Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Tuesday, March 31. Following are links to video on CNBC.com:
Warren Buffett teams up with NBA superstar Stephen Curry for charity lunch, reviving iconic auction
Warren Buffett says he’s still making calls on investments at Berkshire, flags ‘tiny’ new buy
Warren Buffett on Apple: I sold too soon
Warren Buffett: I wish the Fed had a zero inflation target
Warren Buffett: The world is more dangerous with Iranian nuclear weapons
Warren Buffett on Epstein files: Haven’t spoken to Bill Gates ‘since the whole thing unveiled’
JOE KERNEN: Welcome back to “Squawk Box.” Let’s get to Becky. It says let’s get to Becky Quick who’s in Omaha, Nebraska with a very special – that’s not enough. With a very – I need some more. Varies, maybe, very, very, very –
BECKY QUICK: A very, very, special guest.
KERNEN: Very.
QUICK: A little more pomp and circumstance. Maybe we need some music.
KERNEN: Music. Warren Buffett. It’s been so long, it’s just gonna be awesome.
QUICK: Yeah. He’s here.
KERNEN: He is awesome. Tell him I said hi and I love him.
BECKY QUICK: I will. Joe says, hi. You know he loves you, Joe. He’s waving to you right now. We do have a very special guest today, Warren Buffett, the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and this first time that we are sitting down with him since he stepped down from that CE role – CEO role. Warren, welcome. It is wonderful to see you this morning.
WARREN BUFFETT: It is fun to be on.
QUICK: You are on for an interesting reason. For 22 years, you had been holding an annual luncheon, an auction for a luncheon, to benefit the Glide Foundation in San Francisco. You retired from that – from doing that back in 2022 after you’d raised more than $50 million I think the last auction that you raised – that you did raised –
BUFFETT: $19 million.
QUICK: $19,000,100 for the Glide Foundation. And you kind of hung it up and said that was going to be the end. You are back with a new announcement today that there is a new auction that is coming with a twist. This time it’s Warren Buffett, Stephen Curry and Ayesha Curry, and they’re going to be having a new luncheon to benefit not only the Glide Foundation, but the Curry’s foundation as well, which is, Eat, Learn, Play. And this auction is going to be held May 7. It starts at 7:30pm Pacific time. It closes on May 14, at 7:30pm exactly. And all of the benefits of that is going to go to benefit these two foundations, Glide and the Eat, Learn, Play Foundation. How did this come about? Why did you unretire from this?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, let me tell you first how I got into it because my first wife, Susie, was living in San Francisco and she said to me, this guy is real.
QUICK: This guy being Cecil.
BUFFETT: Cecil. Yeah, Cecil Williams, who came to that church in 1963 and it was a dying church in a changing part of the neighborhood in San Francisco, and they weren’t glad to see him the 100 or so parishioners that were left. But he turned it into something that became – it gave hope and life to people that the world had given up on. And I went on Sunday still expecting something less than that, and I watched Cecil, and I could see what he was doing, and he was for real. And so Susie, at some point, said, why don’t you do something to raise some money for him? You know, and so, I think she actually selected the idea of the lunch, and then we did the lunch. The first three lunches brought $25,000 each because they were localized. And then we got the idea of going on eBay. And then we started getting bids from around the world. And it just generally kept moving up, although it wasn’t every single year, but it just – it just put us on the map. And as the final amount, 19 million was raised. Now that was kind of raised because it was the last one, I think, I was doing NFL that had bought an earlier lunch, but I didn’t make any calls to him or do anything. He just turned out to be – it inspires people. And Smith & Wollensky, as you know, covered it in New York sometimes.
QUICK: That’s often where you had the lunch with the winners of this.
BUFFETT: Yeah. And some of them wanted to be anonymous. And a couple came to Omaha along the line because they had some special thing they wanted to talk about. But I think everybody felt like they were glad they did it, and I was glad to do it.
QUICK: Why’d you stop?
