QuestionerEverybody in this room's got to be wondering the same question. Who, in your opinion, both of you, is the next Warren Buffett? Charlie, who's the next Charlie Munger? Well, let's try that first.
WarrenThat's a more difficult question. There's not much demand. I don't think there's only one way to succeed in life, and our successors in due time may be different in many ways, and they may do better. But incidentally, we have a number of people in the company, some of whom are in this room today, and the ones you saw on that screen, who are leads ahead of Charlie and me in various kinds of abilities. I mean, there's a lot of different talents. We've got fellow in this room tonight, today, who's the best bridge player probably in the world. And Charlie and I could work night and day, and if he spent 10 minutes a week working on it, he'd play better bridge than we would. all kinds of intellectual endeavors that for some reason or another, one person's a little bit better wired for than someone else. And we have people running our businesses that if Charlie and I were put in charge those businesses, we couldn't do remotely as well as they do. So there's a lot of different talents. The two that we're responsible for is we have to be able to keep able people who are already rich. motivated to keep working at things where they don't need to do it for financial reasons. I mean, it's that simple. And that's a problem any of you could think about. And you'd probably be quite good at it if you gave it a little thought, because you'd figure out what would cause you to work if you were already rich and didn't need the job. Why would you jump out of bed and be excited about going to work that day? And then we try to apply that to the people who work with us. Secondly, we have to allocate capital. And these days, we have to allocate a lot more capital than we had to allocate a decade ago. That job is very tough at present. Sometimes it's very easy, and it will be easy at times in the future, and it'll be difficult at times in the future. But there are other people who can allocate capital, and we have them in the company.