What Can We Learn From Warren Buffett?

Episode 177:  Vonda has been known to quote Warren Buffet a time or two on the podcast, so it only seems natural that she would want to know all about the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders meeting that was held on May 6th.  Ellie LaFever, PFCI, made the trip to Omaha and we've invited long time attendee Sayer Martin, CFA, who is son and brother, to join us to hear the key takeaways from the days' events. Even the floral industry has much to learn from the wisdom of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

The best way to think about financial history and history in general is is a Mark Twain quote, which is history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

SPEAKER_06 0:17

Welcome to the business and pleasure of flowers. We're your hosts, Vonda LaFever and Lori Wilson.

SPEAKER_05 0:23

And we believe that business and fun are a perfect combination. Kind of like us, Vonda.

SPEAKER_06 0:32

So today I'm here without Miss Lori, but I do have a new sidekick with me today. So hey, Ellie, welcome. Hello, hello. How's it going? I'm good, really good. And we have a special guest with us here today. Sayre Martin is the senior director and product manager at Conga. Now, Conga offers a wide variety of software products for sales-driven companies to simplify and solve problems through the revenue life cycle, you know, such as closing the deals, invoicing, billing management, renewing and expanding accounts. It looks like they take pride in taking complex and complicated processes and making them simpler and faster. Is that right, Sarah?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

You're on track. At Congo, we do enterprise software, right? So we work with the largest organizations in the world to simplify and unify their revenue life cycle, would be the best way to talk about it. So, yes, going from lead all the way through to collecting on the orders that you fulfilled, the contracts that you've negotiated, and then ultimately driving uh cash collection, but also recognizing revenue, which is actually a problem for very large companies.

SPEAKER_06 1:46

Okay. Well, what made me smile about it is because we actually at Flower Click simplify things too, right? So it's not as complicated as you, but we do a little bit of simplifying. And in another thought, I have to laugh because you take things and make them simple for me. So Sayer is my son, Ellie Joe's brother, and he's always taken those really complicated technology things that are over my head. And you've been able to put them into simple terms that mom was able to understand. So it's kind of interesting that that company, that's what you do, right? You're just so good at taking the complicated and simplifying for people to be able to understand.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

I'm happy to hear that. I take great pride in being able to simplify uh the complicated. It took me quite a bit of life to realize how hard that was to do or is to do. And it's uh it's a challenge every day.

SPEAKER_06 2:40

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's another podcast we're gonna do, and that's called The Curse of Knowledge. So we'll circle back on that one another time.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

All right. When you need your your general purpose podcast guest, I can I can do that.

SPEAKER_06 2:53

All right, sounds good. I'd also say that I think you're the happiest when you're being challenged or you're learning.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Yeah, absolutely. I I I think challenge is what drives me in a lot of ways. I would say personally, I'm uh likely to be at my happiest and um most engaged. Um, and to find, you know, what you've talked about on your past podcasts around, you know, sort of the flow state when I'm uh being challenged or learning something new.

SPEAKER_06 3:26

I believe it Ellie's like that somewhat too. She likes to be challenged. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_06 3:34

So say at an early age you were interested in investments. Now, I can't remember when that began, but you've always been interested in investments and had this great respect for Warren Buffett and his investment strategies. You know, tell us a little bit. When did that start?

SPEAKER_01 3:51

I read my first investing book when I was um freshman in college, I believe. No, I was a sophomore. And that summer before I had put some money into a company and um it worked out. It turned out to be luck, but it worked out. I doubled my money or something. And once that happened, I wanted to do that again. Well, the next one wasn't as lucky, and so I realized I needed to kind of learn what to do. And thankfully, very quickly, I came upon Warren Buffett and kind of his teachings. There were several books that that people had written about him. I didn't go directly to the source, which would be his shareholder letters, um, for a couple years probably. But I would say within the first year, I read a book about how to invest like Warren Buffett. And um, it immediately was intuitive. You know, it made sense immediately when it when he talked about buying businesses, not buying stocks, and investing in companies that you can understand, it made made a lot of sense to me. So yeah, I would say I was just not not yet out of my teens to not date myself too much.