BUFFETT: Well, I ran out of gas. You know, I got to be what, 93 at that time, or something like that. And it just – same reason I gave up teaching. I teach – I was – I taught every year from when I was 21 till 88 or 89, and there just came a period when your body said different things to you, and you should turn it over to somebody, just like I did at Berkshire. I mean, at different times, on different things, but I – and so we thought we had a continuation of it all set up, and then for one reason or another, it fizzled. And so the last two years, well, I think the first year, some board member made up some members – but basically the auction disappeared.
QUICK: So they haven’t had the funds coming in.
BUFFETT: No. And Cecil Williams was about my age – and it got so I couldn’t understand him on the phone or anything like that, but all he wanted was this to continue. And so I don’t know where the idea came from exactly, but I said I would do one more, just to get us started again and to have Steph Curry join us in the Bay Area. I mean, it’s just a natural.
QUICK: Right. The Eat, Learn, Play Foundation that Stephen and Ayesha Curry have set up is in the Bay Area as well.
BUFFETT: Exactly.
QUICK: So they’re locally focused on all of these things. For people who don’t know, the Glide Foundation was also, it was highlighted in the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” with Will Smith. So people may have a little bit of an idea of what that’s about. Why Steph Curry? How did that come about?
BUFFETT: Well, I mean, who can say it better? I mean, he’s working with the kids in Oakland. I mean, these are kids between five and 15, or something like that, and he plays basketball with them. And I mean, he’s a terrific guy. I don’t – I haven’t met him personally.
QUICK: But you did talk to Stephen and Ayesha.
BUFFETT: We had a long talk on the phone. And it’s his baby, and he can carry it forth. And, incidentally, whatever is bid this year, I will make the equal contribution. I don’t think – Steph doesn’t know this yet, but I will make an equal contribution to both Glide and to Steph’s –
QUICK: To the Curry’s foundation.
BUFFETT: Yeah. And, you know, just go on to new heights. And Steph is the hero of millions and millions of people. So, I think – I really think as a reward, I think it will continue to be what Cecil hoped it to be. And it would have killed me to have it just die off. And as much what Cecil poured into it himself, he believed everybody was worthwhile. And the world had given up on these people, and he may have started giving a little bit of food to them before he got through – he was doing all these things at Glide. And he never gave up on anybody.
QUICK: And I know that you’ve said that Astrid really liked him, too.
BUFFETT: Oh yeah. Astrid, my second wife. And you couldn’t help but like him. I mean, when you watched him up there with people that the world had given up on and he says to him, I’ll feed you. I’ll have a bed for you. We’ll have a location for you. You know we’re not going to give up on you. And never did.
QUICK: Warren, this is the first time that we’re sitting down with you since you stepped down from the position of CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
BUFFETT: Yeah.
QUICK: It was a long, long run. Very successful run. How is your life different today?
BUFFETT: Well, it’s not much different, except for the – I mean, I go in every day.
QUICK: To the office?
BUFFETT: Yeah. I go in every day to the office. I don’t accomplish hardly anything. I mean, in terms of – it just takes me way longer to do things. And Greg is so good. It was kind of embarrassing how good he is, because he has covered – you know, we’ve got about 200 businesses within Berkshire, you know, that came about, and I can’t name the manager’s names or their wives names, or – and I haven’t seen them, you know, in a long time. It’s easier just to write the letter once a year and kind of do my own thing. Greg covers more ground in a day than I would in a week, even when I was at my peak, let alone my present condition. So it’s a move that in many ways, I could have done it earlier, and Greg would have been better than I was, but you know, and I can still contribute just a tiny bit.
QUICK: Well, are you still involved in making investments at all?
BUFFETT: Yeah. Yeah, but I won’t make any that Greg thinks are wrong. And he’ll run – he’s starting to get a few calls, and he’ll call me about them, and like me, he doesn’t like them, but –
QUICK: Calls for deals?
BUFFETT: He’ll keep me posted. Yeah, Well, yeah. It’s investment bankers calling him and – they will see him – you know, they will try to sell anything. But I cut them off in about 10 or 15 seconds, and he’s – he spends more time with them, but I don’t know where he gets this time, because he plays hockey with his – I mean, it isn’t like he’s as fanatic as I was in terms of running the place, but with no more apparent effort, he just covers so many bases.
