QuestionerThe two of you have largely avoided capital allocation mistakes by bouncing ideas off of one another. Will this continue along into Berkshire's future? And I'm interested in both at headquarters and at subsidiaries.
WarrenIt can't continue very long. I don't get to fetish, Charlie. Any successor that's put in at Berkshire, capital allocation abilities and proven capital allocation abilities are certain to be uppermost in the board's minds or in the current case in terms of my recommendation, Charlie's recommendation for what happens after we're not around. Ten years from now, Berkshire will be an aggregation of businesses where more money has been put in in that decade than everything that took place ahead of time. And so you need a very sensible capital allocator in the job of being CEO of Berkshire, and we will have one. Now, they may not establish strategic thinking divisions, and they may listen to investment backers and everything, but they better be able to do it themselves. And if they've come from a different background or haven't done it, it's a little bit, as I put in one of my letters, I think it's like getting to Carnegie Hall playing the violin and then you walk out on the stage and they hand your piano. I mean, it is, it is something that, uh, Persia would not do well if somebody was put in who had a lot of skills in other areas, but really did not have a, a ability of capital allocation. I've talked about it as being something I call a money mind. I mean, people can have 120 IQs or 140 or whatever it may be, very similar scoring abilities in terms of intelligence tests. And some of them have minds that are good at one type of thing and some of another. I've known very bright people that do not have many minds and they can make very unintelligent decisions. They can do all kinds of other things that most mortals can't do. But it just doesn't, it isn't the way their wiring works. And I've known one other people that really would not do that brilliantly. They do fine, but on an SAT test or something like that but they've never made a dumb money decision in our life and charlie i'm sure has seen the same thing so we do want somebody and hopefully they've got a lot of talents but we certainly do not want somebody that if they lack a money mind