Warren Buffett Q&A Transcript || 2022 Charlie Rose Interview
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Charlie Rose: It’s great to see you.
Warren Buffett: Charlie, it’s great to see you, too. I’ve been in Omaha and I think I’ve made, prior to the last week, I’ve probably made two plane flights in two years. Once to see my sister and…
Free at last! (Laughs)
CR: You’re 91.
WB: I’m 91.
CR: Good health?
WB: I couldn’t be in better health. It’s a little bit discouraging to me that my partner in business, life, and everything else — Charlie Munger — is 98. (Laughs)
CR: And still going strong.
WB: I’m still the kid! (Laughs)
CR: You have a successor in place.
WB: We have a successor in place1, but he’s not warming up. (Laughs)
CR: You’re not ready to go.
WB: I’m still in overtime — but I’m out there. (Laughs)
CR: Do you still tap dance to work?
WB: I tap dance to work, Charlie. I’ve always been happy at work, but I’ve never been happier. I’ve got the most interesting — to me — job in the world. I’ve got people you wouldn’t believe that support me. It takes about four or five. It takes a village, to a degree. But I’ve got three people sitting right down the [hall], within twenty or thirty feet of me: my assistant, Deb Bosanek; the fellow that handles all the trades I tell him to do in the morning and money and billions flow in and out and he takes care of it all, Mark Millard; and I’ve got the chief financial officer, Marc Hamburg, who knows more than most of the finance offices and legal offices and everything else in the world. We’ve all worked together for dozens of years and we like each other and everybody helps me. It couldn’t be better.
CR: Choosing who you work with —
WB: It’s everything. I write a little bit about it in the annual report, but choosing what you do and who you do it with [is crucial]. If you’re like me, you’re gonna spend 70 years or something [doing it].
My assistant hasn’t worked the whole time with me, but she went to work for Berkshire when she was seventeen. She still looks seventeen. And, now, she’ll be with us fifty years at Berkshire.
They know me forward and backwards. They accept my eccentricities. They help me.
I would say this: if you take Mark Millard2, I walk in in the morning (or I call him first) and I tell him exactly — I’ve already done it for today — I tell him exactly what we want to do and he does it all day. Some days, a good many days, he moves billions of dollars — purchases and sales. He takes care of the whole thing.
CR: When do you make those decisions?
WB: I think all the time. I’m on the clock at Berkshire all the time.
CR: Walk me through a typical day.
WB: Well, a typical day… I get up, usually, at a few minutes before seven so I can catch the seven o’clock news and the network news in Omaha — so I get up a few minutes before that. Sometimes I turn on the network news — I always turn on CNBC — and I look at what prices are doing and what’s happened in Europe and what’s happened in Japan.
The market opens, our time, at 8:30 — although we’re doing maybe things in Japan or Germany, too. I call Mark [Millard] at 8:00 — with the market opening at 8:30 — and I tell him exactly what to do for the day. And I probably won’t change it during the day. It’s usually a percentage of something. I will say, “Buy or sell x% of the trading volume,” and I’ll give him a list of things. If there’s a limit of price, I give him the price. And then he does it all day. I don’t need to check with him. He sometimes does billions of dollars worth of business.
He buys the Treasury bills which we… In the last couple of years, we probably bought $5 billion every Monday. I would guess that we might be the biggest buyer. Just week after week after week after week.
CR: You made your first investment when you were eleven years old?
WB: In 1942, eighty years ago, I took $114.75 — every penny I had saved — and I bought three shares of Cities Service preferred [stock]. And Cities Service3 was a pretty well known name [back] then. In fact, in 1920, Cities Service — I think — was the fourth-largest company in the United States in terms of number of shareholders. It was a big company.
It had a preferred stock that was selling at $38 that had started skipping the dividends during the Depression, so it accumulated dividends on it of $60 or $70. And, of course, it was par value of $100, too — and it was selling at $38.
At breakfast one morning — I followed all the stocks every day — but then I made my plunge. I had roughly this amount of money, so I bought three shares. I don’t remember this precisely, but I think I told my dad in the morning, “Now! Let’s move, Dad.” Pop, I called him. I said, “Let’s move, Pop!”
