QuestionerWhat do you foresee as the significant areas of opportunity over the next 50, even 100 years? And if you were in my shoes, what would be your approach and methodology for really learning, tackling, and mastering these areas of opportunity?
WarrenWell, I remain very big on the idea of reading everything in sight. And frankly, when you get the chance to talk to somebody like Lorimer Davidson as I did when I was 20 years old, I probably learned more from Lorimer Davidson in those four or five hours than I learned in college with the, you know, the exception of learning some accounting or one or two subjects like that. So you just want to soak it up. You'll see the area as you go along. I mean, we have, Charlie and I probably, you know, we've made money in a lot of different ways, some of which we didn't anticipate, you know, when we were 30 or 40 years ago, But we did have the ability to recognize some. We didn't have the ability to recognize others. But we did know when we knew what we were doing and when we didn't, and we just kept looking. We had a curiosity about things. You would know at a time like the long-term capital management crisis, for example, that there were going to be ways to make money. I mean, they were going to be out there, and all you had to do was just read and think eight or ten hours a day, and you were going to cover a lot of possible. abilities, probably a very high percentage of them good and some of them sensational. So you can't really lay it out ahead of time. You can't have a defined roadmap, but you can't have a reservoir of thinking, looking at different kinds of businesses, looking at different kinds of securities, looking at markets in different places, and you will then spot a reasonable number of things that come along. You won't spot every one of them. We've missed all kinds of things. But the biggest thing, too, is to have something in the way you're programmed so that you don't ever do anything where you can lose a lot. I mean, our best ideas have not been better than other people's best ideas, but we've never had a lot of things that pulled us way back. So we never went two steps forward and one step back. We probably went two steps forward and a fraction of a step back. But avoiding the catastrophes. is a very important thing, and it will be important in the future. I mean, you will have your chance to participate in catastrophes.