But at least until you're out of school, you have to pretend to do it that 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.

Every time you saw that word, you just substituted the phrase bullshit earnings.

Yeah.

It's not that much fun to buy a business where you really hope this sucker liquidates before it goes broke.

I like cryptocurrencies a lot less than you do.

To me, it's just dementia, 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.

I don't think there are good arguments against my position.

I think the people that oppose my position are idiots.

And so, no, I'm, I'm optimistic about life.

If I can be optimistic when I'm nearly dead, surely the rest of you can handle 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.

A director, getting 100 and $50,000 a year from a company who needs it is not an independent director.

They're looking for Chihuahuas and, and, and, and not Great Danes and yeah, and I hope I'm not insulting any of my friends that are on comp committees.

You're insulting the dogs.

Everybody wants fiscal virtue but not quite yet.

They're like that guy who felt that way about sex.

He's 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 we approve of every buyback at all though.

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.

And yeah, it's perfectly obvious at least to me

that to say that derivative accounting in America is a sewer is an insult to sewage.

I have listened to so many nonsensical cost of capital discussions that I've never heard of an intelligent one.

Yeah, Charlie's 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 and he says, what good is health?

You can't buy money with it.

Well, there are a whole lot of things I don't think about. And one of them was those companies, they are losing two or $3 billion a year and going public.

And the people who invented this crypto crap O.

Sometimes I call it crypto crap O

and sometimes I call it, well, crypto shit.

It's just ridiculous that anybody would buy this stuff

It is, it's even not slightly stupid. It's massively stupid

And 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 car loads and then everything flows smoothly thereafter.

That happened in some unnamed international company, 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.

You are mixing something which is wretched and irrational and has bad consequences with something that, uh, has very good consequences.

But, you know, if you mix Raisins with Turds, there's still Turds.

Um, ah, that's why they have me write the annual report.

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.

And 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 learning anything.

He volunteers.

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?

It's not that great a business as a business, casualty insurance.

It's a tough game. There are temptations to be stupid, you know, 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 meet, meet 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 boy that is to think.

Warren reminds me once I asked the 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 shirt front than hire a compensation consultant.

Um, I think I've offended enough people.

There's chores right in the balcony.