I know America is going to move forward over time, but I don’t know for sure, and we learned this on September 10th, 2001, and we learned it a few months ago in terms of the virus. Now, I’m now about to say something that, and don’t change the slide yet, but I’m now about to say something that some of you will be tempted to argue with me about, but I would make the case that we are imperfect in a great, great, great many ways, but I would say, webcam porn tubes and if you pull up the next slide, that we are now a better country as well as an incredibly more wealthy country than we were in 1789. We’re far, far, far from what we should be, will be, but we have gone dramatically in the right direction. They are fashionable, make you look trendy and you are at your peak of comfort when you wear one of these sweaters.

I mean, stocks are a small part of a business. It’s interesting that stocks offer, which, and stocks are a… We always look at stocks as just being a part of a business. It’s interesting, in 1776, we said we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and yet 14 years later, a year after we really officially began the country in 1789, adopted a constitution. It’s the aim of the Federal Reserve to have 2% a year inflation. You learned in, I don’t know what grade now, probably earlier than when I went to school, but in fifth or sixth grade, that you can have any series of numbers times zero, and you just need one zero in there and the answer is zero, and there’s no reason to use borrowed money to participate in the American tailwind, but there’s every other reason to participate. So when they tell you to bet on America, and I tell you that that’s what’s really gotten me through ever since I bought my first stock when I was 11, I mean I caught a huge, huge, huge tailwind in America, but it wasn’t going to blow in my direction every single day, and you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

That first year I was assigned to Piers Morgan. And we run Berkshire that way, we run it so that we literally try to think of the worst case of not only just one thing going wrong, but other things going wrong at the same time, maybe partly caused by the first, but maybe independent even of the first. One of the scariest of scenarios, when you had a war with one group of States fighting another group of States, and it may have been tested again in the great depression, and it may be tested now to some degree, but in the end the answer is never bet against America, and that in my view is as true today as it was in 1789, and even was true during the civil war, and the depths of the depression. We found that nothing can stop America when you get right down to it, and it’s been true all along, it may have been interrupted. And, the Nuclear Threat Initiative is simply organizations that are devoted to trying to reduce the chances of something of a nuclear chemical, biological, and now cyber nature, from either malevolent or accidental or whatever may be, from causing deaths to millions of Americans, and among the things that Sam co-founded it, but he’s been the heart and soul of the organization subsequently, and he’s talked about, worried about pandemics along with the nuclear threat for decades, and he’s participated in war games where they play out various scenarios, including malevolent pandemics that could be started by the same kind of nut that sent the anthrax letters around the 9/11, a little after.

And, again, Sam… Turn to the next page. In 1914, they closed the stock market for about four months, after 9/11 closed the market for four days, we hustled to get it going again, but nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. So he said at that time, «Germs don’t have borders,» which we certainly learned in the last couple of months, and when I clicked on YouTube, if you’ll go to the next, I found out that basically it had 831 views, and this was only a few days ago, I looked it up, but I don’t know whether most of those views have just been the last few days or the last few months, I shouldn’t say, because of the interest in pandemics, but it is hard to think about things that haven’t happened yet. Sam and the others went on YouTube on October 24, 2019, and they have racked up, as of a couple days ago, 1,498 views. On October, whatever it was in 1987, October 11th I believe, a Monday, markets went down 22% in one day.