source: https://youtu.be/1AlPTiJrJnE?si=Dyn32ncDVz-wNeTi
title: Warren Buffett | Bill Gates | Lecture | University Of Nebraska | 2005

transcription: 
i was just wondering what is what would
you consider to be the worst investment
you've ever made
the worst investment i ever made how
long do you have
i received an email a couple weeks back
from you and it said if i forwarded it
to 20 people
i'd get i'd get 10 000 i still haven't
seen the money yet
my favorite was they offered to cover my
legal costs for just dollars a month
what do you think are some of the most
important most challenging societal
issues that we face
i think the issues of equity we got
lucky tickets in life
got a ticket said american we got a
ticket that said
intelligent what is the best piece of
advice you've ever been given
what did i tell you that impressed you
the most
the world's richest billionaires warren
buffett and bill gates
gives students advice on how to get a
job how to find success
and how to help change the world coming
next on
buffett and gates go back to school
the two richest men in the world are
dramatically different
warren buffett earned his 41 billion the
old-fashioned way
by investing in solid old-line companies
that sell basic products
insurance soft drinks home improvement
and shoes bill gates is the modern
genius who earned his 50 billion
by creating the world's largest software
company
microsoft his innovative products
include
windows office and xbox 360.
in spite of their differences the two
men are close friends
and they share a common passion
interacting with america's brightest
students
today buffett has invited gates to join
him in a dialogue with students
from the university of nebraska school
of business administration
buffett earned his bachelor's degree
here in 1950
there was a girl i had a big crush on
and she was paying no attention to me
she was going with some guy to play the
ukulele and i thought it must be because
of the ukulele so i got to utilize her
to play it she still ignored me
both men relish the opportunity to
engage in spirited discussion with
members of the next generation of
business leaders
[Music]
the one condition they placed on this
event is that no faculty
staff parents or reporters will be
allowed to talk
only students will ask the questions
we're all pretty excited just to have
the opportunity to meet with the two
richest people in the world there's a
lot of questions
i've been waiting for this like oh all
week i'm feeling
pumped i'm excited to see these people
[Music]
got it terrific well this will be great
please give a warm university of
nebraska-lincoln
college of business administration
welcome to warren buffett
and bill gates
as the men take their seats students
selected by the faculty of the business
college
are ready with questions that have not
been shared with either buffett or
gates
the students in with one of the most
difficult questions facing business
today
hello my name is kim martin i'm a senior
finance major here at the university
my question is how do you instill
ethical leadership
throughout your organization and to
begin with how do you know that the
management one level below
you is making decisions that would
parallel your own
we have all the money we need you know
we'd like to have more
but we can afford to lose money but we
can't afford to lose reputation
not a shredder reputation and therefore
i asked the managers
i asked them to judge every action they
take
not just by legal standards although
obviously that's the first test
but also by the test what i call the
newspaper test how would they feel about
any given action if they knew it was to
be written up
the next day in their local paper
to be read by their family by their
friends by their neighbors
written by a smart but kind of
unfriendly reporter
and if it passes that test it's okay and
i tell them if anything is close to the
lines
it's out and they can always call me if
they wanted to check something but if
they call me there's something wrong
with it probably anyway
and that's about it in microsoft's case
our top
management team the majority of them
joined us as right after uh whatever
degree they got if any
now our business in in many ways is kind
of simple it's about writing writing
great software
uh we sit down every year to go through
the various things that people have to
be careful about we have products that
have
high market share we do business all
over the world so there's some
particular
dictates how you work with suppliers
gifts they might
come forward with but it's it's mainly
the
seeing these people in action that that
make us confident about their behavior
i should mention that that i am the only
college grad
up here
yeah i'll be taking my harvard trip off
pretty soon because i
i didn't complete the whole course so i
didn't think i should leave it on the
whole
they don't allow you to wear it more
than half today as i understand it
hi i'm tara steinbach i'm also a senior
finance major at the university
and this is mr gates since you joined
the board at berkshire hathaway
have you considered possibly taking over
for mr buffett when he retires
please take notes on this one
yeah this uh this being on the berkshire
board is a real honor
uh for me and and uh i just
uh joined the board last december i have
to say it's not uh very renumerative
um i can't couldn't even make the flight
out here on my
uh berkshire director's fee
i didn't hear that part
but and but berkshire's been organized
in a very unique way
uh and uh of course very different
uh from my business experience which is
all really related to software and what
goes on there so i'm
looking forward to being a good advisor
uh making sure that berkshire's grooming
people
for whatever succession eventually has
to take place but
it won't be me berkshire's got a lot of
great people and
they they understand the unique system
there and they'll step
uh step up to it we pay our board
our directors 900 a year and i really
would like to pay them more but
bill's so far ahead of me on that forms
list already
i don't want to give him any ammunition
and seriously we're very very lucky i
mean
there were there are people that would
pay anything to have bill on their board
and
it's a real act of friendship uh that he
