Daily Motivations - Warren Buffet's Life Advice Will Change Your Future

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Absolutely fascinating motivational speech by some of the Richest Men Alive,, Warren Buffet & Bill Gates. I hope you enjoy and learn a great lesson. Please share this podcast to your loved ones, it shows me you all enjoy it. Instagram - @daily_motivationsorg Facebook- @daily_motivationsorg Support Us

Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history, and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online at home and especially on public Wi-Fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer at ipvanish.com slash audio. 70 years ago, I was in high school. Almost a third as long as the country has been around.

And when I was in high school, I really only had two things on my mind. Girls and cars. And I wasn't doing very well with girls, so we'll talk about cars. But let's just imagine that when we finish, I'm going to let each one of you pick out the car of your choice. Sounds good, doesn't it? Pick it out, any color, you name it, it'll be tied up with a bow, and it'll be at your house tomorrow.

And you say, well, what's the catch? And the catch is, that it's the only car you're going to get in your lifetime. Now what are you going to do, knowing that that's the only car you're ever going to have and you love that car You're going to take care of it like you cannot believe Now what I'd like to suggest you're not going to get only one car in your lifetime But you're going to get one body and one mind and that's all you're going to get and that body and mind Feels terrific now, but it has to last you a lifetime. The most important thing is to decide, is to be able to define which ones you can come

to an intelligent decision on and which ones are beyond your capacity to evaluate. You don't have to be right about thousands and thousands and thousands of companies, you only have to be right about thousands and thousands and thousands of companies. You only have to be right about a couple. I met Bill Gates on July 5th, 1991. We were out in Seattle. And Bill said, you've got to have a computer. And I said, why? And he said, well, he said, you can do your income tax on it.

I said, I don't have any income. Bercher doesn't pay a dividend. He said, well, you can keep track of your portfolio. I said, I don't have any income, Berkshire doesn't pay a dividend. He said, well, you can keep track of your portfolio. I said, I only have one stock. I said, I mean. He says, it's going to change everything. And I said, well, will it change whether people chew gum? And he said, well, probably not.

And I said, well, will it change what kind of gum they chew? And I said, well, then I'll stick to chewing gum and you stick to computers. I don't have to understand all kinds of business. There's all kinds of business I don't understand. But there's thousands of opportunities there. I did understand the Bank of America. And I'll be able, I'm able to do that. I'm able to understand some given percentage.

But Ted Williams wrote a book called The Science of Hitting. And in The Science of Hitting, he's got a diagram, shows him at the plate, and he's got the strike zone divided into 77 squares, each the size of a baseball. And he says, if I only swing at pitches in my sweet zone, which he shows there, and he has what his batting average would be, which is 400. If he had to swing at low outside pitches, but still in the strike zone, his average

would be 230. He said the most important thing in hitting is waiting for the right pitch. Now he was at a disadvantage because if the count was 0 and 2 or 1 and 2 or so on, even if that ball was down where he was only going to bat 2.30, he had to swing at it. In investing, there's no called strikes. People can throw Microsoft at me and you name it, any stock, General Motors, and I don't have to swing.

And nobody's going to call me out on called strikes. I only get a strike called if I swing at a pitch and miss. So I can wait there and look at thousands of companies day after day and only when I see something I understand and when I like the price at which it's selling, then if I swing, if I hit it fine, if I miss, it's a strike. But it's an enormously advantageous game. And it's a terrible mistake to think you have to have an opinion on everything. You only have to have an opinion on everything. You only have to have an opinion on a few things.

In fact, I've told students if when they got out of school, they got a punch card with 20 punches on it, and that's all the investment decisions they got to make in their entire life, they would get very rich because they would think very hard about each one. You don't need 20 right decisions to get very rich. Four or five will probably do it over time. So I don't worry too much about the things. I don't understand it. If you understand some of these businesses

that are coming along and can spot things on, if you can spot on Amazon, for example, I mean, it's a tremendous accomplishment what Jeff Bezos has done. And I tip my hat to him, he's a wonderful businessman, he's a good guy too. But, could I have anticipated that he would be the success and 10 others wouldn't be?

I'm not good enough to do that. But fortunately, I don't have to. I don't have to form an opinion on Amazon. And I did form an opinion on the Bank of America, and I form an opinion on Coca-Cola. I mean, Coca-Cola has been around since 1886. There's 1.8 billion, 1.8 billion eight-ounce servings of Coca-Cola products sold every day. Now, if you take one penny and get one penny extra, that's $18 million a day, and $18 million times $365

is $7 billion free list, $730 billion or $6 billion, $570 million. So annually, $6 billion, $570 million from one penny. Do you think Coca-Cola is worth a penny more than Joe's Cola? I think so. And I've got about 127 years of history that would indicate it. So those are the kind of decisions I like to make. And you may have an entirely different field of expertise

than I would have, and probably much more up to date in terms of the kind of businesses that we're seeing evolve. And you can get very rich if you just understand a few of them and understand their future. What is it that you two share? What makes this friendship so satisfying for both of you? Well I think we both certainly share a curiosity about the world and we come from two different but related worlds so we had probably spent about 10 hours of this one-hour visit that Bill was scheduled on July 5th 1991 as mother had to talk

him into it. And we weren't halfway I mean we'd got no place in terms of our eventual agenda just in that time. In fact the governor of Washington came by and Bill's dad had to come into the bedroom and pull us out of it. He was a little embarrassed we were talking. But we have fun to start with. I mean, every relationship should have a lot of fun. And we find the world in just such an interesting place. So we like to compare notes on it.

When we compare notes, we have a lot of fun doing it. Part of the time, as I remember the conversation, by the way, there's a remarkable documentary about Warren, which is on HBO. I think it premieres on January 30th, on Monday. You should take time to take a look at it. Bill's involved in that. And you will see, in a sense, it's called, I think, Becoming Warren Buffett?

Yeah, that's what it's called, because. Took me 86 years. But then I got there. Because. You're doing well on it, though. Well, so far, yeah. Best is yet to come. One of the things that happened tonight, Bill, was that I guess your dad at the dinner said, what's

been the most important quality for you? And you found out that you and Warren had the same word. Yeah I think curiosity which Warren mentioned is a an amazing thing where you try and predict what's going to happen and then when it doesn't you sort of think well you know that drug didn't get invented that stock didn't go up that approach didn't get invented, that stock didn't go up, that approach wasn't popular. What is it about my model of the world that's wrong? Who could I talk to, what could I read? And the things that have happened since 1991,

mostly good things, had been amazing and just so much fun to talk about. So we read the news and we think, God, what did Warren think about that? You both are readers. You read all time, all day, Warren. Bill, you're a reader. You also do a lot of courses online as well.

