Introduction

Patrick: [00:00:49] 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 NoVo 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: [00:01:27] As my dad would say, "Testing, 1 billion, 2 billion."

Community

Patrick: [00:01:30] I might keep that in. That's pretty funny. 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: [00:01:52] 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, 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 mono-crop 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.

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 West 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 anecdote for that is rooted in connection and connection to place and people in that place. So what started as a weekend getaway became a kind of a core piece of the work we're doing at the foundation.

Patrick: [00:04:00] I'd like to start with how this affected you, maybe you 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: [00:04:18] 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, 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, 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, "Right, this was that rainstorm from two weeks ago. And now it's grown to this thing."

So the deep 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 that's, and I'm sure we'll 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 history is about 15,000 years, clearly, we were more that than we are this. We were more 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.

Patrick: [00:06:26] It sounds like this very quickly translates into, I guess, I would summarize what you said as seeing connections versus living abstractions. There's kind of all these statistics and quantitative data that drives a lot of what happen in the world now. But this is more about visibly seeing the connections.

Peter: [00:06:42] Right. And that is the 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, those abstractions make no sense.

Patrick: [00:07:29] Let's talk a bit about the NoVo Foundation. Just to give some context, I want to come back to community and see how they all integrate. But maybe you could describe its origins and its current mission.

Peter: [00:07:39] 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 501[c][3] was and learned about what was going on in our community and what we cared about, frankly, beyond our own livelihoods.

So that with the 5% payout of, let's say, 500,000 a year. So that's not hard to do in terms of manage and think about where that money might go and you need 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 foundations, 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, we're going to ... 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.

So I had worked for over a decade with indigenous cultures in this country, and through my music career. 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 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, 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. 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. So I've been steeped in that over the last 10 years, really.

Patrick: [00:11:02] What are some of the most interesting historical points or markers that you've studied that inform that view?

Peter: [00:11:10] 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 mark it there as when it kind of got bad, really bad. And then you can look at the Industrial Revolution, 150 years, which is a time when I think in this country, things really got shot out of a cannon in terms of control and domination, and centralization, and all of that.

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 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.

In Delaware, the age of consent was seven. Nobody believes that. And it's absolutely true. 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 unAmerican up until the Industrial Revolution. So up through the Civil War, 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 unAmerican, literally unAmerican 150 years ago.

So pointing those things out, I think, 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 asked, "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 a life of their agency, basically.

Patrick: [00:13:50] It's an interesting problem you highlighted between the quantitative and qualitative and I always looking at these things, especially history as double-edged swords. So quantitatively, I was just looking yesterday at these amazing falling kind of like the Hans Rosling work. The falling mortality rates, that increasing poverty rates, all of these incredible things happening around the world. Those are all quantitative things. I don't think anyone questions those things. And those are fantastic outcomes of maybe the way the world is. But maybe I think hidden behind those things are the more qualitative aspects, the particulars that you're already referencing.

Peter: [00:14:22] Opioid addictions, suicide rates, lots of things.

Patrick: [00:14:27] Sure. Which are, if you haven't experienced them, I guess, firsthand with a relative or something, they're distant things. Right?

Peter: [00:14:32] Right.

Patrick: [00:14:33] So talk about how those, we'll call them qualitative negative externalities or side effects, how you identify them, which ones, maybe the root causes and how your work is aiming at attacking those specific things.

Peter: [00:14:46] 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. 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.

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 like. 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 work around this and that. Then 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 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.

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 2 or 300 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 communities that survive whatever's coming, and they'll be connected and better off. 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.

Patrick: [00:17:48] It seems like we have more communication than ever, but maybe the less community than ever, in a strange way. And the reason I say that is just from experience that when you stand up something that looks like it might be a community, you get a flood of demand for people that want something, want some aspect of that.

Peter: [00:18:04] Yeah.

Patrick: [00:18:04] Tell us a little bit about, obviously, some of you felt a lot about. I love that safe, scene and celebrated as some of the answer to my question. But what do you think makes for effective community? And what are some limitations? Maybe size would be one example. Like, community can't be too big, because then it ceases to be tight knit. So tell us what you've learned about what makes effective communities.

Peter: [00:18:24] Well, I mean, you're probably familiar with Dunbar's number, right?

Patrick: [00:18:27] Sure.

Peter: [00:18:27] So there's that. There is size. I think density is huge, because for instance, on this continent, really, a 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 Aztecs 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 it'll be interesting to see what kind of reset, whether it's climate change, or disease, or manmade, natural, whatever it is, I think there's going to be some kind of a reset. Maybe 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, 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 is going to bring. I think are just hyper individualism now with what I just heard was called anti-social 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 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. All the hyper individual stuff that's tied directly to consumption is sinking us, I think.