has come on the berkshire board
it takes a lot of time if the rewards
are there they're only psychic but it's
to have him there you know with
the small difference in our ages makes
me feel very good
i'm the older actually i've just
explained it
they it makes me feel very good to know
that uh i've got people of
both of the quality and the the
experience and everything else to make
that decision when i'm not there the
next morning so i'm very grateful
okay thank you
here it goes yeah he's got it
bring out his high school
i'm brian poppy i'm a junior actuarial
science major
uh my question for you is how did you
two meet the first time is there like
some sort of billionaire's conference
that i don't know about her
yeah we have these things we don't talk
about them
no i met bill in on july 5th 1991
and i was out in washington
as a guest of uh a friend of
mine who uh uh was an editorial page
editor of the washington post and
and she knew bill's parents
and uh said we're going down to this
place uh on the hood canal that to meet
the senior gates and and and bill may
show up
and uh i'll let bill take it from there
[Laughter]
well it was a fun event because uh my
my mom was very sociable and always you
know getting people together and
uh i at this time didn't believe in
vacations
you know i was totally focused on my job
and so when she said to me
you've got to come out and meet
with uh warren and catherine graham and
a couple other people
i said mom i'm busy and
you know and she says no this this will
be great and i thought well
i'm not sure you know i'm i'm into the
software thing and
i don't know much about investing uh and
i had
hadn't thought about it much but i went
out and so warren and i met
and i'd actually come out in a
helicopter i was planning to go back a
few hours later
uh but then by the end of the day i was
there you know just talking with warren
and so it uh began a you know really
unbelievable friendship for me
and you know i could tell that even
though we came from different directions
the kinds of things that fascinated us
and that we thought were important were
were very much the same and so you know
for the last 14 years we found
every excuse possible to get together
whether it's you know
bridge or golf but uh really it's about
talking about the world and thinking
about
uh what's going on in it that that's at
the core of it then the more all that is
listen to your mother
i'm mark schmitz uh i'm a senior
actuarial science major could you tell
us a little bit about uh
your work typical workday and how you
manage your time to a lot for
like playing halo 2 and that kind of
stuff
well i don't get to play much halo 2. uh
i
have to say when i play with my
colleagues at work i get slaughtered so
fast it's unbelievable
uh when i'm on xbox live project gotham
racing i'm a little better at it
it's nice to have a job where gaming is
a serious pursuit and we get to
uh think about that and that's what he
said
uh you know and playing around the
latest technology whether it's
uh you know new pcs looking at new
software sitting down with researchers
uh it's it's why i think my job is the
best warren
thinks he's the best but i'm i'm sure
i'm right
anyway i i'm in meetings a lot my
calendar gets very full
with those and then at night after the
kids have gone to bed
i'm on email a great deal i get get
messages during the day that's my chance
to give long responses and then over the
weekend
i i send a lot of mail as well as well
i take two weeks a year to just go off
and read and think
where i'm not interrupted by work or
anything else i'm just
solidly trying to think about the future
and people get to send me things to read
as part of that so-called
think week so it's a nice mix of things
about 25
of the time that i'm out uh traveling
around meeting with customers europe
uh asia and that sort of helps me think
okay
do we have the right priorities what
what are people responding well to and
what would they
they like to see us do better i'm on
think week about 50 weeks a year
i i work about two and uh
you'd be surprised at my days i mean
they are
they're very unstructured
uh no meetings
uh none i mean we i don't like meetings
uh and
uh i read a lot uh
i wish i were a faster reader you know i
get more done but i but i do read a lot
and i i
uh i'm on the phone a moderate amount
uh uh our businesses run themselves
basically out there my job is allocating
capital and and i that's what i'm
thinking about
but i don't like to have things all
packed hour and hour
and and bill and i are both
extraordinarily lucky i mean we really
get to do
what we like to do the way we want to do
it with people that we choose to be
around
and they're terrific i mean we we've
really got everything
uh our way and it's we're very fortunate
and
in his world he has some he has a
different
kind of pace than i have but we both
love it the way we do it and
and uh my guess is that we're
each the most productive in that
particular mode too because it
it it fits our personalities and and
aptitudes my name is topher voorhees i'm
a senior finance major
my question is uh after the xbox 360
where do you see video games going
[Music]
well xbox 360 is pretty good step
it's sort of the first of a generation
what we call high definition games where
the
the realistic uh
vision that you get is is almost like uh
reality
the other big thing is we want gaming to
be more social so this idea of live
where your friends can get on and you
can have
spectators and contests and uh make it
into a very social activity but we think
we can draw in people uh who are older
people who are younger
uh more women into it by having a more
variety of these game types
now every four or five years there'll be
a new game so after xbox through six i
don't know we'll call it
you know 720 or something uh
obvious like that you don't have to go
out much further until the visual
realism
is so good that it's like trying to
improve a cd audio
uh you know see there are there are ways
of encoding audio with more resolution
than a compact disc but people can't
tell the difference
so a lot of it will come back to the
creativity
of those game developers we will start
to have cameras and speech recognition
so
you'll be able to talk to the game
instead of just using
uh the triggers you'll be able to take