What has that done for your life, the sense of constantly learning? Well, go ahead Bill. It's an incredible time to be a learner. I remember when I was young, and I had the Worldbook, which is one of Warren's products, and it was very good, but. Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy?

Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history, and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online at home and especially on public Wi-Fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer at ipvanish.com slash audio. Yeah, I always felt like, God, I want to get into this more in depth. I want to understand it better.

Today, the videos that are online and the courses that you combine with the very best professors, it's phenomenal. Take a subject like weather or climate change, you know, or what's going on in economics, what's known, what's not known. Now with the foundation, a lot of what I need to learn is about biology, making vaccines and what's going on with these various diseases. This is a phenomenal time to be a curious person. The information that's out there, you know, I have a my my biggest promise that I stay up too late because I'm reading and then I'm a little bit tired

The next day the other thing that you share other than reading is optimism You believe in America Absolutely, you know you have said to me more than once I would give up a year of my life just to know what the next 50 is going to be like. Yeah, even the next four now. I mean. Why did you pick four? I know, I just, number that came to me.

The, it is just fascinating what's happened, just in my lifetime. In the 86 years, I should mention one thing about reading. It was at the library here at Columbia, that I wish I spent probably more time than any other student. I lived there practically. But I pulled the book out there, happened to be Who's an American. It told me something about my professor, Benjamin Graham. And then I looked up and I went to the library and I said, I want to learn more about this

because I learned this over here. That changed my whole life. We own Geico now because of that librarian directing me to some other book and then following through on that. It's the chance. I read about one fifth the pace that Bill does, but I still spend five or six hours a day reading. I mean it just you can learn so much. I particularly love biography just to be able to live the lives of these people that have been so see them so extraordinary the lessons

and the you know the discouragements they face just just everything about it. So you can't get enough of reading. What surprises you most about Bill? That's an interesting question. I guess what really surprised me initially is we just found so many things to connect on. He did try to sell me a computer. That's probably the only sale he didn't make, although the computer changed my life for the better,

in a big way, subsequently. But well, he just had the same curiosity. And the other word you have used is focus. Well, the focus is no question about it. I mean, both of us got to where we are in a big way because of focus. Bill, what surprises you about Warren? I was so amazed that he comes to investing

with this broad model of the world. So one of the first questions he asked me was, hey, Microsoft's a small company. IBM's this huge company. Why can you do better? Why can't they beat you at the software game that you're playing? And I always, you know, every day I was thinking about, okay, what advantage do we have? What do we do? But nobody ever asked me that

question. And we talked about the economics of software, which is a very different and special thing, and he could relate it to things that he'd seen. And you know, I didn't understand banking, why some get ahead and some don't and so he was able to put that in very clear terms and so I found somebody whose model was rich enough that it helped me understand things that I really wanted to know and we could laugh about things that were a surprise to us. I'd say his humility and his sense of humor really stood out in this incredible way. I mean he enjoys what he does and he shares that with other people and even you know when I ask questions that are

pretty naive that he's probably been asked 50 times he's very nice about it. Well it took me a long time to figure this out, Bill, but here's how it works. I tried Bill out with some non-transitive dice, and I'd read about them in Scientific America or someplace, and there were only two people in the world in the history of these dice that actually figured it out while I was trying to take their money from them. And one was the leading symbolic logician in the world, and the other was a drunk who didn't really know any better and asked the wrong question. But Bill said wait a second you choose first and the game was over. You taught him not you didn't teach him but you brought him

into a great appreciation of bridge. Yeah he'd play bridge but the family is very big on games his family was very very big on games and and and so we played bridge together and we played in China going down the Great Rivers when we were supposed to be looking at the scenery. But we had a good time playing bridge. All right, we've got a lot of questions we want to talk from the audience. We want to start up in the balcony

so you know we haven't forgotten you. It's hard to see. But is there a number there that has a question? OK, start it wherever it is. Yes, number six. Thank both of you guys for being here today. My question is in regards to public health and vaccinations.

Given our current president's publicly stated stance against the use of vaccinations, both in this country and abroad, how would you recommend that we, as students and future leaders in health sciences, best allocate our resources to most effectively resist his alternative fact political philosophy in regards to domestic and global public health? Thank you. Bill? That's a good place to start.

Yeah. Well the facts about vaccines are very clear and very strong which is both that they're safe and that the vaccine schedule has been designed to reduce disease and you know the more parents that adhere to it the more not only their children be protected, but you have some kids who are immune deficient. So unless the kids around them are protected, then it puts those kids at risk. And there are diseases like measles or pertussis that all it takes is a small cluster, and then mostly those diseases would be coming in from overseas, but you can get infection.

In some European countries, you've had deaths because the kids weren't vaccinated. I don't think the U.S. government is going to come out with any negative statements. There may be a commission, and fortunately, if you look at the facts, the facts are quite unequivocal. We certainly are speaking out in favor of vaccines. I'm a little surprised that we have to stick up for them, but it's true in every country that you get these rumors, and particularly in today's media, those rumors can get out ahead of the facts,

because the rumors are sort of more salacious, or contrary to what you've been told type things. Here, I'm sure we'll have a chance if necessary to go through the facts again and get a clear positive message from the government. And the risk is if vaccines somehow people are scared of having vaccines, the risk is? Well we're engaged right now in polio eradication and the only way that succeeds is to get 95% of the kids to have these vaccines and there we found we ran into a form of

anti-vaccine sentiment that's even worse than US rumors and that is that two terrorist groups one in Nigeria Boko Haram and another one in Pakistan Afghanistan the Taliban said that vaccination was a U.S. plot and, you know, would sterilize women and it was a very bad thing. And they took the women who are going out to the children's houses and giving these oral drops, oral polio vaccine, and actually killed a number of them. And so those negative rumors, the only reason we still have polio today that were not done is because of that part of Nigeria that Boko Haram's caused unrest in the border areas including Baluchistan in Pakistan where there have been these anti-vaccine sentiments.

So you know our risk is simply those negative things. So it's not just in rich countries that we run into this. It absolutely causes deaths if parents don't know, bring your kids in and get them fully vaccinated. And your drive to eradicate polio is to show that you can do it. Well, it started in 1988 when it already had been eradicated in the Americas. So these were the U.S. in the 60s, the rest of the Americas in the 70s, showed that it could be done. So in 1988, well before our foundation was involved, Rotary and a number of other organizations said let's get rid of this.

