The conversation took place the morning of July 6, 2010.

MR  Good morning, I’m pleased to be speaking with you. Thank you.

PB  It’s a pleasure that you want to have a conversation. Thank you.

MR   I read your book (Life Is What You Make It) and it really touched me, particularly the section on success. I want my son to read the book. Just imagine him going through life without the pressure of having to define success in terms of dollars.

PB  Exactly. Whether he’s fully ready for the messages right now or not, you can certainly get across a lot of the points and then he may be ready for it. I did try and make the book easy enough to read. It makes it easier for younger people.

MR   I’ve been reading about Jennifer and her work with your foundation. How long have you been married and where do you reside?

PB  We live in New York and we have been married—it’s so much more fun to say that next year it will be 15 years. We’ve been together 19 years.

MR   Do you have children?

PB   We do not together. I have adopted twin daughters from my previous marriage. They are 34 years old. I was married when I was 22 to a woman who had four-year-old twin girls.

MR   What does Jennifer like to focus on in her life?

PB  She is really running the foundation. The first part of our relationship was, quite frankly, very much about supporting me. She was a wonderfully supportive person in terms of making it possible for me to do the things I did and focus the way I focused. She did things herself, but I guess it was much more old fashioned—traditional in a way. It’s been tremendous to see her really dig into the foundation work. She just loves it. She was doing that for a while in a smaller way for us, but since 2006 when the foundation got really big, she’s been running it and just loving it.

MR   What happened in 2006?

PB  That’s when my dad made this giant pledge of money to the Gates Foundation and to my sister, my brother and myself.

MR   I want to talk about the foundation, but first I would like to ask a couple more questions about you and Jennifer. What do the two of you like to do together? How do you spend your Saturday evenings?

PB  Doing as little as possible, frankly, because we have such busy and engaging lives in terms of the foundation work and the music and various things we’re doing. When we have down time we do very little. We were very lucky to have found an old stone house about two hours north of New York City that we go to. Jennifer plants in the garden and we just sit around and do very little.

MR   Sounds wonderful. I imagine you really enjoy your time together.

PB  We do. And it gives us a chance to catch up on each other’s lives because she’s so engaged with the foundation. I used to be, but now with the book and shows and the things I’m doing—it allows us time to catch up about what’s happening.

MR   Does she ever travel with you?

PB   She generally has too much to do. For instance, right now she’s on her way to India for the foundation work. Sometimes, quite often actually, she’ll travel for the foundation and I’m not able to go along. Again, it’s more the reason, when we have a Saturday night, to just hang out together.

MR   I’d like to talk about you and your dad. Several years ago, Charlie Rose interviewed your father [Warren Buffett] and Bill and Melinda Gates. It brought so much attention to the very down-to-earth person that your dad is. It was my first close-up glimpse at him, and it certainly changed my impression. When you first became aware that your dad was a wealthy and prominent person, you were a young man, is that right?

PB  Right. I mean—and this is just a testament to my parent’s values—overall, growing up, my dad was just busy doing what he did and he loved it. And that’s what we saw—somebody really engaged in his work and enjoying it. It didn’t seem like work, frankly.
    First of all, he really wasn’t prominent and with a lot of money when we were young. He, relatively speaking, did well and it kept growing, but we never saw it. It was not displayed and it was not the point of him working. It was not to make a lot of money, therefore it really didn’t matter to him. He just kept doing what he did. It wasn’t until the ’80s—I was well into my twenties for sure— before there was any sense of public knowledge of who he was and what he had accomplished. Even then, it was mostly in financial circles. It really hasn’t been until the last maybe 10 years that he has become prominent on a world stage, at least in my mind. He’s been just my dad.
    I go with him to a function in Washington every couple of years. The last one was last January and I just said, “Wow! Is this different!” Now we walk through the lobby of a hotel and he’s stopped constantly, and a few years before that, it wasn’t the case.

MR   Many great investors that I’ve read about feel that money they generate should eventually be returned to society, and your dad said he feels that way as well. When did you find out that your dad wouldn’t be gifting you with any of it for your personal use?

