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QuestionerWarren and Charlie. You're famous for making a deal over a day or two with nothing more than a handshake. You pride yourself on the small overhead of doing the diligence mostly yourself. Other successful acquisitive companies use teams of internal people, outside bankers, consultants and lawyers to do diligence often over many months to assess deals. Speed may be a competitive advantage. You've done some amazing deals. But does your diligence process also put us at greater risk?
WarrenYeah, I get that question fairly often, often from lawyers. It's interesting. We've made plenty of mistakes in acquisitions, plenty, and we made mistakes in not making acquisition, but the mistakes are always about making an improper assessment of the economic conditions in the future of the industry of the company. They're not a bad lease. They're not a specific labor contract. They're not a questionable patent. They're not the things that are on the checklist, you know, for every acquisition by every major corporation in America. Those are not the things that count. What counts is whether you're wrong about, whether you've really got to fix on the basic economics and how the industry is likely to develop or whether Amazon is likely to kill them, you know, in a few years or that sort of thing. And we have not found a due diligence list that gets at what we think of the real risks when we buy a business. And like I said, we've made, we certainly made at least, oh, at least a half a dozen mistakes and probably a lot more if you get into mistakes of omission. But none of those would have been cured by a lot more due diligence. They might have been cured by us being a little smarter. The human quality of the management were going to stay are very important. And how are you going to check that by due diligence, you know? How many people in this room who are happily married carefully checked their spouse's birth certificate and so on? My guess is that our methods are not so uncommon as they appear. I'll think about that.