Patrick: [00:20:21] Can you say more about that linkage? I'm not sure I've ever heard that linkage before between consumption specifically and individualism.

Peter: [00:20:27] Yeah. I think that it was sort of "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 happened. And I don't the 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 an idea could have and people had never seen it on that kind of scale. 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 call 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, essentially. So this mythology was created, which of course, got its backlash in the 60s. I love the fact that everybody was kind of straight stickman in the 50s and then they invented the hula hoop, and everybody had to start moving.

But there's some real deep truths in that in terms of people getting into their bodies and starting to feel again, and consumerism started to take on this necessity. If we were going to grow without war, I mean, yes, there was a Vietnam War. But if we weren't going to do something big time with all our productive capacities, we'd better get everybody hooked on something to buy. And I think that the 60s really do your own thing. And all these things that got people into, 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 of that, and conformity was thrown out the window, which was the good thing on one level.

But it created what we have now, is just 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 these smaller and smaller units, is the opposite of where we should 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 of favor to get into this level of hyper-individualism.

Patrick: [00:23:54] There's a nuance that you wrote about in your book around what I'll call work ethic and curiosity in education, sort of this interesting group of ideas that very much are about the individual. Obviously, curiosities vary from person to person. Can you talk about the cultivation of those things and how your own experience has led to certain beliefs about work ethic, education and the importance of curiosity?

Peter: [00:24:18] 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, and work ethic. And how do you foster work ethic? I mean, really. And what is work? 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. 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. 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.

There's this cartoon I saw once with this teacher is going down the aisle of students, and the students got this little cloud above their 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. So 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 had lived inside a home life, where somebody loved their work. And so that was instilled in me that think, okay, what can I find in my life that I'm going to really like to do. And of course, the classic, it's not work if you love it. And that made me curious, to look for what I might want to actually love to do. And dad never said, you have to be like me, other than if you find something love to do, be like me. So whatever that happens to be. Yeah. So how to bring that out is the challenge of our time with an education system that is not built to do that. And of course, Waldorf schools and there's other ways of getting kids out in nature and doing things can help. But it's a huge cultural problem.

Life and Music

Patrick: [00:27:21] I was like your dad taught by example, love teaching by example. So talk about your own early exploration of your curiosity. So obviously music is a huge part of your life. Not just music, but anything you want to talk about in the early days and your own path, just as an example of the kind of it's not just necessarily easy, it's work.

Peter: [00:27:39] Right. Yeah. I love going to the piano naturally when I was a kid. And so my mom had me taking lessons from the old lady up the street like my sister did. And I liked that to an extent. But I didn't really enjoy, first of all, playing someone else's music because I heard the songs in my head, and I was trying to figure them out and all that. And just the language of black dots on a page wasn't compelling. But I loved making stuff up. And yet, I played piano with a friend of mine when I got a little older into junior high and high school. And he was so good that I never once thought I'd be a musician. I mean, I just never even considered it.

At the same time, I was really into photography, and I got a job on a newspaper. And I was the editor of the yearbook in high school. And I basically lived in the darkroom for three years of high school, which says something about my psychological state at the time, I'm thinking. But developing negatives in a dark room in the basement says something. And that's what I thought I was going to be. And yet at some point, I went off to college, I went to Stanford because I got in. And I like to point out now that there was no money that changed hands. I got in for real.

I realized at some point that I couldn't say any picture I took somebody else couldn't have taken. I didn't feel like this certain depth of, wow, that's my expression. But with music, I'd always felt that way. Even as a kid, I thought, I just heard the song in my head and figured it out. Not that it's mine. But it came from someplace that feels authentic. And so I started to go that direction. And really what happened is in at school, two things happened. One, I was invited to a dorm because some guy was playing guitar. And he was supposed to be great. And my friend said, "You should come see this guy." And it ended up ...

I heard him and one song in particular had a true epiphany in my life, one solid epiphany. And it was then when I heard this song, I thought, oh it's about soul. It's about connection. I hadn't really realized how simple you could play and have it touch somebody. And I've been playing relatively simply my entire childhood and life, but I didn't know it could have this kind of power. I think maybe that's what I'm supposed to be doing. It turns out that guy was William Ackerman who started Windham Hill Records, George Winston, all that stuff. But he was a carpenter in Palo Alto. So it was a funny thing that I was hearing somebody that was going to take his music a lot of places.

But the other thing was that I didn't know it. But when my grandfather died, I was about five, my dad's father, and he left us all a farm, all the grandchildren, nine cousins or something. My dad hated the misallocation of capital, so he sold the farm. So I got $90,000, 600 shares, or 605, I think shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock. So suddenly I had this $90,000 and I called my parents and said, "I think I want to quit school and move to San Francisco and buy a little equipment. But most importantly, buy time with the money." And my dad was great. My parents were both great. They said, "Sure, go for it." Which gives you added emphasis to succeed, because they're like, sure. And luckily, they were paying for school so I could go back to school if I didn't. But of course, you want to.

