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Hey guys, in 80 schools not one single child could do math at grade level. Not one. That's not a third world statistic. That's Illinois right now and it's connected to something much bigger. A $4 trillion tax bill, a trade war that cost this country trust and a wake-up call from China that most investors still haven't fully absorbed.
Stay with me because the real story here isn't any one of these facts on its own. It's how all of them are quietly connected and what that means for your money future. Let me take you back to the start of the pandemic because it explains a lot about how I think respiratory viruses spread less in high humidity and high UV environments.
That's not opinion. That's basic science. So while most of the country was panicking, the decision was simple. Go to Florida. We rented out the entire Four Seasons in Palm Beach and brought as many people down as we could for an unknown duration and created what was probably the first corporate bubble in America.
People who came checked in and literally could not leave the property for months. We deployed thousands of servers into a ballroom that was built to host weddings, not run a trading floor. We needed portable generators just to handle the power load and in 5 days working around the clock, several hundred people built out a trading floor that could have handled the entire volume of the New York Stock Exchange if it had to.
That's not normal. That usually takes a year, maybe two. We did it in 5 days because we had no other choice and because the state of Florida treated us like partners in a national crisis instead of an inconvenience, here's the first lesson. When the stakes are high enough, speed that seems impossible suddenly becomes very possible.
The real question is why we don't operate at that pace more often and that bubble experience is exactly what planted the seed for a decision that changed everything about where this company calls home. After everyone moved back to Chicago, one of my most senior partners walked into my office and asked a question I couldn't shake, why did we come back at all?
Miami is now one of our most important hubs, several hundred people, leadership split between Miami, New York, and London. And yes, it comes with real challenges, cost of living, rent climbing fast, not enough school seats for how many families are moving in. But here's the thing people miss, those are the problems of a growing, prospering city.
I'll take those problems every single time over the alternative. The alternative is Chicago, where I lived for almost 30 years. Over that time, the population of children in that city fell by roughly 30%. Schools emptied out, and I'd much rather be in a city fighting to build more capacity for its kids than debating with a mayor about how to shut down schools because of empty seats.
Florida, by contrast, has spent decades building the muscle to manage growth, housing, schools, transportation, cuz the population here has been climbing for decades. That's a fundamentally different mindset than managing decline. Here's the second lesson, watch what a city is actually building toward.
A city investing in capacity for its children is telling you something very different than a city managing its own shrinkage. And speaking of children and capacity, that brings me to the single issue I believe matters more than almost anything else in this country. Here's the statistic I opened with, and I want you to really sit with it.
In roughly 80 schools in Illinois, not a single child is performing math at grade level, zero. Not one child in 80 entire schools. Think about what that means for this country's future. How exactly are we going to compete in this moment in history with AI accelerating, with China producing staggering numbers of engineers every year, if an entire generation of kids can't do basic math, this isn't a university problem.
American universities, when it's all said and done, will get that right. This is a K-12 problem, and it's the single biggest on-ramp to the American dream that we are currently failing to maintain. I've put real money behind this, not just in universities, but directly into K-12 schools, because I want the kids in these communities to have access to a real education, the same one my own children get to have.
But, here's the uncomfortable part. This problem isn't evenly distributed. Kids in wealthier communities tend to get a fundamentally better K-12 experience than kids in the inner city. I was part of a legal effort in California specifically about this. The right of a child to a solid education, something California actually guarantees by its own constitution.
And what we found was that the weakest teachers in affluent school systems tend to get pushed out into the least affluent communities. The kids who need the strongest teachers the most end up surrounded by the weakest ones. We lost that case in front of California Supreme Court, and honestly, that loss still frustrates me.
Here's the third lesson. Before this country debates immigration, trade, or tax policy, it needs to look in the mirror about a K-12 system that is failing exactly the kids who need it most. Now, this same tension between tradition and reform shows up somewhere you might not expect, at the very top of American higher education.
I went to Harvard for years. I was its largest donor. And I'll be honest with you. Harvard lost its way over the past several years. The scandal the university went through was genuinely devastating to its reputation. What I watched happen there wasn't an isolated event. It was part of a much larger shift, a rise of what people call woke culture, a retreat from open and transparent discourse in the classroom, the emergence of cancel culture, and frankly anti-Semitism on campus that should never have been tolerated at an institution of that stature.
I stopped giving to Harvard directly, and I've diversified my education giving across other universities with strong academic programs instead. Partly because I believe in managing risk, even in a charitable giving portfolio, and partly because I wanted to see other institutions, one still committed to rigorous open education, get real support.
Now, under new leadership, I've seen real effort toward returning to open discourse and a focus on the fundamentals of education. That gives me some optimism that Harvard can pivot back toward the position of leadership it's held for most of its history. And I'll say this plainly, one of the things I think this political moment has gotten right is the pushback against the cultural dynamics that were polarizing all of us as a nation.
Here's the fourth lesson. Institutions, no matter how prestigious, can lose their footing when they drift away from their core purpose. The question is always whether they have the self-awareness to course correct before the damage becomes permanent. And this question of who gets access to that kind of education, and what happens after, leads directly into one of the more controversial positions I hold.
Here's something I've said that tends to surprise people. If you come to America for college, I think you should leave with a visa stamped onto your diploma, not to send you home. The opposite. If you come to this country and get access to one of the greatest educational systems in the world, I want you to stay.
I want you to grow roots here, build businesses, support communities, and contribute back to the country that educated you the same way immigrants have been doing in this country for almost two and a half centuries. I think we need to protect the on-ramps to the American dream, and the biggest failure right now sits squarely in K through 12 education, which we already talked about.
