Those of you who are about to enter business school,
or who are there, I recommend you learn to do it our way.
But at least until you’re out of school you have to pretend to do it their way.
People don’t seem to get that point.
Do you have any idea why, Charlie?
Warren, if people weren’t so often wrong, we wouldn’t be so rich.
Yeah, I think you would understand any presentation using the word EBITDA,
if every time you saw that word you just substituted the phrase, “bullshit earnings.”
So no, I’m optimistic about life.
If I can be optimistic when I’m nearly dead,
surely the rest of you can handle a little inflation.
And of course, that's the other advice. The best way to get what you want in life is
to deserve what you want. How could it be otherwise?
It's not crazy enough so that the world is looking for a lot of undeserving people to reward.
Everybody wants fiscal virtue but not quite yet.
They’re like that guy who felt that way about sex.
He was willing to give it up but not quite yet.
Well, you don’t want to be like the motion picture executive in California.
And they said the funeral was so large because everybody wanted to make sure he was dead.
It was investment banker-aided fraud.
Not exactly novel.
That does not mean that we approve of every buyback, at all, though, I mean we've seen ...
No, no, no. I think some people just buy it to keep the stock up.
And that, of course, is insane.
And immoral.
But apart from that, it’s fine.
I have listened to so many nonsensical
cost of capital discussions, that ...
I’ve never heard an intelligent one.
Charlie is big on lowering expectations.
Absolutely.
That's the way I got married.
My wife lowered her expectations.
Sure, there are a lot of things in life way more important than wealth.
All that said ...
... some people do get confused.
I play golf with a man. He says:
“What good is health? You can’t buy money with it.”
Well, there are a lot of things that I don't think about.
And of of them is companies that are losing two or three billion dollars per year and going public.
In accounting, you can do things like they do in Italy when they have trouble with the
mail. You know, it piles up and irritates the postal employees. They just throw away a few
carloads - everything flows smoothly thereafter. You’re naming names again, folks.
That happened in some unnamed international country.
Yeah, Italy.
The general system for money management requires people
to pretend that they can do something that they can’t do, and to pretend to like it when they really don’t.
I think that’s a terrible way to spend your life ...
... but it’s very well paid.
Well, I can’t give you a formulaic approach, because I don’t use one.
If you want a formula you should go back to graduate school.
They’ll give you lots of formulas that won’t work.
As Samuel Johnson said, famously:
“I can give you an argument, but I can’t give you an understanding.”
It’s extraordinary how resistant some people are at learning anything.
The answer is no, the board at Lubrizol
did not breach its duty, because we were not going to participate
in the transaction if they didn’t do it our way.
Has anybody else got an easy question?
And yet it’s perfectly obvious, at least to me,
that to say that derivative accounting in America is a sewer ...
... is an insult to sewage.
It’s not that great a business as a business, casualty insurance.
It’s a tough game. There are temptations to be stupid in it. It’s like banking.
But competency is a relative concept. And what a lot of us need, including the one speaking -
what I needed to get ahead was to compete against idiots.
And luckily there’s a large supply.
I don’t like multitasking.
I see these people doing three things at once, and I think, God, what a terrible way that is to think.
I like cryptocurrencies a lot less than you do.
And I think the people who are professional traders that go into trading cryptocurrencies, it’s just disgusting.
It’s like somebody else is trading turds and you decide, “I can’t be left out.”
Warren reminds me ...
... once I asked a man who just left a large investment bank — and I said,
“How does your firm make its money?” He said,
“Off the top, off the bottom, off both sides, and in the middle.”
Well I would rather throw a viper down my shirtfront than hire a compensation consultant.
I think I’ve offended enough people.
There’s two or three in the balcony!