CR: You felt the thrill of it then.
WB: Oh, I had been reading about it and following it — the whole market. I really had read every book in the Omaha Public Library that was on the stock market.
CR: By eleven?
WB: By eleven, I’ll guarantee you. And some of them twice. I started out reading the ones in my dad’s office. I just loved to read. I read other things, too.
I knew more when I was eleven than I know now. (Laughs) In terms of the actual mechanics of the stock market, I don’t know what happens when I put an order in now. The machinery of the way orders are executed now… I would know if I sat and worked in a trade room for a day or two, but I don’t really know the mechanics of what happens when an order is processed today as [well as] I did when I was eleven.
CR: What is it that you enjoy the most about it? You don’t pick stocks — you pick companies.
WB: Yeah, that’s exactly [right].
But, when I was eleven, I picked stocks. I had the whole wrong idea. I was interested in watching stocks and I thought stocks were things that went up and down. I charted them. I read books on technical analysis. I read Edwards and Magee4 — I think that was the classic then. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages and I read that whole thing over and over again. I read everything.
[For] the first eight years, I thought that the important thing was to predict what a stock would do and predict the stock market. Then I read Ben Graham, I was nineteen or twenty, and I realized that I was doing it exactly the wrong way. But it didn’t hurt that I had that background [of technical analysis] or anything.
I rejiggered my mind when I read the book, The Intelligent Investor. And, from that point, I never bought another stock — I bought businesses that happened to be publicly traded. I became an owner of a business and I did not care whether a stock went up or down the next day or the next week or the next month or the next year. I didn’t have any idea what it would do. I didn’t know what the stock market would do. But I knew businesses. I knew some businesses.
CR: I’ve asked people about your genius —
WB: No, I’m a bright guy who’s terribly interested in what he does, so I’ve spent a lifetime doing it and I’ve surrounded myself with people that bring out the best in me. You don’t need to be a genius in what I do. That’s the good thing about it.
If I would have done physics or a whole lot of other subjects, I’d be an also-ran. But I am in a game that you don’t need… You probably need 120 points of IQ. But 170 doesn’t do any better than 120. It would probably do worse. You don’t really need brains.
CR: What do you need?
WB: You need the right orientation. 90% of the people — I’m pulling that figure out of the air — but 90% of the people that buy stocks don’t think of them the right way. They think of them as something that they hope goes up next week. And they think about the market as something they hope goes up. If it’s down, they feel worse. I feel better [when the market goes down].
CR: What do you think about?
WB: I think about what the company is going to be worth ten or twenty years from now. And I hope it goes down when I buy it because [then] I’ll buy more.
CR: You have a competitive spirit, clearly.
WB: Yeah. Well, you’ve got to be careful about what you compete in. It’s a good thing that I don’t have a competitive spirit in chess or football or anything like that. (Laughs) No, I’m an observer there. I enjoy watching things like that, but I try to keep my competitive spirit in a game where I can win.
CR: Do you have a killer instinct?
WB: Nah, not exactly. I wouldn’t call it a killer instinct, but I do know this — when I want to do something, I always want to do it big.
I put my whole net worth in Cities Service preferred.
CR: $120.
WB: $114.75. (Laughs)
I put my whole net worth in and, since that day (March 11, 1942), I have never had less than 80% of my money in American business. You can call them stocks, but I see them as American business. I’ve owned a piece of American business — at least 80% — at all times. I don’t want to own anything else.
I want to own a home and some things that my family wants and all that, but owning five homes doesn’t mean anything to me because I’m happy in one home. There’s a certain amount of things that [will] go wrong with everything. If I’ve got two homes, I know I’ve got more problems — and I don’t have more happiness.
[00:12:19] Charlie: What brings you happiness?