PB  You know, I’m not sure, and again I think it’s because I never assumed I would get anything, so it sort of turns the thing on its head in a way because I never really thought I should get some of his wealth. I didn’t think he was wealthy growing up, and certainly the accumulation of the money didn’t matter—I didn’t see it. So there wasn’t some desire to either have it or have the things that money could buy because, in our family, we weren’t covetous of things. We didn’t see that in our daily life, so it was never encouraged to say, “Boy you need a lot of money to buy a lot of stuff.” Because that wasn’t in our psyche when we were young, as I got older and the amount of wealth he accumulated became more obvious and bigger, I wasn’t thinking, “I’d sure like some of that!” because that didn’t really make sense to me—I had my own life, I was making money writing music, I was doing what I loved. It’s like, THAT’S what I like doing.
    Obviously, all of this led to the book. Life is about life. It’s not about money, itself—and I liked my life. I guess, somewhere here and there, at the dinner table and different times in conversation, we also knew that my dad didn’t believe in giving the money to his kids. Again, that was okay. That was his held belief. In fact I was sort of proud of it. I thought, “This is so cool that my dad has these greater values,” and he knows that he was born in a time and place and culture and [of a] color and gender that allowed him to just do what he loves and it happened to make a lot of money. So it seems silly—because this world allowed him to do what he loved—not to give the money back to this world, right? It’s like returning the favor, basically.

MR   This could be a tremendous influence on our young people in finding their passion.

PB  I hope so. And again, for me the book and being able to talk like this—I’m really just amplifying my parent’s values. And I’m thrilled that I get the forum to do that…

MR   As small as it [Java Journal] may be?

PB  You never know. If this article touches one person, then all the better. That’s why, for me it’s not about having the biggest bullhorn. It’s really about talking to people who want to hear it and spread the word.

MR   I understand wanting to spread a good message.

PB  That’s what gets us up every morning— thinking, “Okay, there’s a purpose for me out there,” and I think following that is incredibly important.

MR   Your parents were advocates of children finding their own way, and I think this is a really important part of the book. Even though they supported your decisions, did you feel that you had to break free and become your own person and step out of—maybe shadow isn’t the right word…

PB   I would say, no, and that’s often a surprise. People think that either I was struggling with that or my dad might be a little disappointed that I didn’t go into his field. My parents were saying, “Do what’s right for you, do what you love, you’re unique.” So there certainly wasn’t pressure to go into what he was into. I feel that instead of breaking free, I was actually following the same path—which is to say my dad just did what he loved.
    So if I could actually find something that I loved, then I’d be doing the same thing my dad did. And I did—I found music and was able to make a living at it. I made similar choices as my dad in terms of not moving to LA after Dances With Wolves and thinking I had to be in the middle of everyone else’s world with film composing, much like my dad didn’t go to Wall Street. He followed his own path and his own voice. I made a lot of the same decisions, and have done a lot of the same things in a completely different field, but it wasn’t an attempt to be different from him. It was actually an attempt to be the same.

MR   There’s a passage in the book where he said something like, “You and I are doing the same thing.”

PB   We DO the same things. It’s his canvas. He goes and paints a little every day. And for me, it’s the creative work. He said, “You know, we do the same things.”

MR   Your dad gave you a billion dollars to manage and to use to help others. You started NoVo Foundation that works to empower women and girls. Why is empowering women and girls important to you?

PB   It’s the main focus, but not the sole focus, because the real thing we’re trying to get to with the foundation is, what’s the systemic problem here, with the world being what we consider to be out of balance? You might see it as the social environment as opposed to the natural environment. Our social environment is out of balance, and it’s been based in this world of domination and exploitation and control and what you might consider masculine characteristics for thousands of years.
    So we thought, how can we shift this. And you think about collaboration and partnership and nurturing and complexity and mysterious things that make up what you might consider to be feminine qualities. It’s not always about gender. It’s certainly not men versus women. It’s men and women working together to create a better world.
    You think about that and then you look at philanthropy and where you can put your money. You hear story after story about how you give an amount of money to a girl or a woman and it goes back into her family and her community, and how that just ripples out for generations, potentially. You give the same amount of money to a man, it rarely has the same effect. That’s just mostly anecdotal evidence and people could zero in on proof, but you hear it enough and you see it in action enough. You support a girl and you’re automatically supporting a generation and it does extraordinary things.
    We’re certainly working with boys and men and working in early education, doing things that will hopefully support everyone in becoming a more nurturing and empathetic person. But in terms of developing world work in particular, getting to the girls is the most efficient way, because we look at the foundation money as an investment—where we are going to get the greatest return? And that doesn’t mean money, of course. It means social change and hopefully improving the lives of people—and girls are just the most efficient investment.