QUICK: In terms of what you’re doing with investing. I mean, that’s a huge amount of money. How much cash does Berkshire have on hand at this point?
BUFFETT: I don’t know the exact number, but it’s not much different than before. So you know, it’s probably north of $350 billion in cash and treasury bills.
QUICK: Yeah. So –
BUFFETT: We bought 17 billion this week.
QUICK: 17 billion of T bills?
BUFFETT: Of T bills.
QUICK: Berkshire is the largest owner of T bills?
BUFFETT: I think we’re probably the largest bidder. And ironically, I got involved in Solomon because they bid for too many bills. And I don’t think they’d get mad at us now – we’ve been for too many but, you’re not supposed to go over 35% or something in the auction. And of course, you bid through the primary dealers. But I don’t even know the mechanics that well, but one fellow in our office handles all the mechanics of the stocks and bonds we buy.
QUICK: Mark Millard.
BUFFETT: Yeah, exactly. At anyplace else they’d have 25 or 30 people. And he loves what he does, and I love what he does. He’s down the hall about 20 feet, about every hour or hour and a half, he brings me in what we’ve done. And sometimes –
QUICK: What Berkshire has done, just in terms of the markets that day?
BUFFETT: Yeah, I call him. I call him before the market opens, because I see what’s been going on pre market, and probably change the limits only. I don’t get lots of different stocks or anything like that. Every now and then, I’ll let it do something, and I will change – prices daily.
QUICK: But you don’t do that – you don’t check with Greg before you’re doing that? You check with Greg on a regular –
BUFFETT: Well, Greg gets the sheet every day.
QUICK: Oh, he does, too.
BUFFETT: He doesn’t get it quite as fast as I get it. I mean – but he probably gets it sent over at the end of the day or something of the sort. And if Greg differed with me on anything, we wouldn’t be doing it.
QUICK: But you’re still making new purchases?
BUFFETT: Pardon me?
QUICK: You’re still making new purchases?
BUFFETT: Got one tiny purchase, but we aren’t finding things that – we weren’t finding them before.
QUICK: Well, let’s talk about that. The market has come down substantially.
BUFFETT: Not substantially.
QUICK: Well, you’ve got both the Dow and the Nasdaq in correction territory. It’s the worst performance on a quarterly basis for stocks in about four years. Do things look cheaper to you?
BUFFETT: No. Three times since I’ve taken over Berkshire, it’s gone down more than 50%. I mean, if you look at the markets, of the worst, probably was the 2007, 08’ period, although it was that one Monday, when you had 21% in a day. I mean, this is nothing. I mean—
QUICK: This is nothing to make you get excited and think there’s huge valuation—
BUFFETT: Well if they’re 5 or 6% cheaper, that doesn’t, we aren’t in it to make 5 or 6% I mean, but what a big seller either, in the end, we own businesses. Sometimes there’s only owned, sometimes they’re partly owned. That’s what I like to own. And two thirds of our money, or more is in our businesses. And we bought Occidental Chemical on January 3, that was 9.7 billion. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s got some advantages, some disadvantages, versus owning a stock, but it’s got the same principles attached to it. It is a business, and it’s a business we expect to own, you know, indefinitely. I mean—
QUICK: Are you, I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’re necessarily finding businesses that you want to own flat out either, not just purchasing portions of them if you’ve got $350 billion plus sitting around.
BUFFETT: Yeah and we get calls all the time, and there’s so many calls, but the like I said, it takes me five seconds to say no. It takes, Greg’s a little more polite than I am, but I just as soon get the calls just to see what people are doing. But they aren’t offering anything that’s at an attractive price, and what they want is a trade.
QUICK: Are you waiting for the next big drop in the market to deploy that cash, and if so, when do you see that coming?
BUFFETT: Yeah, if there is a big decline, we will deploy, I mean, but we won’t, we will deploy it because stocks are attractive or businesses are attractive to us, and we are not planning to sell them next week or next month, so we want to be right on them. And we’ve had our American Express stock 30 years without having a — close to 40 years, 35 years. And on the other hand, there’s things I change my mind on fairly quickly, but, but the goal is own the owned businesses, and when we buy Occidental Chemical, we expect all of that 50 years from now. You know, the world can change in some way, but that we do not, we do not buy that with a thought of resale.