So I moved up to San Francisco and put a little ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, bought a little equipment and just kind of stumbled my way through. And then got a few really big breaks at times, because I said yes to everything. And that's where I think that curiosity and the willingness, more than curiosity, the willingness to not feel like anything's beneath you or that you're somehow entitled. I mean, that's, again, to go back to my dad, the key in a lot of ways with him is that he doesn't feel entitled. He knows he's lucky, really lucky. He was born a white male in 1930 and had a brain wired for the market system we're now inside of. And that's why he gave all his money back, because he said, "Look, if I was in a society that allowed me to do what I love every day, that society should get its money back. It's pretty great. It's pretty obvious.

Patrick: [00:32:06] Quite an elegant thought.

Peter: [00:32:07] Right. So I grew up with that as a consciousness. So when I started out, I mean, my dad was selling stocks door to door when he was young. So I didn't think I could do anything other than just say yes to everything and work hard. And slowly, these breaks came. So that's what I did.

Patrick: [00:32:25] What has music taught you about life that you think is unique to music, meaning me who's not a musician hasn't really had a deep experience other than loving listening to music may not appreciate fully?

Peter: [00:32:36] Well, the first thing I think of is, and again, this sounds whatever it sounds, but the power of vibration. Because I perform now. I never was in a band in high school, I never had dreams or performing. But over the past 10 years, I've been performing a lot. And I do this thing called a Concert & Conversation. That's what led to the book, actually. So I do live storytelling and take questions from the audience through the whole show. And then play music in specific spots throughout. I don't play that many songs.

But people drop into a completely different place when I do. And it's funny, being, I don't even consider myself a musician, I can create the things I need to get from my head to whatever project I'm doing. But I'm not a great piano player or anything by a longshot. But it doesn't matter. Because if you can reach somebody through the vibration, really, of not only the notes, but really the intention behind the notes, I'm amazed that people can feel still in a song I play that I wrote in 1986, probably, they can feel what's behind that song. It blows my mind.

I was in Hong Kong, playing for a big group. And then I take questions after I play the song. And this Chinese guy takes a microphone, he says, "What was in that song?" And he's patting his heart and he's saying, "What was that?" And I'm thinking, that's magic. Music carries something. I mean, we sang before we talked, we all did. We danced before we talked. So the power of the voice and transmission in that kind of way is, again, we're more of that than we are this that's been with us as a species for a long time.

Patrick: [00:34:25] Do you have a most memorable question that someone's asked you at one of your Concert & Conversation series?

Peter: [00:34:31] It's funny because that is a question I get sometimes. I am sure I can think of one but the truth is, I am so in the moment in those questions because there's 300 people and I'm getting whatever I'm getting, and I couldn't tell you. I mean, sometimes right after the show, I'll debrief with the crew and say, "Okay, what just happened?" But it's been a while everything from did you get an allowance when you were a kid? To does your dad agree with what you're saying? Because I'm pretty relentless with how I talk about the world we're in because of what I see with the foundation.

Of course, my dad has seen the show multiple times and is wonderfully supportive, which is great. And yeah, so many different questions. I did 20 shows this year, and I stopped three or four times in the show for questions. And I usually take about three or four each time. Now I have somebody taking notes with the questions, because I don't remember.

Patrick: [00:35:28] It's such an interesting format. I've never seen it before. How did you alight upon the format itself?

Peter: [00:35:33] That's both the blessing and the curse of the format is that nobody has seen it before. And so to try and explain it to people, and honestly, people leave going, wow, that does not give me what ... It just happens. But I prefer, even when I rarely just stand at a podium, give a talk. But I did went up here recently, and I spoke for five minutes. And I said, "Just ask me questions. Let's just talk about what you want to talk about." It makes it interesting for me, it makes it topical in the moment with the audience I've got. And it's just more fun.

And then there's a couple things in my life, I've looked back and said, "Oh my God, that's what my dad does." And this is one of them. Because famously, at the annual meeting in Omaha, my dad take questions for six hours from 30,000 people. For whatever reason, it's in our blood somewhere that we'd prefer to be interacting and in real time. The other piece of it for me is that it shows vulnerability. I want to as a male in this society, present that. Show up vulnerable, just so people can go, wow, I thought he was going to be pontificating and whatever.

Relationships

Patrick: [00:36:46] My wife and I were, as I mentioned, before, we started recording just with our mutual friend Boyd over in Africa, and just an awesome ... It was our 10-year anniversary. So we were just spending the first big nice block of time. Our kids are a little more grown up, so we were able to get away a bit. And we found ourselves returning to this question of what makes for a good marriage and relationship, obviously 10-year anniversary, a good time to talk about these sorts of things. And as a way of sort of inching our way in this conversation back to community, I'd love to hear some things that you think you've learned about ever bigger sets of relationships.

