QuestionerIn studying the collapse of AIG, one of the things that we learned is that there were parts of the company which understood there were certain financial risks in the market and were lowering their exposure. While at the same time, there were other parts of AIG which were actually increased their exposure to the same risk. In terms of enterprise risk management at Berkshire, how do you share information across units to make sure that the same mistakes aren't made?
WarrenWe don't have any. We're the most uncoordinated pair of individuals and operating both in sports or at the, at the, executive level. There are certainly some people at Berkshire that have some contact with other people at Berkshire, but there's nothing in the way of an organized way of doing that. I mean, Tad and Tony and the Jeep are friends and Don Worcester, and they see each other sometimes, and I'm sure they talk insurance. But we don't make sense. any attempt. If somebody goes in to get a quote from Genri and gets a quote from Ajit, there's no, we have no system that prevents, or that coordinates them, our two units to give the same quote or anything of the sort. We want our businesses to run very autonomously, and we want the managers of those businesses to feel like they're their own business. That's enormously important in Berkshire. So, so we don't tell the people at close. Clayton homes to buy their carpet from Shaw or to buy their paint from Benjamin Moore. We don't, we just don't do that. And you can say that's kind of silly. But it's helped this. Any gains we would get from doing that by selling incremental units, I think would be far offset by the change and the feeling of the manager as to whether they're really running their own business. We hand people billions of dollars and they hand us stock certificates. And they have been running those businesses for decades, in many cases, and we want them to feel the same way the next day when they've got the money and we've got the stock certificates, as the day before, when they have the stock certificates and we had the money. And the moment we start telling them how to change the way they operate or to coordinate with this guy or get this person's approval or anything like that, you know, that just erodes that advantage, which we think is very substantial, that they have. this proprietary feeling about their business.