[0:00]
QuestionerI have made a few mistakes in business by trusting the wrong people. How can I learn who to trust and who not to trust?
WarrenIt's a great question, but you probably have about as good a chance of getting a good answer for me on that as you have of getting on Bill Gates' play next year. But Charlie and I have had very good luck in terms of buying businesses and putting our trust in people it's been just overwhelmingly good, but we filled her out a lot of people. And then they say, well, how do you filter them out? I would say, and I think Charlie will agree with this, people give themselves away fairly often, and maybe it does help to have been around as long as we have in seeing the various ways they give themselves away. When somebody comes to me with a business, then I probably shouldn't tell this publicly. because they'll probably tailor their approach subsequently. But when they come, just the very things they talk about, what they regard as important and not important, there are a lot of clues that come as the subsequent behavior. And like I say, we've really had a batting average I wouldn't have thought we would have had in the people that we've joined with. it hasn't been 100 percent. It's been well above 90. And I get asked that, you know, I mean, how do you make those judgments? And I don't know, Charlie, can you articulate the way we do it?
CharlieWell, partly, we're deeply suspicious when the proposition is too good to be true. Warren once introduced me to a gentleman promoter who wanted to inveigle us into an insurance program, and he said, we only write fire insurance on concrete bridges that are covered by water. He says, it's like taking candy from babies. We are able to filter out propositions like that. Yeah, anybody that, anybody that implicit in their comments or what they kind of laugh about or all kinds of things in terms of the fact, you know, it's so easy and it ain't that easy, you know, And we get suspicious very quickly. And the truth is, we rule out 90% of the times, and we may be wrong about a fair number that we're ruling out. The important thing is whether the ones we're ruling in were right about.