QuestionerWhat elusive, yet obvious to you, truth, has allowed you to think ahead of the crowd and build a clear mental framework to produce a historically significant institution, powerhouse brand?
WarrenI owe a great deal to Ben Graham in terms of learning about investing, and I owe a great deal to Charlie in terms of learning a lot about business, and then I've also been around, I mean, I've spent a lifetime, you know, looking at businesses and why some work and why some don't work. And as Yogi Berra said, you can see a lot just by observing. And that's pretty much what Charlie and I've been doing for a long time. I would say it's important to recognize what you can't do. So we have, we may have tried the department store business and a few things, but we've generally tried to only swing of things in the strike zone at our particular strike zone. And it really hasn't been much more complicated in that. And I think there's another factor that accounts for the fact that Berkshire's done as well as it has, is that we're really trying to behave well. And I had a great grandfather when he died, the previous. gave the talk, and he said, none envied this man's success so fairly won and wisely used. That's a very simple idea, but it's exactly what Berger's trying to do. There are a lot of people who make a lot of money, and everybody hates them, and they don't admire the way they earned the money. And I'm not particularly admirable of making money running gambling casinos. And, you know, we don't own any. We've turned down businesses, including a big tobacco business. So I don't think pretty sure it would work as well if we were just terribly shrewd, but didn't have a little bit of what the preacher said about my grandfather, Angham. We want to have people think of us as having one fairly and used wisely. It works.