Warren Buffett: We'll Never Invest in Nike

Yeah. I don't know that much about those businesses. We do have one person in this audience at least who owns a lot of Reebok, but I'm not expressing a negative view in any way on that. I just don't understand their competitive position and the likelihood of permanence of their competitive position over a 10 or 20 year period as well as I think I understand the position of Brown and Dexter. That doesn't mean I think that it's inferior. It doesn't mean that I think that we've got better businesses or anything. I think we've got very good businesses, but I haven't done the work and I'm not sure if I did the work I would understand them. I think they are harder to understand, frankly, and to develop a fix on than our kinds, but they may be easier for other people who just have a better insight into that kind of business. Some businesses are a lot easier to understand than others. And Charlie and I don't like difficult problems. I mean, if something is hard to figure, you know, we'd rather multiply by three than by pi. I mean, it's just easier for us, Charlie.

We've come... Excuse me. Go ahead.

You don't have to do, we've said this before, but you don't have to do exceptional things to get exceptional results. And some people think that if you jump over a 7-ft bar that the ribbon they pin on you is going to be worth more money than if you step over a one-ft bar. And it just isn't true in the investment world at all. So you can do very ordinary things. I mean, what is complicated about this? But, you know, we're $3 billion pre-tax better off than we were a few years ago because of it. There's nothing that I know about that product or its distribution system, its finances or anything that really hundreds of thousands or millions of people aren't capable of that they don't already know. They just don't do anything about it. And similarly, if you get into some complicated business, you can get a report that's a thousand pages thick and you got PhDs working on it, but it doesn't mean anything. You know what you've got is a report, but you won't understand that business, what it's going to look like in 10 or 15 years. The big thing to do is avoid being wrong. But there's some things that are so intrinsically dangerous. Another of my heroes is Mark Twain who looked at the promoters of his day and he said, 'A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.' And that's the way I've come to look at projections. I mean, basically, I can remember Warren and I were offered $2 million worth of projections once in the course of buying a business, and the book was this thick and for nothing... and we were given it for nothing and we wouldn't open it. You know, we'd almost pay 2 million not to look at it. I mean, it's ridiculous. I do not understand why any buyer of a business looks at a bunch of projections put together by a seller or agent... or his agent. I mean, you can almost say that it's naive to think that that has any utility whatsoever. We just are not interested if we don't have some idea ourselves of what we think the future is to sit there and listen to some other guy who's trying to sell us the business or get a commission on it tell us what the future's going to be. Like I say, it's very naive.