QUICK: You’ve sold a lot of stock that’s done very well for you, Apple—
BUFFETT: Well, I sold it too soon, but I bought it even sooner. So, it worked out. Yeah, I think we’ve made over $100 billion in that pretax.
QUICK: But you’re regretting it? You say you sold it too soon?
BUFFETT: No, no, I don’t have any ability to predict what stocks will do next week or next month and I will buy them if they’re cheap. I’ll buy a whole lot of them if they’re cheap and I think I really understand the business, and Apple is still our largest single investment.
QUICK: And you like it that way?
BUFFETT: Yeah, well, if I didn’t like it, I could sell it. Yeah, I can, I think it’s a remark — it’s better than any business we own outright. Now, we own a railroad that’s worth more money than our Apple position, for example, they’re both looked at the same way. I mean, they’re both, they’re both businesses. I expect the, I think it’s more predictable in a certain sense, that the railroad will be around 50 or 100 years from now, but it doesn’t earn the rate remotely on capital than Apple does. I mean, Apple is a business that you’ve got one, probably and your kids have got them, and—
QUICK: Not one, we’ve got like 20 of them.
BUFFET: Yeah, devices. Actually, the Bell Telephone Company was that way at one point, but they were regulated.
QUICK: Well, do you worry about regulation coming for some of these big tech companies, in particular Apple?
BUFFETT: I think the consumers are in love with them too much. I don’t, I don’t think Washington will do anything that really destroys something that every one of their voters likes and they’re using themselves. I mean, it’s a remarkable product that way. Just think of something as useful as the Apple is. I mean, it’s, Tim Cook has done better with the hand than Steve Jobs. He couldn’t have done what Steve Jobs did, but Steve Jobs handed him a hand that Steve would not have done as well. Steve picked him. I mean, when you get right down to it, and Tim was a fantastic manager, and he’s a good guy, and somehow he gets along with everybody in the world, which is, you know, that’s, that’s a technique I wouldn’t have for example. Certainly my partner, Charlie Munger, wouldn’t have had it, but I’m very happy to have it be our largest open. I was not happy to have it be as large as almost everything else combined.
QUICK: Okay, that makes sense.
BUFFETT: Although at a price I was, and they could—
QUICK: Right. Hold it up—
BUFFETT: It’s not impossible that Apple would get to a price, we would buy a lot of it, but not in this market. I mean, it just isn’t going to happen in this market.
QUICK: How much would stocks have to come down for you to think that this is really attractive, if it’s—
BUFFETT: Well it depends on the stock. Some stocks now, generally speaking, they move together to quite a degree, but, but I don’t think I know what the market’s going to do. I do think I’ve got a reasonable idea of what a business is worth. I have no idea what the stock market’s going to do, and I don’t think anybody else does either.
QUICK: You don’t necessarily follow tech companies and Apple, people look at as a tech company, but you always looked at as a consumer company.
BUFFET: It’s a consumer.
QUICK: Yeah.
BUFFETT: Company.
QUICK: So what do you do about all of these tech stocks and the AI trends that are there? Do you try and follow any of that? Do you get involved in any of those industries?
BUFFETT: Well I don’t because A, I wouldn’t be any good at it, and besides, I’m so late to the game. I am not learning new things well. I still don’t know what to do with the phone, but I just recognize the fact that that you know you’re going to have one, and your kids are going to want one, and and it is a terribly useful, I mean, it’s incredibly useful. And you get something that’s useful and offered worldwide, and where, to some extent, you’re a little worried about maybe moving your photos from one system to another. All I had to do was go out to Nebraska Furniture Mart and talk to customers is what, that’s what I did 60 years ago at American Express when they were looked at like they were done for on the salad oil scandal. And I went down to the Omaha National Bank, and I said, are you getting a premium for American Express tickets? They can sell their traveler’s check for more than Citigroup, Bank of America, Barclays, everybody had and they were getting a premium at the same time, everybody else was worried about them getting in, getting out of business. And the same thing, when they actually started their card, they were going up against Diners Club and Carte Blanche, who had come first. And they came they came on later. And instead of coming in at a cut price, they came in at a price above the competition. That says a lot about how consumers felt about American Express.