you know a bat or a golf club and our
camera will watch uh what you're doing
and so it'll be a bit more like the
virtual reality thing in
terms of uh reacting and then it it's
seeing exactly how to respond to that
hi my name is pamela bracey i'm a senior
marketing major here at the university
and uh if you guys decided to drop a 100
bill would you bother going back to pick
it up or would you let a lowly college
student like myself go get it
if he drops 10 cents on the floor as he
walks out and he doesn't pick it up i'll
pick it up
[Music]
next warren buffett and bill gates give
world-class
advice to the students about good habits
making mistakes
and keeping their inner scorecard in
check
hi my name is nicole brockhoft and i am
a senior business administration major
here at the university
and i was just wondering what is the
best piece of advice you've ever been
given
and how has it impacted your personal or
professional lives
what did i tell you that impressed you
the most
actually i can answer that uh when first
i met warren uh we were talking about
getting together and doing
uh something again and he pulled out his
calendar and the pages were
so blank uh and i said wow
you know you've managed to avoid getting
tied into a lot of kind of meaningless
activity
and you know warren said yeah you have
to be good at saying no
uh and picking the things that that
really make a difference and
that's one of many things i've learned
from warren but that's one of my
favorites and uh
so i can blame it on him whenever i'm uh
turning things down
yeah well i actually i i told him that
was it the truth is i don't get invited
any place
i think that you know i got
an awful lot of good advice from my dad
and and he didn't he didn't lay it on me
i mean he just
you know you you you picked it up from
him but there was never any of this you
know do this do that uh
type of thing at all but but i think he
really
taught me that it's more important uh in
terms of what's on your interscore card
than your outer score card i mean some
people
get in a position where they they're
thinking all of the time of what
what the world's going to think of this
or that instead of what they themselves
think about and if
if your inner score card if you're if
you're comfortable with that
uh i think you're going to going to have
a pretty happy life and i think the
people that strive too much for the
outer
scorecard sometimes find that it's a
little hollow when they get all through
i'm mary reiser i'm an accounting major
i'd like to know we all consider you to
be the financial
business experts and we look to you and
follow your lead
but when you need advice and feedback
about an idea or decision i'd like to
know who do you go to
well usually i look in the mirror
the nature of what i do means i have to
think
pretty much independently because if i
take a poll
in effect i'm going to do what everybody
else is doing and i don't
think much of that usually in
investments and so
i have to have an environment and i have
to have a temperament personally
that lets me think for myself and
i've got a terrific partner a fellow
named charlie munger
and you can't find anybody any smarter
any any better quality of anything but
we think a lot alike
and we do talk things over occasionally
but we don't talk him over very often
because
i know how he thinks he knows i think
he's taught he's taught me a lot you
know and and
you know why should i pay for a phone
call if i know he's going to say
so if i need to get a a cabinet around
to make decisions or anything like that
i probably shouldn't be running the
place
and that doesn't bother me to have the
responsibility for it but i
i just don't want to put it up to a vote
because i've seen too many particularly
investment world
as you get larger and larger groups
making the decisions they get more and
more homogenized
and i don't think you will ever get
brilliant
investment decisions out of a large
committee
for me probably the most important
decisions i make are a lot like
when i pick what technologies the
company's going to bet on
those are a bit like warrants where you
really have to be willing to
be contrary to leave some things aside
and going to some places
that aren't aren't very hot if you
get out of sight of that technical realm
uh you know i'm
i'm super lucky to have steve ballmer
who's now ceo of microsoft
and we're in each other's offices almost
every day
he uh you know he's more of a business
type thinker i'm more of a technology
type thinker but
we a little bit have learned uh what the
other one's going to say
over the years so we can give each other
a hard time about
the positions we we expect outside
of that if i had some really tough
decision i'd
talk to my dad i'd talk to warren
i'd talk to my wife melinda so i have
enough people that know me and actually
know
where my uh judgment isn't
its strongest where i might get over
excited about something or
you know forget to think about something
and so they're good at correcting
particularly
good at correcting uh whatever uh those
blind spots are
and i think it's good to encourage your
friends and advisors
uh to really give them that license you
know i can go to a party and forget to
say hello to
various people or something that's a
very minor example of my
blind spots not to the hostess
melinda would help me do that
so you know a small number of people
that you can turn to on
on certain key things is a a great great
asset
and incidentally it at berkshire bill
has an integrated
business we have this diverse group out
there but we have 40 managers and i
really encourage them to be doing
the same thing i mean they they run
their businesses and they know how to do
it they're going to make some mistakes
but
they basically make the calls and they
don't have to check
with us it's it's amazing how
decentralized we are in that respect but
but you know we bet our brains and we've
been on people
with energy and brains and integrity and
and and
they're going to call most of them right
and i think we would lose an awful lot
by having all kinds of layers of
committees to review that they had to
check with that sort of thing
i'm katelyn poultre i'm an actuarial
science major and i'm a junior
and you both have several managers