[00:12:21] Buffett: Oh, that. I would have to honestly say that what makes me happiest is what I’m doing. You know, I enjoy two things about it. One I know all went over time. That doesn’t mean I’ll beat everybody else or anything like that. but I mean, the game is very, easy. If you have the right lessons in your mind about what you’re buying, I’m not buying stocks. I’m buying pieces of overwhelmingly American business. And I’m happy, that’s what I’m doing. I’m happy when stocks are going down, I’m happier when stocks are going down because I can buy more of them with the same amount of money. I’d be happy if I were a farmer, I want farmland to go down. So I could buy more acreage. You know, it just makes sense. And I’ll tell you that the second thing I really like. I like being trusted by people. You know, I like to do what I do with partners than do it sitting in a room myself, even though I might make more money that way.
[00:13:40] Charlie: you like the idea that people are trusting you with their savings.
[00:13:43] Buffett: Yeah. They just say, look, “I’ve saved money. I don’t know what to do with it.” And they give it to me and, and they don’t, most of them give it to me. I mean, certainly originally, but even now to an unusual degree, you haven’t told me what the idea is, that number is for the lifetime. And then the most of them, I mean, I’ve done this a long time ago. Most of them give it away when they get through. They never quit saving. I mean and of course, I’m sort of their savings machine.
[00:14:16] Charlie: They save it and then give it to you
[00:14:20] Buffett: Yeah. And then they say, keep it and just keep building up. And they don’t do it with the idea they’re going to retire when they’re 65 and then build great castles or anything like that. They just basically a few do, I mean if you spend some money, let Rob, but overwhelmingly, they, if they’ve been saving, when they were 25 and saved a little money, he gave it to me. They’re still saving. There were 11 doctors that we met hilltop house. There was one friend of mine named Bill Angle and he was trying to get these other doctors to join with me. So I don’t know what was in 1958 or 59. I invited 12 doctors to this dinner at Hilltop house and he had me come. And he basically said, “this is my friend Warren. And if you’ve got any brains, you’ll give him some money.” And so we spent the evening and these guys were all probably in their low thirties and 11 of the 12 put in $10,000 each the 12th said to Bill, he said, “well, what happens if we lose our money?” And my friend Bill, I’ll never forget what he said, “well, dummy.” He said, “we’ll form another partnership!”. That was the guy that didn’t invest. He got reminded of this by the other 11 for the rest of his life. And those people stuck with me and, one of them died. Then the last year was in front of my deleted and 101, and his name was Stan Tools. And he came from a little town about 300 people near Omaha. And he became an ophthalmologist and a super wonderful guy in every way. I mean, he helped all those fellow doctors and, you couldn’t have found that final guidance, but two of the other 11, two of them are still alive and the money and the amount of money. I mean, they haven’t built, they could have done anything. I mean, they, they got to look bigger than anybody. But then what about the lives they liked?
[00:16:49] Charlie: and so have you, you live in the same house you’ve lived in.
[00:16:54] Buffett: I’ve lived in the same house since 1958, 63 or 64 years. A quarter of the life of the country. I’ve lived a quarter of the life of the country in one house. And I like being five minutes from the office too. I’m gonna just think if I’d had a 35-minute commute. I’ve gone to the same office now since January of 62. So it’s been 60 years, And Let’s say I’ve saved 30 minutes every day on commute each way.
[00:17:28] Charlie: Let me turn to the shareholder’s letter that you wrote for 2021.
[00:17:33] Buffett: Well, that letter was, I started that letter in my head. I’ve already started next year’s letter in my head, but I started that letter in my head…
[00:17:41] Charlie: Because you can begin to see what….
[00:17:45] Buffett: It keeps forming, but that isn’t a newsletter that comes out, you know. It’s what I want to talk to my sisters. Well, I forged it originally in terms of my sisters who had brought me all their money and Berkshire, they trusted me 60 years ago and they just put it all in and they’re very smart. My older sisters’…died recently, but both of them are very smart and interested in financial matters, but they’re not a nob like me. And so they got other interests too. And basically, be they’ve had to be on their money and they don’t want to hear day today.
[00:18:34] Charlie: So you tell them what’s happened in the last year.
[00:18:35] Buffett: Once a year, It’s like I sit down with them and tell them you know, here’s what might be interesting to you. And that’s, I’m doing that all year in my mind and I’m doing it, I’ve done it. I know what I’m going to talk about next year unless something changes in a dramatic way.
