapproval i mean he just he would basically and then he had plenty of reasons for having disapproval too but he would he basically would just essentially say you know i know you can do better than that yeah there's a way of saying it but but he didn't he didn't and i i don't think i ever heard him raise his voice you know in my lifetime and but but you knew if he was disappointed with you and and and that that that would have a big effect with all three of us actually but including me i don't want to please my dad i want to place my mother yeah but i uh sure i mean i i think we all did and we knew incidentally we didn't have to do a lot to do that we just had to do our best he never attempted in any way to steer me into any kind of activity he encouraged me to go to college when i didn't want to go to college but in terms of whether i was you know if you'd asked in his preference he never would have said it to me but he probably would have liked me to be a preacher or something of the sort but if but he he did not try and steer me in any direction and and and and even in terms of you know later on in terms of getting married or anything of the sort he he was just for me and it's a great feeling well i uh because i was i was born in 1930 i was conceived during the crash so i i actually owe my existence because my dad was a stock salesman and by november of of 1929 when i was conceived there was no sense calling on people to try and sell them stocks so i i think he was probably just staying home and there wasn't any television in those days so here i am so i probably owe my existence to the stock market crash but my dad my dad had a heart attack uh very young around that period i don't know the exact time but he he basically felt if you did your best things would work out and and he uh the bank where he was working uh closed uh i think it was the day before his birthday and august 12th in 1931 and it he had what little savings he had in the bank he owed 55 a month on a mortgage on on the house we had and uh but he you know i don't know this but i just know from his behavior subsequently and everything i've heard he wasn't discouraged i mean and and uh like i say went on to have a third child and he just he worked right through the depression started his own company because he had no place to go he couldn't get a job anyplace so he started his own company originally called buffett's selenica and company i think selenica put up a little money because my dad didn't have any and uh that company continued i eventually went to work with it was always a small company he never made lots of money we never belonged to a country club we never had a second car any of that sort of thing but we always we lived fine and about 1936 we moved into a nicer house and and uh it it was a it was a middle-class sort of living and and that's what that's the way he wanted to live i think i think probably that the fact that my dad was optimistic would have had a big effect on me because i admired everything about him uh so to the extent that i was absorbing lessons from him without knowing it i probably uh i probably came about that i i don't know how much of being optimistic is you know just i've got every reason to be optimistic for one that i've been healthy all my life pretty much despite the fact that i eat like a six-year-old and i've had terrific friends throughout my life it'd be kind of hard if i was anything but optimistic there'd be something wrong with me but i i do think i certainly being around an optimistic father uh he didn't care about money at all i mean he wanted to have enough money so his family could live fine but it it meant nothing to me he was kind of entertained by the fact that i like to make money but but uh his optimism reflected itself in the fact that he he believed that you know that all three of his kids would be do terrifically although like i say the expectations for girls and were entirely different than for boys but i i had no doubt that he thought that i was going to be a huge success i was i was pretty standard i i like to read more than most kids and i uh i really like to read a lot uh my eyesight was bad i didn't know that for a while but uh uh it never slowed me down uh but i liked i liked sports and i was i was average i never was i was ever good i was never terrible so i wouldn't have been i never would have been the first guy chosen but i'd ever been the last guy chosen for basketball or baseball or whatever it might have been uh uh you know when the time came i liked girls and it was a pretty normal that way uh except we did move to washington when i was 12 or so when my dad got elected to congress and that disrupted my life and for a period i was i was very rebellious after that i mean i felt that i was doing fine and almost and all my everything was going well and and uh and then we moved to a different environment and i uh so i i uh i behaved very badly there for a while not too long but but but long enough to probably cause my parents some worry well i just at school i just lost interest i mean i i i took pleasure in tormenting my teachers i mean at that time for example a t was the stock that all teachers owned for their retirement paid nine dollars a year dividend it was the ultimate safe stock so the teachers all owned it so my teachers found me a big pain in the neck but they did think i knew a lot about stocks and so i shorted 10 shares of att and brought the confirmation to school and showed these teachers and i was shorting the stock they were counting on for the retirement i was a real pain in the