Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2013

by Carol J. Loomis

If talking about nuclear destruction on the sixth green at Pebble Beach is incongruous, it doesn’t seem to bother Buffett. A nuclear bomb, he says, “is the ultimate depressing thing. It will happen. It’s inevitable. I don’t see any way that it won’t happen. But we can reduce the probabilities. If there’s a 10% probability of something happening in a given year—and I don’t know if that’s the right probability; nobody knows—then the chances that it will happen in 50 years are 99.5%. If you get it down to 3%, there is about a 78% chance. If you get it down to 1% per year, there’s like a 40% chance, so reducing the probabilities per annum of anything happening obviously increases the chance significantly that your kids will get through their lifetimes without this happening. You can’t get rid of the knowledge. You can try to control the materials. You’ll never get rid of the intent. It is the ultimate problem of mankind.”