So maybe starting with marriage, I would love to hear, and again, thinking about where you're living versus New York City and all these other things we've talked about, what would you say you think you've learned about how to proactively make a relationship, maybe specifically a marriage better?

Peter: [00:37:32] Oh, boy. There's so much in there, because I talked about this in the show, and I'll start here, I guess, is that we start out in the womb as water creatures. We're water creatures, which I find fascinating. We're water creatures, and everything's great, temperature, nutrition, all these kinds of things. And then at some point, we think we're dying, and we start pounding, and we get out of there. I feel like if we could talk at that moment, we'd say, "Who the hell's responsible for this, everything was great." But we're born into our parents stories, the cultural story, all these things we didn't ask for. And all we know is we need to survive.

So I would say, I'm going to guess within hours, we start basing what we do on the environment we're in, so we're acting. But we're acting from like day one based on the feedback we need and are getting so we can be fed and held in some way and nurtured. And so the process of figuring out who we actually are, that's why it's so hard. It's a lifelong process, because we never had an opportunity to just be us. We had to behave in accordance with the environment we were born into. And then you start getting sent into the education system, and it just goes on and on where less of us is able to know ourselves and even have the agency to figure it out.

I'm not sure if anyone listening has had perfect parents, but I don't think they exist, because they were in the same situation. And so we've got this copy of a copy of a copy of trying to figure out how to be in relationship. So Jennifer and I, about 10 years into our marriage actually, found ourselves playing a role that we believe in based on the relationships we were ... Yeah. I mean, it's just, we had a crisis. And we thought, okay, either we're going to examine this or we're going to split up and probably take all the baggage somewhere else. So we chose to do the deep work of, first of all, figuring out who we were. Who are we? What's meaningful to us? How can we be in relationship? And really unpacking all the things we'd learned mostly from our parents, but also certainly the environment. And really challenging ourselves to go as deeply into that as possible.

That allowed us, again, to start with ourselves which was the critical piece, why am I reacting the way I am? Why am I behaving the way I'm behaving? All these kinds of things. And with the sort of courage and challenge of wanting to make the relationship work with the person that I'm most intimate with, knowing, believing that it will reflect out from there. And I think the idea of fractals is real. I mean, I think things worked on multiple layers. And if you can get yourself more in right relation to who you want to be in the world, and then in relation to your partner, and then family, and then community, it builds out. And I've seen it, I mean, I can tell you, it works because I lived it. And it creates what I think of as an upward spiral.

We all know what a downward spiral can feel like. But you can get into a regenerative place where the two of you are excited about the challenge of how can I sort of stand down from my own projections and standard behavior, and check myself as I'm in relation to this other person? And even to the point where you're saying something, and you have an expectation of how that person is going to respond, because they always do it that way. That's holding them in a place that doesn't allow them to come back in a different way. And so it's super subtle.

I think there's science out there that says there's a half second between all the information that's coming to us and our meaning making of it, there's this half second delay. I think about hacking the half second, essentially getting into that half second, where you've got that's your moment to say, wait a minute, is this really me? Am I really reacting or projecting or whatever it is, the way I want to in the world? And it takes presence. It's huge.

Patrick: [00:42:03] Do you think that there's a common set of things that are most commonly in the way of someone doing that first step? I think the word work is appropriate here, right? It's definitely not easy on themselves first, even prior to the relationship thing. So what is so in the way of us being ourselves? That seems like a crazy question.

Peter: [00:42:20] Yeah. It's the environment we're in. The environment, the culture now is, again, clearly with education, first and foremost, but then the weapons of mass distraction, which is another phrase I love, is constant. It's like in recording as a signal to noise ratio, we're recording this the hottest signal possible so the noise from the fans or the outside world doesn't get in there. And the noise is everywhere in our lives. And the signal if you want to call it, what's coming from your heart or your gut, not from your brain, but from other factors in your body gets drowned out by all the noise. So it's not a single thing. It's the collection.

I can't remember, 150, 200 years ago, we were all farming. We all sort of knew not only what our neighbors were doing, but what we had to do to survive. And we knew that the kids and the mom and the dad, everybody was working towards some common purpose, which is basically to stay alive. And the house was a unit of production. It made what it needed or it traded and bartered. It was not a unit of consumption, which is what it is now. Now you work to go out and get the things you need and bring them back. We're so flipped in terms of, again, the species out of context of who we actually are, that we're constantly searching for that, for who are we?