deck for a while and there was a period actually there was one short period where uh in i think it was the english class they actually put me in a special room i was kind of like hannibal lecter and they shoved the things in under the door you know but that didn't last too long my dad at one point just went on for six months i stole things then i mean it was uh it was i didn't steal them because i wanted to i just stole them because the guys i was hanging out with were stealing things and and uh and i like these fellows and they liked me but but my dad at one point said you know he can do better than this and and he may have thrown in the fact that i think you'll have to give up your paper routes if you keep behaving this way and so i shaped up i ran away yeah i when i was at the low point sort of i i decided it would run away and and i uh i was kind of a coward about it so i talked to other guys john mcrae and roger bell into running away with me and uh so we we went out we got on wisconsin avenue out uh near western avenue and we started hitchhiking first guy that picked us up uh we got in the car three of us hitchhiking and and we asked him he asked him where he was going he said i'm going to hell you want to come along and at that point i the whole adventure was sort of tapering uh but so i got out of there as fast as i could but we got to hershey pennsylvania uh one of the guys had some thoughts about the fact that hershey was sort of nirvana and we could go to the hershey plant they'd give us free free hershey bars and had an amusement park there and then we got picked up by the highway patrol in in in pennsylvania and that scared the hell out of us they took us down to the highway patrol headquarters and we could hear this teletype in the background we just we were lying to these highway patrolmen about how the fact we had our parents permission and everything and we were afraid that telescope was sending out our all points alert you know pick these guys up so we got out of hershey as fast as we could and finally we got back to washington roger bells roger bell's father was a congressman too and roger bell's mother actually was in the hospital he cashed in his is what were then called war bonds uh to uh have the money uh to finance his part of things and uh she was and and he uh he i think he wanted to go to stanton military academy and i think he ended up winning that i walked in the door and the first thing my mother was said to me was how come he came back so soon which was a little deflating so that was that was the last time i ran away bad i i socially when i left omaha i was in eighth grade and uh i was doing okay socially in omaha but when i moved to washington they were at a different point sort of in in in social development at that point and i i was the youngest one always in the class because i'd skipped and uh so i i was sort of out of the swing of things there for a while i uh i went to my 60th reunion at wilson high and there's a girl there named barbara wigan she's got a married name now but i took her out one time to the uptown theater and washington and i asked her whether she remembered what movie we saw and she said no i don't remember that and then she said but i do remember one thing and like an idiot i said what was that and barbara said well you picked me up in rehearse and it was true that i owned a half interest in rehearse while i was in high school which was not the smoothest thing that or coolest as i would say now the thing that you could you could do on a date yeah well when i was very young i was probably only 10 or so at that time but this was before i moved to washington i did work at my grandfather's grocery store and there was a fella named eddie that was the oldest driver we had seven trucks at seven orange trucks at the grocery store was a credit and delivery store and so i would be his helper and people would phone in their orders and then i would load the truck in reverse order of of how we were going to deliver and eddie would tell me how to load the truck so i went out with him the first day i loaded the truck like he said and we started out and our first stop was in benson and then we went up for our second stop was in dundee and then we went back to benson which was a couple miles away again then we went to central alabama and we went back to benson again and i couldn't take it after a while i said eddie you know i'm only 10 but but uh this is the craziest route i've ever seen i said let me redesign this and we can get this done with half the mileage and then they gave me this disgusted look and i thought eddie was 120 then he was probably about 10 years younger than i am now but eddie look gave me this look and he said warren don't you understand he said mrs call is the best-looking woman on the route and if we get there early enough she may not be dressed and he said and then mrs code is the second best looking and if we get there and i felt so sorry for this woman that was last on the route i mean by definition she was in bad shape but i learned a little bit about business then and and sometimes how the employees interest can differ from those of the employer i've always been competitive but uh sometimes it doesn't pay to be competitive if you're in the wrong game i i i was in a one boxing match when i was about 10 or something like that and after the first round i don't think i could lift the lift the gloves but fortunately the other guy was in the same position that didn't make much difference it wasn't it was not a formal household uh and most a good bit of the time