SPEAKER_06 5:08

Well, that's fair. That's fair.

SPEAKER_03 5:10

Did your interest in Warren have anything to do with you going to Creighton and the proximity to the Oracle of Omaha? Or was that coincidence?

SPEAKER_01 5:20

That was a happy accident.

SPEAKER_03 5:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Actually, yes, it did. So I had a friend who was a Nebraska native. Uh his dad, I believe, lived near Kearney and was a farmer and was a he had held Berkshire shares for a long time. Both A and B shares. If you want to look those up, the the A shares are now around half a million dollars apiece. Um, so he was able to get me to the meeting. He just casually asked me one day, hey, do you want to go to a Berkshire meeting this this weekend? And I'm kind of like, What do you mean? I hadn't heard of the annual meeting. I've heard of Warren, but I hadn't heard of the annual meeting. And so we ended up going, and it was in it was actually in 2001. So I was in college then, and he and I sat there and listened to Warren and Charlie talk for you know the six hours that they still continue to do today. So it's been quite a while. Uh that was uh so it's been this is my 23rd meeting. I think I haven't been in physically to two of them, 20 and 21. There were no meetings.

SPEAKER_06 6:23

Well, that actually was my next question is how many have you attended?

SPEAKER_01 6:27

And 23, yeah. So 2001, yeah, this was 2023, so that many in person, and they've all been they've all been different, but they've all been the same. You know, it's it's been pretty interesting. There's a reason you continue to go back, too. And obviously Ellie has started to go with me as well.

SPEAKER_06 6:45

So yeah, tell me why do you continue to go back?

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Well, I think there's really nothing like the Berkshire annual meeting. I was telling someone earlier today, it's like a combination of a rock concert and a cult meeting together, as well as a giant shopping event. So if you roll all three of those into one, there's really not anything else out there that's like that, you know. I mean, I haven't been to many cult meetings, but I would imagine it'd be pretty similar to this. Um because everyone's sitting there listening really just to a couple of old guys talk for six hours, right? Uh, which which is pretty incredible. I've I've heard good things about the Walmart annual meeting. There's a there's a lot going on there, but they actually do have rock concert there, and they have famous MCs and things like that, too. Uh, but here you have a guy talking about business, talking about life more so these days than he used to. And it's just fascinating. Now, they've also started to put it online. That's been new. That's actually made it easier to go in the last few years because you know, most of the people that do go are more kind of diehard. They're not just there to see them, they can see them online now, right? Many people can, uh, and that's a great way to consume it. Also, the the shopping piece of it is is one aspect, but seeing the businesses, you know, Berkshire is a collection of multiple businesses. And, you know, there's the companies you've heard of, like Dairy Queen, and there's the companies you probably don't hear about, but definitely notice when you're on a plane, which is Flight Safety, right? Like the largest pilot training company in the in the world. And so seeing those companies and seeing their their exhibits, seeing the people that work for them and being able to talk to them is is an interesting aspect. And so you get to sort of feel and touch the company, if that makes sense. It kind of brings it to life.

SPEAKER_06 8:42

Is that what you felt, Ellie? Is that why you enjoy going, or what do you enjoy most about going?

SPEAKER_03 8:47

I kind of have a different routine than Sayer in a way. Like I like to go sit, listen to him for a couple hours, and then go get a good pulse on the exhibit hall, the showroom floor, all the companies. Um, it really is a very tangible way of like looking at investments for me. And something that Sayer always told me early on with investing is like to invest in companies that you like and that you really believe in, and not just because they're trendy or their stock is trending one way or the other. So it really gives you a good pulse. And just jumping quickly into something that I noticed while shopping, I guess, was how refreshing it was to see these companies that you think of like being really tried and true. And when you think about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, who are 99 for Charlie and 92 for Warren, you know, you kind of think like the old, the old dogs in the game. And when you go to the exhibit hall, like some things I noticed, Dairy Queen now has a non-dairy dilly bar. That's you know, something um Nebraska Furniture Mart really showed off their Dyson products, which are kind of the hot thing right now, and the Bose products, and um, to see that he's now bought the the parent company of squish mollows, which are these stuffed animals that are squishy and like soft, and kids are obsessed with them. And the line was absolutely out the door the entire time we were there. Just to kind of get a pulse on seeing how these companies evolve, even though it is this massive old institution, if you will. Seeing seeing how things evolve was was what I love to see, aside from listening to Warren and Charlie, obviously.

