WarrenThe five-minute test is, you know, Charlie and I have, we're familiar with virtually every company of a size that would interest us in the country. I mean, if you've been around for 40 or more years, looking at businesses, it's just like if you were looking at, you know, studying baseball players every day, you get to know all the players after a while. And that's the way it works. Then we have a bunch of filters we've developed in our minds over time. We don't say they're perfect filters. We don't say that those filters don't occasionally leave things out that should get through. But they're very, they're efficient. And they work just as well as if we spent months and hired experts and did all kinds of things. So we really can tell you in five minutes whether we're interested in something. And we had never owned shares in flight safety, but we've been familiar. with a company for at least 20 years, wouldn't you say, Charlie?
CharlieSure, I had a partner who bought a lot of it. 20 years ago.
WarrenYeah. Yeah. But that's true of almost any business. And we know, we've got a fix on what we don't understand, and then we don't care to know about them, particularly, although we'll pick up a little as we go along maybe. But, and then the ones that are, we're capable of understanding, we've probably gotten about as far as we'll get already. So we do know in five minutes. Now, when we do something with flight safety, before the purchase and even for somewhat, a little after the purchase, I'd never been, I'd never set foot on a, on a piece of day of 40 or so training centers around the world. I never set foot on one of them. I've never been to their headquarters. We never looked at a lease. We never look at title of the properties. I mean, we don't do all of those things. And I will say this, to date. That's never cost us a penny. What costs us money is when we misassess the fundamental economic characteristics of the business. But that is something we would not learn by what people generally consider due diligence. We could have lawyers look over all kinds of things. But that isn't what makes a deal a good deal or a bad deal. And we don't kid ourselves by having lots of studies made and lots of reports made. They're going to support whatever they think, the guy that. pays them, you know, wants anyway. So it doesn't mean, they don't mean anything. They're nonsense. But we do care about being right about the economic characteristics of the business.
[2:39]
WarrenAnd that's one thing we think we've got certain filters that tell us in certain cases that we know enough to assess. And then we make some mistakes. Charlie?
CharlieI've got nothing to add to that except that people underrate the importance of a few simple, big ideas. And I think that to the extent, Berk's the extent, Burk's the importance of a few simple, big ideas. Hatcher Hathaway is a didactic enterprise teaching the right systems of thought. I think that the chief lessons are that a few big ideas really work. I think these filters of ours have worked pretty well. And because they're so simple. Yeah, I think most of the people in this room, they just focused on what made a good business or didn't make a good business and thought about a little while. They could develop a set of fillers that would let them in five minutes figure out pretty well what made sense or didn't make sense.