was a happy household and and some of the times it wasn't but most of the time it was and we did there was a lot of um there was a lot of entertaining in the home in those days i mean nobody had much money so there were bridge clubs for example and i i always i always did very well with older people i mean i i liked my dad my dad's friends and then i used to walk over to a church for choir practice i was in a kid's choir when i was 10 or 11 and on the way back i'd always stop at about 10 houses and talk to various housewives i knew through my through my mother or my dad and and there was a lot of sociability and we had a ping pong table in the basement and all all of the all of my dad's friends that would come over they'd all take me on in ping pong i was reasonably good at that and there was a lot of that sort of thing so it was there was a lot of sociability that way that didn't cost any money basically uh and it was we had a good time there was a lot of singing that my we had a little organ that my mother played uh my dad and mother were both quite religious and so it was mostly uh well it was almost exclusively uh church him so i still know the words to some of his old churches it didn't have much effect on me i i i was i was in the kids choir at dundee presbyterian church and i actually my wife and i taught at sunday school right there uh class right after we got married for a while and then i think one of the people in one of the other classes heard too much laughter coming out of our class we were having a very good time so i think they decided that they could use a new new faculty at that point i didn't want to go to college i was i was 16 when i got out of high school i was making about i probably was making 150 a month or something like that delivering papers which only took a couple hours in the morning i had this half interest in a pinball machine route with a buddy of mine i like to go to the horse races and handicap horses and i really felt that i didn't really need much more than that and i was buying stocks i mean i i i read the wall street journal every day and i did a lot of charting of stocks and that sort of thing then and i was having i actually was having a pretty good time and i didn't see that really was much to be gained by going to college but my dad kind of jollied me into it and i think he probably they didn't have essay at least we didn't use sats in those days but i think he probably would have taken the test for me if need be so he suggested that i apply to the wharton school of the university of pennsylvania and if i didn't like it i could quit and a year went by and and i got very good grades in college i may not my my grades improved as i went along in school and uh but i i didn't feel i was learning that much there because i had mostly graduate students as professors and they were just staying a chapter ahead of me in the book and i can i so i i asked my dad if if i could uh quit then and he said well give it another year so i gave it another year and uh still felt the same way uh so he said well do what you want to do so i actually transferred the university of nebraska and that way i finished in three years because i had had enough credits that i could get out in three years and i was in a hurry i want to get out i'm doing a disservice to those schools because i i did learn a fair amount there and i and i would say that's the university of nebraska actually uh my year there i learned fully as much as i was learning at wharton which had a much bigger reputation one day uh i was reading uh the um uh daily nebraskan which was the college newspaper and and it said in room 300 or something at three o'clock they're going to award this scholarship of 500 to go to a graduate school of your choice so i showed up there and i was the only guy that showed up and these professionals want to keep waiting for other people to show up i said wait a second it's at three o'clock so i got the scholarship unopposed and i applied to the harvard business school my dad was suggesting that to him and anything my dad wanted me to do in the end i i i usually went along with i mean and he never pushed me hard but but i if i knew he he wanted me to do something i was very inclined to go along so i applied and and then uh i went to they told me to go to chicago to get interviewed by this fellow that ran a country day school near chicago so i got on burlington train and rode for 10 hours to chicago and i got another little interurban train rode up to this day school and the guy interviewed me for about 10 minutes and and he uh basically said you know buy something else so i i reversed the process spent 10 or 12 hours getting back thinking what am i going to tell my dad and it all worked out because uh they did turn me down but then i was at the university of omaha that summer and i was leafing through a catalog of other schools because i did have those 500 bucks that they were going to get me from nebraska to go to graduate school and i saw these names of graham and dodd who had written this masterpiece of a book in 1934 and it was now 1950 and i had no idea that they were teaching or anything and i saw that dave dodd was the assistant or associate dean i think it was at columbia so i wrote him a letter and i it was i think it was probably august by then and i said dear dean doug i said i thought you guys were dead but now that i know you're alive i'd really like to come study under you and so he got me in and he turned out to be a wonderful wonderful friend i mean he would take me to dinner there and he he he treated me