[The anual letter] keeps forming, but that isn’t a newsletter…It’s what I want to talk to my sisters. Well, I forged it originally in terms of my sisters who had brought me all their money and Berkshire, they trusted me 60 years ago and they just put it all in and they’re very smart….both of them are very smart and interested in financial matters, but they’re not a nob like me…Once a year, It’s like I sit down with them and tell them you know, here’s what might be interesting to you. And that’s, I’m doing that all year in my mind
Warren Buffett [00:18:50] Charlie: Can you tell me what that is?
[00:18:52] Buffett: No, but I can tell you this. Last night, you know I went to music man and among the people who were with me was my friend, Carol Loomis. Carol is 92.
[00:19:05] Charlie: She’s a great journalist and writer.
[00:19:11] Buffett: She starts editing. I sent her the report, which I think is perfect, always at the time I said, or the report in I’ve usually December and she keeps sending it back and she, kinda won’t let me send it out without, checking to make sure that I like looking at if I left out a comma or something like that. so right up to the end, but so that the report, although it’s dated February 23rd, that, that report basically it was written in my head for a long time, but it was what I thought was finished probably in December. And then Carol tells me there’s a lot of work to do.
Investing during the Pandemic [00:19:58] Charlie: No big investments in 2021, because you didn’t see anything that met your requirements.
[00:20:03] Buffett: Yeah, I wrote a report and people can go to Berkshirehathaway.com and they can see exactly what I think and I’ve thought for 40 some years of each report.
[00:20:14] Charlie: But for you to make a big investment. What do you need to know?
[00:20:20] Buffett: I need to know that I think the Berkshire Hathaway is going to be worth more money someday down the road. Not tomorrow. I wanted to do the down if I’m buying something you know, and I would say this, the world has changed a lot since that report was written, but the world changed a lot 2 years ago. Just think about it.
[00:20:47] Charlie: Because of the pandemic.
[00:20:48] Buffett: pandemic. It’s almost exactly two years later. And that happened two years ago and we didn’t know exactly what it was. We didn’t know what the financial result would be. We didn’t know what the result was, you know, I mean, we just didn’t know, but when I wrote my report in February, I didn’t know the pandemic was going to hit, but, you know, a week later, and I didn’t know that the American financial system was on the brake, you know, chaos a few weeks later. And if somebody wants to read a great book that just came out it’s a sensational book called trillion-dollar triage. That tells us on a day-by-day basis, what was going on in March that; well, in my opinion, Jay Powell, he matched Paul Volcker in terms of doing things that needed to be done that day, you know? And it’s a great day-by-day report. The book just came out a couple of days ago.
[00:22:04] Charlie: We expect the fed will raise the rates. Does it remind you of the 1970s?
[00:22:12] Buffett: Everything that happens in the investment world reminds me of something or other, I mean, every day, if it’s a boring day, it reminds me of something. I mean there, but I don’t think that way, all I’m trying to do is buy businesses. Let’s pretend there is no stock market. Let’s say I had to buy these privately, like you buy a farm privately, like a bio department house, private their investments. So you’re looking to say, what can I do with the money I’ve saved. To put it away. So I feel good about getting it back later under any circumstances, but not necessarily on a given moment, but if I have a farm, it’s going to take me a while, but it is. People will be so much better if they actually didn’t have a stock market in terms of buying businesses, but you know…
[00:23:08] Charlie: You’ve made two huge investments recently. One is Activision.
[00:23:15] Buffett: No, we have two fellows in the office that each, they manage a total about $30 billion between them Ted watch learn and Todd homes,
[00:23:27] Charlie: Two people you chose.
[00:23:28] Buffett: They’ve been with us for about 10 years each. They have total authority over the monthly investment. They’re just as independent in buying things as I am. I mean, If they decide to buy something in a country I’ve never heard of and the stock, they don’t ask me.
[00:23:47] Charlie: But are you saying that maybe they were decided to..