SPEAKER_06 10:42

Yeah, I listened for six hours on TV. I was the TV person because I wasn't going in person, right? It was quite a ways. But I was impressed at the way that Warren could recite numbers. OMG, I was just like, you know, from 1939 to 65, and he would give these years and he'd give the numbers. I mean, I of course I couldn't do a facts check, but I'm pretty sure he was right on. That's that's pretty amazing. I mean, that he had that recall at that age, and then Charlie, even as well, you know, the two of them, like you said, old guys, but wow, they're not like vast knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

They're lifelong learners. It's a good lesson. Uh, every time you see them, when they, yeah, you're right, when they have the the recall that they do. It's pretty pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_06 11:32

So, Sarah, I'm gonna ask you, you know, you're pretty well versed in investment history, right? You read on what's happened in the past, and you know, you're not gonna give me any predictions, I'm sure. But with what you've seen in your lifetime, have you seen history repeating itself in investments? And you know, what have you said to yourself, oh my gosh, I could see this coming?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

The best way to think about financial history and history in general is is uh Mark Twain quote, which is history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And so I would say that's what I've observed. Uh so that's that's number one, but I could put that in the context of the annual meeting by thinking about it in terms of the years. So my first year was 2001, and I remember at that meeting, which was May of 2001, that there was a standing ovation for Warren when they started talking about internet stocks, right? Because the Nasdaq had collapsed, you know, it'd been maybe uh call it a year and two months since the peak of the NASDAQ in 2000. And for years running up to that, probably three years running up to that, Warren was getting a lot of uh backlash for not investing in those types of companies, which turned out in most cases to be garbage, and a lot of people lost a lot of money if you at least if you didn't sell at the top, like a Mark Cuban did. Um, and and then so he's been sort of timeless, right, in not investing in things he doesn't understand. And then you come into the periods like in 2008, he had a lot of opportunity to get heavier into banks that were making a lot of money uh in investment banks, for example, that were making a lot of money on buying and packaging mortgage bonds and selling those off. You know, sort of sidestepped that. And at every step, he's he's gotten you know pushback on why aren't you investing in these things? And then last year it was crypto. And why aren't you investing in this? And he said, you know, something like, If you tried to sell me all of Bitcoin for $25, I wouldn't buy it, right? And it's like a $500 today with $540 billion market cap or something. And then this year, people were not asking him about it. Last year he had several questions about it, and so it's just been interesting to see. I would say that aspect definitely repeats itself, which would be excesses in valuations, right? And the urge to invest in things that are exciting never goes away. And it often comes in waves and it often ends badly. And those meetings have been really nice snapshots in time, uh, both of the run-up and peaks and and then the ends, which like this year was would be one of those. Although you notice some of those peaks in their absence because there weren't questions about crypto, right? There's less questions that said, great job for not investing in crypto, right? It's more you just notice the absence of those those types of themes or questions that come up in the meeting. Is that does that help?

SPEAKER_06 14:41

Yeah, yeah, that helps a lot. One of them that he did invest in, though, was Paramount, right? And now there was some question on that.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

So Berkshire has changed a lot over the years, and we could rabbit hole on probably a lot of this type of stuff. But basically, uh Warren years ago, he hired two people that that are now managing a lot of investment assets at Berkshire. It used to be exclusively Warren, right? Remember, he's run this company for like 56 years or 58 or something like that. And it was always him and Charlie. And now they have two investment people that are running large portfolios. And so when you see the decisions like that in the media, it may not be Warren. It may be one of these other two managers, two investment managers. So uh yeah, I did see that about Paramount, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it was him making the decisions, and he's even been more even more adamant the last few years about not talking about specific investments that he makes or they make.

