YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Buffett

lines on the record: 78
first: 2020-01-07
most recent: 2020-01-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Head and the teacher comes through with scissors and cuts the cloud into a square. And that's what happens. And that happens very insidiously. I mean, it's not just the obvious stuff we can think about, but it happens through the language. For instance, with my dad, I saw a guy come home every day at the same time loving what he did. We didn't know what he did. We had no clue. And it wasn't reflected back in more houses and bigger houses and cars and boats and whatever. So there was no reference for the money he was making. But there was a reference to how much he enjoyed what he did. So I lived inside of that. I lived inside of home life where somebody loved their work. And so that was instilled in me to think, okay, what can I find in my life that I'm going to really like?”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what should we be thinking of as work? Because we have this intense focus on job creation and the word I hate almost more than any other one is workforce. Workforce. Think of it. You don't want someone to feel like they're being forced to work. And yet it is in our vernacular everywhere. And so we have created again through words someone said language is the skin of culture. And that is true. Language is the skin of culture. So the words we use matter. And so when you're talking about workforce and job development and economic progress, progress in general, what's it actually mean? You're creating this whole mold for people to have to fit into. And so there's this cartoon I saw once where this teacher's going down the aisle of students and the students got this little cloud above their head.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, again, I look historically at our education system and it was about assimilation and control. It was not about curiosity and growing the child up into whatever they were going to be. It's all about thinking this kid has an empty brain and we have to fill it up. So our education system is, I don't think, reformable. I mean, I think you have to start completely over because it was built for assimilation. And so how do you foster curiosity? And what's the other one? Education curiosity. Work ethic and work ethic. And how do you foster work ethic? I mean, really. And what is work?”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, be going, I think. And I get that everybody wants to be seen and heard for sure, especially people that have been smashed by somebody else for centuries potentially, but it's not doing the species a favor to get into this level of hyper-individualism.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially. And so this mythology was created, which of course got its backlash in the 60s. I love the fact that everybody was And consumerism started to take on this necessity if we were going to grow without a war. I mean, yes, there was a Vietnam War, but if we weren't going to do something big time with our productive capacities, we'd better get everybody hooked on something to buy. And I think that the 60s really, you know, do your own thing and all these things that got people into, oh yeah, I'm the Pepsi generation or whatever it is. It's all about me and I have to get a certain kind of sneaker and a certain kind of this and a certain kind of that and conformity was thrown out the window, which was the good thing on one level, but it created what we have now, which is this hyper factionalized, whether it's, and don't get me wrong, these things are important, but pronouns, race, all the things around dividing people into the smaller and smaller units is the opposite of where we should act.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An idea could have people never seen it on that kind of scale. And things like eugenics and all that stuff was going on here. But once that happened, everybody here had to go, okay, we can't call it that anymore. Let's come up with SATs and like all these other ways to cull the herd for lack of a better word, which is an awful way to say it. But people were into finding ways to manipulate without, and specifically around, I think, consumption. I'm kind of jumping around here, but there's a lot of things that happened in the 40s and 50s that created this sense of we have to get people to conform, but we have to be careful how we do it because it could be used for evil purposes. And here's this thing around single family homes, nuclear family. All of that stuff is a myth. I mean, we are not made to be in little boxes by ourselves. We're meant to be in community and connection and tribal units.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that it was sort of an aha moment for production. I mean, I think about going back to when factories really came online in the end of the 19th century and then we had World War I that kicked everything in the pants in terms of production, production. And then once the war ended, you had to do something with all this productive capacity. And the 20s and the Depression, all that happened. And then another war kicked in. So that took care of the depression essentially is to get productive capacity up and running again. But then after that, there's a couple of things that happen. And I don't, history sort of, some of it I know well, but other things I sort of form out of feeling and intuition. But I do know that what happened in Nazi Germany scared a lot of people because the level of mass control”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family home and the nuclear family and all these things that were really designed to increase productive capacity and uptake and consumption. It started really with the 60s, of course, but this idea that you are special and different and you got to get the thing that's right for you and all this kind of all the hyper individual stuff that's tied directly to consumption is sinking us, I think.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll be interesting to see what kind of reset, whether it's climate change or disease or man-made, natural, whatever it is, I think there's going to be some kind of a reset. It may be 100 years from now, maybe 500 years from now. There's got to be something because we are an invasive species at this point. So density is a big thing. And then sort of breaking free from individualism, I guess. And you start to realize when you're in community that's truly connected that you need everybody for something and that if you don't today, you might tomorrow and you never know exactly what somebody's going to bring. And I think are just hyper individualism now with what I just heard was called antisocial media, which I love, but all these is destroying us. I mean, it really is making, and I think that starts with whether it's the mythology of the single.