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Well, in the early stages, the competition was very weak, and I do n't think it's as weak now. But Charlie, 2008 was full of people with high IQs, Yeah. experienced investment professionals. I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of them . And you invested in the Daily Journal in some stocks that are now worth, well, 3 or 4 times as much, or something.
This is true. Yes. Well, I call it an opportunity. But maybe it's routine for him . But yeah, but I waited many years before doing it. But they still became available. Oh yes. I am but you were full of possibilities when I first met you. You didn't wait for Unfortunately, I wasn't overflowing with money .
No. Well, you didn't have enough money. Yes. Well, now we have money, but no ideas. OK. I don't understand how anyone can not be fascinated by this country. If you look back to 1776 or 1789, whichever date you want to count from, you know, that was the most significant economic period in the history of the world.
Actually, if you look back, I was born on August 30, 1930. Now, if someone came to me in the womb and said, " Let me tell you what's happening outside right now." Yes, the stock market just crashed, but that's not all. 4,000 banks will go bankrupt. The Dow Jones will fall to 42. It was 381 shortly before your conception.
And it will drop to 42. They will close the banks for a while. We will have 25% unemployment. We're going to have a dust storm in the Midwest. The locust will take over everything around. You know, it's like in that Woody Allen movie where he says, " Come back." Come back. And all that has happened since August 30, 1930, is that the standard of living of the average American has increased sixfold.
Six times. You know, this is absolutely incredible . I mean, look at the centuries when nothing changed for the average person. I mean, century after century. So we have a system that works great. It crashes periodically and always has problems. I mean, you know, my father was very much against the New Deal.
So my sisters and I have sat at the dinner table for as long as we can remember, listening to how everything is going downhill. Actually, my father-in-law told my future wife and her mother that he wanted to talk to me before the wedding. And he was completely on my side. So I didn't panic about it or anything like that.
But I came to his house shortly before the wedding, and this wonderful man, Doc Thompson, sat in a chair for a couple of hours and said, "Warren, I just want to tell you that you're going to fail, but it's not your fault." "And he said, 'You and Susie, my daughter, you know, if you starve, she would starve anyway .'" I mean, this, this is not your fault.
It's because, you know, it's because the Democrats are in power, and they're going to lead the country down the path to communism; and, you know, and just don't worry about failing," because that went on for quite a while. Uh, and then he blessed me, and we got married. That was a happy ending. But ever since I graduated in 1951, the two people I respected most in the world, my dad and Ben Graham, both said, "You know, you've got a great future ahead of you , but don't start doing stocks now, because there's never been a year when the Dow Jones average has n't finished below 200," and now it's above 200.
That's too high. And if you start selling stocks to people now, they're going to have a bad experience. So why don't you wait a little bit and go work at Elmo National Bank or do something else, stay out of the way. Uh, there 's always a downside. A country always has problems. I mean, this country went through a civil war.
You know, it's been through all sorts of things. But what happens is, you know, we have a couple of crappy years every now and then. We've had , you know, 15 recessions since the founding of the country. And we'll always have a list of 10 or 15 things at the beginning of the year that tell you why, you know, this country can't do well.
But all I can say is that it does n't happen in a straight line. But the power of capitalism is incredible. I mean, you know, that's what's getting us out of this recession. I mean, monetary policy and fiscal policy have some utility, and certainly in the fall of 2008, government was needed on an extremely large scale.
It could do what was needed, and it was the only one that could do it. But if you look at the history of the United States, you know, probably half of our recessions happened in, say, the 19th century, when people did n't even know what fiscal or monetary policy. So what happened was this: there were excesses, and then the resuscitation force of capitalism put the country back on a path of stronger growth, and it happened again and again, and the game is not over yet.
That doesn't mean that America's potential is exhausted, it's just that the rest of the world has caught up to us to some extent. So you see, for example, state capitalism in places like China, where they're unleashing economies that have been in decline for centuries. But it's not because people are smarter there.