MR   Someone from the United States, looking at a third world country, sees the gap between where they are and where we are. But to them, perhaps the gap is not so wide. So understanding the culture that you’re working within is certainly a part of the challenge.

PB   For sure. I have a term I use often, which is philanthropic colonialism—the idea that we somehow know better, and we want to go in and make other people more like us, which is just completely wrong. We have to meet everyone where they are and realize that they have a whole world that has value and potential, and it’s really unlocking that. It’s not going in there and saying, “Oh this is so sad that you only have this.” You go over there and realize these lives are incredibly rich with other things, but we live in a structure where there’s a lot of people who can’t get basic needs met because they don’t have the educational or economic empowerment they need to unlock their own potential.

MR   That reminds me of the part of your book where you’re talking about how horrifying it is to think about the arrogance involved in what happened to the Native Americans.

PB   Right. Perfect example. And talk about poverty—there’s nothing more depressing or sad than to visit a reservation in the Midwest. But really a lot of reservations are incredibly impoverished. It’s because, for whatever reason, when the Europeans came over here, they did not see the incredible value that was there with indigenous people, and that’s true all around the world. There are indigenous tribes being wiped out constantly because of the need for resources. There again it’s the exploitation part around the world that needs to be checked a little bit.

MR   Can you tell me about some organizations that you’re looking at supporting now through NoVo?

PB   There are a lot of them, and our general strategy is to work with intermediaries. So for instance, we met the woman who runs the Nike Foundation, and she was so passionate and so intelligent around the work with adolescent girls. She had a staff in place, the strategies in place, the partner she was going to work with, which are on the ground—the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] in the developing countries, the people who are working with the girls. She had this whole idea mapped out. We said, “Well, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel—let’s invest in you, let’s do this work together.” So a lot of what we do is find the larger organizations that are already doing the kind of work that we feel is important in the world and support them, because we want to run out of money, frankly. We want to use our money to support the field so that when we’re gone, the field is stronger.
    We don’t want a foundation that’s around forever. We want to get the money out there and get it working effectively. We rarely invest directly in the work on the ground, but we’re working through organizations that have the staff and the capacity to really know who’s doing great work.
    It’s also similar to my dad’s investment philosophy. He’ll find a business with great managers—he doesn’t want to go in there and work hard at changing something. He wants to find the things that work already. That’s really the approach we take with the philanthropic dollars.

MR   Do you choose the organizations you fund geographically, that is do you spread it around or how does that happen?

PB   Some people ask if we work just domestically or internationally. And I say, “It’s one big world, and we try and find great leaders that are aligned with our vision and support them.” They might be in Chicago and they might be in Bangladesh. The key is to try and identify the people that are really doing the kind of work that we feel is important and support them.

MR   I’d like to talk about your music. You’ve certainly written some beautiful music, and honestly, through this whole process I’ve become more acquainted it. You wrote the music for that very beautiful fire dance scene in Dances With Wolves, I’m sure you hear that regularly…

PB   It’s fun to have two minutes that almost everybody on the planet remembers.

MR   And you wrote two scores for The Scarlet Letter.

PB   Yep. Worked on that as well. And the television score for 500 Nations which was eight hours. That’s probably the longest thing I’ve ever done. Pure heft!

MR   What was that like?

PB   It was after Dances With Wolves. A friend of Kevin Costner’s said, “Look, you have just rejiggered the American psyche with this film, and you need to follow it up with some history.” Kevin agreed, and this guy went on to direct an eight-hour television series called 500 Nations. It probably is the most definitive history of the North American Indian Nation. He asked if I would score it. So I went from two minutes in Dances With Wolves to eight hours of television, and it was just fascinating. I worked probably eight months on that in Los Angeles, and it deepened relationships with Native American artists and certainly my knowledge of the history and all sorts of things. It was just a great, great experience.

MR   What do you like to do the most? Did you like 500 Nations and those eight hours?

