Citadel's Ken Griffin and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez In Conversation At The Economic Club of Miami

All right. Thank you, everyone, for coming. My name is John Hartley. I'm chair of The Economic Club of Miami. On top of our very distinguished speakers tonight, Mr. Ken Griffin and Mayor Suarez, first we'd like to start by thanking our sponsors for making this event possible: everyone at Miami Dade College, its president, Madeline Pumariega, who I will be introducing momentarily, and especially for providing this beautiful venue, along with our event sponsors, Miami Worldcenter, Berkowitz Pollack Brant Advisors and CPAs, and Finback Investment Partners. I'd like to thank all the event staff, including our fantastic student volunteers, who many of you, I'm sure, have seen tonight, Maria Diaz, our security, AV, catering, and all our friends at Citadel and the mayor's office.

And last but not least, all of you for coming. I want to just take a brief moment to explain what the mission of The Economic Club of Miami is. Our purpose is to promote thought leadership and networking in the same way that the economic clubs in New York, Chicago, and D.C. are trying to do. Our goals are to connect, to convene, and to educate. The four of us, the four co-founders, saw this as something Miami very much needed given the influx of professionals and firms and the relative paucity of networking events like this that exist in Miami. We thought that those who migrate from places that have economic clubs and many networking events might benefit from a similar group that we could create as a centralized hub for networking and thought leadership.

We got together and we decided that this was something that Miami really needed. We since have gotten to work and plan a whole string of events on topics from technology, real estate, inflation, and investing, to crypto, NFTs, central bank digital currencies, as well as many topics in international economics. As you know, Miami is a very international city. So we are trying in many respects to capture the zeitgeist of this moment, which Mayor Suarez and his team have played an instrumental role in creating along with illustrious business people and benefactors like Ken. It's an honor to host them together tonight in a public forum in Miami, the two of them for the first time. So we, The Economic Club, are a membership organization.

What does this mean? It means that you can become a member. And becoming an Economic Club member entitles you to free access to all our public events, as well as additional VIP programming and access to some of our more private events, which often include many of our speakers, like those tonight. All you have to do is go to our website, www.econclubmiami.org, where you can find instructions on how to complete our application, which you can send back to us for review. You can also find us on social media as well. Again, that's econclubmiami.org. Without any further ado, I'd like to introduce our next speaker. Madeline Pumariega is the first female president appointed to lead one of the nation's largest educational institutions, Miami Dade College, where you're sitting right now.

In addition, you know, adding to its historic nature of this appointment is the fact that Pumariega is an alumna of MDC. And she's the first president appointed to lead one of the nation's largest educational institutions. I know I already said that, but I think it should be said again. And the fact that she is an alumna, I think, is absolutely fantastic. Prior to becoming MDC's president, Madeline was appointed the first female and Hispanic chancellor of the Florida College System. In that role, she designed and implemented strategies to keep college accessible and affordable for Floridians, especially for those entering high-demand job fields. In 2019, Pumariega became the executive vice president and provost of Tallahassee Community College.

In her current role as president, Madeline has prioritized working with business partners to identify the skills needed by key industries and tailoring higher education programs to match those needs. This intentional forming of strategic alliances and job pathways between companies and MDC really accelerates each graduate's ability to enter the workforce immediately. Driving her relentless pursuit is the passion to develop leaders and build thriving communities. I thought I'd just mention, just before this event here began, both the mayor, President Pumariega, and Ken have been meeting with a number of MDC students, some of whom are in the audience here. But without any further ado, I give you President Madeline Pumariega.

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Miami Dade College. We are so pleased to have Ken and the mayor here with us, partnering with The Economic Club of Miami. I'm so proud of the work that they are trailblazing and doing in Miami, and we look forward to future collaborations. For many of you, I know you know Miami Dade College. For some others, we stand as the largest college in the country. More importantly, we are Democracy's College. It is right here where 125,000 students come through our doors to find that dream, the American dream, to have hope and optimism and understand that through the power of education, they can transform their lives and their family lives. We have over 2.5 million alumni that have done just that.

Some of the best of the best of Miami came through the doors of Miami Dade College and found the love and purpose and passion to do that. We're so proud to be partnering with the mayor as we build Miami to be not only the capital of Latin America, but the capital of talent—that every business owner has the confidence that they can bring their business here, grow their business here, and that their business can thrive because they will have the talented workforce. Working with Venture Miami and the Venture Tech Scholarships and the Miami Foundation, we're proud. We're proud that we're going to open up opportunities of a path to every student in the city of Miami to be able to have that post-secondary credential.

While we might question if a four-year pathway to a university is necessary, what we know that in a knowledge economy is necessary is post-high school credentials. And we're doing that through artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud computing. We're doing it around healthcare—40% increase in nursing production right here at the college. And through MDC Tech, next year, just a block away, we'll launch a charter school where students can come in and, while they're in high school, be able to get the tech skills. In Democracy's College, we believe students not only need the academic skills, they need the enterprise skills to be successful. They have to understand what economic freedom is. They have to understand common sense and dependability and teamwork.

And most importantly, they have to understand the digital skill sets that are going to make up the second half of the 21st century, with AI, cybersecurity, and everything that we're seeing around financial technology as well. So we're proud to host you here tonight. And without further ado, I want to bring up who you've been waiting for to hear from. And the first person I get to introduce is someone that is a friend to all of us. He certainly epitomizes what Miami is about. I would say that he was famous way before his "How can I help?" tweet. But without a doubt, that tweet set off momentum and a movement that made us all in Miami think about, "How can we help? How can we help each other? How can we help business?"