[00:23:50] Buffett: well, I’ve actually said that one of those I’m sort of very clear in, and there’s a letter on, on the website that describes exactly the circumstances. Cause he got misreported in the press originally. And so I have written a letter there because actually a number of secother first pass news organization. Picked up a story without checking whether it was true. I mean, they ran with it without independently reporting it. So they, the one I’m not going to name names, but there are some names in my letter, but they just ran it wrong, a wrong story which had implications on its own. So the letter is up there. It’s going to stay posted forever because it’s the correct record of what happened precisely is that one of the other fellows decided to buy Activision. Didn’t ask me and it’s fine. I mean, he bought it. He bought about, I think I used the figure of $85%. I think when we double-checked, it was $76 or $77, but we’ll list every day. That he bought it at the price. He bought it and the price was reported wrong by the press and that it was picked up by a whole bunch of other organizations and printed as wrong. And so millions of people read an incorrect story. And so we’ll have it at the annual meeting. I think I’ll have a slide if anybody asked me for it, let me show everyday purchases, the exact price. And that was done by one of the fellows in the office now. And that was like I say, $77 was in October and the rest was in early November and he paid, he paid about $77 a share and you can buy it today. And Microsoft announced. The first story said weeks later, which makes us all like two or three or four weeks later it was 12 weeks later, months later.
[00:26:03] Charlie: So this was months before Microsoft decided to acquire Activision.
[00:26:09] Buffett: The other guy like that as a stock, as a business. And so it was buying it and he paid an average of $77 a share and we will have a list of every day at every price. And then I guess it was well, there was a big expose type, story run and but he wasn’t buying during any of that period. And then the preliminary proxy came out has been filed with the SCC by Activision deciding, describing the history of the deal was to when Microsoft came to them and it was an It was sometime in a couple of months later that Microsoft first approached Bobby Kotick. And then four other people, you can read it all to file with the SEC, And then after it was announced, the stock, you could buy the stock at $78 a share. So the implication, the first story was that it was somehow that somebody made a great deal by getting tipped off or something. Simply not $1 a share after it was announced higher than one of the other fellows paid for about 15 million shares. He still got it.
[00:27:49] Charlie: How about Occidental?
[00:27:50] Buffett: Well, Occidental And we go, well, you know, a couple of years ago we financed Occidental
[00:28:00] Charlie: And had some warrants coming out of there
[00:28:03] Buffett: Vicky, who I’d never met before. And I got a call on a Friday and Bank of America saying that, Occidental’s going to need some money to buy Anadarko. And I think I did not know then they were in competition with Chevron and will I meet with them because they needed a lot of money fast. And I said, “sure, how about tomorrow?” And went back and forth. Or another came up Sunday that Friday. And we met at 10 o’clock in my office on a Sunday. And I said we’ll give you $10 billion under these circumstances. But we’ll do it tomorrow. And you know, that’s not wall street, but that’s, Berkshire. And so and they knew I was good for it. And so we made a deal Monday night, the next day on the night. No, I told our guys, you work all night, all night for them, and we get this thing done on Tuesday,
[00:29:17] Charlie: But is there much negotiation or are you simply saying this is what I will do.
[00:29:21] Buffett: This is what I’ll do. I always say that’s what I’ll do. I mean, you know, I’ve, said, that’s what I’ll do many times. And I’ve always, and, that is all I’ll do.
[00:29:33] Charlie: But this is what you have come to represent. I mean, think of the financial crisis and think of Goldman Sachs but it gave them credibility when they needed it. That Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway had decided to have confidence in them.
[00:29:50] Buffett: We were putting in X, billions of dollars. And then when I questioned where we’re putting it in, it wasn’t an IOU or they all, we send them the cash and it was right after Lehman. And there was a run on the whole economic system. Everybody was the dominoes the numbers were falling. Yeah. Goldman Sachs knew they’d be fine. Although dominoes didn’t fall. And they had to worry about the United States Congress because they were mad at banks. this time they were mad at banks and this particular guy, but they were mad at banks and they really didn’t. Some of them didn’t fully understand what the hell was going to happen.