PB   Yes, I love a challenge. That’s probably what it gets down to. I love a challenge in whatever form that happens to come. I usually go for it. It doesn’t mean I’m excited about it. Sometimes I moan and groan, but ultimately it’s what I look for.

MR   What inspires you in your music?

PB   It’s probably changed over time, because at first it was just so exciting to be able to make a living and write music. So commercials—having the deadline of commercials and having the challenge of meeting someone else’s need by writing music that they’ve needed as opposed to what I wanted to do—it’s a very different thing. You’re in a service industry, basically, so that was its own challenge, having a deadline and serving a client.
    Film isn’t terribly different from that. You’re still serving the story and the director and you have a deadline, but you’re not selling a product—you’re helping tell a story.
    When you get into writing music for your own sake, like the songs I’ve been writing recently, it’s inspiring because you’re learning something about the world and you want to put it into a condensed form that other people might learn, too. My song, Plastic Tomb, for instance—I’m affected by being out in nature and then having to go into a big box store for something and it’s such a shock. I write a song about it, and then I learn about the North Pacific Gyre where all this plastic is, and I make a video that kind of encapsulates that, and that’s fulfilling for a different reason. It feels more personal in some ways, for sure.

MR   I had a thought about you writing a particular song—I’m going back to this social idea of success. I want my son to be more aware of your ideas about success, and wouldn’t it be great if you wrote a song about that—maybe you have?

PB   Sort of. I’ve written it about my own experience. Also, when I was 19 and I wanted to write songs, I did it for a little while, and I didn’t have anything to write about. I didn’t have the life experience yet. There are certainly those prodigies that just come out writing these brilliant songs. I was not one of them. I would write a lot of instrumental things and I was tuned into something where I would hear music in my head and I’d play these songs on the piano from when I was a kid, but in terms of narrative heft—something important to say—it took me a while. That’s why I got into instrumentals and writing music for commercials—I didn’t really have that point of view that was refined enough to really bring out until much later in my life.

MR I keep thinking that about my son—  maybe one day he’ll move on from heavy metal music. But I’m trying to appreciate it.

PB   And to some extent in teenage years it’s our need to find our tribe. We all experiment with different things to say, “Where do I belong, what’s my tribe?” And so heavy metal is definitely a tribe.

MR   Okay (much laugher between us).

PB   So just look at it as him testing the waters a little bit.

MR   I’m so proud of my son. I hear people talking about teenage years and, honestly, the biggest problem that we have is really about me going with the flow.

PB   It’s so great that you think that way, because you’re self-correcting as opposed to thinking it’s all about him, in terms of the problem.

MR   I don’t think children are really the problem, for the most part, but we blame our kids for so many things.

PB   They don’t come into the world loaded with baggage. That’s great—recognition of these kinds of things—because then it turns to a personal responsibility of, “What am I doing to contribute to this?” And there’s not nearly enough of that in our world.

MR   Oh, that’s it. When there’s a problem at home, I’m usually participating in it.

PB   Even if you ignore it, that’s participation.

MR   I read that in 1999 you did a benefit concert for Robert Redford and his son, Jamie. You collaborated with Hawk Pope, chief of the United Remnant Band of the Shawnee Nation. Then you collaborated with Pope on a PBS special titled, Spirit. Can you talk about your experience collaborating with Hawk Pope?

PB   Sure. I actually met him during the 500 Nations work. That was back in ’93/’94. The film editor on 500 Nations was using a CD with his voice on it for some of the music while they were working on editing. The editors work with music that already exists just to get a feel for it. The director heard his voice and said, “Wow, that is something special, let’s find him.” So we did, and we brought him out to LA and he recorded some things. We had a couple of conversations and we got along right away. We ended up—it was sort of this match made in heaven, where he was singing these songs that were many generations old and I was creating this music for this score that, of course, was brand-new, and the combination was just really special.
    We kept up the relationship, and he had written a song with his cousin called, Hidden Heritage. It’s a song that basically says there are so many of us who have native blood and we don’t know it, and we feel disconnected. His cousin realized that her great grandmother or some relative was native, and she had the blood, and nobody talked about it. It spoke to this bigger idea of disconnection and how so many of us feel that way, regardless of whether we have native blood or whatever else. I got excited about this particular song and its meaning, and I kind of pulled it all apart and put it back together and we came up with the cornerstone for this show, Spirit.
    Then we performed together at an event for Jamie Redford—Robert Redford was there as well. It was a benefit, and it just kept growing and turned into this show, Spirit, that was a PBS special. And then we went on and toured it. My greatest accomplishment with that show was getting it on the [National] Mall in Washington. It was quite an adventure. He’s a friend to this day. We stay in contact, and the Spirit show may actually end up going to China. There are all sorts of things that may happen with it, but it was such a profound experience to have him as a friend and a teacher really, throughout the time when I was developing the show.