SPEAKER_06 15:43

Yeah, he actually mentioned that at the meeting. Oh, he didn't want to talk about it. It was kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_02 15:48

There you go. Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 15:50

There was a quote as I was looking, and it says the majority of our businesses will report lower earnings this year than last year before thousands of people in the event on Saturday. During the last six months or so, the incredible period for the U.S. economy has been coming to an end, he said, um, which I thought was interesting. I mean, kind of the post-COVID bubble had been burst and it's kind of settling in. You have any thoughts on that, Sarah?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

I thought this was actually one of the more interesting uh answers that he gave. But he talked about the COVID period essentially from the consumer behavior standpoint, talked about how consumers were behaving, and essentially they wanted whatever the thing was, whether it was clothing or new furniture or new flooring or whatever the thing was, they weren't buying it at a discount. They weren't trying to get the price down, they just wanted it today. And if they couldn't get that today, they would buy something else today. Very price insensitive, very instant gratification, right? There's all the the money that was kind of flooding in from various uh stimuli that the you know the government gave out, and and he said that because that's sort of ended and the consumer has retrenched a bit, especially as interest rates have come up. Yes, the extraordinary period has ended. I I think that the consumer behavior that I saw during the pandemic was exactly as he described. And I would say even some of my own behavior was exactly as he described, because you were just more in in those periods, you're just more focused on I don't know, the present moment, maybe, right? You know, that I've always thought about various economic times where you see very short-term thinking, which is really what that is, is as you know, the gazelle being chased by a lion, right? The gazelle's not worried about planning their next meal when they are they are the lion's next meal. And so it's like when you have anything like that that shortens your time horizon, then you can have behavior like that. But definitely the money that was flooding in was also a huge uh huge piece of that.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so people were making up for lost time, and now that time is kind of come where they've slowed down.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah, it's really it's really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 18:16

That's when he said that, I actually thought of flower shops first because you know the pulse lately has been things are slowing down, things aren't like 2021. And you know, we've always said like you can't truly compare. That's that was as Buffett said, an extraordinary period of time. So it was refreshing hearing that from him, from the Oracle.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Yeah, I thought that was good perspective. And really, Berkshire, I I sometimes think that some of these smaller companies that Berkshire has bought have been for data points for him because he gets these reports so often, and he can see you know how many different rail cars are loaded with coal and lumber and like all these different things, right? He can see that running through that railroad more so than anyone else. He can see how many dilly bars, you know, Dairy Queen sells, he can see all these different areas of the economy, stuff like these what'd you call those squishy things?

SPEAKER_04 19:20

Squish mollows.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

You know, how many of those are selling, right? Those are absolutely not a need, right?

SPEAKER_03 19:25

Can I tell you something? You absolutely can about the squishmallows. They were there, they had Warren and Charlie ones. Tyler had the idea, which uh other people did as well, to go onto eBay to see what they were selling for. And we both I bought him for 20, I sold them for 200. Nobody needs a squishmallow, but people on eBay, the people of the world, somebody in Texas bought my squishmallows.

SPEAKER_06 19:54

So oh my gosh, that's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 19:57

I know it's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Yeah, so I totally understand what you're saying, but in terms of if you think about what he sees, and so how valuable his perspective is, he sees all of that information that they do not have to report publicly, right? But he sees the squishmallows data, and then he sees rail car loading data, right? And rail cars like moving oil and gas, you know, whatever. That stuff is not really discretionary, you know, the certain amount of that is needed all the time. Or ammonia, you know, for fertilizer, all you know, that stuff is gonna move normally, but then he so he has just an uh an amazing perspective that's better than any economist, in my view.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

That's a good point.