[00:30:38] Charlie: They were mad because this was a financial crisis.
[00:30:41] Buffett: It was more than a financial crisis. I mean it was a financial crisis cubed.
[00:30:45] Charlie: but it had an origin in financial institutions.
[00:30:49] Buffett: Yeah. A lot of people did a lot of things wrong, but there was plenty of it on wall street, plenty of it on wall street, but there was plenty of what else worked too. I want to emphasize that but, wall street made a lot of money out of doing a lot of things that contributed to the crisis.
[00:31:05] Charlie: Here’s my point Berkshire and Warren buffet merged to a point where your reputation and your credibility. ..
[00:31:19] Buffett: and our money and the body were important. They won’t as a determining factor.
[00:31:27] Charlie: they wanted the money, but they also wanted credibility.
[00:31:31] Buffett: They had to have instant credibility and that’s what they had to have somebody who countered besides people whose position it was to lie.
[00:31:41] Charlie: And how did you build that? Which is an essential part of who you are and Berkshire Hathaway.
[00:31:53] Buffett: Well I started on March 11th, 1942, and I had a father that was the right father now. And I was lucky.
[00:32:03] Charlie: I think that you may have heard this Lennon once said there are decades when nothing happens. And then there are weeks when decades happen.
[00:32:13] Buffett: That’s very well put. And when you’re buying businesses, don’t, don’t call them stocks. When you’re buying businesses where you’re buying apartment houses. Sometimes when you’re buying land, you know, all kinds of things. There are times when you get a chance to act and do something really intelligent may happen once every 10 years, once every 20 years depending on what field you’re in, where you live, what you know, all of that. But most of the important things, there’s a lot of foundational work, but the actual big acts in life, are when you proposed to your spouse, forget all the other stuff. I mean, if you, if you made the right decision and you get the right answer from him or her, you’re 90% of the way home in life.
[00:33:05] Charlie: But also things happen in the world. Like the pandemic
[00:33:06] Buffett: That’s true too,
[00:33:07] Charlie: And it can change everything as it did.
[00:33:10] Buffett: It happened in 1929.
[00:33: 11] Charlie: It happened in 1918 and 19.
[00:33:19] Buffett: I forget when these things were in 1907. I mean, when they closed the stock exchange back in 1914 for a long period of time, people don’t ever think about 9/11. They closed the stock exchange for a few days. And I mean, there are big events in this world.
[00:33:36] Charlie: We’re going through one of them right now.
[00:33:38] Buffett: Yeah. I’m going, we’ll get into discussing that particularly
[00:33:42] Charlie: Allow me this. I mean this is having a huge effect on the world order.
[00:33:51] Buffett: Yeah. But it doesn’t do me any good and it doesn’t do the world any good for me to talk about it. So.
[00:33:57] Charlie: Can we talk about the global economy then, you know, in terms of where we are?
[00:34:01] Buffett: I can tell you where we are, but yeah,
[00:34:04] Charlie: But yeah, let me phrase it this way, in terms of the global economy. I mean when you look at the United States.
[00:34:13] Buffett: the United States is the United States economy, and it’s very easy to look at the statistics on it. I mean, more people, a greater percentage of the American population is, wealthy now or have more income now than they’ve ever had. And if you look at whether the bank of America gives you their average deposit, I mean, you just look at the wealth and that doesn’t mean everybody’s wealthy, but it does mean relative to any other period of time. And I mean, people here have more money now. They get mortgages at lower rates than they’ve ever gotten. So if they want to buy a house or something.
[00:35:03] Charlie: Okay, But is that going to continue. I mean what do the rates are, right? Raising as you know we were in an inflation period.
[00:35:11] Buffett: I’m not going to pick them straight for you, but
[00:35:13] Charlie: What I’d ask you to predict?