MR   I’d like to hear that music.

PB  500 Nations is available on Amazon. There are different versions—the two-hour version as well as the full set. And the Spirit show is available through Amazon and through my website.

MR   How do you feel about the music industry today?

PB   The industry used to be about music and developing artists and nurturing, and again, kind of those feminine values, I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it really was about the music. And even the executives were turned on by the music and how to expose it to more people. And this was the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s. Then it became such a big money-maker that it became about quarterly reports and the various things that run a lot of businesses. So it’s about the hits and how do we squeeze more money out of this faster. It sort of just ate itself alive in a way, because it became about something other than the music.
     Then digital technology came along, which just kind of kicked it real hard when it was down. Suddenly, anyone can make music, so you don’t need a big advance from a record label to go into a big fancy studio. You can make a record in your bedroom and you can press a button on your computer and get world-wide distribution, as opposed to needing big trucks and record stores to move music around. In one fell swoop, the whole model was essentially destroyed.
    It took a while for it to start to fall down, which is what’s happening now. But in about 2000 to 2002, all the writing was on the wall. And the problem is that the record labels kept fighting it because they couldn’t imagine a world that wasn’t based on what they already knew, which is common. We all take some comfort in knowing that we’re going to get up the next day and things are going to be kind of the same. The record execs were kind of hoping for that, but it just was impossible.

MR   It really gets back to what we talked about earlier, and that’s doing your passion as opposed to being distracted by the money.

PB   Yes. It was once a passionate business and it became all about the money. And then technology stepped in to again sort of say, “Okay, everything is different now, and if it’s about the money, that’s not going to work anymore.” Everyone will always still want to make and listen to music, but it’s just changing form dramatically.

MR   It’s freeing to think about success in different terms. I’ve always wanted to live on a horse ranch, that’s my dream. Yet, if I take another look at it—I ride horses with friends and I often volunteer at Longmeadow Rescue Ranch here in Missouri, primarily for horses that have been abused and neglected. I do get to ride, I do get to be around horses. So there’s another way to view it.

PB   Absolutely. And the funny thing is that you may end owning the ranch and horses, and then you go, “You know what, I wish I didn’t have all this stuff I have to take care of now. It was so much more of a soulful feeling of taking care of something that had been abused…” It’s funny that you may in fact get what you wish for and then go, “Oh, you know, it wasn’t actually about the things I thought it was. It was about that connection to the animals.” You found a way to get it even if you didn’t buy a big piece of land.

MR  That’s a good point. The other part of wanting the ranch is that someday, I want to do something with children. But I suppose I don’t need a giant ranch to do that—I have a son and I have neighbor kids.

PB   Good observation, because I think a lot of people look outside of what’s right in front of them, and then realize, “Wait a minute, here is the closest and most dear thing to me in life, and this is the one to focus on.”

MR   Yes, and what a difference we can make in society in our own small, little way.

PB   Absolutely. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It takes each one of us to have that be our motivating force every day. It’s, “What change can I make in even the smallest ways?” Somebody told me once that they asked the Dalai Lama what thought comes to mind when he first wakes up in the morning? He said that the very first thing is that you check your motivation. What is going to get you up out of bed? Is it going to be to try to do something good? That means, again, imparting whatever positive, supportive things you can with your child. What’s greater than that, really.

MR   I’d like to talk about your book. You talk about tolerance and how it was stressed in your family, particularly by your mother. The word tolerance, to me, sort of implies putting up with something not liked. But you point out that you are talking about an acceptance and a respect for others’ ideas and opinions.