And it's been harder than was expected just because of these sentiments. Here we are in 2016, a 17. Last year, less than 50 cases. So we are very, very close. In fact, there's so few cases now, the way that we track where the virus is, is we go and look at sewage samples.

And we see, because a lot of kids get infected and pass it along without getting paralyzed. And so it's only through these sewage samples and we see because a lot of kids get infected and pass along without getting paralyzed and so it's only through these sewage samples we know that there's still about four places in Pakistan and Afghanistan and one place in Nigeria that we haven't gotten there yet. All right, let's see, next question. I've got to see a card. Number one.

Thank you both so much for being here. My question, again, sorry, is a little bit on the political spectrum. I was wondering what you're both most hopeful about in this new political environment we have and also what you're both most worried about. You want to take hope or worried more? Well, I'm confident that America will move ahead. It's been, from the time I was born until now, the real GDP per capita of this country has gone up six for one. I mean, nobody ever dreamt that would be possible.

And when you look at what's happened in this country over 240 years. It's an absolute miracle. When I went to Columbia Business School in September 1950, one woman in the class. I mean, this country moves forward. And you can't stop it. So I'm enormously up. I say the luckiest person born in the history of the world is the baby being born today in this country. And we will go and everybody, half the country

always is going to be somewhat unhappy, close to half about the last election. But I grew up in a household in the late 1930s. My dad was very Republican. My sisters and I didn't get dessert unless we said something bad about Roosevelt. I mean, it was just required required and I heard all these apocalyptic views about after his third term there'll be no more elections. I've been hearing that all my life

and you know year after year after year with occasional hiccups and an occasional seizure like we had in 2008 and 2009 but this country it's all profit folks. I mean you know when came in, just think of what it would have been like in 1776. Nothing here. And now we've been... And the velocity of change... Oh, it just keeps moving. I mean, guys like Bill, they don't quit. I mean, he moves on to something like polio.

He mentions 50 cases in the world. There were more than 50 in the ward where I went when I was a teenager to see a friend of my sister's and they were all in these rocking machines and everything. They were destined to a terrible, terrible life and it was just one ward in Omaha and now that's the yearly total thanks initially as well as currently to Rotary and some, but people kept working on it. This world moves forward and it it's been doing it. I bought my first stock when I was 11 in April of 1942.

The Dow was 100. If you haven't looked, it's 20,000. Something good must have happened in between. And it's going to keep happening, folks. Bill, I know you share the optimism. What about concerns? Well, the optimism is partly that I think American innovation is strong, you know, support

for research is by and large bipartisan, and so whether it's health breakthroughs or even energy breakthroughs, I think, you know, every year that goes by, we're going to have more of those things. Now this administration is new enough. We don't know how their budget priorities will come out. There are things like foreign aid, which is a small part of the budget, about 30 billion a year, but that means the U.S. is the biggest, that every time there's new leadership we have to go in and articulate the benefits.

It's well spent. It's not the image that people have in the past. And so right now, I think there's a lot of intensity to make sure we get that message out and get both in terms of the executive branch and the Congress to maintain amazing things like the President's Malaria Initiative or PEPFAR, which is an HIV thing. These things started under President Bush.

And so our foundations had a great working relationship with Democratic and Republican administrations. Most people wouldn't realize that US foreign aid as a percentage of the economy, which is generally how it's measured, reached its low point in 1999 under the Clinton administration. Now I'm not saying it was the administration, it was a mix of the administration and the Congress. Then during those Bush years it went up fairly substantially. Now the economy helped with that, but these initiatives were really amazing and you know I'm hopeful that maintaining or

even growing these initiatives will be a priority when there's a lot of talk about tax cuts and different spending activities and so it is a bit up in the air during these months ahead. And you've often made the point that no matter how big the private contributions are sometimes in terms of sheer scale you need a government involvement. Yeah, somebody asked me today if PEPFAR, which is this AIDS program, was canceled when private

philanthropy made up for it. Well, PEPFAR is over five billion years. That is, this one aid program, which is a phenomenal thing that's saved over 10 million lives, that's larger than our foundation, which is the largest in the world. So there's no possibility, the government sector, US, UK, other European donors, that's a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year in total that's uplifting these poor countries in health and education. And if we lose the

consensus around that, if people draw inward too much, we will hurt progress and there will be millions of lives lost because of it. One thing that might be mentioned, Charlie, is that the difference between now and 60 or 70 years ago in the ability of really bright people, really innovative, really energetic people to get financed to do things is just dramatically better than it was at that time. So now if you've got good ideas and there's good ideas right in this crowd and you've got energy, it's far easier to get financed to move forward those ideas than you could 50 or 60 years ago.

Is that because of the internet or crowdsourcing? It's just lots more capital around and people more optimistic about business. But better ways to connect the two, the capital and those. Absolutely. And the ideas. It's dramatic. And the willingness to take risk.

The first venture capital stuff is in the 1960s, and it's tiny. Microsoft when we were taking outside investment we took at a valuation of 20 million dollars we took a million dollars for 5% of the company. I'll do it retroactively folks. You had your chance. You had your chance. We never spent the money that is is, our business was profitable enough.

We really didn't need to do that, but we wanted people on our board to give us advice. There's an episode of Silicon Valley where all these venture capitalists are courting this guy. That really reminded me of what it was like. By that time, which was 1984, there were dozens of venture capitalists. And that's something that other countries have tried to duplicate. They have, in small part, but not nearly as well, this willingness to take risks, the idea that if you have a failure it's not a mark of shame that, hey, what's your next startup going to be? You heard his secret, folks. He gets his ideas from Silicon Valley be sure. All right cards let's see where the cards are. Okay number three take the

card right there. Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history, and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online at home and especially on public Wi-Fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer at ipvanish.com slash audio. So you started this talk about how you're able to make a model and it won't accurately predict what happens.

And on the other side of the coin, I was wondering what happens when you create such well-developed predictive technology and what are the ramifications and implications of that outcome? Well, I don't think our predictive technology is going to be like an oracle. Warren's nickname is the Oracle of Omaha. But the percentage of times you convert to things like macroeconomics because they involve emotional sentiment. We're a long ways away from that.