And that again, that's why I think the level of suicides and opioids and all the rest of it, just loneliness is so huge. And it's why things like Facebook take off because it's this full version of connecting. But it's not being in the same room. It's not feeling the feelings that you have when you're with somebody. Yeah. So we I think, and that's why I feel we're in collapse. We have gone so off the rails in terms of having a life that gives us a sense of purpose and agency. People think, yeah, but it was so much harder. It was just life back then. In reference to now, it's harder.

But now we're living in this convenience cycle that's going to kill us because our DNA, I guarantee when it goes into grocery store, it's doing backflips going, I can't believe all this stuff is available. So we're excited about water on tap, refrigeration. Like all these things we haven't even begun to process as more and more come online, literally online. And so to figure out who you are in all of that, you're just buried by noise and some of it feels good. A lot of it feels good. So that makes it even harder to shed. But I know who I am more clearly when I'm sitting in the creek. And that sounds, I don't know how it sounds, but it sounds simple and maybe like, no, there's got to be more to it. But I don't think there is really.

Patrick: [00:45:10] Take you one step further out from a spouse relationship to that have relationship with friends, what have you learned about being a good friend?

Peter: [00:45:18] Well, I'll start with listening. I think the best kind of friend is one that can listen and connect to your story or feelings or what you're experiencing, and then reflect back something that is either helpful to them in some, whether it's sympathetic or challenging or a critical way. Somebody said once, the thing they'd hope to be in life is a welcome addition. And a welcome addition can take a lot of forms. You can be critical, and that's a welcome addition, it doesn't have to always be nice.

I think the best kind of friend is one that can listen and connect to your story or feelings or what you're experiencing, and then reflect back something that is either helpful to them in some, whether it's sympathetic or challenging or a critical way.

So to be a good friend, I think is to be a welcome addition, to be something in that person's life where it's regenerative too. That it's not just about them, but it's about what's in between. I think that God isn't in anything. It's between everything. I think God is here between us. It's the relationship. And that's true on the molecular level or the Galactic level is that it's the interplay between things. And so an interplay is a good word. I mean, you want to have it be playful and joyful, even if it's hard, it can still give you something that feels good.

Patrick: [00:46:29] It's right there in the mission you mentioned earlier, extraction versus collaboration. Sort of the same idea.

Peter: [00:46:34] Exactly.

Patrick: [00:46:35] I'm curious also, the value as you get now to a community, the size say of Kingston. I think you said 23,000 people.

Peter: [00:46:41] Yeah.

Patrick: [00:46:42] What that then likes to look like now. So friendship and spouse relationship seem like manageable to me. A relationship with a community even that big, even though that's a small town, it seems daunting. So how might one person hope to have an impact on a community of that size?

Peter: [00:46:56] Well, it's never going to be one person. I mean, that's part of it. Is you find people in the community that have the same, somewhat like-minded. They don't have to think the way you think but there's a certain like soulfulness more than mindedness, where they want to be a part of a thriving place that nurtures people and makes people feel safe or it gives them the opportunity to. So you find the others, as Timothy Leary famously said, find the others. And the more you know yourself, the more you can find the others. You have to start with yourself always, always, always, that's the bottom line. And then through that, you can start to find people that resonate with that. And you get some kind of a cohesion.

I'm not sure yet whether you can do it in a community of 23,000 people. So we're starting at a neighborhood. And some things affect the whole community, but most things are still .... Like in Detroit, they call them neighborhood tiles, I think, where you just start with small units, and get the feeling there. And then you start to not exactly replicate it. But learn the lessons of that and find out how you can create the conditions again for it to happen somewhere else. And it's complicated. I could say foundations are going to do this in all these places. But if I'm not having the felt experience of doing it here, and seeing the complexities of it, and recognizing the power in different people doing different things, so it's really that. It's finding the others.

And it helps to have like-minded government. It helps to have certain people in place that can at least not hinder some of the things you're doing. But what we're doing here, again, it's ecosystemic. Its food, its education, it's healthcare, it's childcare and transportation. There's a radio station that we essentially the foundation is supporting to be the fire. I call it the Farm the Food, of course, and the radio station, the Fire, which everybody gathers around to hear stories and talk. And with those two bookends, then you start to fill in all the wants and needs and whatever the community may need by talking to yourself and learning from each other.

Patrick: [00:49:10] I might call this episode, first make your own music. Something like that.

Peter: [00:49:14] Exactly.

Patrick: [00:49:15] This notion that it has to-

Peter: [00:49:16] Find your note.

Patrick: [00:49:17] Find your note has to start with you is really compelling. Since you've obviously done so much work in the philanthropic field and are clearly intimately familiar with it, I'm curious what the dark sides of it that you've discovered, not with yours, but more generally speaking, whether that be weird signaling devices or nefarious use of these things, what should those interested in this topic of which I'm meeting more and more people be aware of?

