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compared to other jobs and so on, just gets tilted more and more and
more toward people who are wired in some way or have special talents
that enable them to prosper in a huge way in a 10 trillion-dollarplus economy and disparities will widen. And basically we have had a
system in this country that, through the tax system in various ways,
has sought to temper what a market system will produce in the way of
distribution and wealth. You really have unchecked, as it was many
years ago, unchecked, you will have families like mine, or whomever,
people that bring a small edge over the rest of the populous. They
will prosper at a rate that continuously outpaces the others.
And you can see it in entertainment. If you're a Frank Sinatra or
something now and you have some edge over the othersthe ability to
sing to 280 million people, or if you're the heavyweight champion
with the ability to be seen in the homes of 280 million people or
whatever numberit's worth far more relative to the general laborer
pay than it was 50 or 75 years ago. All technology advances and all
productivity advances and the pure market system work toward greater
inequality of wealth and we have a system in this country where
generally we have sought to temper that somewhat through a
progressive income tax and through the estate tax in the last ten
years or soand particularly over the last five yearswe've seen a
reversal and I think it could have some very unfortunate consequences
over time.
I was lucky to be born here at this time basically. I'm wired to be
good at capital allocation. I get no credit for itI came out of the
womb that way. I've worked at it, but people work at all kinds of
things in this country and all countries to work at the job they're
in. But I was wired in a way where in a huge capitalistic economy,
just taking little bites off what's available, I could amass enormous
sums of money. If I'd been born two hundred years ago that would not
have been available to me. If I was born in Bangladesh it would not
be available to me.
Now people who think they do it all themselves, I pose to them the
problem of let's just assume they were in the womb as one of two
identical twinssame DNA, same wiring, everything the sameand a
genie came along and said one of you is going to be born in
Bangladesh and one of you is going to be born in the United States.
All the human qualities are the same. Which one will bid the higher
percentage of the income they earn during their life to be the one
born in the United States? The bidding would get very spirited. I
mean, all these qualities of luck and pluck and all these things that
are supposed to take us to the topyou know, like Horatio Algerwould
not work as well in Bangladesh as here. This society delivers huge
opportunities to people who happen to have the right wiring. And it
delivers a pretty damn good result to people who could function here
compared to the rest of the world and compared to a hundred years
ago; but the disparity will widen absent the taxation system. That's
one of the things you need government for in my view.
Our market system is a wonderful system. You look at this country and
it's interesting. In 1790, we had just a little under four million
people. Europe had 100 million people. China had 300 million people.
So here's this little countryand our IQs might be different from the
Chinese people or the Europeansand they have natural resources and
we have natural resources, but somehow those four million people have
gotten to where they have close to 35% of the GDP of the world, even
though they only have 4 billion4 _ percent of the world's
population. What has happened here? Here we're in this raceit's only
been going on now for 210 years against 300 million people in
someplace else that are just as smart as we are. But somehow our
system has delivered this incredible bounty. I believe the two most
important things in that and they're far from perfectbut I think we
have more equality of opportunity so that the right people get to the
top. The right guy ends up being on the Olympic team of science, or
business, or medicine or whatever because we have not had the
artificial barriers to quality rising to the top in various areas.
And the second system is the market system and we have had an
inducement for people to purchase what people want and that has all
kinds of wonderful fallout, but it also results in an incredible
inequality of wealth over time and absent the estate taxeswell, with
just compound interest, you could take my grandsons and you'd have a
significant percentage of wealth eventually. And you need something
that tempers where the market system leads to but you don't want to
screw up the market system. You want to let them make it first. You
want to keep the Andy Groves or whether it's Michael Dell or
whomever, you want to keep those people working, long after they've
got all the things they need in life. You want that energy and that
talent working, because it does work for the benefit of everybody,
but then you need to have something that prevents huge concentrations
of wealth.
QUESTION: Along the same lines, I heard a speaker from India who
talked of why America's thrivingbecause in India, you know your
dad's a chemical engineer and that's what you're gonna bewhereas
Americans under Christianity and capitalism think we can take and
should get whatever we want. My question is how would you solve the
terrorism threatwhen people hate us now because of our wealth and
freedom?