QUICK: Warren, let me ask you about the economy because the Fed is in a bit of a quandary right now, just trying to figure out which one of its mandates it’s more worried about. Is it worried about inflation potentially rising more. Is it worried about the jobs market and, you know, potential decline in economic output? What, what of those two issues would worry you most if you were at the Fed right now?
BUFFETT: Well, if I were at the Fed, the thing I’d worry about always is, you know, you’re the reserve currency of the world. I mean, so you’ve got very smart people, very sophisticated people, the American dollar looks like nothing could happen to it. I don’t feel anything could happen to it. But if it does happen to it, I would, I would, I wouldn’t want the responsibility of running the Fed.
QUICK: But what I mean—
BUFFETT: The world will be dependent on it doing it. And last time in 2007 and 08’, you had Congress that essentially felt they knew more about it than Secretary Treasury. And so they really gummed things up when they when they turned on TARP the first time. And I mean, it was, I think now people better understand what, the Fed can print money.
QUICK: The Fed can print money, and we have a president, President Trump, who would like to see the Fed cut rates? Would you cut rates if you were there right now?
BUFFETT: I don’t know what, what I do there. I mean, 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.
QUICK: Did they keep rates low for too long? I mean, I think that’s, as they didn’t worry about inflation, as they said it was going to be transitory? Because I think even Powell himself said that he might wish he’d turned it sooner.
BUFFETT: Well, I wish they had a zero inflation target.
QUICK: Right.
BUFFETT: But, I mean, once you start saying you’re going to tolerate 2 percent, that compounds pretty dramatically over time. And you’re saying to people, if you’re getting less than 2 percent on your money, you’re going backwards. And, actually, if you pay tax, you may pay tax on the 2 percent. You know, I mean, I don’t like that particular goal. But—
QUICK: So, inflation is maybe what you’d be more concerned about? I mean, that’s what Greenspan, Alan Greenspan always said.
BUFFETT: Yes. I would be, I would care about inflation. I would compare what I really would care about is the stability of the banks.
QUICK: Yes.
BUFFETT: I mean, the banking system, in some sense is very strong, in other sense, is very fragile. I mean, JPMorgan in the last couple annual reports reported doing $10 trillion of business per day. Now, that’s an unsecured policy. Now, they know what they’re doing. Believe me. I mean, there’s nobody smarter than JP– but I don’t want — I didn’t want — during the 2008 period, I didn’t want anything unsecured, you know, out there for a day. I mean, who knew? Nobody was any good. You know, I mean, it, the world is very interconnected and everybody panics. I mean, it, you know, they may say they don’t, but you can call the biggest investment banking firms and they say, well, they don’t answer the phone even if things get bad enough. And if they do answer the phone, you know, they say 10 bid, 20 offered subject.
QUICK: Yes. I mean, Joe will talk about that day that you mentioned in where the Dow was down 21 percent. I think he was, at that point, he said it himself. He was hiding under his desk for the calls that were coming in.
BUFFETT: Yes. And—
QUICK: Because when liquidity disappears, it disappears—
BUFFETT: 21 percent and that was some day, and it just kept coming. And most of the specialist firms, which then counted for more in terms of the stability of the markets. They were broke. I mean, as I remember, they went around to their banks and said, just don’t pull the loans, you know, but they, people, they were supposed to keep making markets, but people just kept hitting the bid and can widen the spread out. You got circuit breakers now, all kinds of things. But when people are scared, they’re scared. And people, if you yell fire in a crowded theater, everybody runs. Still, it still pays to beat people to the door, you know, and I can get trampled, you know, so, I will stand back there and say everybody to stay calm, you know? But that’s because I can’t run fast. On the other hand, when people come back into the theater, they come in one at a time. They know they don’t have to get into it. But when people panic, they panic.
QUICK: But is it the banking system we should be concerned about right now, or is it the shadow banking system, the private credit at this point?
