How Buffett can make an investment decision "in five minutes" · Transcript · BuffettMungerGPT

WarrenOur immediate decision is whether we can figure what's being offered out to us or not. I mean, there's a go-no-go signal, and Charlie and our are often thought to be rude when we think we're just being polite and not wasting the other person's time. So as they start mid-sentence in their first conversation with us, we just say, forget it. And Charlie's pretty good at that, and I'm picking it up. The, it's, we know very, very, very early in the conversation, whether somebody's talking about something that there's any chance is actionable by us. And we don't worry about the ones we miss. We want to make sure that we don't waste any time thinking about things that when we got all through thinking about them, we're not going to know enough to make the decision on. So we just rule those out, and that rules a lot of things out. But then if it gets through a couple of these filters and makes it into an area where it says, this is something that we know enough about to make a decision on, we're ready to move right then. So we make decisions. We can make a decision in five minutes very easily. I mean, it just is not that complicated. Now, we know about a number of businesses and industries, and there's a lot of businesses and industries we don't know anything about. We know about a lot of things about certain kinds of bonds, and we know some — there's a variety of things we know about and it's nice if we can expand that universe of knowledge. But the most important thing is that anything that gets through is in an area of knowledge. And the truth is if we can't make a decision in five minutes, we can't make it in five months. You know, there's, we're not going to learn enough in the following five months to make up for the fact that we went in deficient in the first place.