working under you so i was wondering
what are some steps
that a new entrant into the job market
can take to accelerate their journey
towards an upper
level management position yeah well
one thing i will tell you that i didn't
realize when i was getting out of school
is how much
the unusual person will jump out
at you i mean you know and it isn't
because they got
200 iqs or anything like that it's
really because just how they behave
you know what they bring the energy they
bring the commitment they bring the
quality of how they do things how they
treat the people around them all kinds
of things but
you will jump out much more than you
might anticipate
one of the things you would want to be
sure to do
uh is whether you like it or not
get very comfortable it may take a while
with public speaking for example i mean
that that's a
an asset that will last you 50 or 60
years and it's a liability
if you don't like doing it or
uncomfortable doing it that also will
last you 50 or 60 years and it's a
necessary skill
but a lot of the skills are just human
skills if you get the best out of people
around you
that's a rare talent and it it doesn't
it doesn't correlate with iq it
correlates with a
you know an attitude and uh toward the
world and toward other people and
it's a talent that if you work at early
and you're really conscious about it
you know you don't have to show up other
people you know you don't have to be
smart in there or anything
you want to bring out the best in them
it will pay huge dividends
certainly in the the business microsoft
is in
the opportunity of of an employee after
they've been with the company even
say three years people can start to rise
they can rise because they're
good at strategy and that's mostly
writing things they can rise because
they're leaders of people
uh they can rise because they're an
individual contributor and we try to
have career paths
that are good for each of those things
the ideal person to be frank is somebody
who's good at all three of those things
and as you get high up in the
organization
the jobs really demand uh great
individual thinking skills
being great with people and great with
strategy it's always stunning to me
given how many smart people there are
and in these individual buckets there's
uh there are quite a few people but when
you want that combination it's rare
and i don't know why it is it's possibly
if you're a good individual
contributor that you're given so much
slack that you're never
encouraged to reach out to other people
and get their ideas but the
the people who have that right
combination or if they if they're not
good at one of those things they partner
up with someone
and draw uh that missing piece out those
are very rare so whenever we were
looking at top spots
uh you know if we could find more people
like that we it'd be a fantastic thing
uh my name is ryan mellick i'm from
omaha nebraska i'm a senior accounting
major
and my question mr gates is i received
an email a couple weeks back from you
and it said that if i forward it to 20
people
i'd get i'd get 10 000 i still haven't
seen the money yet
how do you think he got to be number one
on that list
yeah i get a lot of that spam email
myself uh
my favorite was they offered to cover my
legal costs for just dollars a month
so i'm trying to track those people down
no but in all seriousness um when you
were
just beginning your career what what
sort of things do you think were
made a big impact in your success what
habits did you develop and kind of what
what sort of things could you pass on to
us as younger people
i had one habit that uh i developed
when i when i was uh at college that was
actually a very bad habit which was i
like to show people that i didn't do any
work
uh and that i didn't go to classes and i
didn't care
and then at the very last minute uh like
two days before the test i
i'd get serious about it and and people
people thought that was funny
uh you know that was my positioning the
guy who did nothing until the last
minute
then when i went into business that was
a really bad habit
and it took me a couple years to get
over that nobody praised me because i
i would do things at the last minute and
and i tried to reverse
to students i'd actually uh i didn't
think that highly of who were always
organized and had things done on time
i'm still working on it but uh
procrastination is not a good good habit
bill can change clothes in the car
i mean i i that's why we don't ensure
him at geico incidentally but
[Laughter]
he has a little that happened left so
but the habits you develop and
and i go back the other thing is have
the right heroes i mean i've always been
lucky in that respect and
if you know if you the people you look
up to
are going to form your vision of what
the world you know how you want to be in
later life
and the one well i'll give you two
pieces of advice i'd
invest as much in myself as you can i
mean you're your own biggest asset by
far i mean you've got
you've got all kinds of potential all
the people in this room
you know you're lucky to be in this
country gotten a good education
but most people go through life using up
a very
very small part of their potential and
so anything you do that
invests in yourself uh
is that's the best investment you can
possibly make and then i would
i would follow my passion i mean
whatever turned you on
you know i uh i found i was lucky i
found something early that
that turned me on but but uh
you don't want to take a job just for
the money you don't want to take a job
for an organization that you really
don't feel good about or work for people
that you don't feel good about you
you really want to be excited when you
get out of bed every morning and it
won't necessarily be the job that you
have 10 years later
but you'll be learning so much as you go
along and you know i
i took a job with ben graham my hero and
and you know i never asked the salary
and i found at the end of the month when
i got my first paycheck what i was
earning because i just knew it was the
right thing to be
to be doing so i would i would i would
follow follow your passion
my name is elizabeth vineyard i'm a
senior marketing major i guess my
question is
hearing about the globalization of
business being a small business owner
myself i wonder how you see that