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, you're probably familiar with Dunbar's number, right? So there's that, there is size. I think density is huge. Because, for instance, in this on this continent, really, tribal culture, clan, tribe, smaller units, those were working pretty well in right relation to the world around them and various other tribes. Of course, if there's a resource scarcity, you're going to have problems, but generally. But when you get into the Aztec and Mayans and it starts to get densely populated, you get all the same hierarchical mess that you get anywhere. So I think population density is huge. And I think”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That survive whatever's coming, and they'll be connected and better off. And that's, I joke about the Novo Foundation 100-year plan, but I don't think we're going to do a lot in our lifetime that will be seen for what I think it ultimately will be.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the greatest country in the world, supposedly, and then to be seen, to be a witness, whether it's in religion or law, you need a witness. Otherwise, you don't exist essentially. And to be celebrated for who you are. And so we are trying to create, not even create, just create the conditions really for those kinds of environments to flourish. For me, it's a little bit like the monks, and I don't know the story very well, but in Ireland, I guess one decree was that the monks had to be literate. And so they would find these ancient texts and just copy them so they had things to read in the monastery. What they didn't know is that they were preserving ancient texts so that two or three hundred years later somebody would be looking at this stuff going, oh my God, thank God they did this. I feel like we're doing that. We're just creating these threads so that 100, 200 years from now, there's going to be community.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we go to a place like Detroit, where people have already said, no one's coming to save us. We got to figure it out. And we go into neighborhoods in Detroit, neighborhoods in Baltimore, neighborhoods in Jackson, all these different places where people are doing it for themselves. And it's with community gardens and community Wi-Fi and worker own this and that and community houses where people come together and kids can do after school stuff. Really, it's an ecosystem of intervention, but not to solve it on the level it's been created, to start to create community where people see each other and feel safe. My wife, Jennifer, has the best three words for all of us to grow up into, which is safe seen and celebrated. People have to feel safe. So many people don't. It's epidemic, I think, in terms of how many people feel unsafe in our culture right now.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard because we're inside a frame that allows those things to happen. It also allows philanthropy to happen. We're all inside this frame. And so how do we work outside of that to try and create a more natural setting for our species? Because even it's funny, even with life expectancy and mortality rates and things, who are we to say we're supposed to live longer? We think we're the most important thing. We are so ego driven in terms of we're better off, everything's better. And we're forgetting about massive die-off of all these other things that will kill us eventually if we don't pay attention. And so I am sure that we're in the midst of a collapse. It's not coming. It's happening. We don't know how far into it we are. But what we have to do is build the lifeboats essentially as best we can at the foundation. That's what I feel.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last thing you did was sell yourself for a wage to someone else. You were either a farmer or some sort of small entrepreneur or something. And now wage labor runs everything. And to think that that was un-American, literally unamerican 150 years ago. Pointing those things out, I think, is, or learning them at least for me. And then I do this show where I point them out to others is important to kind of open up our minds to the fact that we are making this all up. Russell Brand famously asks, what day is it? And we say whatever day it happens to be. And he said, no, it isn't. It's just a day. And we agree that it is Monday. And remember that these are agreements. And if they're hurting a lot of people, maybe we should change those agreements. So more people live life of their agency, basically.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Old, we made it all up and we can do better. And some of the more egregious facts, one of them in particular, and it really is post-Civil War. That's when things got centralized and kind of codified into where we are now in a lot of ways. And one of the facts I talk about sometimes is that the age of consent in every state in the Union but one through the 19th century into the 20th was 10. And in Delaware, the age of consent was seven. Nobody believes that. And it's absolutely true. And there's no woman in the room that made that law who in the world would make that law. And yet my grandfather was born in the 19th century. So this is not some far off people that we don't act like that anymore. It's that runs inside our country. Wage labor was unaware up until the Industrial Revolution. So up through the Civil War.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are different ideas around when things started to go awry if you think they are going awry, which I happen to think. You could go back to agriculture 15,000 years ago. You could go back to monotheism 2,000 years ago. You could go back to the enlightenment, the printing press, all these things 500 years ago, which would include colonization and all the things that happened then, which I would kind of market there as when it kind of got bad, really bad. And then you can look at the industrial revolution and 150 years, which is a time when I think in this country, things really got shot out of a canon in terms of control and domination and centralization and all of that. So when you talk about things like the money system and the economy and all this stuff, this is 150 years old basically. And so I remind people all the stuff that's running us isn't that.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly the nurturing in various ways and how life is created and grows versus how do you own it and control it and use it to your advantage. And so that's reflected in all sorts of different work we do. And that changes because the world we're in is changing, to say the least, even just since 2006. It's given me sort of the impetus. It's obviously something I'm interested in anyway, but really getting into the history of how we got here. I don't think you can know where you're going unless you know where you came from. And so I've been steeped in that over this last 10 years, really.