SPEAKER_06 20:44

Yeah, there was a quote from the CEO from Brooks Running Shoes, and he was a little bit skeptical of the steep customer downturn that they're talking about because he said, with unemployment being so low, it's hard to believe we're gonna fall off a cliff into a recession at the consumer level. You know, he said, I'm wondering if it's gonna be more asset value recession. So, what is an asset value recession, Sarah? Maybe you can explain that to me.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

I think the best way to think about it is that, and this is where you hear about interest rates rising, interest rates are gravity for asset values, is the best way to think about it. So, you know, to put it pretty simply, if you can buy um a stock that yields uh 5% on a dividend, right? You know that the value of the stock could fluctuate, you know, um quite a bit. But if you can put uh the same dollars in cash and get 5%, now you really have to think about it, right? You have to think, well, okay, when do I when do I need the money? Uh if it goes down, what will happen? Um, right? And so it sort of depends now. You have a a lot more options. If you can earn five percent on cash than you did uh last year. He talked about this. Berkshire has 125 billion or something of cash. Last year that yielded 50 million based on whatever the non-existent interest rates were. This year it will yield 5 billion, that same cash. So, you know, he can sit on it and do just fine, and so can an individual investor. And so, what does that do? Well, uh, think about the same 5% interest rate on an uh apartment building. Last year that might have been the yield on an apartment building if you bought it. But yet an apartment building is hard to sell, it takes a long time, you have risk in terms of you have to you know you have to invest in it, you might have some tenant turnover, those sorts of things. And the yield determines the price, essentially, of like an apartment building or determines the price of a stock, right? So if you're getting a dollar dividend on a $20 stock, that's a 5% yield, right? If you're getting $10,000 on an apartment house and that's $200,000 would be a 5% yield. So again, as that interest rate goes up, the asset value comes down. That's what the asset value recession means. And I don't fully understand that quote because asset values determine how people spend. There's something called the wealth effect, uh, where basically if stocks are going up, right, it's say you gain $50,000 in the stock market because you're just your 401k went up this year. Well, you have another $50,000 in your mind, right? So you have to save less money in your mind this year. But if it goes down $50,000, it could have the opposite effect. And you may say, well, I need to put more money into my investments this year. I need to save more this year. So I spend less. So an asset value recession actually does become a consumer, can become a consumer recession. The circle doesn't square there with that comment from that CEO, to be honest, with you.

SPEAKER_06 24:02

Yeah. So let me ask you, um, when I was watching from the view of the television, it seemed like an unusually high number of young adults or adults 13 to 15 asking the questions, which I was kind of impressed, you know, and some of them had been there like somebody had been there nine years, I think. I was like, holy cow. But over the years, do you feel like you've seen the average age of attendees change?

SPEAKER_01 24:26

I would say the first few years that I went, they weren't as young, but everyone has always brought their children. I would say the last 10 years have been about that, about uh pretty similar, where you'll have a lot of kids asking questions as well.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Yep. You know, it's changed a little bit here and there, but generally you'll have I think you could go back to the Warren Buffett archive, which is on CNBC. You'll find recordings of kids that have been there the whole time, which is great.

SPEAKER_06 24:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

I it's it's really great to see that.

SPEAKER_06 25:02

So let me ask you, what is one thing you're teaching your daughters to think about money?

SPEAKER_01 25:08

One thing.

SPEAKER_06 25:10

Okay, you think of us a couple.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Interesting. Well, it's one of the things that Ellie said. I think that it's the most important in investing, uh, which is you want to buy what you know, like you what you understand. I think it that is super important. Really, understand is probably the biggest one because buying uh something you know or something you know you just believe in isn't necessarily the full picture. So you need to understand it. Um, that's probably the biggest thing. And then uh the second is to uh invest while you're you know as young as you can, right? I think making your money work for you is always important. And the earlier you start, you're gonna have a huge advantage. I mean, look at Warren, right? So Warren is worth 120 billion. He would probably be the wealthiest person on the planet right now if he hadn't given away 100 billion or whatever it's been. Um, so just think about him as the wealthiest person on the planet. At call it if he hadn't given it away 300 billion or so thereabouts, it would be at least double. But that's not something that's well publicized. You don't really think about like all these shares leaving every year, but he was at at age 30, he was worth a million dollars. Around 40, he was worth around 25 million dollars at 40, right? So now he's 92 and he's worth 120 billion dollars. I mean, it's it's boggles the mind, but you know, you think about the earlier start of the compounding, right? It's really incredible.