affecting the small business sector
i don't think most small businesses as i
think of them i don't think it's going
to have that much
effect on what you do i mean if you're
bringing something
to your customer that they want at a
price that makes sense for them
you know you're not going to be undercut
by whether somebody's doing something in
china indiana small business i mean when
i think of the small businesses i deal
with
they do not have a a problem with with
globalization that
if you've got a major textile business
or shoe business or
you know furniture business you're going
to be very much affected by
what's going on around the world in
terms of production costs
so globalization is important to track
because it's changing the rules of the
game
as warren said it doesn't directly
affect a small business because usually
the fact that you're there locally
doing a very differentiated product
means that somebody far away
can't do exactly what you do the biggest
change agent
globalization is the uh what's going on
in china where they are
in a sense even more capitalistic than
we
are uh in terms of how they're they're
letting businesses develop and keeping
things very efficient
and so i think it's very important no
matter what career
everybody here is going into to look at
china as a change agent think about
globalization and then thinking
about uh these indirect effects on the
opportunities
for the the companies you you work for i
think that will be very important
hi i'm marissa pont i'm a senior
management major um
obviously as a public what we hear most
about are your successful investing
adventures or the new products that you
develop that work out
i was just wondering what is what would
you consider to be the worst investment
you've ever made
the worst investment i ever made how
long do you have
[Laughter]
well i i've made some very bad ones but
that doesn't really bother me
you know it may bother the shareholders
but that's another question
the uh you know you're going to make
you're going to make mistakes in life i
mean
there's no question about it you don't
want to make them on the big decisions
you know who you marry and
some things like that so there's no way
i'm going to make a lot of business and
investment decisions without making some
mistakes i may try to minimize them
i i don't i don't dwell on them at all i
don't i don't look back
the biggest mistakes
are the ones that actually don't show up
they're the mistakes of omission rather
than commission we've never lost
that much money on any one investment
but it's the things that i knew enough
to do that i didn't do we have
we have missed profits of as much as
you know maybe 10 billion dollars in
things that i knew enough to do and i
didn't do now
the fact that i didn't buy microsoft way
back
uh is not a foregone opportunity because
i didn't know enough to make that
decision but there have been other
investments where i didn't know enough
to make the decision
and for one reason or another i either
didn't do it at all or i did it on a
small scale i was sucking my thumb when
i should have been writing checks you
know basically
and and you know those don't show up
there's no place where
it shows missed opportunities but i've
i've missed some big ones
the triumphs in life are partly triumphs
because you know that everything isn't
going to be a triumph and
and i i would never get too hung up
on mistakes i know a lot of people that
really agonize over them and and it
it just isn't worth it i mean tomorrow's
another day and you live it forward and
just go on to the next thing
i think in in microsoft's case the
biggest mistake
uh is where we miss uh something that's
coming along is going to be huge
and for us if we get in too early like
uh
the idea of delivering tv over the
internet iptv
we got in probably five years before we
needed to it's just now
starting to happen i don't i don't feel
bad about that at all
there's a few things like understanding
uh direction
say the internet search would go uh
where we go
we're playing a tiny bit of ketchup on
that uh
let's you know let's work some overtime
on this uh
little problem here uh people are kind
of underestimating
uh our ability to uh move to the front
of the pack there
and we've had that in many cases uh we
had that when the internet came along
and
became this big phenomena that we needed
to really uh
push the company into that we had that
when ibm broke off its relationship with
us and went in
to competition with us that was uh uh a
very big challenge but we don't want to
have anything that comes along
some breakthrough in terms of how
software is done that we haven't
gotten the best people in and are are
putting that together with the work
we're doing so it'd be missing
uh something like that that that would
be our worst mistake
hi my name is morel wax and i'm a
freshman international business major
how much money as you guys being both
billionaires do you guys carrying your
wallet at any given time
how much we got in our wallet well i can
answer that
because we're going to go to a this
evening we're going to get in a poker
game
okay and it's a 500 buy-in and so i made
very sure that i had a five
at least five hundred dollars in my
wallet uh
and i have a little more than that but i
don't carry around a lot of money bill
now actually a lot of times it's weird i
don't carry a wall at all i do what i do
carry is bridge
problems so that if i get in in a line
or
uh things are slower even when i'm
driving
i uh like to have something to
uh mental to work on he better have 500
tonight though
in fact i brought a little extra so i'm
ready for the game
as the event nears its end students ask
questions about how they can change the
world
and warren buffett and bill gates offer
surprising insight into the true
nature of success hi
my name is stephanie tompkins i'm a
senior economics major
a lot of us are pursuing higher
education because we want to leave the
world
a better place than the one we found it
and
as one person at the end of the day who
can actually affect
tremendous amounts of people and ideas
how do you make your decisions
you're you're changing the world every
day i mean if
if it's nothing but the children you
have i mean you know you are forming
their view of the world and every