The biggest modeling thing I'm involved in is a group that models diseases. So we look at HIV or tuberculosis and understand, OK, what do we have to do in terms of diagnosis and drugs to get these things down? Once we finish polio, we'll go on in our next big challenge, which will take decades, but I expect will be done in my lifetime,

is malaria eradication. So these models aren't nearly at the point where they can take human sentiment into consideration. The field of economics, a very basic question about what we should have done differently before the financial crisis. There really is no consensus, whether it's with the public or inside the profession of economists. They agree that some of the emergency treatment we did was necessary and important,

and I wish that was better understood. But in terms of the root causes, it's actually a little disconcerting how little our models or understanding explain how that imbalance got so extreme. All right, well, number two. Hi, my name's [? Campania.?] I'm in the deneering school here at Columbia. And I wanted to ask, you were talking about that you love reading.

I wanted to ask if you have a particular book that it changed your life, like the way you think about things. And I also wanted to ask, what is the thing that you admire the most about each other? Like you, Bill, about Warren, and the other way around. Thank you. They sort of touched on the second question, but go ahead, they may want to add to it.

Books, though, first. Changed your life. Well, a book did change my life, and it was by a fellow who taught here at Columbia, Benjamin Graham. And I read the book when I was 19, called The Intelligent Investor. And I had been interested in investments since I was maybe seven or eight.

And I'd read every book in the Omaha Public Library, all, public library, but that was a lot of- So why do you think you were interested in investing when you were seven or eight? I think it's because I was too dumb to get interested at four. My dad had a very small investment firm, and I would just go down, and I read all the books that he had there, waiting to go to lunch or whatever it might be, and then I went over to the public library and read them all.

It just was a fascinating subject to me. But I didn't have any... I knew what everybody thought and all of that at an early age, but what Graham wrote made sense. I just happened to pick that book up at a bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska. But to investing per se, is there something about your core competence that made investing the perfect place for you to be? Yeah, it certainly wasn't a pro football player. It was a question of zeroing out all the other incompetencies. I was left with one thing.

Just the allocation of capital. I was actually wired in a way that was, this would be something I would be good at. So wired in what way? I can't tell you precisely, but I've got the right temperament for it, which is much more important than IQ. If you've got more than 120 points of IQ, sell the rest to somebody else. You don't need investments. But you do need the right temperament. You do have to be able to think for yourself. And getting back to the earlier question, the first question

I ask myself when I look at a business is, is it important and easy what I can determine about this business? And a lot of them don't make it. Now, Bill is looking for hard questions that plague society and where intellect and money may make a difference. They may not for a while. But he's taking on the tough things. My job is to find easy things.

I'm looking for one foot bars to step over, rather than eight foot bars to jump over. But that's not irrational if you're looking at the investment universe. But reading is key. On the book thing, I will tell you a wonderful book to read. I can tell you a number of them. Intelligent Investor, obviously, if you're

in the investment field. But Catherine Graham's Autobiography is a marvelous book and it's absolutely honest told by an incredible woman who had an incredible life and then wrote honestly about it. But and someone who you knew very well and invested with and she was a bit reluctant and had to be assured. Yeah, she was afraid of me actually. know that she was afraid of me actually. But what makes that book so much? It is such a broad range of human experience, honestly told.

I mean, you couldn't have, nobody in Hollywood could write a scenario that she lived through. And just to see that world develop how she reacted to it. You can learn so much. My partner Charlie Munger just loves Ben Franklin. You can learn from other people and their mistakes and I find biography is my favorite. Part of the reason you love biographies. Pardon me? Part of the reason you love biographies. Yeah. Where is a card? Right here. Just come here. I'm having a hard time seeing the card so that right here. See where the hands are raised. Hi, my name is Chisama. I'm a senior here at the college.

I'm also a Gates Memorial scholar with my family over here. scholar with my family over here. So I'd like to ask, so what both of you do and what's a lot of risk? And sometimes you have to face the feel of failure with that risk, so I'm asking how did you overcome that fear and what steps did you take to do that? Well I think I was very lucky that when I was in high school the computer was brought in there and I developed a fascination for it and became kind of fanatical about it so that I didn't view it as risky, I viewed it as this kind of fun hobby. Even when I went to college, which I didn't finish, but I spent time up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I wasn't sure that would be my life's work. Now, as the chip came along and made it mainstream, it became very obvious that something dramatic was going to happen. And so my passion, my hobby, and the area I could start this company right at the beginning of the revolution, that coincided in a nice way. And I never felt it was risky.

If Microsoft had failed, I didn't have kids or anything. I could go back to school and finish you know, finish my degree and, you know, go get a job somewhere. I was very risk-averse in running the company. I always made sure we had enough money in the bank to pay everybody for at least a year if nobody paid us at all. Because this idea idea I was hiring people who had kids and families and they were moving to work there and here I was you know 19 20 years old and sort of telling these people I'd be paying their salaries so I was actually very conservative on a financial point of view and one of the

few arguments I have the Steve Ball, who came in and played a phenomenal role in the success of the company, was how many people could he hire? Because I was trying to be so conservative. But I let him go full speed, and it turns out our financial success meant that we never had a conflict about that. But you know I think it's great to be risk taking particularly when you're young trying out different things fields that you know aren't very popular that you might enjoy. But I never got into a position where I was taking actually in any meaningful sense I was taking a big risk. I mean the risk for you would not to have acted because you felt the train was leaving the station. Yeah and it was so clear that you know this was going to happen. And this was so much fun.

I mean, I was a fanatic. I didn't believe in weekends. I didn't believe in vacation. My mom had to negotiate whether I'd come once a week for dinner. No matter who the guest was. That's right. That's right.

But Warren, you have often said you still tap dance to work. Absolutely. Because you can paint with your own colors. Yeah. I get, I'm as excited about tomorrow in terms of what's going to happen as I was when I started. I was having a lot of fun when I started, but I'm having just as much fun now. And I was, when I was here at Columbia, I had this terrible fear.

It was impossible for me to speak in public. I mean, I wasn't able to do it. I actually read an ad in the New York Times. I went down to Midtown, signed up for a course, gave the guy a check, and then stopped payment on the check. I mean, I just petrified. But finally, and actually, after you get through hearing me today, maybe you'll wish I'd stayed afraid of public speaking.

But that's another question. Then when I got out to Omaha, I finally decided I just had to do it. get through hearing me today, maybe you'll wish I'd stayed afraid of public speaking. But that's another question. Then when I got out to Omaha, I finally decided I just had to do it. So I gave a guy $100 in cash. And once I'd parted with $100 in cash, I'd jump off the Grand Canyon to get my money's worth. So it changed my life.

