David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Warren has been thinking about the conundrum of what to do with his wealth since long before he was wealthy. In his teenage years, he was already thinking about when I’m really rich, what do I do with it all? He is immensely frustrated by any attempt that he has at philanthropy, which has to be, why he basically says, that's a Susie problem. She'll figure it out and set it up when I'm done. His frustrations largely come from the fact that he does have things that he really cares about and that he cares about promoting. I think he's very worried about an impending human societal problem of overpopulation. Which interestingly enough didn't end up happening that the world has sort of slowed and I believe maybe even stopped the global population growth. He was very worried about not only when you use up all the energy on earth, but are we going to use up all the food and will famine be an issue. He had tried to give to various charities over the years. But he was so obsessed with performance and metrics, and that kind of money was a scoreboard that when he would give it, and he couldn't sort of understand the investment return. He wasn’t privy to the investment return, he couldn't choose the investment manager that it really wasn't used to compound in the way that he was used to his investments compounding in a way that you could sort of see a dollar return on. It was just immensely frustrating and he'd really throwing his hands up in the air and kind of just donated here and there, but had a big fortune. Yup. I think as we called in part one, there is this element of his psychology where he's curious about the scoreboard. He just wants the money to have as big a number as possible. He doesn’t want to buy stuff, giving it away like surely eventually, he'll do that. He just wants to get the number as high as possible by the day he dies. That's what he cares about. Which is, of course, competing with the fact that he wants people to like him. Not only does he want to be very wealthy, he wants the world's adoration. He throws himself a festival once a year for everyone to fly in and visit. Nowhere in Securities Law does it say that your shareholder meeting must be like. This is a Warren Buffett creation to bring this upon himself. He wants to be a beloved figure, and teacher, on top of being the wealthiest person on earth. You could see how those things could come ahead.…

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