and you do it every day so you are a
teacher but with the people around you
one of the best things in life to do is
to surround yourself with high-grade
people because you will
behave as the people around you do but
they in turn are getting it from you
it's kind of like a planetary system and
and you will try i promise you you
you know you will change the world in
some way and and my guess is you'll
change it
very much for the better and and but you
can't expect to see something dramatic i
mean
it's not it's not one of those shazam
moments or something of the sort
but you you by how you're behaving
are are affecting other people setting
an example for other people that you you
will find ways
to to leave a better world than you
entered
and one thought i'd have on that is that
i i think it's very important
as young as possible to get a broad
exposure
uh in this country to people who are
are less successful in the kind of
conditions they're
living in and what kinds of things are
holding them back you know
is education working to tap into
people's talents and giving them
the equal opportunity we believe in and
then ideally to get
in many places in the world where living
conditions aren't nearly
uh what they are uh here in the united
states it's one of these things when you
first learn
all of this it's a little easy to be
down because you think geez i didn't
know it was
like that things are improving and the
opportunity
for capable people to jump in whether
it's
helping with medicines helping with
education a small number of people
can actually make a a very dramatic
difference
hello i'm daniel diloreto from reno
nevada my question is
our society or our generation generation
y we face a lot of issues
what do you think are some of the most
important most challenging societal
issues that we face
and what can we do as future leaders to
ensure that we create a better society
in the future
i think the issues of equity that we
have
whether it's between countries or even
within our country are pretty serious
issues
and if you get too far out of whack on
that
then uh you get a divide and
and you don't get the fluidity and the
sense of opportunity
that this country has stood for so i
think you know we've really got to renew
our commitment to the ideals around uh
equality and i i think there are uh
there's a lot of actions that that
suggests
we should be taking to invest in the
long term but certainly at this stage
we're
we're not taking right now i i can't say
it better than bill but
we we got lucky tickets in life i mean
you know
got a ticket said american we got a
ticket that said
intelligent we got a ticket you know
that that said that this time rather
than 200 years ago
and the same talents would not have
produced much so we got a very lucky
ticket in life
a lot of people don't get lucky tickets
you know we were over in china together
10 years ago and we saw some people that
wouldn't make any difference what
what their brain power was or anything
else they weren't going to have a chance
uh
at least for a long long time i think
we've got to do a much better job
of not only taking care of the people
who get the bad tickets in this country
but in doing what bill and melinda have
done which is going around the world
and and helping those people have things
that we regard as absolute you know
givens in our society i mean the bill
has taken vaccines
to people around the world that that
died very young ages and families that
get destroyed and all kinds of things
for things that we could do something
about those are the things that we
should be
working on in in your generation
um i'm jared carlson uh senior
management major uh my question is
if you could have one superpower what
would it be and why
one super power bill
well i can think more about that than i
do
i know extending extending was one's
lifetime would be uh
yeah a reasonable thing yeah i'll take
notes if you have anything to say
uh you know i don't i don't think being
able to get rid of
competitors that wouldn't be much fun
that'd be like hitting a hole in one all
the time
uh being able to read super fast yeah
that'd be nice well bill can read
i mean he's about three times as fast
and just think of
i mean he he i probably wasted 10 years
reading slowly
no if you talk about granting a wish i
mean what you would with the
type of thing i mean what you really
would hope is that
somehow you could reduce
uh the threat posed by nuclear knowledge
uh in the world i mean that is that's
going to be the great problem
of mankind in your lifetime and you know
the
the knowledge is out of the bottle the
genie's out of the bottle on that
and you have a lot of evil people in the
world and then the question is how do
you prevent
intent of evil people coupled with
knowledge which has now gotten more
widespread
to interact in a way where huge amounts
of
damage are done to people throughout the
world and that
i mean that if i could i think that's
the most intelligent thing
to work on philanthropically for example
but i don't know how to do it very well
we do a little but that's uh you know
that would be the wish but the reason
it's
the reason it's just kind of a dream is
because the problem is so tough
hi my name is kristen lovegrove i'm a
senior finance major
in our society that's so material and
you and your families are so well off
how do you ensure that your children
value things that aren't material and
things that will truly make them happy
in the end
well i was i was a little lucky in that
respect in that my kids didn't think i
was rich
and i wasn't rich for a while i mean but
but even even after i was it
you know we lived in the same house that
they only there's only one house they've
known in their life in terms of a
primary home and they went to public
schools and in omaha and then
and we lived in a neighborhood where and
we still do where they where the average
income is probably more or less average
for
for omaha so they they really didn't
have that problem my kids didn't even
know what i did
i mean because i probably because i
couldn't explain it very well but
they did not grow up in a rich
environment now
those situations different and i'm just
in terms of
uh you know being a celebrity and all of
that sort of thing and that that came
