Peter Buffett – Finding Your Note

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest today is Peter Buffett. Peter is a musician, composer, author, and philanthropist.
He's an Emmy Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, and co-chair of the Nova Foundation.
We discuss music, community, philanthropy, and finding one's note in life. This is a very different episode, much more about life in general, with no business or investing discussed. Like his father, Warren, Peter has the gene for phrasing ideas in memorable ways. And I think you'll find many great phrases in this chat that will stick with you.
I've been thinking about Peter's idea of making sure those in your life are safe seen and celebrated ever since our chat. Please enjoy our conversation.

**Peter Buffett** (1:27)
As my dad would say, testing one billion, two billion.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:30)
Might keep that in.
So Peter, I'm really appreciative of the time today. And since we're sitting in Kingston, a place that you've deliberately chosen, I'm always interested by how people end up where they end up and what they like about the place. So I thought we'd maybe actually start with the place that we're sitting. What is it about Kingston that led you to ultimately plant your roots here? And we'll use that to trace backwards in time.

**Peter Buffett** (1:52)
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.
And 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, a like-minded 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 and 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.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:00)
I'd like to start with how this affected you, maybe and your wife personally. And then we'll build up to sort of the community aspects of the foundation because I'm very interested in that. So what would you say changed most about you moving from a concrete jungle to a much more nature-oriented place over the years? What have been the most significant changes?

**Peter Buffett** (4:18)
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, and we have a creek on our property as well, and to sit in the creek, to be on the land, we are, 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.