like a son it was a marvelous experience well i actually when i was at columbia i had been terrified of public speaking all of the time uh prior uh well i don't want to start it must have started maybe i had some terrible experience i can't remember you know in grade school but i was terrified i couldn't do it i'd throw up and so i avoided classes where i would be expected to do that and uh i was i was fine if i wasn't on stage i mean i could i did a lot of talking otherwise but but uh so when i was at columbia i saw an ad uh for a dale carnegie course in midtown new york and i went down and i wrote a check to take the course and then right right act after i got up this little apartment i was paying 10 bucks a month for on claremont avenue i i stopped payment on the check and i just didn't have the guts to go through with it and then when i got out of school i came back to omaha i'm now 20 years old i'm going to sell stocks to people that are 50 or 60. and i didn't even look 20 and i just knew i had to be able to get so i could speak in front of people better so i again i saw an ad that at the rome hotel here in oman 16th street that they were going to have a dale carnegie course and i went down and the fellow and i'm walter keenan who later became a very good friend and a partner in my investment partnership but who i never met before uh was the teacher and i handed him a hundred dollars in cash and if if i parted with a hundred dollars in cash i knew i was going to follow through so we took that dale carnegie course and there were about 30 of us and we couldn't say our own name in public at the start they made us do all these crazy things to get out of ourselves and so we stood on tables and did all kinds of things and it worked and as soon as i got out of that class i went right out the university of omaha and said i want to start teaching because i want to get in front of people and force myself to keep doing it and that's why i can't stop talking now it was during the class incidentally they gave a pencil every week for the person who'd done the most with what they'd learned the week before and during that class i proposed to my wife to be and she accepted so when i told that story the following week when we met i won the pencil well she was uh she was 19 when we got married and i was 21 and uh uh but she was so much more mature than i was there's no comparison and she she really put me back together i was i was i was very good at a lot of things i mean in terms of business or you know for my age but on the other hand i was i was i was kind of a lopsided a character i'm still lopsided in some ways but now i'm lopsided in in ways i like and i was in those days i was lopsided in some ways i didn't like so she she really put me together she was she was there with a little watering can putting and pouring it on me and and it it you know she's responsible for for well i i would have accomplished nothing without her yeah i mean she was she was incredibly empathetic and everybody she was non-judgmental it wasn't that she didn't have standards but she just was non-judgmental about people and she felt every person again was the moral equivalent of every every other person she was interested in every person individually we once went to a football game in seattle uh university of washington was playing nebraska and at halftime i went down to get a hot dog and a coke and she went with me and there was a line of about four people there and i got in line and five minutes later i had my coke and my hot dog in hand and i went back and she was waiting a few feet away and and there was a woman standing next to her and this woman was at that point was saying now i've never told this to anybody else in my life this is one you know that woman was not there when i went to get the dog people just they opened up to her she had more people probably that considered her their best friend than anybody i've ever known well i was i was very focused i i i was into my work big time and uh uh so i she she did most of the work uh by far of bringing up the children which was probably a good thing they have more of her qualities than mine which is i would i would recommend i told my dad leave me out of his will uh i don't need the money i'm gonna you know i knew i was gonna get rich so i i told him just have my sisters so i was a trustee for my mother and then subsequently for my sisters but but no i was not i didn't i did not become the central figure in the family at all my politics became more overt uh after my dad died uh but uh you know he died at age 60 so he was young i was 33 at the time but uh but i don't i my life didn't change dramatically we we incidentally i mean we lived here in omaha we lived a block and a half from susie's parents and we lived about two miles from my parents so the whole family was pretty much here in omaha including some man's aunt and uncle i i was not much of a disciplinarian i i tried i didn't it wasn't a question of trying it was just natural but i i i tried to behave with my kids like my dad would behave with me i mean i never tried to steer him in anything because i i i i just cherished the fact that my dad had supported me so much in anything i did so i've got three very different kids and they've got a common heart which they got from their mother but they but i have never felt that it was important that they come into berkshire hathaway or that they do what i do that's crazy you know i mean they they're each one have individual talents and i certainly wouldn't want to try and take up what they do i've got one