BUFFETT: Well, it’s all parts of the banking system because they all affect each other and the troubles from one can spread over to another. And, well, you saw what happened, I mean, in 2008.
QUICK: But at risk of potentially, I don’t want people to say that you are commenting on what’s happening in the private credit situation right now. What do you think of the private credit situation right now? Are there enough concerning issues there that you worry that it could cause a contagion—
BUFFETT: I don’t think I know.
QUICK: Okay.
BUFFETT: I don’t, I do not think I know what, but, therefore, I want to be prepared for anything, and, therefore, we will always have, we’ll always have cash around and we’ll have treasury bills. We won’t have money market funds. We didn’t have them in 2008. We won’t have commercial paper in 2008. There’s just one thing that’s legal tender. And, you know, if you own treasury bills, and we have known, we don’t own treasury bonds way out. I mean, but every Monday, the treasury has to sell bills. And as long as they got to sell, you know, X billions worth of bills, I mean, they kind of a, they can print some money to do it, and they’ll do it.
QUICK: But just to put a fine point on it, you don’t think you know what’s happening out there. You’ve had this huge cash forward north of $350 billion. It’s just there waiting for any time. It’s not that you necessarily think that there’s something on the horizon. It’s just the longer time goes—
BUFFETT: Oh, sure. No, I always want to have—
QUICK: Yes.
BUFFETT: Yes. And I never want to buy anything just because people think the market is going up.
QUICK: Yes.
BUFFETT: I mean, the idea that people think they know what the market’s going to do is just crazy. I mean, the idea that they would shout out to the world, you know, that something they really knew, I mean, that’s like saying if they had gold — found gold in their backyard, they’d come on television and say, here’s where the gold is in my backyard, you know? I mean, they’re selling something.
QUICK: They want other people to follow, you mean?
BUFFETT: Well, they know that there’s a certain, I mean, there’s people in the United States and other parts of the world, but you’ve seen how much they like to gamble. And, basically, you have this incredible cathedral called the American Economic System. Nobody’s seen anything like it. I mean, it’s the cathedral of all cathedrals. But attached to it is a casino and people can walk back and forth between the two. And believe me, people like to gamble. I mean, they gamble with the odds against them in the market. They can actually gamble if they — well, they really aren’t gambling if they do it, but, I mean, if they just buy a stock and sit for 50 years, if they got a group of them, they’re going to do fine. I mean, the American capitalism system works and betting against the house does not work. I mean, it’s just — it’s so simple. But, people like to gamble. I mean–
QUICK: When you say gamble, are you talking–
BUFFETT: I had my honeymoon in 1952.
QUICK: Yes.
BUFFETT: We went through Las – Susie and I. We just got my Aunt Alice’s car. And we drove and we went through Las Vegas at the time. And I watched all these people who were dressed well and they’d flown on jets. They’d flown, you know, for many hours, spent much money and everything else to go and pull handles, you know, or do something that was mathematically dumb. And I thought, this is the land of opportunity. I told them we were going to get rich. I mean, how can you have people who have perfectly decent IQs rushing to do dumb things, which they do, and industries build on it. Now, it’s become legalized and the more they open it up, the more people like to do it. They like to do it in the stock market. And actually in the stock market, at least they got a favorable expectancy if they just sit tight.
QUICK: Right.
BUFFETT: But they don’t sit tight, of course, if they, if they’re gamblers.
QUICK: So, you’re not – so you’re not a fan of prediction markets, of legalized sports gambling, even of day trading, is that basically what you’re saying?
BUFFETT: Well, I don’t think, I don’t think you can stop it once you open it up, and once the states found out that they could pay about 60 cents on the dollar, or something like that, whatever they may have different systems for different states. There was one state it was legal in when I was a kid, and we’ve been around for hundreds of years. But then once people saw how that was working, other places took it up. And of course, rich people love it because they don’t have to pay. I mean, to the extent that the states raise money from people who that what the dollar really means something to them, actually relieves the taxes on me or other rich people. I mean, it’s not direct. I mean it, but it’s, it’s the net effect. So I don’t like things that make a sucker out of people. I don’t like them. I particularly don’t like them when the government sponsors them. I don’t think the government should play its I don’t think the function of the government is to play its people for suckers.