late enough with me that it didn't
didn't really pull pose problems for the
family but it
it has to be a it's a significant factor
and i'll turn over to bill
yeah i can i can verify what warren said
about his house
i was very excited to go visit you know
think what has he done what what
amazing things is he going to have and i
went to his dining room
he didn't even have seats on the chairs
and he didn't even know they were
missing either so i i don't
i don't there's no hurry on these things
bill i mean
i think it is tough and perhaps uh
particularly so
when children grow up and have a very
nice house and they think
you know what are the real limitations i
do think there's some very basic things
around
giving them an allowance at a young age
and sticking to that and having them
decide okay you want to buy a candy bar
today that means you can't buy
uh one in in the future and start to
figure out that that there are real
limits
i i do think we're lucky that uh our
children will get to go
uh to africa and asia and see how people
live and
and and even from a young age understand
that the united states
is in turn statistically an aberration
that the lifestyles we have we should
wish that uh many decades in the future
that the world at large
uh can live in these same ways and
you know hope that people treat them in
a normal way and treat them for what
they're
uh actually good at that you know would
bother me a lot if they were being
approached uh because somebody thought
they could influence something
uh you know it's an awful thing every
kid should be evaluated based on
on who they are and and what they're
doing our kids
are rich and are going to be rich by the
standards of the world
they don't think they're going to
inherit uh a significant portion of the
fortunes of either of us i mean 99
of what i have it'll go to philanthropy
one way or another
and and bill has the same attitude
basically
that that we are not going to
turn out some super wealthy super super
wealthy kids
they'll be wealthy i mean there's no
question about that
but the idea of dynastic
fortunes you know i find it turns me off
and that
i i don't think it's what america is
about i don't think if you talk about
equality of opportunity in this country
and really
having everybody with talents having a
fair shot at getting the brass ring and
all of that the idea that you
that you hand huge positions in society
on
simply because someone came from the
right womb you know
and i find that i just think it's almost
un-american
my name is matthew body i'm a senior
from elgin nebraska
several eastern european countries have
successfully enacted a flat income tax
and now there is growing pressure in
western europe to do the same
would you support the united states
adopting a flat income tax and why or
why not
well i wouldn't support it i i you'd be
amazed how flat it is already
if you look at both the payroll tax
which is over 12 percent now
and that applies on the first 80 or 90
000 of income so bill and i
pay practically none of that in relation
to our income
the people that work for us it's a big
big
tax so if you take the tax
that my assistant or
the anybody in our office pays they've
got 12 percent on that first
80 or 90 thousand dollars and then they
have the income tax
and their tax rate literally
in many cases is not well it's it's it's
the same and maybe even higher
than my own tax rate since they cut the
rate on capital gains to 15
in dividends to 15 so what has gone on
in this country in the last
well in very recent years is a huge
benefit to the very rich and
and not that much relief to people down
below and people when you read about tax
rates they
usually leave out the payroll tax and
they don't they don't refer this 12 and
a fraction percent
so we have come in my view to a taxation
system that's much too flat in this
country and
and frankly i think that that that bill
and i should have a higher
tax rate on the income we get we we pay
a lot of taxes but
but uh it's it's really at a a very low
rate and it's a rate that's
less than half the tax rate that i was
paying
25 years ago when i was making a lot
less money they have really taken care
of the rich
yeah i go along uh with that
wholeheartedly i think
we probably need a more progressive
system as we look to balance
the budget that at some point i think
people recognize
that needs to be done probably one of
the ways that'll be done is is that the
rich should bear us a slightly somewhat
higher proportion of the burden than
they do
today very large fortunes aren't never
go through an income tax maybe it's a
little ironic but both
warren and i would say things in several
aspects of the tax system
should be uh more progressive i could
spend the rest of my life
and i could have done this 20 years ago
and actually pay no
federal income tax because i could have
taken my berkshire hathaway stock
borrowed some money against it every
year to live on
and when i died you know then the estate
would would pay off the debt on it but
i could have gone through my life a good
bit of my life
without paying any income tax whatsoever
and and it's i frankly think it's
it's very unfair hi my name is dan semf
and i'm a senior finance major
my question is the forbes 400 put your
collective networks
at 91 billion dollars by comparison that
figure exceeds the combined gross
domestic product of
the bottom 70 nations in the world how
do you feel that your immense wealth
contributes to the balance of global
prosperity
yeah well the wealth in effect is a
bunch of
i mean the the prosperity comes about
for the products that microsoft turns
out i mean that
they're changing the lives of millions
and millions of people
in the process you get these eventual
claim checks
on society's output these little pieces
of paper that i've got in a
vault called stock certificates you know
can be turned in
at some point to to get goods and
services of one sort or another
basically the money is going to go in a
way that we think
will have the most impact beneficial
impact on society viewed on a global
basis not just on a national or regional
basis
it will go
we hope until as intelligently as we can
make it go
to change the lives of people all over
the world now there's two factors that
enter into
that's the amount you leave or put into