son that farms i'm not much for manual labor but so why should they do what i do i mean it's never made any sense to me so i i have i i'm sure i brought to the raising of kids what i thought were the better parts of without doing it consciously but what i thought were the better parts of the way i was raised it worked well but i don't think it'll work for lots of other people necessarily but it worked very well i mean we loved each other and we uh and we both we not only loved each other we admired each other and and and we were totally in sync with what the other was doing but we were two different individuals it wasn't hard for me i mean they they they were still part of our lives they just you want them to do that so that was not hard for me it goes back to that was it oscar hammerstein you know that bell's not ability a ring of the song's not a song till you sing it love in the heart isn't put there to stay love is in love till you give it away it it's it's a very strange thing love you can't get rid of it if you try to give it out you get more back if you try to hang on to it you lose it and it's it's something like there may be other things like that but i can't think what they are understanding about human behavior and all of that if you're observant at all and you had a long lifetime and you had all kinds of experiences you you learn a lot about about human behavior i think you recover how do you recover from your i recover from my dad's death or anybody else and you know or just a good friend that died a very good friend a week ago that you know you go on but that uh susie spent lots she spent more time probably with dying people than about anybody that wasn't in the medical profession i mean she helps people die and and uh uh she helped my friend joe rosenfield it was a man he was one of my heroes one of her heroes too and he lived to be in the high 90s was a marvelous man i mean he's a real model for anybody and uh but by the time he died i mean it's he had no wife no child anymore and and she was there when he died and she she did that for dozens of people well austrian has lived with me for a long time and and uh you know susie put me together ostrich kept me together and she's been doing it ever since and uh she she takes care of me like nobody else could take care of me and and not just physically i don't mean that i mean just in all ways well it's just it's it's it's the best mental game i know aside from business which i think is kind of an interesting mental game too but uh it's you know you're it you're going to play a hand every seven or eight minutes and uh you are going to be facing something where every hand you played in the past has got some utility in evaluating the present hand but you'll never play the same hand twice you're playing it with a partner so it's a game where partnership dynamics are very important it's a game where every card played you can draw or every bid made or not made or every card played or not played you can draw inferences from so it is i regard it as absolutely the most fascinating game there is i'm not that good at it but uh and i think that i can't think of a better form of mental exercise and uh you know i hope i'm playing it when i'm 100 years old i i probably spend at least 10 hours a week uh playing bridge on the computer and and i enjoy every minute of it i i'm not frugal in the sense i buy anything i want i buy and if i could if i thought it was if i thought i would enjoy a 200 dinner uh better than a hamburger i'd get it i'd buy it but i on sunday uh i frequently take out my children grandchildren and great-grandchildren i've got nine great-grandchildren and and seven of them live in this area and we go to dairy queen we don't go to dairy queen because berkshire owns it we don't go to dairy cream because it doesn't you don't run up a big bill we go to dairy queen because i'd rather eat their food than anybody else's and the rest of them do too so i i have never maybe one you know go back to when i was 15 or something but basically i've never denied myself anything i wanted and the plane is very useful to me uh and it makes it enables me to do things that i wouldn't be able to do otherwise and and uh it's a lot more comfortable and you know so it doesn't make any difference what it costs because money has no meaning to me anymore so if something costs me a million dollars and i'm going to really get something out of it i'll do it but there's very very i can't think of what you know money doesn't certainly doesn't buy love it'll buy sex you know by by recognition you know you you write you can get a you can you can you can get your name out of building if you want to write a big enough check but there's no way you can buy love it can it can buy testimonial speeches but uh so most things the very few things that require money a plane requires money so that but i could have multiple houses but my life would be worse rather than better i have all kinds of friends that have multiple houses and you know basically they become like a you know hotel manager you know and they have to plan what people want you know i don't i don't want to do all that well my wife and i first wife susie when we were in our 20s talked about what we do with money i kept telling her we'd make a lot of i'd make a lot of money and she humored me she didn't really care and and and whether she believed me or she believed me on things generally so she probably believed me but it didn't really make that much difference but it didn't make a difference what we're going to do with the money after we made it