It's the ultimate problem. I felt that way after 1945 because
essentially you always have people who are psychotic or megalomaniacs
or just plain evil or religious fanatics or whatever it may be. There
is a certain percentage of people who for one reason or another are
sociopaths and thousands of years ago their ability to afflict harm
on their fellow man was the ability to throw a rock at somebody and
it gradually went to bows and arrows and guns and a few things. But
up until 1945 the ability of misdirected peoplewhich will be more or
less proportionate to the population over time (maybe you could make
the table. And they didn't know if their kids were going to be alive
some weeks later. But we got through it. And basically, we've been
very lucky, but we've also done the right things over that time. It
doesn't work forever. The bio thing, I mean, it's scary. Anthrax
isn't as easy to deliver. The deliverability of Anthrax is a problem.
You can take the amounts in those few envelopes and it would kill a
hundred thousand people but it's a problem to disperse. The progress
of weaponry over the years (if you want to call it progress) has been
dramatic.
When I formed my foundation in the late `60s, I said that the number
one problem was the nuclear threat and I just don't know how to
attack it with money very well. I support something called the
nuclear threat initiative.
The great problems of society are the ones money won't solve.
Probably true in your families too. The problems you have where money
doesn't helpthose are the real problems. The problems that money can
help, this country can one way or another solve. And the ultimate one
is the one you mentioned there. There are people in the world that
want to do us great harm. We're more the target than anybody else.
Some of them will have the knowledge, fewer will have the materials;
they won't have the deliverability.
But North Koreathere's a small probability in the next year that
something happens with North Korea. I don't know whether it's .01
or .03 or .005, but it is a probability. There's some probability of
it. And there's a probability of all kinds of other things. People
would have thought it was science fiction if you'd have written about
what would happen at the World Trade Center a few years ago. That 20odd people could carry it off with box cutters and so on. It's the
problem of mankind. Our job is to reduce the probability in every way
we can. The number one way is to try and do whatever you can to deter
the further spread of nuclear weapons. Like India and Pakistan each
have that ability and they have the hatred that's existed over the
years and the sort of incidents that developed by accident.
President Clinton was here last Saturday at my daughter's house and
we had lunch and we were talking about India and Pakistan. He worked
on a solution I think it was right on the eve of the State of the
Union message a few years back. And he didn't know whether something
was going to break out or not. The consequences are just huge. It's
the number one problem of mankind. I don't have any great answers,
but I think that the Commander in Chiefit's his number one job.
Whatever it may take in terms of our borders, in terms of solving the
problems of stockpiles around the country, cooperating with the
Russians, get rid of a lot of the material like that. It will be the
problem of your lifetime and your children's and your
grandchildren's.
With all the storm of regulation in the last couple of years on the
people who are on the team, basically. And the right CEO question is
very tough, if you're on the board and you've got a reasonably good
person, but you know you could go out and get better.
And the overreaching has been very tough in recent years. Frankly
people want to appraise something. They've brought in consultants and
the consultants were basically hired by the management. And if they
weren't they still do what the management wants so they'll get
recommended to other firms. And it's been a one-sided, dice is loaded
game. And I know what our approach has been at Berkshire in order to
tackle that. And it's been quite unorthodox. But we'll do it. We
still have to follow the rules. I have to make sure we qualify in
other ways too. But I don't pay any attention except to make sure we
follow the law. But that is not the way we select directors. And
interestingly enough, I said in the annual report we have to get some
more. And I heard from about 30 people and I said they had to have
owned their stock for some time. And these people had millions of
dollars, each one of them, and they were willing to take the job. And
they were interested in the business. And we picked a couple and we
may pick another one or two.
I think some companies are making some progress. I think Jeff Immelt,
for example, at GE is leading the way to some degree in terms of
trying to set up the company's governance in a way that makes the
most sense to the shareholders of General Electric. And he's taken
the lead in that. He wants to do the right thing and he's going to be
around there for 15 or 20 years and it's interesting to methat kind
of person. And you'll find that. But basically, most CEOs have
learned how the game assists them and they're not going to give it up
willingly.
Is there anybody I've forgotten to offend?
QUESTION: I'm interested in your opinion of American manufacturing. I
know that you've invested in Montgomery and mobile homes and Shaw
Industries and I know that most of those companies don't have the
breadth of Chinese manufacturing coming at them. And I was wondering
if that is an absolute staple of how you analyze a manufacturing
company; is it childproof?
Berkshire Hathaway started the textile business; in fact it goes back
into the 1800s if you go to all the predecessor companies. I got in
in 1964. We had a couple thousand employees in New Bedford; it was
down from 12,000 by the time I got there. Twelve thousand had cut
down to two thousand. We had a couple thousand peoplevery decent
workers, working for low wages. It was a lousy job in terms of pay.