But I would say this. Don't fear failure. Almost everything that's turned out, I got turned down by Harvard. The best thing ever happened. Among other some good things that happened that didn't seem good at the time. Don't worry about it and don't let it eat at you or look back. Just keep going because you're going to have some things and forget them, go forward.

All right, I want to go to the back of the room, right back there, wherever number three is. Hi, my name is Matthew Mann. I'm a first year at Columbia Business School. Both of you had a moment where you went out on your own. And I guess my question would be, if you were to do it all over again, you're in our shoes. What industry would that be in?

Where would you start your own business today? I'd do the same thing. Yeah. I mean, for one thing, I'd be a failure at anything else, probably. No, I mean, I had fun when I was in my 20s, my 30s, and now I'm 86 and I'm having fun. So I advise students, as much as possible,

look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job. I mean, don't sleepwalk through life, and don't say it's all going to be great. You know, I'll do this, and I'll do that. And I'm just marking time to get to be older. As I've told people, that's like saving up sex for your old age. I mean, it just is not a good idea.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are you urging them to do? I'll explain. Just what I'm talking about. Now, it just, you really want to be doing what you love doing. And you can't necessarily find it on your first job. But don't give up before you find it.

Bill, you've had the unique experience, A, because of your curiosity, B, because of your involvement in global health, to see the impact of a lot of other areas, whether it's biomedicine or whether it's a whole range of other things other than computer science. If you were going to drop out of Harvard today, which field would you be most likely attracted to? Well, I love the hard sciences.

And there's some phenomenal things that people will get a chance to be part of. I'd still probably pick computer science because the work in artificial intelligence today is at a really profound level. You know, our ability not just to play games but that is a profound milestone, the AlphaGo work that the DeepMind people at Google were able to achieve and that kind of technology is in all the leading companies and a lot of universities.

With AI, creation of agents, the ability to read and understand material, it is going to be phenomenal. So anything connected with that, I think, would be an exciting lifetime career. I also think in energy, we have the imperative to have energy that's reliable, cheap, and clean. And no system available today can provide that, whether it's for rich countries or for

poor countries. And so the innovations there will be profound. And there's many paths that could provide that solution. Finally, I think biology, it's the most thrilling time. You know, we are going to figure out obesity, cancer, even things that are very hard like depression because the mind is even more complicated than other parts of the body. I see this through the lens of the disease of the poor, the infectious disease, where new vaccines, new drugs, we are moving faster than ever

and some of these are platform technologies like DNA vaccines that are going to give us just that one thing will give us lots and lots of solutions and so working in that space is phenomenal. Now I say this to my children and they may not want to do hard sciences. The one who's picked wants to counsel patients and be a doctor and even more than the science piece, that relationship with patients is what grabs her. So everybody has their own taste but in terms of big impact, those three higher science problems would be at the top for me. All right, next.

Right here, right next to number one. Hello. Thank you guys for being here. Also thank you to Mr. Gates. I am also a Gates Scholar and without your foundation I wouldn't be here. Many industrial-based communities have been severely affected with higher levels of unemployment due to the increasing utilization of automation, which ends up displacing workers. What do you believe is a possible solution to unemployment arising from automation?

It's a good question. Because there's a lot of talk about globalization and all of that, and a lot of other people step forward and talk about how technology and the impact technology is having on jobs and the demand for new kinds of skills. Yeah, we were here at 1800 and conducting this and somebody would point out that eventually tractors would come along and better fertilizer and again that 80% of the people are now employed on the farm and in a couple hundred years it's going to be 2 or 3%.

And what are we going to do with all these people? Well, the answer is we release them. Keynes wrote something about it in something called Essays on Persuasion. He wrote in 1930 about what a more prosperous society would become like. And he actually postulated that in 100 years, and we're now 87 years away from that, that there would be four to eight times as much output per capita. It's remarkable. But he didn't quite get how it might get distributed.

But the idea of more output per capita, which is what the progress is made on productivity, that that should be harmful to scientists is crazy. I mean, the distribution may be a problem, but if one person could push a button and turn out everything we turn out now, is that good for the world or bad for the world? You'd have to figure out how to distribute it, but you'd free up all kinds of possibilities for everything else. So everything should be devoted initially to getting greater productivity, but people who fall by the wayside,

through no fault of their own, as the goose lays more golden eggs, should still get a chance to participate in that prosperity. And that's where government comes in. Bill, anything to add to that? Yeah, a problem of excess is a different problem than a problem of shortage. If all the tractors and computers stopped working, then we would have problems of shortage there, and we just wouldn't have enough people to make the output. A problem of excess really forces us to look at the individuals affected and take those extra resources and make sure they're directed to them in terms of re-education and incomes policies and the

need for labor in terms of smaller class size helping handicapped kids reaching out to the elderly the demand for labor is not at zero if you ever get to that point fine you can shorten the work week and, and you'll be just fine with that. And so this idea of taking an individual who, during their generation, is affected, I think there's a lot to be learned about that, a lot of thinking we have to do. But the macro picture that it enables is an opportunity.

Number two. Also, I'm urging people at the back so you have a chance. We want to go back up to the balcony as well. So I see number six. We'll come to six after two. Yes. Hi, my name is Sam. I go to Columbia College.

And my question is, what steps do you think need to be taken in order to improve public education, particularly in economically depressed areas of the United States? I think this is a super important issue because the dropout rates, although they've gone down a little bit they're still very high and and very based on income and even kids who graduate a lot of them don't enter college or they do enter college and they end up in these remedial courses for their reading or math capabilities and those people have an extremely high dropout rate from higher education. And they can incur debt.

They have a negative experience. So we have a long ways to go in education. There are some very strong points of light. Like here in New York City, some of the charter schools are with even less resources than schools at large, doing a phenomenal job of educating kids. There are a lot of countries, particularly in Asia, who spending way less of their GDP on education are doing a great job educating their kids.

And it's not just the top 20%. Their bottom 20% is pretty phenomenal in the case of China, South Korea, and Singapore. And so looking at what we've learned in charter schools in terms of building the culture, giving teachers feedback, what is good teaching look like? Do we give teachers a chance to learn from each other about that interactive element that makes the subject seem relevant and important? There are great teachers, but spreading those practices has been very, very tough. And so I'd say it's a top priority. And our foundation has that. For our work in the United States, education is the top priority, whereas outside the U.S., we take

on health. It's a tough problem because the institution of education are fairly resistant to change and people are not yet convinced by various approaches very easily. But we need to keep at it. We're going to stay and actually put even more money into trying to help create models. OK, up to number six. Hi. First, I want to thank Bill.

