[0:00]
WarrenI started buying stocks when I was 11. I'd been reading every book in the library on it. I loved it. My dad, you know, it was his business, and I'd get to go down to his office, and I'd read the books down there, and they saved the money, and finally, by the time I was 11, I could buy a stock, and I could tell you, at that time, I went to New York Stock Exchange when I was nine. My dad took us to New York, each kid to New York once. And he took me, and I went to the New York Stock Exchange, and I was in awe of it. And I could tell you how the specialist system worked and the odd lot arrangements, and I could tell you history of finance and all of these things. And then I started, I got very interested in technical analysis and charted stocks and did all kinds of crazy things, hours and hours and hours. And save money to buy other stocks. I tried shorting, and I just did everything. And then when I was either 19 or 20, and I can't remember exactly where I did it or something, I picked up a book someplace. It wasn't a textbook at school, but it was in Lincoln, Nebraska. And I, you know, I looked at this book, and I saw one paragraph, and it told me I'd been doing everything wrong. I just had the whole approach wrong. I thought, I was in the business of trying to pick stocks that would go up. And in one paragraph, I saw that that was totally foolish, and I left, I brought something that it's really interesting. Let's put up, what do we call this chart? Oh, here we are, yeah. Let's put up illusion, illusion one. Yeah, there we have it. You know, if you look at that, some people will see two faces, some people will see a base, and some people will look a long time and only see two faces. But the mind flips from one side to another, and that's some name for it that's some name for it that they call it ambiguous illusions or something of the sort. There's other things. things that talk about aha moments or or in the old comic strips with Popeye Wimpy would have a little balloon over his head and the light bulb would go on there's this point where all of a sudden you see something you haven't seen well it took me I had an illusion that I was looking at we'll say in that one two phases go to the let's go to the one label two And if you're looking at it from one side, you look, it looks like a rabbit. If you look the other way, it looks like you're looking at a duck.
[3:34]
WarrenAnd, you know, the mind is a very funny place. And I think people call it an a perceptive mass when you have all kinds of things going on in your mind. And they've gone for years and they sit there and get lost. And then all of a sudden, you see something different than what you were seeing before. And it took me in stocks, which I was intensely interested in, and I had a decent IQ, and I was reading and thinking, and, you know, and it was important to me to make some money on it, every motivation in the world. And then I read a chapter. I read a paragraph, actually, in chapter eight, I think it was, of the intelligent investor. And it just, it told me that I wasn't looking at the duck. I was looking, you know, now it was the rabbit, whatever it may be. And whether you call it a light bulb, whether you call it, you know, a moment of truth, whatever it may be. And that's happened, that happened to me in Lincoln. I mean, it changed my life. If I hadn't read that book, I don't know how long I would have gone on, looking for head and shoulders formations and 200-day moving averages and the odd-lot ratios and a zillion things. I love that kind of stuff. Except it wasn't. It was the wrong stuff. I was looking at it.