They were skilled at what they did. Mostly Portuguese. New Bedford
was a whaling town and there wasn't one thing wrong with that labor
force. And we got killed, basically. If you talk about comparative
advantage in this world, people are willing to work a lot cheaper
someplace else. And there wasn't any answer. And when you talk about
millions of people when you go from textiles, and shoes, and now
furniture, and there aren't great replacement jobs for those people.
They're not going to move into all kinds of wonderful jobs.
There's a significant percentage of your population that is nonproductive so that productive people have to turn around and be
offered more. It puts more and more strains in the economy. The fact
is, we're seeing some of that.
I've learned the hard way. I've learned in the shoe business and the
textile business. And I've learned the hard way. There are times you
cannot fight. You cannot fight with labor at X here and at one-tenth,
or even a fifth, or fourth X someplace else. People aren't going to
buy it from you just because it says "Made in America" on it. They'll
go to Wal-Mart and if our Fruit of the Loom underwearforget the
qualityif it has the best price on it, we're gonna sell it. If
somebody figures out how to do it for 50 cents-a-three-pack or
something cheaper, then we've got a problem. We're okay because we've
got 16,000 people working for us outside the United States and about
4,000 people working for us in the United States.
QUESTION: I've listened to you for a long time and studied your work.
It seems to have evolved as you've gotten into things like NetJets
and recently I've read about your investments in China and the oil
industry. And I just wanted you to give us some insight with your
desire to not be capital-intensiveindustries that require any
capital spendinghow NetJet works.
Well, we try and get, you know, flight. That's sort of funny. Flight
is a very expensive piece of equipment. The airline business, it's
been the great capital trap of all time. If you look at the history
of the airline business, it's been about a hundred years exactly. No
money has been made transporting people. I mean, just imagine, you go
back to Kitty Hawk in 1903 or whenever it was, and you have this
picture all of a sudden of what it's going to look like with planes
carrying four hundred people, going coast to coast in five hours and
all of the things that would open up. And you say, you know this is
unbelievable. Everybody's going to get rich. And yet, it's been a
loss, in spite of all the capital that's been put in.
If there'd been a capitalist down in Kitty Hawk he should have shot
down all of them. There'd be a statue of him in my office. Here's the
man that shot down Orville and saved us all a fortune. But the reason
it's a lousy business is because the equipment is so expensive and
also because of the costs. And because it's a commodity business to a
big extent. I mean, in the end, if you're running XYZ Airline and you
open up USA Today in the morning and your competitor's advertising a
lower price, you've gotta match it that day.
That's not true if you sell See's candy, like we do in the West, or
something of the sort. You just tell people that cheap candy'll kill
of me, then I produce in the middle, then you take care of me when I
get old. Society does it, society should do it. But that equation
gets tougher and tougher as you get more and more people in the young
part and the older part because the people between 21 and 65 are the
people who have to turn on the output to take care of everybody; and
that means not only the manufacturing businesses but in services like
medicine.
We're now starting to hit that again. We had a honeymoon period for a
few years, where in effect, hospital stays were reduced. It used to
be in terms of maternity wards, people would be in for a baby and
might be in for a number of days, and we're cutting it down. HMOs
came in and bargained down prices and all that sort of thing for
awhile. But now we're out of that phase and you're starting to see
these 10% a year increases. And you start getting 10% a year
increases for companies in a world where the GDP is drawing 3-4% a
year. And somewhere it starts biting and biting badly. So we will
see. We will see some systems that put in more perks as they go
along. There's just no question about it.
QUESTION: I wanted to go back and ask a question. When you buy a
company, is it a selection process, or a voter-type process?
It's selection that pulls the culture. And the culture evolves more
or less. But selection you start with. The first thing I look at when
somebody wants to sell me a business before making a decisiondo they
love the money or do they love the company? If somebody loves
painting, they may make a lot of money selling paintings, but they're
going to keep painting. If they love playing golf, they may make a
ton of money, but they'll keep playing golf. Jack Nicklaus will be
out on the Senior Tour, whatever. If they love the money, they're
going to take the money, and they'll promise me they'll go to work
for awhile; then after six months, they or their spouse will
say, "Why are you jumping out of bed at 7 in the morning? You spent
40 years building this business and now you have all the money in the
world and you're still doing the same thing as before just so you can
send a lot of money to Omaha."
I think that decision is the most important question I've got to ask.
I ask questions about the economic characteristics of the business
and the price I'm paying, but I don't have any management in Omaha.