I witnessed the role of your foundation in eliminating polio in India, and I'm really thankful for that. My question is more on how to set the basic level of debate in any public sense. There are many trade-offs. How to explain climate change policy for people who are losing jobs in the coal sector?

How do you balance the current short-term economic goals with the long-term peaceful transition to the renewable sources of energy? No, it's a good question. The certain topics are so complicated, like climate change, that to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult, and particularly when people take any of that complexity and try and create uncertainty about it. And for example, India's kind of paradigmatic in that they want to electrify for all sorts

of good reasons having to do with health and reading at night and quality of life. The question of should they delay electrification for climate issues is going to be very difficult. The ideal is to innovate in such a way that they can go full speed ahead on electrification without emitting the CO2 that a the natural path of them today, which is coal, is the way to go. And so we have a lot of cost reduction to do because rich countries may be able to buy premium electricity when you get to middle income or lower that's just not going to happen. And you know democracy has us allocate these resources in terms of investing in the future

and things like research and investing in the present. And when you have a problem like the financial crisis then you do get a little bit of more of short-term thinking. And I'm hopeful, I think it's better for the world and for the country, if we can get back into a little bit more of a focus on the long term. We have some questions from Facebook. Warren, a central tenet of your investing is to invest for the long term. And this comes from Brian White, who says, how might Bill and Warren convince investors to think beyond short-term returns

to encourage world-changing innovation? Well, I've spent my life trying to convince people on investing for the long term. Listen, if I knew how to double my money tomorrow, I'd probably invest for the short term, too. I know how to double my money tomorrow, I probably invest in the short term too. It's much easier to invest for the long term if you're just talking pure investment because you know what's going to, in my view, be very high probability what's going to happen 10 and 20 years from now in a major way and I don't have the faintest idea what's going

to happen tomorrow or next week. But if you're talking about societal, it's very tough because politicians face elections either every two years or six years and the way congressional districts have been organized, primaries have become more and more important. And so it's very hard to have politicians think of something that's wonderful for the country for 20 years, but will cost them the election two years from now. And that's a basic problem in a democracy, and it gets to be more of a problem as we get – we've arranged congressional districts so the primary dominates because a very limited number of people turn out and their motive tend to be on the extremes of both parties.

So it's not easy. Well, whether you're going to make an investment in a company or whether you're going to buy the company, what are the factors that you have to be, that you're looking for? What tests? I'm looking for durable competitive advantage. I'm looking for something that has a mode around it for a considerable period of time. And I'm looking for an honest and able management

to run it, because I don't know how to run it myself. And I'm looking for a purchase price that's not excessive. But it's better to pay a little too much for something that's a very good business than it is to buy some bargain, but really the company, but down much of the future. And I don't know, I don't have an ability to predict with a high probability of success the future of most companies. So I'm looking for the exception.

But the nice thing is if there's thousands of companies out there, I really don't have to be right on a couple. I mean it's exactly the opposite of baseball where you have called strikes and the pitcher's trying to throw it to you at the worst part of the strike zone for you and if he succeeds in getting into that corner three times and you don't swing you're out and investing it's a no it's a no called strike thing so I can sit there all day and somebody can throw me one company after another and finally I got one of my sweet spots. Both of you have chosen both wives and partners well.

Charlie Munger added what? Charlie Munger changed my views. He refined them in a huge way in terms of looking for the quality companies and looking for the ability to make an investment that would work out well for five or 10 or 20 years, as opposed to something that might be one, I call it cigar butt investing, where

there was one puff left in the cigar, but the cigar was free. So you picked up these disgusting looking things and got one puff out of them and went onto another one. And that worked OK, but it was small scale. And it really doesn't build something satisfying. So he kept forcing me in the direction of saying, you know, is this really a business we want to own forever? And do we want to get associated?

It's like a marriage. I mean, do you want to get associated with this person forever? And it's a great way to look at things. Bill, your wife, Melinda, has added what? Well she's... Not only four children. Three children. How much time do I have? Because she is your partner and she was there in the philanthropy from day one. Absolutely. At Microsoft I had two partners who were amazing. I had Paul Allen in the early days, and then Steve Ballmer's, the company, got bigger. And we would not have achieved anything what we did without those partnerships.

Because when things are tough, when you're making big decisions, having somebody who's really in there with you committed, for me, I couldn't have done without that. For the foundation, Melinda is an amazing partner. She thinks about the people issues better than I do. She, you know, knows when I get over excited about the science. She can, you know, make sure we're we're being realistic about it. And it makes it fun. You know, last week I went

to Europe to hold economic forums. She went to Nigeria and then this weekend we just sat and talked about, okay, what did we see, what does that say about the work we should do? And so, you know, I don't think I'd enjoy it without a partner and particularly someone amazing like her. It's more fun with a partner. I mean, Charlie and I have had more fun working together than neither one of us would have had individually, and we have never had an argument after Working together for 58 you talk every day not anymore because we know what the other guys gonna say we just run

We talked it all out 50 years ago So if you see Charlie and he says why haven't you call me you'd say well, I knew what you say anyway We still have a lot of fun together. All right, right there. Let's see, number two. Hi. Hi, my name is Molly Zanger. I'm a student at Barnard College. I guess what I'm basically wondering

is what your main considerations are when you're choosing where to donate and what causes to donate to, and what the main challenges are that are associated with that. Yeah. I wholesale it because I made a choice that I wanted to have. Well, originally, my first wife and I planned that I would pile it up and she would unpile it. Then that was plan number one, but she died in 2004 and then I had the problem of figuring out the best way to distribute what turned

out to be a lot of money. And I wanted some people who had similar values and similar objectives to what I had, but I also wanted people who would pour in intelligence and energy and in the case of Bill and Melinda, a lot of their own funds would work at it full time, but who really saw society as I saw it, which was that every life is of equal value. And that if you start with that, and then you figure what you might be good at changing, whether it's in medicine or education or early learning or whatever it may be, that was my answer, was the wholesale.

And retail philanthropy would drive me crazy, but wholesale philanthropy I really like. Bill? Yeah, for our work at the foundation, the belief in innovation, which both Melinda and I saw at Microsoft, our question was question was okay how do we bring that kind of innovation to help the world's poorest and we learned that coming up with new vaccines that although you can pay a lot to have them created the marginal cost comes down to less than a dollar. So great getting a new vaccine for the main cause of diarrhea or pneumonia, that can be a phenomenal thing.

