Speaker 1: Larry Fink of BlackRock has predicted that in the near future, all investors will be using ESG, environmental social governance metrics, to help determine the value of a company. I'm worried we don't score well on everything from climate to diversity to inclusion. How well do you think Berkshire measures up on those metrics, and are they valuable metrics?

Speaker 2: I think in reality, we measure up well, but we don't participate in preparing reports for anybody that asks about it, and we have this idea that even though all shareholders are equal, we prefer individual shareholders. We actually prefer people we know as co-owners, and we don't want to be preparing a lot of reports and asking 60 subsidiaries each to do something where they'll set up a team and then mail things to headquarters, and then we'll supply them to somebody who, if our stock goes up some, is probably going to sell it anyway. We want our managers to do the right things. We give them enormous latitude to do that, and I think that our batting average really is quite good. You saw in the movie, we talked about having 100% of the electricity. We sell in Iowa from essentially wind generation, and that doesn't mean that we get to do it 24 hours a day. We sell some and we buy it, but essentially, we will be creating as much wind energy as all of our customers use in electricity. There's one other utility, electric utility, that's about our size and roughly our size in Iowa, and they have practically no wind resources, and the wind blows where they exist, too, but we will have that 100%. As a matter of fact, it's a moving target because we do so well, partly we do so well on wind generation, that a number of the high-tech companies want to locate in Iowa and get clean energy from us at very low prices, and therefore, the moving target becomes our growth in customers in that area, but we're not going to spend the time of the people at Berkshire Hathaway Energy responding to questionnaires or trying to score better with somebody that is working on that. We trust our managers, and I think the performance is at least decent, and we keep expenses and needless reporting down to a minimum at Berkshire. We do not get, I mentioned this in the annual report, I can't imagine another company like it, but here we are with $500 billion of market capitalization, we do not have a consolidated P&L monthly. We don't need it. I can't imagine any other organization doing that, but we don't need it, and we're not going to tie up resources, people resources, doing things we don't need to do just because it's the sort of standard procedure in corporate America. Corporate America is very worried about, in general, they're very worried about whether somebody's going to upset their apple cart with activists and everything, so they want to be very sure that every shareholder is happy on issues like that, and in the end, fortunately, we don't have to worry about that, so we don't have to run up a lot of expenses doing things that don't actually let us run the business better. Charlie?

Speaker 3: Well, I think in Berkshire, the environmental stuff is down one level down from us, and I think Greg Abel is just terrific at it, and so I think we score very well. When it gets to so-called best corporate practices, I think the people who talk about them don't really know what the best practices are. They just know what they think are the best practices, and they determine that based on the whole sale, not the whole work, and so I like our way of doing things better than theirs, and I hope to God we never follow their best practices.

Speaker 2: I'd like to point out one thing on independent directors. I mean, I have been on 20 public company corporate boards, not counting any Berkshire or its subsidiaries, so I've seen a lot of corporate boards operate, and the independent directors, in many cases, are the least independent. I mean, if the income you receive as a corporate director, which typically may be around $250,000 a year now, if that's an important part of your income, and you hope that some other corporation calls the CEO and says, how's so-and-so as a director, and your CEO says, oh, he's fine, never raises any problems, and then you get on another board at $250,000, and that's an important part, how in the world is that independent? I mean, it's—I really, just on observation, I can't recall particularly any independent director where their income from the board was important to them. I can't recall them ever doing anything in board meetings or committee meetings that actually was counter to the interests. You know what? They put them on the comp committee. I mean, they're just not going to upset the apple cart because what they're— and I would—I'd probably behave the same way in the same position. I mean, if $250,000 a year is important to you, why in the hell would you behave in a way that's going to cause your CEO to say to the next CEO, say, this guy acts up a little bit too much, you know, you'd better get somebody else? It's the way it works, but they've got these ideas.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it works a little worse than Warren's telling you. Yeah, Charlie and I— It's really awful. It's awful. I mean, we— And Warren and I are—we occupy the niche for pomposity very well ourselves. We don't need any more of it.

Speaker 2: Charlie and I were on one board. Well, I was on one board, actually, a long time ago where we owned a very significant percentage of the company. And the rest of the board was almost exclusively customers of the company, but not owners. They had absolutely token holdings. And at one point, we were looking at something where a tax decision was being made in terms of distribution of some securities. And it was a lot of money that was involved. And one of the other directors said, well, let's just swallow the tax. Well, his swallowing amounted to about $15 or something. I said, let's parse this sentence out. Let's swallow the tax. That's let us swallow the tax. So who wants to swallow an equal amount, you know, than me? You know, you don't get invited to be on boards if you belch too often at the dinner table.

Speaker 3: Well, at Blue Chip Stamps, we had a director who said, I don't see why you guys should be so important just because you own all the shares. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Charlie and I used to have to cool off after the Blue Chip Stamps meetings. We and Rick Guerin owned what percent, probably? Oh, yeah, 50%. Yeah, 50%. And they'd appointed all the— They were all members of the Rotary Club. It came out of a government settlement or something. And it was not an ideal form of decision-making. And they just had a different calculus in their mind than we did. And I can understand it, but I'm not going to replicate it. Okay, Greg.