It's not because they're working harder. It's just because they've plugged into a system that works great over time. And I'll tell you, in the next hundred years, you're going to have probably 15, maybe even 20 bad years. But we're going to be so far ahead of where we are now that we're going to be hard to recognize.
Charlie, well, I think you can go back a lot further. You know, Europe had the Black Death, when about a third of the population died. The world will go on . That's extremely optimistic, Charlie. Do you have anything more encouraging, Charlie? I don't know. I understand Dick Holland's point of view to a certain extent .
I've known him for a long time, by the way. He took away any hope of me becoming the head candle-extinguisher in the Unitarian Church. He was damn good at it. Anyway, what was that? Can you say anything optimistic? Well, I have a slightly different view of it. So I would say that you can stay cheerful even if things are a little bit worse.
And that's a very good quality. I have a personal saying that has always amused me. I say that politicians are never so bad that you don't live to see them back. Well, on that wise note, well, the answer is that the world flips a coin every day , deciding the fate of people who could literally destroy the planet as we know it.
You know, we, uh, we'll do it. And unfortunately, uh, uh, the main problem is people who have large stockpiles of nuclear weapons. I knew a man who said, " I don't know what I'm going to do if there's a nuclear war." I'll just crawl under the table and say goodbye to life." Yes. Well, that's a big problem for humanity, along with the proliferation of other weapons of mass destruction in the chemical and biological fields.
The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to nuclear knowledge, and more and more people will know how to do enormous damage to the rest of humanity. Uh, over the years, a certain percentage of the population who are psychopaths, megalomaniacs, religious fanatics or whatever, will wish evil upon their neighbors.
And the bottleneck will probably be the materials and, to some extent, the means of delivery. Uh, I think people now tend to associate the threat of weapons of mass destruction with terrorists and some criminal organizations, not so much with countries. But I see both options as huge threats to the future of humanity.
And, uh, we haven't made much progress in that regard. We should do everything we can to restrict access to the materials. Uh, I even have a few thoughts on this , which you can find on the Nuclear Threat Reduction Initiative website, and there's a proposal that might at least slightly reduce the incentive for all countries to have highly enriched uranium, etc.
But this, this, this is the main problem of humanity. If there are 6.5 billion people in the world , you're probably going to have almost twice as many people wishing evil on their neighbor as you did when there were three billion people. And, uh, for a long time, if you were a psychopath or something, all you could do was pick up a rock and throw it at the guy in the cave next door.
And then you moved on to bows and arrows and guns and cannons. But for millennia, the ability to do massive damage was pretty limited, no matter how crazy you were. And starting in 1945, when Einstein said that the atomic bomb, as it was called then, uh, changed everything in the world except the way people thought.
This was a comment made shortly after Hiroshima. Uh, we live in a world where the ability to do harm to others has increased exponentially, but we haven't gotten rid of the crazy people or the people who want to do it . And whether it's, you know, Iran or whoever or terrorist organizations or whatever, we live in a very, very, very dangerous world that's getting more dangerous over time , and we've been very lucky since 1945 , when in the Cuban Missile Crisis in the ' 60s, the odds were maybe 50/50.
I think we were lucky that we had Khrushchev, and we were lucky that Kennedy behaved the way he behaved, but we were really lucky. And, uh, Charlie and I talked about this a lot in the '60s . But it's, uh, it's not going to go away . And I would hope, at least in the United States, that we have an administration , whether it's Republicans, or the Democrats, for whom this is the top agenda item —trying to find a way to minimize that risk.
It can't be eliminated. The genie is out of the bottle, but we have to, this has to be the top priority— minimize the risk that we get involved in something that causes, you know , death on a scale that no one has ever even thought about before. Charlie. Yeah. Well, you're talking about death on a scale that people have never thought about before.
People recently found out that the population of Mexico probably dropped by 95% because the Europeans brought their pathogens. And this was a pretty big civilization that got through that narrow "eye of a needle." These things can happen and have happened. And look at Mexico today. I do n't think it's going to wipe out our species.
Well, this is, I hope, encouraging. Cockroaches will survive. That's a very good question. And I wanted to I wish I knew a better answer.
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