David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Think about how privileged that position is. We should have a standard curriculum in this country for sixth graders, where it starts, they walk into their math class or whatever the class is and they say, open your Invest America account. Everybody's on the same page. You teach sixth graders in an inner city school today about stocks, you may as well be teaching them Mandarin. They're not participants in the game. I talked to Seth Klarman from Baupost. He said, I'll write the curriculum. I talked to David Solomon at Goldman, the folks at Schwab, and Fidelity. Everybody sees this as a challenge. This is a simple, simple idea that we could get behind, and literally in a single term could change over a period of a decade, the trajectory of every child born in this country. What's cool is I think you've basically already seen evidence that this works with Robinhood. People still had to have the means to put money into Robinhood and then decide to do it. But it activated so many people to become investors in America and around the world over the last couple of years. Some of those people will prove to not be good investors. Some of them will prove to be amazing investors. Part of the challenge here is everybody says, oh, you're letting people invest in the stock market. What if it goes down? Here's the deal. We have 100 years of history. Owning your slice of America is a good bet, as Warren Buffett likes to say. I don't know if it's going to go down in the first year or up in the first year. It doesn't particularly matter to me. I know if you give these kids a slice of America over a period of 40 or 50 years, it's going to be worth a hell of a lot more in the future than it is when they get it. But way more important, is every day of their lives, they will feel like they belong to the system. They're not on the outside looking in. The power of that psychologically to that child will dwarf the amount of money that's in that account.…

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