We've got 16 people in Omaha and we've got 165,000 employees. So we
just don't have anybody to send out. We don't have any firemen. So I
have to count on the people who sell me the business, they take
hundreds of millions of dollars, like Rich Santulli at NetJets and
they're still going to want to get up at 5:30 in the morning and
Thanksgiving weekend when everyone's in such hurry because they all
want planes at the same time. Solving those problems and the thunder
storms in the east and whatever it may be. And when they get all
through at the end of the day, wanna do it again the next day.
And the truth is you can go in, this is one of the ways I look at
business, I can give you a billion dollars and tell you to go to
California and try and beat us in the boxed chocolate business and
you'd say to yourself, how am I going to do it? Am I going to sell
them for cheaper prices? Am I going to get new outputs? You can't
displace it because you can't change what's in peoples' minds with a
billion dollar advertising campaign or anything of the sort.
You could build a shoe factory in China that will put us out of
business because in the end you may care a little bit. Remember
Florhseim shoes or Big Men shoes 20 years ago, they're gone. You
don't really care what shoe, you care what it looks like and if it's
a name you recognize, fine. You don't pay something extra for it and
you sure as hell don't look at the bottom of the sole and see if it
says "Made in the USA" or not. You really need to be in something
where cost is not the controlling factor. Hershey barsyou know, you
go into a drug store and say, "I want a Hershey bar," and the guy
says, "I've got this private label I make myself, same size as a
Hershey bar and it's a nickel cheaper." You walk across the street
and buy a Hershey bar some place else. That's when you have a
business. It's when you walk across the street if the guy tries to
sell you something, even if it is a little cheaper.
But if you sell wheat, my son lost a farm and it's a terrible
business, and I told him the day someone walks into a place like this
and says, "I'd like some of [name-brand] corn, please," you know you
are in a good business. But when they just say "Bring me some corn,"
it's a lousy business. In fact, such a lousy business, they had a
fella that I read about that he won the lottery and he was a farmer
here in Nebraska that won 20 million dollars and the TV crew went out
to him and asked him, "What are you going to do with the 20 million
dollars?" He says, "I think I'll just keep farming `til it's all
gone." That's what happens when you are in the commodity business.
You don't want to go near it.
QUESTION: What do you think about the prospect of the current economy
and how would you change economic policy?
I pay no attention to economic forecasting. Your children are, absent
of the terrorism thing, but in terms of material wealth per capita,
your kids are going to live better than you and your grandchildren
will live better. And again in the 20th century, real GDP per capita,
real GDP, one of seven for one in this country, just think of that,
seven times. You can cash that out to fewer hours of work or more
product or all kinds of things. But it's a wonderful, wonderful
economy and it'll get better over time. Now to make any given 20 or
30, assuming I have 20 years left, there will be a few lousy years
and there will be a few so-so years and most will be pretty good
years and a couple fabulous years and I don't know in what order they
are going to come. But if I'm a good golfer and I haven't played a
course here before and I knew there would be some par 5s and some par
3s, I'm going to take some more strokes on the par 5s than on the par
3s on average. The importance is that I play, that I play each hole
well. In the end I will end up with a good score. I can't just go
around and play the par 3s. I can't do that in business. I worry
about being in good businesses with good people. That's all I focus
on. Never base a decision in business, I've never based a decision on
expansion of a business or anything like that based on an economic
forecast because A) it's not reliable and B) it's not important. What
is important is where we are going to be in 5 or 10 or 20 years in
the country and will we be better off for this. So we don't have any
clear-cut economic forecasters. My partner Charlie and I never talk
about it. We just talk about how can we put the money out in
businesses that we have owned forever, with the kind of people we can
trust.
QUESTION: Could you talk a little about your foray into telecom and
maybe about the MCI convergence?
There hasn't been much of a foray in telecom to start with that.
Telecom is not a business I understand very well. I have no insights
into that business. It's always struck me as a very competitive
commodity-type business, capital intensive. It's just not a game
where I have any kind of any interest at all. I'd rather sell candy
or something of the sort, where you can understand the competitive
advantage. But I don't like businesses that are going to change a
lot. I like Gillette, you know a hundred years ago almost, they were
the dumb regular blade. Like value, they sell over 70 percent of the
blades to the rest of the world, in the world70 percent. Everybody
knows how to make them; they don't have to steal the technology; they
don't have to distribute them. But here's a company that has 70
percent overtime. So it's a great, great business. It will dominate
10 years from now. Dominate 20 years from now. Berkley will dominate
surely 10 years from now or 20 years from now. Coca-Cola will
dominate, but who's going to do what in telecom? I don't even know
what's happened in the past very well and I have no idea in a fastfolding industry what's going to happen. So I view the change as
beneficial to society but potentially very harmful to investors.