Peter: [00:49:39] Read my op-ed from 2013. I had no idea but it was the shot heard around the world. I really, I'd just come from this big philanthropic conference, and just so frankly disgusted by all these mostly white rich guys saying what's the ROI and how do we do this, we can figure it out, and they cause most of the problems. And so, the number one thing is that we're in a world Philanthropy has to exist, which I find problematic and yet here we are. Most people in philanthropy don't really want to just put themselves out of business, which is exactly what they should be going to work every day thinking is, how can I not have a job tomorrow?

And yet, it's this legacy and the trap of it is, and this is true of activists this is to true on both sides of the coin with both foundations and then the organizations they support, it feels so good to be passionate about fighting against something and have a reason to say this has got to end, this has got to stop. And yet, and this is hard and we're really just coming to this now, if you're fighting against something, you're giving that thing energy. You're giving it your energy and you're saying it's legitimate because you're fighting it. And our greatest challenge with the work is to say, we have to build outside the fight, we have to find out what this world needs, what our species needs. The world is going to be fine.

Somebody said the other day, this is not the Earth's first rodeo. It's been through meteors hitting it and all sorts of things, it will survive. We may not or certainly we won't at the level we are now. And it's because of all those externalities you've mentioned before. We live in this world where externalities are just, they're not considered really in a lot of ways. So the trap of philanthropic work is it's sort of seductive power of feeling like you're doing something good. And that doesn't mean people shouldn't try in different ways. But it can blow you into this sense of look, we're reducing poverty, and then you start to look at the particulars of that. And we are overloaded.

I did 20 cities this year with my show. And each one I went into the community for a couple hours just to see some of the social service organizations and different things. And we are beyond maxed out with the homelessness and poverty and food insecurity and all these things. Nobody can keep up with the demand of the displacement and the poverty, for lack of a better word. And I see social service organizations saying, well, again, workforce development, get them to consolidate loans, or get them into this, or get them into that. And it feels like they're just shunting them, pushing them into this system that will just keep these cogs and these wheels turning. And yet, in real time, right now, people need help, obviously.

So our job, I feel like, is to try and build a lifeboat, build little bits of community here and there, where people will feel different, feel they have agency over their own lives, which is very different than just getting a job. Yeah. But the challenge with philanthropy is it's the seductive nature of thinking you're fighting against something and that you might win. One activist that has sort of flipped her whole script in terms of her purpose, said, a win inside the system isn't a win. It's really hard to fully accept that and figure out what to do.

Patrick: [00:53:20] Have you seen this guy, I think his name is Chris [Orotate] who used to be a, I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, he used to be a Wall Street options trader or something, derivatives trader. He left his job and started going into underprivileged communities taking pictures. And he alighted upon McDonald's as the place that he liked to go because it was this interesting structure for community in local areas. He came up with this fabulous book, I mean, the photos are kind of breathtaking. But it strikes me that almost everyone that talks about this in a grand way has never been to one of those McDonald's.

Peter: [00:53:48] No. Exactly.

Patrick: [00:53:50] Particular or again.

Peter: [00:53:51] Yeah. When we got the big bang in 2006, Jennifer and I spent three or four years just soaking up everything we could to learn. And so we went to Monrovia and Freetown, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh and places in India that none of them are on the list of vacation spots by a mile. We essentially got a chance to look under the covers of the global market system. And it's stunning. I mean, when you fly into Monrovia, Liberia, I don't know what the population is. But it's big. Hundreds of thousands of people certainly. And you're finding it at night and it's dark. That's the first thing you know. You're like, oh my god, there's 300,000 people down there and it's dark.

And then you get on the ground and you see people doing whatever they have to do to survive another day. And it's that classic line that if hard work major rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. I mean, you see that level of really of what this side of the world lives on. This gets back to convenience. We love our cell phones and love this and love that and the shirts and half of them are coming from Bangladesh or somewhere else for a terrible wage labor. But again, in my show, I hold up my phone and I say, "Right now there are villages being destroyed and women being raped to control the mineral in this phone and I didn't pay for it."

And I've been to fields in Florida where the tomato pickers are being treated horrifically. And the tomatoes are sold 45 minutes away in a grocery store and nobody knows it's the particular again, nobody knows where that came from. It's hard for me on the road to basically eat anything, because I look at a cherry tomato or I look at a piece of lettuce or I look at these things, and I think what's the supply chain that this is connected to and who is being treated less than human? And almost anything we buy, you can trace back to somebody not being treated well.

Patrick: [00:55:54] If you could send everyone in the world to one spot to one physical place to maybe learn from where they go, where would you send them?