So you're looking for these super non-linear, dramatic things because as a, you know, per poor person or compared to government funding, philanthropy is actually quite small. And yet, funding vaccine projects, the government isn't as good as that as a philanthropist who assembles a team and over time is learning how to do that very well. And we had models. You know, Rockefeller Foundation was a phenomenal foundation. The Green Revolution is just one of many things that they did which raised agricultural productivity and avoided hundreds of millions of starving.

So studying the other foundations that have taken these big breakthroughs and created a model out of those, that was very informative to what we've gone after. What's the most important lesson you've learned though about making investments from the foundation today that you learned along the way? Well, I think when we started out, I thought that just coming up with a new vaccine or drug alone would be enough, and that the world would then take that and get it out to all the children of the world,

partly through field visits I did, that Melinda did, looking at the statistics, that delivery system doesn't get out to a lot of the kids. And so, having to figure out how people were hired or how that was funded and measured, this what's called primary health care, we were drawn into that out of necessity. It didn't fit the normal sort of in the lab, you know, come up with this great concoction and yet in order to achieve our goals we needed to think about those delivery pieces. In fact, sometimes the state of the product actually had to be simpler in some ways in order to get through

that very limited delivery capacity and now we're getting to 86% of the world's children with vaccines. It was about 70% when we got started. So that's a good increase. We still have 14% to go. Bill and Melinda have amazing convening and persuasive powers as well. So I mean, they bring something far more to it

than just money. I mean, they work incredibly hard, as do my three children and their foundations, but they work incredibly hard at getting governments involved in vaccines or whatever it may take. And that just is, you know, it's an extra dimension that I think very few people have in the field. Yeah, I mean it's a hands-on travel to experience. When Melinda is in Africa and she's holding a little baby, I mean she is actually thinking, you know, this kid needs to be vaccinated, has a decent chance in education and all that. I feel the same way about the kid, but what I really think is, is he going to pee on me, you know, and can I have him so much?

So there's just a difference in that human touch that makes a big difference. I'm halfway in between. I think he's closer to me, actually. Number one, number three, and number four. First one, then three, then four. Hi, I'm Malvika Goswami at the Columbia Business School. If the current government were to ask for your advice on immigration or health care reform, what would you recommend to them?

Well, on immigration, well, immigration, I mean, this country is built on it. I always say to people that are anti-immigration, let's put it in retroactively. Everybody leaves. This country, if you think about it, you've heard this before from me, but we are sitting here in part because of two Jewish immigrants who in 1939 in August signed the most important letter perhaps in the history of the United States. And you can go to the internet and go to search Bing and just type in Einstein Roosevelt 1939, Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein,

two immigrants came here, they both they came directly from Germany, two immigrants, came here. They came directly from Germany as Lahrd came from Hungary before that. And they told President Roosevelt that the Germans were likely to develop an atom bomb, which was likely to work. It's less than a full page. And we'd better get to work on something fast.

And the Manhattan Project came out of that. And if it hadn't been for those two immigrants, you know, who knows whether we'd be sitting in this room. Immigration? I'm going to let him handle it. No, no. I mean, you know Andy Grove, you know, I mean, just go off and down the line. Exactly. I mean, it's, this country has been blessed by immigrants.

And you can take them from any country you want. And they've come here, and they've found something that unleashed the potential that the place where they left did not. And we're the product of it. The question also was about health care. What can you tell us about health care that you think is important in terms of the consideration

of what might happen? I mean, if you were building a health care plan for America, what would be the elements that you would want to include? Well, there's no doubt that in order to provide decent health care, the percentage of GDP devoted to it is going to go up over time. It's already very high, and yes, there's some efficiencies to be gained in that 18% or so number.

But as society ages, as we come up with new things like joint replacement, organ transplant, which are going to create lots of human benefits, we're going to have to have more resources overall, including more government resources for health care. And so it's a tough problem because you have both access problems today and you have cost problems today and you have cost problems today. And you know, whenever I look at a problem I have this one simple lens which is innovation should help here, but in this case innovation, while it will provide breakthrough drugs that will save costs, like if you can cure Alzheimer's, which we certainly haven't done yet, that will save on huge long-term

care costs. So we have these chronic diseases that we've made less progress on than some of the others and you know the market mechanism to get pharma to go after those things and the basic research US funds, I am quite optimistic that we'll have some advances but they'll also give us some very expensive things that will mean we're spending more money against it. And I do hope that at some point that we really are calling on the best minds to look at the incentives for the breakthroughs, the most efficient system we have here. I think there's a lot of unhappiness in the country now stems from

the fact that the health care system isn't delivering and yet people are saying less government, more government. I don't think they're being given the depth of education about why it's so tough that over time will help them vote for the right solution. The depth of explanation. Let me go to Facebook in just a moment. But where was I? I promised three, four, and six. Three is there, and six is up there.

So go three, six, and then we'll go to Facebook. Hi, my name is Josh Schaefer, and I'm a dental resident at Columbia. My question is, for future doctors and dentists of America, what advice do you have in giving about having a proper balance of providing that healthcare, but also mastering the concepts of business and economics? Well, Atul Gawande is an incredible author. He in the current issue of the New Yorker has the latest in wonderful articles about

the healthcare system. And he's talking about the people who do sort of heroic surgery like himself are paid twice as much as the people who are on an ongoing basis in a great incremental way learning about the patient and seeing what works for them and he it's a calling cry to say hey though that part of the system needs to be run better needs needs more resources and you know so I think it's brilliant that he's saying that and it also corresponds to what is working in some other countries.

Six. Hello, my name is Diana from Columbia College. So you both have invested a great deal of money abroad, but there is a prevailing belief by some that there are pressing issues in America, there are poor people here, there are sick people here, and we should deal with that first before even tackling anything abroad. So what are your thoughts on that?

Well, my own personal thought is that every life is of equal value. And in many ways, if you have a limited number of dollars, you actually can do more for more people outside the United States. We do have greater resources here for our 320 million people than exists around the world for seven-plus-billion people. So you can improve the lot of more people

by intelligently spending a billion dollars or any other number in other areas of the world actually than here. And coming from Omaha and having the money, I have people who can say, well, why not spend it all in Omaha? You grow up here in Omaha, it's done all kinds of things for you. And I absolutely acknowledge that. But in the end, if I've got X dollars to spend, I can make life better for more people if I can have it intelligently allocated in other parts of the world, actually,

than the United States. And that draws a fair amount of criticism, but I live with it because that's just what I believe. All lives have equal value is really the driving force behind the foundation. I'm an accident. I won the O'Varian lottery when I was born in the United States in 1930. It was 40 to 1 against me.