charity and and then how efficiently you
do it
bill and melinda in my view they run the
largest one but i would say they also
certainly among all the big ones or
anybody that i know about they run the
most efficient one they have literally
said to themselves how do we use this
money
to change in a major way for the better
the lives of the most people in the
world
what could be more rational so they've
combined what i would call head and
heart with huge sums of money
and no one's gotten result in my view
like they have
yeah i think the key point here is that
owning
you know warren owns a a big piece of
berkshire i own
uh still a measurable piece of microsoft
that's not consumption uh what the
limited resources of society
uh come up you hit those limits as you
consume
and so somebody who makes say 50 million
and chooses to
you know just build mansions and have uh
things happen for them they are
diverting resources in their direction
instead of those resources being used uh
say to help
out people are less successful and so in
fact if you can
accumulate some of society's wealth
through luck and skill and then make
sure it's used on behalf that the
consumption
overwhelmingly goes to the less
fortunate
uh you know it's a little bit like robin
hood you're recycling wealth from that
top part uh back and it's incumbent on
the people
the higher up that list you are the more
in a sense there's a responsibility to
put
not only the wealth but your brain power
into those activities
i am alison mack a senior marketing
major as college students we're
constantly thinking
and planning towards the future where do
you personally envision yourself to be
in 10 years
i'm glad you didn't ask my doctor
i'll be if if i'm in decent health i'll
be doing exactly what i'm doing now
because i'm doing what i love now i mean
if
i could do almost anything that doesn't
require any athletic or mental ability
and i what do i choose to do i choose to
jump out of bed every morning and run
down and work at berkshire hathaway and
i don't see anything that changes that
i'm doing what i love and
and you know health will determine uh
how long i can keep doing it but
i've told my children that when i start
going gaga and you know spend my time
spinning yoyos and things like that
that they're to come to me and and tell
me that
it's time to step down but i've told
them they better all come as a group
because if just one comes i'm going to
take them out of the will
you know ten ten years from now i'll uh
be turning sixty
uh i have to say every every time that
the the age ten years older than me
always seems like that's when i'll be
old
uh when i was forty i thought fifty uh
would be that mark
now that i'm very close to that i think
no no no that's
that's not uh being old you know my
life's work
in terms of creating a company is is
certainly
around microsoft over the next 10 years
my balance between the time i spend on
philanthropic things versus
my my full-time job will switch somewhat
in the favor of doing
philanthropy spending more time on that
it does mean i need to get
one of the great young people at
microsoft to sort of get on the hot seat
of setting the product strategy which is
the
uh a great part of my job i love my job
it's an amazing job
and you know i'll always be able to have
some mix of microsoft and then then a
bit more philanthropy
hello my name is paul ternis i'm a
senior business administration
and music major uh from north dakota
originally uh i was wondering what is
your definition of success
and what has been your largest
non-business success in life
well we played ping-pong against a
nine-year-old girl in san francisco
two weeks ago her name's ariel yeah how
many points did you do
she got up bill got more points off her
than i did
i thought i was pretty good and this
little nine-year-old
is disgusting she should have been in
bed
she totally cleaned us and
uh though that was that was a little
humiliating uh
i'd say in my case my my goal for uh
success out outside of work is is
definitely raising a family
um just getting started with that and i
think there's some unique challenges
of uh when a parent is very visible
and has money and things like that it's
not easy
in any case to raise kids the right way
but i'd say i you know i i hope hope to
be successful at that
uh so far i haven't caused cause them
any damage they seem to be doing okay
we get a lot of people that want us to
adopt them i mean
he's working on his children i'm working
on my great-grandchildren but otherwise
we've got the same approach
i would say this in terms of success
this will surprise you
but i would say i've never known anybody
that got to my age or close to my age
that had lots of people that loved them
that felt anything other than a success
i mean you have lived a successful life
if
as you get older the people that you
hope love you do and that that includes
your your family
your business associates all kinds of
people and i
and the converse of that is that i know
people enormously wealthy
you know they get schools named after
them and they get they get uh
you know they get dinners in their honor
all that sort of thing
and the truth is that nobody thinks a
thing of them and
i got i have to believe they know that
and that everything gets
quite hollow in their life at that point
and they've got all these markers and
there's people on the forbes 400 you
know that
that are in that category and i won't
name names
but it's i really i can't think of
anyone i've known
and and i've known some you know a lot
of people by this point in my life i
i i've seen them in very ordinary jobs
all all kinds of situations if the
people around them love them
they feel very successful
thank both of you so much we appreciate
you coming
with the final question of the evening
answered warren buffett and bill gates
prepare to leave the stage but not
before shaking hands with all of the
students
who took part in the event
[Applause]
okay thank you yeah okay you're terrific
you're okay thanks for coming
[Music]
the bridge is a great game i advise all
of you to take it up if there's no game
like it
if you go on the internet however
my name on there is t-bone and
and bill's name is challenger but he
spells it c-h-a-l-n-e-n-e-n-g-r
right yeah that they're not right