PB  Yes, that’s a very important point to make, and I think a lot of people don’t recognize that about the word tolerance. It’s great that you put it that way because I agree—tolerance sounds like you’re tolerating or putting up with it, as opposed to truly respecting it — even if you don’t agree with it, realizing that it’s valid and there’s another point of view that needs to be honored.

MR   What do you see today in terms of tolerance?

PB   Boy, it’s a big question and I wish I had this wonderfully perfect answer. It goes back to some fundamental problems that we’re all trying to grapple with that all stem from fear. And mostly it’s really two things: fear and desire. Those driving forces throw us off course at every turn. And of course, society will use those mechanisms in ways, whether it’s government or corporations or just people, to get what they want because they’re afraid. So they need to control, they need to make more money. It’s this constant kind of overlaying of people’s fears and desires that keep us from saying, ”Wait a minute, what’s really important here?” It’s having a roof over your head and having enough to eat and being able to nurture your kids.
    There are very few fundamental things, but that’s what’s great about it—there aren’t too many that we can all agree upon, so that should make it simple. But instead, we layer all of this stuff on top of everything else. And again, I think it’s always driven by someone’s fear or their desire.

MR  Also, we all have our own models by which we color the world.

PB    Right. It’s funny. If you were born in New Delhi instead of Milwaukee, you would have a completely different belief system, and you would believe just as strongly about that.
    And it’s still ultimately based in fear. There is so much fear around having to join a group as opposed to inclusion — I’m thinking of the Quakers or the Baha’is. There are certain groups that just say, “Look, we’re all in this together and we gotta figure out how to stay connected because we all ultimately want the same things.”

MR   In your book, you talk about your dad’s ability to block everything out and really focus. And he wasn’t interested in the money — he loves what he does. Would you say that that is his ace in the hole, his ability to focus?

PB   Yes. People are amazed at how he made all this money, and what’s the secret? And the secret really is the focus and the detachment that comes with focus. I’m not saying that his ego wasn’t invested in it. He loves the fact that he’s good at what he does. It’s a lot of fun when you’re good at something. And for him, the return on the investment shows that he’s good at it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but the money wasn’t filling some giant hole in his psyche in terms of having to buy things so he could look significant, and that’s a huge difference.
     So he wasn’t emotionally attached so much to the outcome. He loved what he did. And I think that’s critical—the emotional detachment of what the outcome had to be. He would have found a way to put food on the table if he wasn’t a good investor. But if he loved it, he’d probably still be doing it at night while he was doing another job. The focus is what real focus brings, which is a level of detachment that almost seems antithetical. It seems like, “Wait a minute, if you’re super focused, aren’t you super attached?” But it kind of goes into another realm at some point, where you are so focused that you’re actually not attached.

MR   I get that. Have an intention and a desire, but don’t be attached to the outcome.

PB   Right. My mom used to say, “Show up, tell the truth and don’t be attached to the outcome.” And it’s true. If I were attached to the outcome, I would have never gone to places I’ve gone in my life. Because if I just wanted to make money writing music, I was doing that with commercials. And if that were my goal, then I had satisfied that goal and I could just keep doing it. If I wanted to score a film, I had reached that goal and I could have kept doing that. But it was more exciting to follow the music and see where the music took me—and it took me to way more interesting places than I could have ever imagined myself. I wouldn’t have gone to those places or thought I could do them. So it’s been quite a lesson in that—following the passion as opposed to some expected outcome.

MR   I wish we would all start teaching it to all our children.

PB   That’s another focus of the foundation— social, emotional learning and teaching the whole child. It’s not about teaching to the test and all sorts of subtleties. How do you keep the human alive inside the person as opposed to saying, “This is how you excel and you have to follow this track, then you have to do this.”

MR   We’ve touched on so many things here, and I think that a new model of success—or the self-definition of success—is an important aspect of your book, as well as taking a look at what we value in our Western society. It’s emotional because it’s a feeling of relief to think of success in a different way—my way. Thank you, Peter. I enjoyed this conversation.

PB   My pleasure.  


On July 13, 2010, Peter Buffett performed “A Concert and Conversation” at the Center of Creative Arts (COCA), where I had the good fortune of a face-to-face conversation with him and got to hear him play live. Thanks to Archer Wealth Management for underwriting the event and bringing Peter Buffett to St. Louis.