[00:35:16] Buffett: Right, today, Charlie, you live in an environment. You live in a new environment where the bottom 2% in terms of income in the United States, the bottom 5 percent, for sure. The top 1% all live better than John D Rockefeller was living when I was six years old, John D Rockefeller was the richest man in the world. And today, you can get better medicine, better education, better entertainment, and better transportation. You can do everything better than equally. You can. I mean, it’s just astounding. That’s in my lifetime, if you wanted to watch a football game, he still had the goal there. And I can sit there with this big screen and they keep showing me the replay. So that explained to me what happened and everything. And maybe everybody doesn’t have a screen as big as mine, but damn near everybody has a screen or has an iPhone or a computer or access to one. And they have access. I mean, when I was, born, you know, the dentist didn’t use navigate. I mean,
[00:36:42] Charlie: There has been progress and none and nowhere more than in the United States.
[00:36:50] Buffett: Well, relative to the base, maybe more than I make, but there’s no country that’s done what our country has done in seven. If you go back three of my lifetimes, you’re looking, you’ve three lifetimes. You are looking at less than 1% of the world’s population, closer to half of 1%, half a, 1% of the people in the world are sitting in this land. They don’t work harder than people in, the rest of the world. I mean, in terms of hours of unpleasant labor, everybody’s got hours of labor, that aid practically, they don’t come Laden with gold, And you know, they are half of 1% and they work the same hours. They got the same IQs. They may be in little self-selected in terms of enterprise, in terms of going across oceans and fast forward a couple of lifetimes. And they’ve got 20% plus of all the bounty in the world. I mean, something that. Like nothing. We just imagine that if you’ve gone to anybody, constitutional Congress since 1789, if you go to any one of the representatives there and you said, I want to tell you what this place is gonna look like, you know, in three more of your lifetimes, your great, great-grandchildren. are going to be flying in the sky. They’re going to be watching sports all over the world and are going to entertain their medicine. They hold you off to a lunatic society.
[00:38:50] Charlie: But at the same time, as you know, and you hear this all the time, you have 845 billionaires in America, and they have more wealth than the bottom 60%.
[00:39:02] Buffett: That’s true, and that’s up to the government. Government has a proper place as the rule maker, but Henry Ford. By 1922 or three, he was turning out 2 million cars a year. Now, how many could the Ford family use? 30, 40 I don’t know. So 2 million people are getting the benefit of what he’s doing and he’s getting 30,000, he’s getting 50 cars and he’s getting a whole bunch of little claim checks. Just think of it. Everything on Thomas Edison did all the things he did, you know, he made some money, but we better. I mean, we’re using it. It belongs to us. And it doesn’t. If you take what an hour of labor delivered to you a hundred years ago, and what an hour of labor delivers to you now for you and your family? It’s unbelievable.
[00:40:08] Charlie: but that’s an argument for the forward progress as an argument.
[00:40:13] Buffett: it’s an argument for capitalism, but it does capitalism just say, get rid of a referee and a government. We’ve got a government who can tell capitalism what to do. Do you think they do? And that’s what they should do. And they do it in different ways at different times and all kinds of things. But I’ve got this money, which I’ll never, again, you know,but it has value to somebody. I mean, it’s claim checks on future output that’s declining judge bawling to me. So I want to buy 50 superyachts. I couldn’t do it, but What does it mean to me? It can buy more things for other people that are useful. And I know I have everything I want in life, you know, everything. So it’s not evil, but the federal government, is the boss in the end and they shouldn’t screw up capitalism, and capitalism shouldn’t screw up the federal government. It’s very simple.
[00:41:25] Charlie: but does capitalism need to be reformed, itself, As you know,
[00:41:29] Buffett: it’s evolving, always. We started in 1789. We had, we had business and it’s gotten far, unbelievably, more productive for people. And the only thing it can do with what a producer has given to other people, it isn’t like the 50 richest guys in the country can say, I’m just going to eat everything. They’re turning out products that I found. I’m probably the least capable guy in the world of working with it, but it makes life better.
[00:42:07] Charlie: It is the reason that Apple is the richest company in the world.
[00:42:09] Buffett: Yeah. And you had Tim cook on before and you can hear as a company that a guy invents something, all kinds of other smart people do the same thing. Apple, I think sells less than 25% of the smartphones in the world. I know a guy that produces as apple does, but Apple has produced the one that is the most useful to people. It’s an aspirational product. Somebody, you know, a lot of people have made cars, but you got a few survivors that made the ones that people liked the best. And, you know, we would be selling 16 or 17 million cars a year in this country. We have 50 producers or whether we got three and we never used to have.
