Warren Buffett on Middle East Oil Prices and Nuclear War Risks

about what you think that is happening that's happening about what's happening in the middle

east right now what's happening what's happening in the middle east oh um there's a lot of ways we

could go with this but why don't we start with just what it means for crude oil and energy

in particular berkshire owns a utility company what do these higher prices mean well it it means

the two oil positions we have uh chevron and and occidental go up a lot but but that doesn't mean

i can go around predicting what will happen next i don't know what's going to happen tomorrow over

there yeah you for a long time were involved with the nuclear initiative i think still are

funding that and i know your very first priority in philanthropy was the nuclear problem i think

it's the problem i think i think it should well i'll put it this way when i was when i went to

school grammar school they told me the sun was going to burn out in four and a half billion years

i took that pretty philosophically i mean i gotta handle that and now you've got

nine countries including you know a guy in north korea i mean and

there will be something happen and we worried enormously about it when there were two

and we had perfectly we had really pretty sane leaders and and kennedy and khrushchev you know

i mean you were not dealing with unstable people or anything like that and uh uh

uh you know the ships turned around but but people were hiding under their desk with two

i mean just think how you feel with north korea having it and iran wanting to get it i mean it

it is and i don't have an answer for that i mean we did the right thing in 1938 even

or 1939 you can go look at it's all over the internet the most important letter ever written

and and uh leo's the lord could not get the message to he was a famous nuclear physicist

terrific one very funny too and he he couldn't get the message to roosevelt but he knew if

einstein signed the letter that it would get there and he finally got einstein to sign the letter

that letter was a month before the germans started rolling into poland and and i don't

think roosevelt understood u-235 any better than i do i mean you know but he knew if einstein signed

it he better do something and the funny thing is of course he was doing it because he was worried

about the germans getting it and and and uh it was actually used on the japanese but it it

we and we haven't learned to live with it now we've been we've gone 80 years since then

we've had a lot of close calls i mean we've had training tapes put in there that that almost got

the president to do something they've had them i mean uh there is no way that the planet has an

expectancy of 500 years now when it was four and a half billion when i was a kid and we had to do it

i'm not faulting anybody my dad was in congress he would have voted for i mean

everybody rejoiced on pj day you know i mean it it