SPEAKER_06 26:49

So let me ask you, how do you get a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old, 13, 14-year-old to go, oh, but dad, I want this, I want to buy this, I want to. How do you get them to understand how important that is?

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Well, we've taken a lesson from you, which is to try to get them to put a portion of, you know, say their birthday money or their mowing money or whatever, whatever it is into an account that they can't really get to easily. And that's really how we've done, you know, sort of the source of funds. And then I've done some investing for them, but I have asked them, you know, here's this company, what do you think of it? Do you use it? You know, those sorts of things, and then buy that for them. And then basically it's sort of like the same thing that happened to me. The first stock that I bought happened to go up and happened to work out. So I realized it was possible. So I try not to get them to look at it when it's down. And then when it's up, I'm like, hey, do you see that? Check out your account, right? And so it gets it's a little bit of a reinforcement, it's maybe a little bit of a cheat, but I think you have to do that at the beginning to get them to understand, like, oh, okay, don't just put it all in cash.

SPEAKER_06 28:04

There was a quote that said the long-term investing horizon is still key to realizing value investment, is what Buffett said. I'd love to be born today, start out with not too much money, and turn it into a lot of money. And he said, I'm sure Charlie would do the same. I thought that was a great quote.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Yeah. Well, do you remember what he said right after that? Ellie, I don't know if you're in the room. But he Charlie said, Charlie said, I like my big pile.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Yeah. I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

So so Warren said, I'm sure he would do the same thing. And Charlie's like, no, I like my big pile.

SPEAKER_06 28:44

Yeah. Well, he said, I think quite funny. I think value investors are gonna have a harder time now that there are so many of them competing for diminished set of opportunities. My advice is for investors to get used to making less. And that's when Warren said, Charlie's been telling me the same thing the whole time we've known each other since 1959. And uh Buffett said, What gives you opportunities is that the other people do dumb things, which I thought was a great quote. And there's been a lot of there's been an increase in people doing dumb things.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

So I I can't disagree with that. You know, Buffett in his shareholder letter this year talked about kind of a I guess a retrospective on how investing at Berkshire has gone and how the track record was built. And he he essentially said that he's had one good decision every five years.

SPEAKER_06 29:42

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

And that's really what's built the wealth. He said it's been a essentially a dozen truly great investment decisions, which is about an average of one every five years.

SPEAKER_03 29:54

But the magnitude of those are decisions, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

That's right. Yeah, that's right. Long time horizon is definitely a benefit.

SPEAKER_03 30:03

Going back to giving you opportunities, other people doing dumb things. I he also mentioned something about emotions in business and keeping emotions out of it. And I think some of the dumb things among many dumb things that people do is the mistake they make is their emotions drive their decisions. And so he was obviously talking about keeping your emotion out of things when it comes to business, which is uh something that we could all be reminded of.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

That's right. Yeah, I think you know, if you look at how people behave, that's a big piece of what Warren talks about. You don't, it's really subtle, but he's very he's a very astute observer of how humans behave. And um, you know, one of the ways that people behave is they buy slowly and they sell quickly. Right. And so that's that's what creates those opportunities, right? Investing is interesting because it's one of the only things out there where you buy more when the price is higher, right? Like every single one of us on the you know, listening, you want to buy more of most things when it goes down, when there's a sale, you're you'll wait for a sale, or right? That's just how you behave. But then for some reason in the stock market, people get more comfortable when it goes up.