Peter: [00:56:03] Let's see. I think of a garment factory. Because we're all, I guarantee you, every one of us is wearing clothes that was made someplace that if you ... And I would say not just go there, but live that life for three days. Not that I've done that, but I've looked inside those lives. And I would say the same thing, Immokalee in Florida, you go there and that's where a whole lot of tomatoes come from. And you look at 12 to a trailer where the rent is ... And there's a company store and one person owns all this stuff. And they're just extracting from these people that are putting food on our table. So there's a lot of places you could go, honestly. I mean, you don't have to go halfway around the world to see some pretty egregious behavior.

In fact, when you get into things like trafficking, you can go to any truck stop and see things that should never be happening. It's everywhere. That's what has blown my mind. And that's why I had to look at history to figure out how the hell did we get here because this is not good. And you can pretty much look at reconstruction, post-Civil War, and it's all there. I mean, if you dive into that aspect of our history. But you can also look at Columbus's first journals, and it's all there, this country was built for exactly what we're doing.

People think, oh my god, how did Donald Trump happen? Are you kidding? He's the perfect distillation of what this country represents, actually. I think whatever's happening is what needs to happen. So I'm not anti-anything. I'm like, well, this is what we got. But yeah, you can go a lot of places and it's not hard if you look, but it's hard to look, frankly.

Patrick: [00:57:46] There's this amazing book called The Body Keeps the Score, it's medical book, but it's about the ways in which traumas of varying levels of intensity manifest in the body. So I've kind of a question around the relationship between individual traumas, you've talked a lot about sort of collective trauma, let's say, what did you say, a species out of context, it's like trauma writ large may be accurate. I love this notion of finding your note. And maybe if anyone takes anything away from this, listening to this, it's hopefully in that direction of more towards your note and away from sort of a general prescription. Any kind of closing thoughts on that process, whether or not trauma is a part of that, recognizing your own trauma, but things that you found in yourself or in others close to you have allowed for that sort of note flourishing.

Peter: [00:58:32] I would say, first of all, describing us being water creatures and popping out in the world, that's highly traumatic. So there's a lot to be said, for birth trauma. Even though when I would hear someone say that it's whatever, we all do it, but it's actually extremely-

Patrick: [00:58:46] The first major rite of passage.

Peter: [00:58:47] That is massive, and I don't think we really give that enough credit or whatever the word would be. But then what I really feel is that we are all and now more than ever, probably, or maybe not, but we are all walking wounded. We all have these traumas. There's this thing called the ACE score, the Adverse Childhood Experiences. That is a scientific medical test that you fill it out, it can lead to an understanding of what physical manifestations of trauma might be later in life. So they've linked certain things with certain physical issues later. But I think that is that story of maybe anytime, but certainly our time is the kind of unresolved but even unexamined traumas that we have experienced.

I cannot tell you, I'm again, getting into the foundation and hearing about the level of abuse, physical, verbal, sexual abuse of children and adults and how high that is. I don't think there's any other species that does what we do to our young. I might be wrong. There might be invertebrates that eat their own young and various things. But in terms of warm-blooded animals, I don't think anybody does what we do to our own. And I don't understand that. So all do the point, the only way to find your note is to get the dissonance which would be trauma out of the way so you can hear whatever is harmonically resonant in you to just keep the metaphor alive.

It's not necessarily through talk therapy or something, it's going to be different for everyone. I find it fascinating that there's so much more talk in this culture now, plant medicines and things that Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind-

Patrick: [01:00:39] Talk about a rupture in the conversation that guy created.

Peter: [01:00:41] Oh, my God, and I will tell you, and it's from my own personal experience, that it changed my life to have these experiences and realize and I know so many other people. And it's considered this counterculture, scary all this stuff.

Patrick: [01:00:57] Way more common than people think, yeah.

Peter: [01:00:59] Way more common than people think. And much more utilized until it was outlawed, essentially, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, there were different what you would call drugs. It's a different world.

Patrick: [01:01:12] Pollan's book, its way into that history.

Peter: [01:01:14] Yeah, it's fascinating and true. And I think that each one of us in our way, and it may not be that way, there are other ways, but need to be jolted awake. And that doesn't have to be traumatic. What it actually does is allows you to see your own personal story and traumas at a scale where you can look at it, it's kind of shrinks it down, and you understand it better, and you understand where it came from, and you get knowledge around it where you can sort of say, okay, that's not me. Actually, that's the thing that happened to me.

Whatever form it takes, recognizing that we all carry something, I was incredibly fortunate not to have abuse in the family, basically, that in any form. But it's rampant in this country and the world, really. And of course, the system itself is abusive to so many. So to have the luxury of self-reflection and a moment to think who am I and how do I figure this out more, it is a luxury. We have created a system where there's no slack in it, there's no free time to consider.

Patrick: [01:02:23] What has you most interested and excited right now? What is the issue or thing that you are spending a lot of your time thinking about?