so we actually set up a foundation over 50 years ago i just looked back at the records and the other day and i think we set it up in 1964 and we always said that we were going to give if i made a lot of money which i was convinced i would that we would end up giving it we'd have everything we wanted but but and we would leave our children originally the idea was enough so they could do anything but not enough so they could do nothing that was a line that actually catherine graham gave to me but it makes a lot of sense i mean if you're very wealthy uh you know it's crazy to you know have your kids out there and and in rags or something of the sort but it's also crazy them so they never have to lift a finger the rest of their life so so over time we've given them we gave them some money but in in my entire lifetime everything that i've spent my wife spent and my kids have spent that came from me will be quite a bit less than one percent of everything i make the other 99 plus will will go to others because it has no utility to me and it and my kids have all they need they each run a foundation which i uh fund and they do a terrific job doing it and they each in their own way they do it and they work hard at it and they live pretty much normal lives i mean they they are not they're not driving driving around i i i gave them probably how many years ago five or ten years ago i started giving a few hours on the plane but not not not enough so something they could go crazy on it but uh so i've i've softened up some on that but uh uh i i i i couldn't be more pleased with how the whole subject of money has worked out in our family i thought i would pile it up over the years and i would be sort of a compounding machine to build up a whole lot of money and then she would unpile it in terms of uh uh running a one very large foundation and uh she was younger just a couple years younger than i was but and women live longer so i thought the odds were very good that she would disperse it and that it would be much better to give away many many billions later on than give away a few millions early on and that i was particularly good at compounding money and therefore society would benefit by waiting and she didn't want to wait as much as i did but she never quite appreciated compounding like i did uh so it that it worked out and then she she she died 10 years ago and and so i had to change my plans and but that was the that would have been the that was the original plan and she did run the foundation for a long time and she gave away significant money but and when she died uh i'd given her 22 000 over the first few years of our marriage just because i thought she ought to have it in her own name and she left a three billion dollar estate and and 97 or so percent 98 of that money uh went to the foundation and so we always figured that the money could do a lot of good and that a lot of money could do possibly a whole lot more good and that she was better at giving away money than i would be and i was better at filing enough that she would be so the whole thing made sense to both of us i'm giving it to five foundations uh the gates foundation is the largest but the money has gotten to a scale where very few operations could really handle it but i double the amount that i give to each one of the three children foundation so they're getting at present prices for berkshire they're getting close to 100 and i don't know 125 or 100 probably closer to 150 million of stock a year and they got to keep spending it then there's a susan buffett foundation which was originally we had intended to be the whole thing that's the one we set up 50 years ago and that's got quite a bit more money in and then the largest is the gates foundation who have the same feeling that i do that every human life is of equal value and so i'm i feel very good about what's being done with the money the money has no utility to me it can't can't make me happier can't make me you know in any way and probably can make me miserable if i had to do certain things with it and it has utility to other people if properly used so i've got a solution that fits exactly the objectives that we started with 60 years ago or so i'm a wholesaler in a sense in terms of giving it away but uh i've got an older sister doris who's owns a sunshine lady and she spends all day every day giving away money at retail and she's done a terrific job at it i send her all the letters i get and uh she looks into each individual case she doesn't give money to each individual case but she evaluates them and she helps people and she gives them you know she's their friend too in addition to the small checks that she give out but you can't get rid of the money that i've got doing that i i love the fact she does it and i support her in a small way but uh i have to do things at scale and having a solution that where i feel good about the people feel good about what's being done and has the ability to do big things makes me yeah that's exactly what i intended the money to do all along both probably because bill and i and melinda uh have worked on developing the giving budget i think actually that will be i think that will have quite an impact over over the decades not i think 50 years from now the giving pledge will be looked at as as a uh a really important move and will affect the level of philanthropy by the particularly by the very wealthy in this country so i think that will be a factor and i i hope that berkshire hathaway is is something that people uh study in terms of a business operation very wealthy people they vary