QUICK: My dad has always said the lottery is a tax on the stupid gambling, same thing?
BUFFETT: It’s a tax. It’s a tax on stupidity. But it’s, it’s, but I’m not mad at the people that are stupid. No, I really am not. I mean, you can’t help it, to some extent, if you’re human beings, you’re geared that way when somehow, you know, it’s developed within the humans. I don’t like it when the government that they elect decides they’re going to profit off that sort of activity. And I particularly, I think it’s kind of cynical. I don’t think, I don’t think you should have a cynical government. I mean it’s—
QUICK: Warren, let me let me shift gears and ask a little bit about what you think that is happening, that’s happening about what’s happening in the Middle East right now.
BUFFETT: What’s happening with what?
QUICK: What’s happening in the Middle East?
BUFFETT: Oh.
QUICK: There’s a lot of ways we could go with this, but why don’t we start with just what it means for crude oil and energy in particular? Berkshire owns a utility company. What do these higher prices mean?
BUFFETT: Well, it, it means the two oil positions we have, Chevron and Occidental—
QUICK: Yeah.
BUFFETT: Go up a lot. But that doesn’t mean I can go around predicting what will happen next. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow over there.
QUICK: Yeah. You for a long time were involved with the nuclear initiative. I think still are funding that. And I know your very first priority in philanthropy was the nuclear problem.
BUFFETT: I think it’s the problem. I think, it — well, I’ll put it this way. When I was — when I went to school, grammar school, they told me the sun was going to burn out in 4.5 billion years.
QUICK: Yeah.
BUFFETT: I took that pretty philosophically. I mean, I could handle that. And now, you’ve got nine countries, including, you know, a guy in North Korea. I mean, and there will be, something will happen. And we worried enormously about it when there were two. And we had perfectly, we had really pretty sane leaders in Kennedy and Khrushchev. You know, I mean, you were not dealing with unstable people or anything like that. And. You know, the ships turned around, but people were hiding under their desks with two. I mean, just think how you feel with North Korea having it and Iran wanting to get it. I mean, it — it is — and I don’t have an answer for that. I mean, we did the right thing in 1938 even or 1939. You can go look at it. It’s all over the Internet. The most important letter ever written. And Leo Szilard could not get the message to. He was a famous nuclear physicist. Terrific one. Very funny too. And he couldn’t get the message to Roosevelt, but he knew if Einstein signed the letter, that it would get there, and he finally got Einstein to sign the letter. And that letter was a month before the Germans started rolling into Poland. And I don’t think Roosevelt understood U-235 any better than I do. I mean, you know, but he knew if Einstein signed it, he better do something. And the funny thing is, of course, he was doing it because he was worried about the Germans getting it. And it was actually used on the Japanese. But it, we, we haven’t learned to live with it. Now, we’ve been — we’ve gone 80 years since then. We’ve had a lot of close calls. I mean, we’ve had training tapes put in there that that almost got the president to do something. They’ve had them. I mean, there is no way that the planet has an expectancy of 500 years now when it was 4.5 billion when I was a kid and we had to do it. I’m not faulting anybody. My dad was in Congress. He would have voted for it. I mean, everybody rejoiced on VJ day. You know, I mean, it — it — but there was no way we could undo it.
QUICK: Well, I think the question becomes today, Nikki Haley was just on “Squawk Box” right before you. And she was saying she thinks the president should go in and find the enriched uranium in Iran right now. And that’s a controversial position.
BUFFETT: It’s a controversial but I would be, I would be for one way or another, if I were president of the United States. I don’t want to be president United States, because I don’t want that. Sorry, I, I one time asked one president. I said, you know, if, if the Soviets had launched, though they already were in the air and our policy was mutually assured destruction, would you have told Strategic Air Command, unleash ours knowing that it wasn’t going to, I mean, it was going to just kill millions and millions and millions more people and add to a super polluted atmosphere that who knows what is going to happen? I mean, it, and now we have—
QUICK: What was the answer?
BUFFETT: The answer? Well, a, the, this president said, he said, “I’ve thought about that every day.” Because some major shows up at midnight—