But I also recognize there's real frustration across this country about how opportunity gets distributed, and part of that frustration shows up as resistance to immigration itself. This idea that we should take care of the people already here before we welcome others in. Here's where I land on that.
We don't always know whether everyone crossing the border was coming here specifically to pursue the American dream. But you cannot look at millions of people crossing that border and call that a well-functioning immigration system. At the same time, this is fundamentally a nation built by immigrants, and there's a long-standing tradition here of wanting people who come to contribute, to build, to grow this economy.
We do want a real functioning level of immigration into this country. What we don't want is chaos mistaken for policy. Here's the fifth lesson. Supporting immigration and demanding a secure, orderly system are not contradictory positions. Pretending they are is exactly how this debate stays stuck instead of actually getting solved.
Now, how I think about giving politically and philanthropically actually ties directly back to this same education obsession, and it might surprise you who I've chosen to support. In my 20s, I didn't have money to give, so I gave my time. I tutored kids in the inner city of Chicago, and I saw firsthand just how hard it is for a child to break the cycle of poverty when the system around them isn't built to help.
As money became more available than time, that same instinct turned into funding public education reform. One of the things I'm proudest of, helping underwrite the cost of giving a book to every newborn child in the city of Chicago. It's well established that the number of books a child is exposed to early in life has an outsized impact on their entire educational trajectory.
But here's what frustrated me the most. I'd pour resources into public education and then watch that work get undermined by political decisions that put the interests of a teachers union ahead of the interests of the actual students. That's when I made a decision. I was going to support politicians, Republicans and Democrats who genuinely put education first as part of their platform.
I still do that today. I'll be more straightforward. I generally agree with more Republican policy positions than Democratic ones. But I think it matters to recognize good faith people fighting for kids on both sides of the aisle and I've never limited my support to one party when education is the issue at stake.
Here's the sixth lesson. Real conviction isn't about blind party loyalty. It's about identifying the specific outcome you actually care about and supporting whoever is seriously fighting for it regardless of what letter comes after their name. Now let's talk about grading the current administration because I think the honest answer is more complicated than either side wants to admit.
People ask me constantly to grade this administration's economic policy pass or fail. Here's my honest answer. It's way too early to know. On some fronts real accomplishments stand out. The southern border secure for the first time in years. That's a genuine achievement. Deregulation has been one of the quieter wins.
Simply because the relentless stream of new regulation on corporate America has stopped. That alone lets businesses focus on growing again instead of bracing for whatever new rule comes out of Washington next. But on trade, it's been a much rockier road. Tariffs are without question a regressive tax.
I've said that plainly and I stand by it. They create at least a one-time rise in inflation, and the real question is whether that one-time rise becomes something more structural because of how difficult onshoring manufacturing actually is. With unemployment sitting around 4.2% most Americans already have jobs, good jobs.
The real obstacle to reshoring manufacturing isn't a lack of ambition, it's a genuine shortage of skilled labor ready to work in those factories. I'll be honest about something else, too. We've lost some trust globally through this period, whether it's with the UK or through the back and forth de-escalation with China.
Rebuilding that trust is one of the most important things happening in American economic policy right now, even if it doesn't make the loudest headlines. And then there's the number that should worry everyone regardless of party, $4 trillion in tax reductions against 1 1/2 trillion in required spending.
Nobody has fully explained how that closes the deficit. The scale of government spending in Washington has become almost incomprehensible, billions and trillions thrown around like they're interchangeable. The honest truth is this, the only way America actually solves for the promises it's made to its people is by growing this economy far more rapidly than we currently are.
Tax policy and spending cuts alone won't get us there. Here's the seventh lesson. Good policy and good politics aren't always the same thing. Real accomplishments and real unresolved risks can exist in the same administration at the exact same time, and pretending otherwise in either direction is dishonest.
Now, here's the part of this conversation that genuinely changed how I think about where global power is actually heading. A moment happened recently that I think investors still haven't fully absorbed, the emergence of deep seek out of China. That was a real wake up call. For the last decade, I think America has consistently underestimated how fast China's ability to innovate is actually accelerating.
And here's the uncomfortable truth. China already leads the world in a broad range of the emerging technologies that are going to define the next 100 years. Not a narrow lead in one or two areas, a broad lead across many of the fields that matter most. That has direct implications for how we need to think about education in this country, the same education crisis we started this whole conversation with.
We need to strengthen our universities and fundamentally improve our K through 12 system, not as some abstract moral goal, but as a competitive necessity. If we can't out-innovate China, every other economic advantage we have becomes harder to defend. And on the investor side, there's a real tension right now.
Some investors pulled back from America, anxious about the shifting stance on trade, but there's also a clear, undeniable realization settling in. No country in the world matches the rate of innovation and commercial development that happens here, except increasingly China itself. Here's the eighth and final lesson.
The countries that win the next century won't be the ones with the most impressive headlines today. They'll be the ones that took their education gaps seriously before the gap became permanent. bubble built in 5 days during a national crisis, and it ends with a wake up call from a Chinese AI lab that should change how every investor in this country thinks about the next decade.
In between, we talked about a city that's dying and a city that's growing, a university that lost its way and is trying to find it again, an immigration debate that's more nuanced than either side admits, and a tax bill with numbers that still don't fully add up. But if there's one thread running through every single part of this conversation, it's education.
It's 80 schools with not one child at grade level in math. That's not a side issue. That is, in my view, the single most important problem this country needs to solve. Because every other challenge we've talked about today, competing with China, closing the deficit, building the next generation of American leadership, runs straight through whether we fix that problem or keep ignoring it.
If this gave you a clearer, more honest picture of where things actually stand, headlines and understand the real story underneath them. today, which issue do you think matters most for America's next decade?
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