To us, investing is the equivalent of going out and betting against the pari-mutuel system. We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning, and that pays three to one. In other words, we're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is, and you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced.

[With] closet indexing....you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker.

This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do.

You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.

We like our current shareholders and don't want to entice anyone to become one. It would help current shareholders to hear our CEOs [of the Berkshireoperating subsidiaries], but we promised them they could spend 100% of their time on their business. We place no impediments on them running their businesses. Many have expressed to me how happy they are that they don't have to spend 25% of time on activities they didn't like.

I'd rather throw a viper down my shirt front than hire a compensation consultant.

I don't have too much interest in teaching other people how to get rich. And that isn't because I fear the competition or anything like that - Warrenhas always been very open about what he's learned, and I share that ethos. My personal behavior model is Lord Keynes: I wanted to get rich so I could be independent, and so I could do other things like give talks on the intersection of psychology and economics. I didn't want to turn it into a total obsession.