QuestionerYou mentioned you looked at, you used filters to look at a company. So could you elaborate on what those filters are?
WarrenOpportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you've got two suitors who are really eager to have you, and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that's the way we filter stock buying opportunities. Our ideas are so simple. people keep asking us for mysteries when all we have is elementary idea. The first filter we probably put it through is whether we think, and we know instantly, whether it's a business we're going to understand, and whether it's a business that, if it passes through that, it's whether a company can have a sustainable edge. And that gets rid of a very significant percentage of the things people. I always want to tell you some story or anything, and I'm sure they regard, regard me and Charlie is very arbitrary in terms of, you know, in the middle of the first sentence, saying, well, you know, we appreciate the call, but we're not interested. I mean, you know, they just think if they explain something, and if I get letters on this all the time. And but we really can tell in the middle of the first sentence, usually whether those two factors exist. And if we can't understand it, obviously it's not going to have, we can't make a decision as to whether it has a sustainable edge. And if we can understand it, we very often can come to the conclusion that it's not the kind of business where it will have a sustainable edge. So 98% of the conversations we can end, you know, in the middle of somebody's first sentence, which, of course, goes over very big with the caller. And then sometimes, if you're talking about an entire business, we can tell by who we're dealing with whether a deal is ever going to work out or not. I mean, if there's an auction going on, we don't want to, we have no interest in talking about it. And it just isn't going to, you know, it isn't going to work. If someone is interested in essentially doing that with their business, you know, they're going to sit down or want to renegotiate everything with us all over again after the deal is done. And we're going to have to buy the business two or three times before we get through. You just see all these things coming. And on the other hand, we've had, you know, to. experience, basically, with the people we have associated with. So it works, it's efficient. You know, we don't want to listen to stories all day, and we don't read brokerage reports or anything of the sort. It's just, there's other things to do with your time.