SPEAKER_06 31:21

Because they think it's gonna go up more.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Yeah, that's why it's so hard, right? It seems so straightforward. Buy low, sell high, right? It's very, it's a very easy rule.

SPEAKER_04 31:32

Buy the rumor, sell the news.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

She has another quote for us.

SPEAKER_04 31:36

Do you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 31:37

No, because I think the the dumb things that often happen on on news, right? It's been pretty crazy over time to see you know the beginning of COVID, right? Stock market was down huge, like 30% or something over two weeks. Then it was up more than ever. It was the fastest rally ever within you know a few months after, right? So it's pretty pretty incredible. We've seen it just in recent years, how how crazy it can get.

SPEAKER_06 32:11

So, what is your biggest takeaway? I'm gonna ask first, Ellie. I'm gonna ask you, what was your biggest takeaway?

SPEAKER_03 32:18

Something that I think actually, I don't know if I heard it from you, Sayer, before I heard it from Warren. Somebody asked him, you know, living your life, what impact do you want to make, the legacy? And he just said, write your obituary and reverse engineer it. And I've heard that a lot. Wow. But something, you know, kind of clicked when he said it. Maybe it's just because it's him. But I think that is so important. I think that's with anything. Like in business, that's what you're supposed to do is like write down exactly what you want as your end goal for your business and go back, work backwards. But you know, the same can be true for your life. And I feel like also like one of my things is anytime I get on an airplane, I kind of evaluate if that airplane were to go down, like, am I happy with what I've done so far? I think about that every time I get on an airplane. So I just think that's it's great advice. It's kind of morbid, but for if you can handle it, that's the way to do it. Fair?

SPEAKER_01 33:18

That's really good. It's hard for me to beat that one. I I love that quote. I and I, yeah, you're right. I've heard it in multiple places as well. But I think you know, it's underappreciated how good of an example Warren is of that. You know, he's been a teacher his entire life. You know, he could he could have kept all of this knowledge to himself, and it he might have even had more money, right? But that's not really the scorecard for him. No, you know, he lives in the same house that he's lived in for 60 years plus, and you know, it doesn't have an extravagant lifestyle, so that doesn't really matter. It's the teaching part. But yeah, for me, I I for this individual meeting, you know, I would say they're becoming more special because you know, these guys are 92 and 99. Um definitely showing age, but still very sharp. And you know, I think that the timeless principles that they continue to espouse are you know more important than ever. It's always a good annual reminder to me that you know you don't have to chase the new and best thing, right? You can have one sort of North Star and continue uh to go there year after year. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's easy to chase squirrels, right? Uh, but to you know, sort of stay focused on the long-term goal is is important. And Berkshire and and Warren and Charlie are examples of that.

SPEAKER_06 34:51

Yeah. Yeah. One quote was live your values, don't just talk about them. And I think that's true with the two of them and Berkshire, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:59

That's good. Yep. What was your takeaway from watching it for six hours? We at various times walked out and went, you know, to the shopping or we had to leave a little early. You watched every cute, you know, question and answer.

SPEAKER_06 35:15

I mean, it was just like you, you've there was so much. Like I said, my biggest takeaway from that was things like that, that they were just really talking about the values that they have in life. And so many times it's not the money, you know, it was about the values, it was about the legacy you want to lead. He was telling that story about a family who, after a will was written, how nobody talked to each other again. And, you know, what good is that? You know, he was sharing stories like that, and it was just like, yeah, that's so true. With all the money both of them have, they just kind of kept coming back to that. It's about, like you said, Ellie, too. How do you want to live your life? How do you want to impact other people? What is your legacy? And I think we all just need to think about that as we walk away today. So thank you, Sarah, for joining us today. It was great to have you.

SPEAKER_03 36:03

Yes, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

It's fun to be here. I'm always happy to talk about Warren Buffett.

SPEAKER_03 36:10

If you had a son, his name would have been Warren. We all know that.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

It's interesting. Maybe his middle name.

SPEAKER_03 36:16

Middle name.

SPEAKER_05 36:17

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