just like very poor people vary in in their emotions and motivations and everything but one problem that they have they often have is that they don't have many peers to talk to when you get into the question of their children for example or war philanthropy or whatever it may be they may have a lawyer they talk to but they they don't just want to go and talk to anybody about it so bill and i have found in the giving pledge that that when we open up the conversation they really like to talk and the first meeting we had we asked david rockefeller if he would host in new york city and he was very gracious about it and put together a group of well we put together the group he held the dinner of 15 or 20 people and i started by asking one couple that were there and these were all very well known names and i said you know tell me about how you came about your philosophy of giving well we went around that table and was a couple of hours later before people finished talking they wanted to talk about it but it wasn't something they were going to talk about the neighborhood you know or anything of the sort and many of them had different over the years i mean as we talked to more people they have all different kinds of family situations and some of them been very disappointed with their kids and some of them feel terrific and some of them find the kids want the money and others the kids who want philanthropy and uh but from that came the idea that that we might develop something in the way of both being smarter about philanthropy and and getting people perhaps engaged in a younger and and in a bigger way by by organizing uh an entity that would focus on that and and uh so the giving pledge came out of that and there was a need for it i mean it it is uh it isn't it's changed the behavior of loads of people most of the people overwhelmingly in the in the giving pleasure were philanthropically inclined beforehand they were going to do it i think some of them were doing it sooner i think some are doing it bigger and in a few cases and they've told me in fact i've got letters at the office uh they've told me that it really did change how they thought about things that uh clarified their own thinking had one case where the the one of the parents was somewhat reluctant to do it and the kids talked him into doing it which was remarkable and i think it's done wonders in a family when that happens well the big answer is you're in the right place if you're an american and uh you don't have to be particularly smart you just have to be patient and the the biggest thing in making money is time and i've had this long run and so the compounding at the end turns into very big numbers but but if you would well the start of start of the 20th century the dow jones average was a 66 and it ended at 11 400 you know and that was with the great depression and world wars and flu epidemics and everything else so you've got a tailwind in this country if you just own a cross-section of it one big thing is keeping down expenses and the other thing is is is not trying to pick one stock but only a large group of stocks and buying it over time and then just sitting and paying no attention to people who say they know when to buy and sell stocks or buy and sell this individual stock so it's it's a very simple game with a person who doesn't try to do very much doesn't usually does better than the person who spends a lot more energy on it it's been 50 years since may 10th i in 1965 that i formally took control of berkshire hathaway it was done through a partnership that i ran a bunch of people to join me and i ran the money and started as a textile company with doomed to fail and uh step by step and uh we've created something that is kind of what i dreamt we might create over time but it took a lot of time to do it never seemed like we were making that progress much progress on any one day but compound interest works uh how can you look at a country just anybody watching this if they if they walk out their door and think of what was there in 1776 you know there's a bunch of trees in all probably there wasn't anything here and four million people the first census in 1790 just under 4 million people and we ended up a few hundred years later with 25 of the world's gdp now that something's working and it isn't because we're a lot smarter than we were then or that we're working harder we're not working as hard but we've got a system that really really works it doesn't work for everybody and that's something to remember but in terms of overall output it has worked since 1776 and it'll keep working better and better over the years uh not in a straight line i mean it that it has some fits and starts to it but but this system will turn out more and better goods per capita year after year in my lifetime alone one guy it's gone up six for one in terms of real gdp per capita since i was born in 1930 and i was born into a pretty good country then but uh you can't stop this you can't stop america you really you probably can't stop the world the world is learning the lessons of you know china 40 years ago or so decided to modify their system in a way that unleashed the potential of that population which before that had not moved they were just as smart as we were they worked just as hard but they weren't getting the results but now they've just you know they're going like gangbusters

Channel: Kunhardt Film Foundation

Views: 186,992

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Id: ieXLNVwshRU

Length: 99min 35sec (5975 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021