But I don’t want to repeat myself. And I realised that in America, the producer is the master of the film and the director is just a technician.

I think now, especially with Love & Hyperbole, I was like, let me just write the best thing that I can make for myself. Totally intuitively.

One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money. But we couldn't be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed. Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility. Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.

They were blocked in their minds to do this because they thought, oh this is not done, we don’t do that in our field and you can’t do that, and I said: Why not?

The number one rule I give them is just not give them the golden rule. Do unto others, I'm not a religious guy, but, I mean, nobody said it any better in a couple thousand years than that, which may be why it's lasted to a certain degree too. I mean, more people are reading a 2000-year-old book about how to behave than anything that anybody's coming up with lately. Now it's got a lot of, particularly the Old Testament, it's got different kinds of stories, to some extent, but if the whole world lived by the golden rule, it would be such a more wonderful society.

I think that Jay Powell in when, when the epidemic broke out, I think he acted in March of 2020 and I think if he'd waited two or three weeks, it would have been a disaster. Once the dominoes start toppling, they just start toppling and, and, and, and that line is shorter than anybody thinks, and it topples faster. And I think he did exactly the right thing, and he, he did it even stronger than Volker did. You know, I mean, he, he and Volker are my heroes at the Fed.

The reaction of my family and me to our extraordinary good fortune is not guilt, but rather gratitude. Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others.

The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.

My first mistake, of course, was in buying control of Berkshire. Though I knew its business - textile manufacturing - to be unpromising, I was enticed to buy because the price looked cheap. Stock purchases of that kind had proved reasonably rewarding in my early years, though by the time Berkshire came along in 1965 I was becoming aware that the strategy was not ideal. If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the "cigar butt" approach to investing. A cigar butt found on the street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a smoke, but the "bargain purchase" will make that puff all profit. Unless you are a liquidator, that kind of approach to buying businesses is foolish.

We have two pieces of regrettable news this year. First, Gladys Kaiser, my friend and assistant for twenty-five years, will give up the latter post after the 1993 annual meeting, though she will certainly remain my friend forever. Gladys and I have been a team, and though I knew her retirement was coming, it is still a jolt.