I was male. Now it's 80 to 1 against being a male in the United States in 1930. I was just plain lucky. My life had been far different. Bill always said if I had been born a long time ago, I'd have been some animal's lunch because I can't run fast and I can't climb trees and everything. I'd be saying I allocate capital, I allocate capital. It wouldn't work and you know I was lucky but 79 out of the 80 weren't as lucky as I was at that time. Bill, go ahead Bill. Yeah in terms of helping people in other countries the foreign aid budget of the U.S. is.8 percent of the

budget. And there will be, in the years ahead, a discussion about is that worth doing? It saves lives for typically about $1,000 of life saved. And in terms of stability and countries eventually being self-sufficient and being part of the world economy, there are some huge benefits to that. So if we were talking about should we spend 20 or 30 percent overseas, okay, you know, that would be a very interesting discussion. But what we're trying to preserve is something that's gotten smarter and smarter all the time as proven benefits, all of which are things that our foundation co-invests, invests in the

same things, like the polio thing is 0.8%. So I'm hopeful that in a big world that can remain a priority. All right, let me go to another Facebook question. This is from Nadia Akwal says, how might Bill and Lauren encourage innovation, particularly among teens and young adults? How do you encourage innovation? Well, I think you have a market system that provides rewards for it.

And we have it. I mean, we have an incubator for innovation in the United States. And Bill can drop out of school, Andy Grove can come from Hungary. And I mean, this just welcomes it. And thank God. I mean, that's why we have the kind of prosperity that we have. I mean, the question of how it gets divided is a secondary question, and that does not get solved as well by the market system. But our system is just designed for it. And look at what has happened.

Number one, also I want to make sure we get the people in the back so we only have five minutes left. There's a couple of hands up in the back, so please recognize them. Hi, my name is Sahir. I'm a senior in the engineering school. As men of such great influence, I'm curious, and we touched a little bit about this in the last question, but how you deal with reconciling your convictions

with maybe what is believed by the public, maybe even a majority, considering that you have the wealth and power and fame to make such great things happen? Well, I don't see, you know, the convictions I have, you know, I love sharing them and talking to people and understanding, you know, where people disagree. You know, I can be overly science-centric about things. There's all sorts of causes that are super important that our foundation, because we have limited resources, we don't get to go and do.

There's lots of diseases. There's aspects of education. Part of the strength of philanthropy is its diversity. And so just by sharing the fact that it's fun, it really can have measurable impact, I hope that sets an example for all of philanthropy. I don't happen to believe that you know my voice should be that much louder than other people, you know, so you know some of these big political donations, you know, at least you know I and Warren as least Warren and I, we've chosen not to

have that be a huge way that we're spending our money. That's a personal choice. The money's being saved not for the megaphone, but for the work of the foundation. We get a podium of a certain sort. But people do not, with a partner like Charlie Munger, you don't have to worry about my views being accepted automatically. Point out the shortcomings. And the influence of money in politics, I really think,

is bad news for this country. I think Citizens United was a terrible decision. And the idea that somebody can pour millions and millions of dollars into a campaign, and in certain cases, it not even be identified, I think really kind of goes counter to the kind of America I believe in. The two of you created, along with Blen and others,

created the Giving Pledge. How's that going? Going terrific. Bill can tell you about it. It really is going terrific. Yeah, philanthropy is kind of a lonely thing. Bill, tell them what it is exactly. Yeah, okay. This is, you know, we love philanthropy of all types, and part of the strength of

American philanthropy is actually people with very little who are incredibly generous. Here, though, we said for the people who are super lucky, have over a billion dollars, we want a group who are working together, who are committed to give the majority of their wealth away, to learn from each other what's worked, what hasn't worked, how do you involve your kids, how do you hire staff, and they'll find areas they're working on to cooperate, but we're not pulling any money and we thought we'd get you know 20-25 people together and in fact now we're at 156. So it is a wonderful yearly event. I've made some great people. I do think that the quantity and quality has gone up because

we're getting together. We'll never be able to measure that in a direct way. And we're making special efforts in China and India because now we have a lot of wealth there that wasn't there before. And in their own way, I think they, by having a strong philanthropic sector, that will help those countries and therefore help the world. What's interesting now, Bill and I are having dinner actually with the group tonight, for example. But if you go back 100 or 150 years, people got wealthy by making some money

from the first oil refinery or still a mill and building another one. And Henry Ford would build a plant to build cars. And then it would be actually from retained earnings, which eventually turned into cash. Now you can get rich very young just by having an idea and you can get that idea monetized and capitalized in a way that you cannot believe. So we are particularly interested in getting younger people interested in philanthropy because there will be huge, there are huge fortunes by people that are now in their

20s and 30s and just think about those the potential for that group. And so this thing has worked out way, way better, including getting younger people to join us. Number six. Hello, my name is Christina Nunez. I'm a fellow dental student to Josh. Thank you for speaking with us today. I'm curious about your insight related to relationships. I'm personally given a desire to honor myself

and respect other individuals, have found it difficult throughout life to discern which relationships to really foster and invest in and accept challenges from and which to kind of forego and abandon because they're more harmful than helpful. So are there any major life lessons that you two have learned through your personal experiences? Well it's a very important question and the more you will move in the direction of the people that

you associate with. So I it's important to associate with people that are better than yourself. And actually, the most important decision many of you make, not all of you, will be the spouse you choose. And you really want to associate with people who are the kind of person you'd like to be. You'll move in that direction. And the most important person by far in that respect is your spouse.

I can't over-emphasize how important that is. And you're right. The friends you have, they will form you as you go through life and make some good friends, keep them for the rest of your life. But have them be people that you admire as well as like them. Bill, you're there to that? Yeah, some friends do bring out the best in you.

And so those, it's good to invest in those friendships. And you know, some friends challenge you about things you're doing. And that, you know, that level of intimacy is great. I wouldn't say that I'm, you know, I was so obsessed with work, I didn't invest I'd say in my 20s and 30s as much as I should have. It's really through Melinda and seeing other people I realized, okay, that is, you know, it's really worth the investment to have those people as you're always there to help them and vice versa.