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i did not make my fortune by and large on the cutting edge of technology my first investment with my pitiful savings of adventure some sort i invested in a community right in pasadena and it was called william miller instruments and i damn near lost all my money it was hell on earth we just barely squeaked out with a substantial outcome but and what did this end is that the the oscillograph that we'd invented and we're so proud of and we thought it was going to knock the world flat somebody invented magnetic tape without telling me and by the time we got that telegraph ready to go to market we sold three three total in the whole world whole country well it's this technology is a killer as well as an opportunity and my first experience that damn near killed me and and so but that's sort of the other part right over the 75 years that you've been you've been involved in investing for a long time was keep me out of venture capital on the edge of technology but even i tried to avoid it but even so in the companies that you you deal with some of them are market leaders at one point in time and as you just suggested some technological change or change in preferences will lead those companies to be without with less of a market than they used to have for their products and so how does one think about this over the long term because um the companies of america behave more like biology than they do anything else in biology all the individuals die and so do all the species it's just a question of time and that's pretty well what happens in the economy too all the things that were really great when i were young have receded enormously and new things have come up and some of them started to die and that is what the long-term investment climate is and it does make it very interesting look at what's died all the department stores all the newspapers u.s steel john d rockefeller's standard oil the pale out of his former self you know it's just like biology so they have their little power they have their little time and then then they get clobbered and and so how does one as sort of a a witness or sort of in a certain way one lives longer than the life of some of these companies sort of deal with change right so you could think about uh an investment portfolio that you created a point in time will only have validity for a certain amount of time and so how does one learn to deal with change it's a question that i always ask my students and i would just how does one how does one somebody who has to take the resources of very large numbers of people deal with change any thoughts on that matter well some people try to get on the cutting edge of change so they're destroying other people instead of being destroyed themselves and those are the googles and the apples and so forth other people like me do some of that joining things like apple and and in some ways we just try and avoid big change that we think is likely to hurt us and so berkshire for instance owns the burlington northern railroad you can hardly think of a more old-fashioned business than a railroad business but who in hell's ever going to create another trunk railroad so it's a very good asset for us so and we've made that success not by conquering change but by avoiding it now burlington northern itself has been quite clever at adapting technology to their railroad imagine the good luck of being able to take an existing railroad and double deck all the trains and raise the heights of the tunnels a little and so forth and all of a sudden you've got twice the capacity at very little incremental cost which is what that railroad has done so that is everybody uses new technology but it really helps to have a position that almost can't be taken away by technology how else are you going to carry goods from the port of los angeles to chicago except on our railroad
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