Absence of change is how you get rich in investing. If you buy
something that's very good and you don't worry about it changing on
you and there's certain mysteries that run themselves with that,
there's certain industries that don't. Anything with a lot of
technology is something to be very wrong on in a short period of
time. Now people say you can be very right on it too but I don't know
enough to know the difference. I haven't run into very many people
that do, occasionally people think they do but it's very hard to
predict.
Look at the television industry. Television changes the lives of all
of us in this room. I don't think there's a television set being
manufactured in the United States that there aren't 20 million of
them being sold that were manufactured elsewhere. Radio came along
and nobody made money after a little while making radio sets. There's
just all kinds of things that are beneficial for society that involve
change. Just take the computer business. If you look at the people
that got into computers 30 years ago, you had people like, well I can
go down the list, it was a lousy business. Wonderful for society,
grew up on it. But it was like, we might use the example of the auto
business. 2,000 auto companies in the United States were formed
2,000. There was an Omaha Motor Company. There was a Nebraska Motor
Company. There was Maytag, there was Dupont. What you've got left,
you've got two companies struggling and the third sold out to the
Germans. They are running the company basically for the pensioners
now. It's been a terrible business model for this country. But it's
thoroughly fascinating. It's little niche businesses like WD-40, or
something like that, that do very well. Just a little something to
stick together. Auto manufacturers turn out millions of cars and
hundreds of thousands of people work there and they are lousy
businesses. Capitalism has had growth in that sense. You can develop
a good restaurant and somebody can come along and copy it the next
day and figure out something new to add to the menu or add a little
more parking. People are always looking at successful models and
going after them. That's terrific for the consumer. It can be very
brutal to be in those kinds of businesses. Like McDonalds sort of
owned the world 20 years ago, but not now. Wendy's is doing better.
Burger King is kind of struggling. It's tough. I don't like tough.
QUESTION: Tell us a little bit about why you're involved in
California.
California: A) I've spent more time in California than any other
state, except for Nebraska. I've had a home up there for 30 years.
The big reason is California is too big to ignore. California is the
size of France in terms of GDP. I mean it is twelve or thirteen
percent, or whatever of the United States' economy and it's important
to Nebraska that California do well. We will not do wonderfully in
Nebraska if California is a mess. And California is a fiscal mess. I
mean, in May of this year we were approached by investment bankers
presenting the state of California because California needed to sell
11 billion warrants. These were warrants that were going to be issued
in June, due next June to tide over the deficit. California couldn't
sell those. The only way California could sell 11 billion was to get
someone like Berkshire Hathaway or somebody else to guarantee, if
worse came to worse, we would buy those bonds at junk bond prices. In
other words, if they couldn't find any buyer in the world to buy them
we would stand by it. We offered to do it for a price.
A group of seven banks led by Merrill Lynch, and Citicorp, got paid
84 million dollars. They got paid three quarters of 1 percent for
doing nothing but guaranteeing that if California could not find any
buyer in the world between now and next June they would step up and
buy this 11 billion. That got them past the June crisis. Their credit
card wasn't any good without a guarantor. What happens in the state
of California affects the state of the country, and that was the
situation. Now they face 3 billion revenue anticipation notes. They
are talking about paying 1 percent to get a letter of credit backing
those, these are due next June. From now to next June on the market
and they are going to need to pay 100 basis points for just the
guarantee that somehow somebody will buy these damn things, cause if
they don't they've got a couple other things in the works.
California, in my view, has until next June when this batch with come
due plus they will be facing further deficits. They have until next
June to be credible in the world on their own in terms of the
financial markets. Because the financial markets don't have to buy
California paper, I mean there's nothing to force them to buy. Now
California, I hasten to add, is too big to fail. I mean you can
predict dire things, they can run out of cash, but somebody will come
to the rescue and the only party to come to the rescue if they don't
get their own house in order will be the federal government.