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And through my music career. And so we were both highly sensitized to how the country was formed and some of the consciousness that still runs quite thoroughly through us to this day and knew that the world was out of balance. I mean, you can look around and see that. Again, if you get particular about it, you can start to see some behavior that is egregious and has been for a very, very long time. So that was really our premise is we want to help foster a transformation from one of domination and exploitation to collaboration and partnership and seeing girls and women as the primary agents of change. But more than that, and this is where it starts to get whatever word someone wants to put to it, but it's more about the feminine side of things. So we all have it in us. We all have feminine and masculine traits, but it's the nurturing.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foundation, you're better looking, your jokes are funnier, you're invited places. This magical thing happens in terms of suddenly having all these resources. And that's weird. And we had just moved to New York, so it was doubly strange because I never, and my dad had never thought of this either, of what having my last name would be like in New York where it's really the financial capital, certainly the country in the world in a lot of ways. So the foundation really happened in earnest in 2006. And that's when Jennifer and I had to look at each other and say, okay, what is really important to us? Because this is, we're going to have to hire to this. And that was part of the beauty is we didn't have some legacy foundation. We could hire to the mission and start with just us and go from there. And so I had worked for over a decade with indigenous cultures in this country.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad did what I call the Big Bang in 2006 when he decided to give all his money away. But the foundation, we had a foundation before that. In 1999, my parents, unbeknownst to the three of us, I'm the youngest of three kids, gave each of us a $10 million foundation, mostly to see if we were interested and how far we might take that. And for us, we got to learn what a 501c3 was and learn about what was going on in our community and what we cared about, frankly, beyond our own livelihoods. And so that with the 5% payout of, let's say, $500,000 a year or so, that's not hard to do in terms of manage and think about where that money might go. And you have to have a little part-time help. And that grew over time. But in 2006, it became a billion dollar foundation because of my dad's gift. And when you have a billion dollar,”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is a big point I always try to make, and it comes from, I guess it's a William Blake quote that says the abstract without the particular allows the demonic. The abstract without the particular allows the demonic. And we live in a world of abstractions, whether it's P&L statements or whatever it is, we are in that world. And so to find the particular in yourself and in the place you're in and then the people you meet. And that's what the foundation work is about. You can look at metrics around this many people have been lifted out of poverty or whatever the metric is. They're not the people. Go there and live on $1.50 a day. And that's the particular. And then suddenly.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This thing that was part of the natural world. It's not like we're separate from it at all and we're in the animal kingdom. We happen to be the apex predator and that's a problem, I think. But it reminds you of who we are as a species, basically.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Connection and information flow, for lack of a better word, from the natural world into my daily experience has informed me in terms of how I walk in the world and behave, again, in ways that are so deeply qualitative and yet very difficult to put into words. But it has affected both myself and Jennifer in ways that I feel like, oh, that's, and I'm sure talk about this more in terms of other aspects that allowed us to live like this, frankly, but this is natural. If we as a species have been around for 200,000 years, that's generally accepted in that range, that we would know each other if we saw each other 200,000 years ago to some extent. And all of histories about 15,000 years, clearly we were more that than we are this. We were more.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh boy, what a question because it's so significant and yet it's all qualitative and we live in a world of quantitative and so to really be able to articulate it all to some extent the effects it's had on me because it is profound. I am outdoors as much as I can be, but I'm not a hiker or an outdoors person. I'm just in the backyard barefoot. And what that has done for me, we have a creek on our property as well. And to sit in the creek, to be on the land, we our house has a small six-acre farm attached to it that we do not farm because that's a lot of work. But to eat food from the land you live on, I cut open a cantaloupe that came from the farm and the juice, of course, is in there. And I'm looking at that juice and going, oh, right, this was that rainstorm from two weeks ago. And now it's grown this thing. And so the deep”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“displacement and all these things that we see from the foundation standpoint, the antidote for that is rooted in connection and connection to place and people in that place. And so what started as a weekend getaway became a kind of a core piece of the work we're doing at the foundation.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Government, all sorts of great people doing amazing things to try and revitalize community and make it feel connected. And then finding that there was a farm, a 1,500 acre farm nearby for sale, a three-generation monocrop sweet corn operation that we were able to purchase at the foundation. And that's when, for me, the aha moment went, oh my gosh, we have food and land, which is the most fundamental thing to all of us. It's how we get through the day. And a small community of like-minded people, and we could start to potentially kind of re-knit the fabric of what community really means back together again, because I think we're, as my friend Wes Jackson says, we're a species out of context. We are in a place in time that is not who we actually are as a species and the level of disconnection.”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excellent. Well, it was, I guess, prompted by moving to New York City. And while it's a wonderful place, at some point you got to get connected to something besides concrete and the intensity of it. And my wife really said, we got to find a place to get away to every once in a while. And we found this area through a friend. At first, it was just a place to get away to and then it became an obvious home. And it really was being so much closer to nature first. And then we can talk about this more as you want to, but it became a real central focus for the foundation work. I started to realize that the world is wildly out of balance. That's sort of the fundamental idea of why we do what we do at the foundation. And that to be close to a small community like Kingston, 23,000 people, like my”
2020-01-07 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note - [Invest Like the Best, EP.153] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source