[00:43:10] Charlie: But here is an interesting fact, as you know, Tesla has more market value than all the other automobile companies combined.
[00:43:19] Buffett: Yeah. That shows what America produces. He’s taking on general motors and Ford and Toyota, all these people, who’ve got all the stuff and he’s got an idea and he is winning. That’s America. I mean you can’t dream it up. I mean, it’s astounding now. You still need a referee.
[00:43:51] Charlie: And that’s the government.
[00:43:52] Buffett: Yeah, sure. And you need a judicial system and you know, but that comes with government and we’ve got the best so far. We’ve got the best system. We’ve got a better system than we used to have. We’ll have a better system, 50 years from now.
[00:44:05] Charlie: Why are you so sure.
[00:44:10] Buffett: Well, I’ve seen 91 years of it, I’ve never seen a period where I didn’t believe that.
[00:44:18] Charlie: That it will get better.
[00:44:19] Buffett: Of course.
[00:44:20] Charlie: And every aspect
[00:44:22] Buffett: Not every aspect, we can go backward or something. No, it’s not, but it’s unbelievable what has happened, you know, let me just think. You know, we’ve got civil war, we’ve got a great depression. We have, we’ve had all these things. And we’ll continue. I’ll guarantee you’ll probably get them next year. And the year I’ve been hereafter, but in a herky-jerky, but the dramatic manner, business moves forward. Government moves forward, and more important people move forward.
[00:45:00] Charlie: The thing that you feared the most, and you have said this, is nuclear war.
[00:45:05] Buffett: Yep. It was Einstein. You know, maybe it’s Burton Russell, this one, but he says, this changes everything in the world, the way men think.
[00:45:11] Charlie: you don’t want to talk about the current situation where one of the questions is, what if we end up with world war three and a nuclear catastrophe is a reason you don’t want to talk to me about it because you don’t want to be quoted by people.
[00:45:28] Buffett: I don’t know. I want to talk about it, but,I’m talking about nuclear catastrophes pop past. And the truth is that, well, it was Einstein that said, “I know not what the weapons of world war three will be, but world war four will be fought with sticks and stones”. And that says it all. Yeah, we’ve got the power and other people have the power to essentially destroy the planet. And climate change is important. All of those things. I mean, we, there’s all kinds of things we should be working on, but in the end.. we can destroy that. It’s not just us, we’re going to end the planet, and that it’s, and I don’t want to talk about much more beyond that. I don’t like saying that to people, but it’s true. It was true when Einstein said it, I mean, it’s been true, you know, we came close to the Cuban missile crisis
[00:46:34] Charlie: And it is being talked about now.
[00:46:39] Buffett: All this you talk about,
[00:46:43] Charlie: But let me, before we leave capitalism, in a sense, do you see any changes that businesses ought to do? Because you know, there is, you know, on part of Larry Fink and others. Where does Warren buffet come down on that argument?
[00:47:03] Buffett: I will be talking about a lot of things on April 30th at our annual meeting And that’s what I’m talking about. All of our shareholders at the same time and
[00:47:12] Charlie: The people who’ve trusted you.
[00:47:16] Buffett: yeah and the be there’ll be 40,000 in attendance. And it’ll you know, it’ll be taken around the world and, and that’s when I can talk to all, if they want to listen to it, I will everyone, every one of my partners can hear at the same time on a Saturday. So star merged is not open until Monday. And so I think digest, or like, what should we play or anything else? Cause they can watch it on a CNBC. We’ll be sending in a little bit of watching.
[00:47:48] Charlie: Watching It’s not like being there.
[00:47:50] Buffett: Well, it isn’t for a lot of people, but it’s where we’re going to have in my view, if it were held today and that was what April 30th, but we will have, I think from everything I hear, we’re going to have the largest. Grew up coming along. I think I ever, and I sure hope so.