Peter: [01:02:32] I'm certainly spending a lot of my time here in Kingston thinking about, okay, what are some of the levers that I can pull on that help release? I have a funny saying for the foundation is, NoVo Foundation, putting money out of its misery. And so the idea of how do we put money out of its misery? Because money is just energy and where you put it is what happens, and it does not like being held up and not being able to do whatever it does, if I may anthropomorphize money for a minute. So what's exciting is to figure out, okay, where can we release money into systems and structures that aren't part of the system and structure? Who's doing the imaginative, creative? Because we're only going to imagine ourselves out of this.

There's a great phrase, "If you don't use your imagination, someone else will." And that's what's happening, is our imagination has been hijacked and every screen is just taking it further. But if we have the time, which most people don't have, because of debt slavery, which I believe is absolutely the thing, those of us who are lucky enough to have the time should be working on cultivating our own imagination, so that we can start to think outside the structures that have created what most people are a slave to, what most people are indebted to in some way. So that's what excites me, is looking for the others.

Those of us who are lucky enough to have the time should be working on cultivating our own imagination, so that we can start to think outside the structures that have created what most people are a slave to, what most people are indebted to in some way.

And then thinking myself because it's funny, I did music my entire life. And now music is less important to me because Kingston's the creative act like it to try things with others. It's not me coming in and stepping all over town and saying do this, do that. It's listening and learning and feeding where I think I can feed with the resources what I hope is a different way of being in the world for the community.

Patrick: [01:04:27] Maybe we'll call it creating upward spirals instead.

Peter: [01:04:29] Yes. Upward spiral, it's for real because I-

Patrick: [01:04:32] A wonderful metaphor.

Peter: [01:04:32] Yeah. And I felt it personally in my own life. I felt it in the relationship with Jennifer and I felt it in this community as we've resourced it and really just put water into good soil. So yeah.

Patrick: [01:04:45] Obviously, you've got a well known father, but it sounds like a wonderful family just more generally speaking your own and when you've created. Any closing thoughts or lessons from what you've learned from any of them.

Peter: [01:04:55] It's so funny. It's like when I do by show, I want the answer to be just solid. Because it's the chance to have the solid answer. And that is a big one because I think of, again, vulnerability and willingness to not know and open to the possibility of what someone else might bring you if you aren't already projecting your own thing on them. Whether it's my family, Jennifer, the community, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I'll meet somebody and have some kind of little judgment. And then 20 minutes later I go, "Oh, my God, what a jerk I was to think this about that person. They've actually been through all this or they're bringing all this to this."

So it's really dropping the projections, it's dropping the story and recognizing that here we are in real time, and anything's possible if we allow it to be. We'll be let down. But instead of all the letdowns creating a wall, just go, okay, well, that wasn't perfect. And let that slide by and try again and be open. The cellist I worked with is extraordinary. So it's myself on piano, and the guy on cello in my show. And Michael, is truly an alien. If you don't believe in aliens, meet Michael and it'll change your mind. He's phenomenal. But I've been with him for 20 years now in various ways with shows. We've doing this one for over 10.

He will come in contact with every single person I've ever seen, the cab driver, the woman changing out the buffet at the breakfast in the hotel, every single person. And the first thing he'll do is ask them their name. And they'll say their name, and then he'll spell it back to them, especially if it's kind of a funny little name. And then there'll be some kind of laughter around, he got it right, he got it wrong. And then he'll ask them where they're from. I cannot tell you how that opens people up.

I will test it out sometimes whether it's I'm done a breakfast first at the hotel and the server's kind of shut down and just do anything. And I thought, watch this. And Michael shows up, and she's telling us about her trip to Italy. And there's like all this stuff. And all he did was ask her name. It's not that hard to connect, but you have to be willing to do it, and then just see where it goes.

Patrick: [01:07:21] In the spirit of connection, I think you'll like my closing question. So you're not 157th person that I've asked this. Which is for the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

Peter: [01:07:31] I would say that would be Jennifer and that it's sticking with me. That is absolutely. Because I, through necessity, and this is what you learn in life, I guess, is that you do ... There's a great Gospel of Thomas, I forget that, but Jennifer quotes it all the time. "That which you do not bring forth from within you will destroy you. And that which you do bring forth from within you will save you."

And so if you're sleepwalking through life and not even know you're sleepwalking, which is often the case as it was with me, I was a nice guy, I was outwardly, nothing wrong. But I realized I was living inside this frame that was flawed in terms of the relationship with her. And essentially, I blew it up, blew it up big time. She knew there was something deeper there, more important there that we were destined for where we are now and was kind enough to, not that it was easy, but kind enough to see that and stick with me.

Patrick: [01:08:30] Often, I judge these conversations based on, will I go do something differently, or did this jar me a little bit and this one certainly did. So I really I'm appreciative of your openness and honesty and just a fantastic conversation. So thank you for your time.

Peter: [01:08:43] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Transcript by @ScarrottKalani