There will be a solution, but I think it's way better if the
solutions arrive early rather than late. I mean Benjamin Franklin
said a lot of wise things but when he said, "An ounce of prevention
is worth a pound of cure, I mean that is the guiding light at
Berkshire and should be the guiding light for everybody with fiscal
problems of any kind. California's an enormously rich state. It's not
going to float off into the ocean or anything like that. It's a
terrific economy actually, it's got an added business problem but all
that's solvable. But if it is not solved soon, it's a few minutes
before midnight on that and then it will get solved by somebody else
for them and I just think that's a terrible mistake.
You need leadership that has got the guts to come up with the kind of
program that is required and has the ability to communicate it both
to the people of California and in turn to the credit markets. The
burden of proof has now shifted in the credit markets to "show me" on
behalf of California. That burden of proof is, California will have
to make sense, they won't be able to do it with smoke and mirrors
next year because they've got markets that will look very carefully
at where the cash is going to come from and how it's going to go out.
You've got a lot of stuff out there that's mandated, that leaves you
less room to maneuver both for taxes and expenditure than you might
have in many other states. They will have a situation where to some
extent the general electorate has set rules for both income and
expenditures that ties the hands of people and having set those
rules, the people who set them really didn't have a responsibility
for making things. They just hit the bulldog for this or that. It's
an interesting problem; it will get solved.
The good news is, it's like this country. Peter Lynch says when you
buy stock, buy into a business that's so good that even a dope can
run it, because sooner or later one will. There's a lot of merit to
that. If you just buy businesses that your idiot nephew can run,
you're going to do all right. You don't want a business that a genius
has to run. That's the worst kind of business in the world really.
And the truth is, our country is so good that we can take a fair
amount of mismanagement. We test that occasionally, but we come
through too.
On that bullish note, it's nine o'clock. Thank you.
Governor Leavitt: Thank you, Warren; I don't think there's anything
we could say that would express adequately the appreciation people
feel. Two things left, one is a pitch and the second is a picture. If
you would like to have your picture taken as a memento tonight with
Warren Buffet, he's prepared to come stand, take some pictures with
you if you would like. Now for the pitch: I want to make sure you
understand what we are doing here in terms of the Oquirrh Institute.
Most of you will know that the Oquirrh Institute is essentially a
bunch of people who believe in entrepreneurship and apply the
principles of entrepreneurship so you can solve some innovative
public policy problems. The Oquirrh Club is what we are celebrating
tonighta group of people who come together twice a year and do what
we are doing tonight. We'll have a unique day of recreation, a chance
to learn some things, and third we get to meet some great peoplea
wonderful network. Some of you have been invited as guests tonight to
get acquainted with the Oquirrh Club. You can count on the fact that
somebody will call you asking if you want to join; we hope that you
do. We anticipate getting our numbers up to 50. We have been building
up this year, with 34 thus far. When we get to 50 we are going to cap
this program. It's a great institution and I think you'll see over
the course of the next few years that Oquirrh Institute will probably
become one of the country's most prominent public policy
organizations because of the unique model that we are using. Thank
you all very much.
You should know that Dell Loy, through his generosityhis bounteous
generosityhas helped get the momentum started for the Oquirrh
Institute with a very generous 1 million dollar gift to get this
started. A picture of Early Light. Most of you know the meaning of
Oquirrh is early light. It's a Goshute Indian word. The Oquirrh
Mountainsthe Indians saw the mountains and said they liked the way
they looked when the sun hit. Dell Loy, this picture won't do it. You
know what's inside my heart and inside the hearts of your friends.
Thank you very, very much.
Dell Loy Hansen: I can speak for myself and almost everybody else in
the room that I've met that the reason we're here is quite simple. We
all have one and the same answerit's Mike Leavitt. Now once we got
here we all found a lot of very, very interesting things to get
together with and go forward and do. But we all know the catalyst for
this organization was Mike Leavittthere's no doubt about that in my
mind. And so we have a token of gratitude to him. But there's another
thing we can do for him and I think it's even more important than
this token that we will give him. And that's to remind ourselves that
the best gift we can give to Mike Leavitt is to make the Oquirrh
Institute prosper and grow and make it better than it is so that when
he comes back there's a bigger and better institute for him to come
back to and to lead in the future. So with that, let me present to
you: To Governor Michael O. Leavitt, founder of the Oquirrh
Institute, shining early light on public policy.
Thank you all very much for your friendship. As Warren was talking
tonight about loving what you do, I must tell you, I love what I do.
I'll hang this at the EPA but I'd be afraid somebody would come in
and ask if that that was CO2. It's a reflection. Thank you all very,
very much for your friendship and what you are doing to make this
work. This is going to be, I believe, an organization that will make
great contributions to the world. Thanks.