How can we all prosper in all of this? And that is the mayor of the city of Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez. There you go. And joining him is Ken Griffin from Citadel. So much has been written about Ken, but just having him interact with our students, what you can see is his attention to details and certainly his love for Miami. And Ken, come out and join us as well. A warm welcome to the two of you to Miami Dade College. We look forward to what we know as an engaging conversation tonight with two amazing thought leaders. Thank you.

Thank you, Madeline. I was telling this to Ken backstage, and I mean it. She is the most dynamic—one of the most dynamic presidents in the country and one of the best presidents that I've ever met. So thank you so much for being who you are, for being so proactive, for hosting this incredible conversation today. And I want to also acknowledge the presence of County Commissioner Keon Hardemon, who's here, and the chair of my commission. Two great public servants that have been there with me from the beginning of my public service and are still with me as we chart a course for the future of the city. I was telling Ken sort of backstage just a second ago that this is such an exciting conversation for me to be able to lead as sort of a Cafecito Tech Talk, which is something that I've differentiated myself in doing as a mayor.

I get to sort of provide a portal into my life, which is meeting exceptional people like you. And I was saying that, reflecting on the last Bloomberg article that was written where they said, you know, where you said—your quote is saying that if the mayor has a good idea, I'll fund it if I like it. Just like tonight, you can't imagine the number of phone calls that I got from people who had good ideas and also from people who wanted to be here tonight. So I want to thank the Miami community for showing out today and for making this a sold-out event. This is like, harder than a Super Bowl ticket.

Thanks for being here with us today.

It is such a pleasure to be here this evening.

So let's get right into it. You know, when we first met in Chicago, you talked about sort of the difficulty that you were struggling with at the time of deciding what you were going to do. And I think a lot of people don't realize that your roots began in Florida, that you are sort of a Floridian initially. Tell us a little bit about your Florida roots and how you grappled with the decision of leaving Chicago and coming here to Miami.

Well, I think there's actually two very different stories there. Sure, my father and mother came to Florida to work on the space program. And I was born of the Apollo era, which was just a remarkable moment in American history. We could do anything as a country. We could put man on the moon. And we did. It was a triumph of technology, of creativity, and frankly, of just sheer will and bravery. I mean, the men who set foot on the moon, they put their lives at stake to accomplish one of the greatest moments in the history of humanity. And my father was a part of that with General Electric. And we were here for several years until the space program started to wind down in intensity, at which point we left Florida for, of all places, Brookfield, Wisconsin, where my dad worked with GE Medical Systems on the CAT scan project.

Now, jump forward about a decade. My father had an opportunity to work with a Florida business, Gory Roof Tile. The concrete tiles on your roof, they acquired from a conglomerate based in Texas, and my dad came here to be part of the management team, so I went to middle school and high school in Boca Raton. We had the chance to play a number of schools down here in Miami in soccer, and that was often a pretty humbling experience.

Amazing. So you've built two incredibly successful businesses, among others. And I remember, I don't know at what point in the pandemic it was, seeing the fact that you had decided to take over sort of the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. And I remember thinking at the time, 'This is unbelievably transformational for our state, and this could lead to something incredible for our city.' You proved that location—you didn't have to be necessarily in Chicago or in New York to be successful. Tell us how that experience sort of led to potentially the decision to be in Miami, and how has it been seamless? Has it been difficult? Has it been complex? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

So I'm going to flip it around. I'm going to actually say that the people of the state of Florida proved you could not only run a world-class trading operation here in South Florida, but you could build it in five days. Five days. Five days. And the cooperation that we had from the political leaders in Palm Beach, from the engineering talent in Palm Beach, from everyone, from people that literally shot rockets through pipes to connect us to the internet with enough bandwidth, to the individuals that gave us enough power to run several thousand servers in the Four Seasons ballroom, which we turned into a trading floor big enough to run the entire U.S. equity market in five days, told us a lot about what could be possible in Florida.

It would take us months to do this in a northern city, but there were 200 people there 24 hours a day. I took my son to witness this happening, because to me, it was reminiscent of when this country just strove for greatness, building the Hoover Dam in a few years. In Chicago, it took us five years to build a bike overpass. And to build a trading floor here in Palm Beach that could literally handle the entire U.S. equity market in five days was just a remarkable statement about the work ethic, the diligence, and the ability for the civic, the political, and the talent of the state to come together to do something that was just damn near a miracle.

You know, I find it fascinating that sort of the first two answers to the first two questions involve government at some level, right? You're talking about the space program. You're talking about creating the trading volume that's the equivalent of the volume of the entire trading volume of the U.S. You know, we in Miami believe that government should facilitate, not that government should dictate, right? And we are sort of—we're shaped by a lot of our origin stories, which is to be kicked out of countries that believe that government is a solution to all problems. How has your experience been working with government, working with leadership here in this community, and what do you think is sort of the right balance?

So our experience here in Florida over the course of the last two and a half years has been consistently the men and women who serve in public office have a mindset of, 'How can we help?' And it is a pro-get-it-done mindset that is often lacking in the northern cities. And so that's really empowering because when you face a deluge of bureaucracy and waiting and waiting for permits and waiting for a meeting and waiting for this and waiting for that, it really kills the entrepreneurial life of a business. And it's such a contrast to be here in South Florida where, I mean, to be clear, there are black-and-white rules, and they are what they are, but when they're black-and-white, and people are thoughtful about how to help you get things done in the context of the rules, you can make some pretty amazing things happen and you can do it really quickly.

So government plays a really important role in our society at large because it does define the playing field that we play on. And to the extent that government empowers Americans to be innovators and to be entrepreneurs, it helps to keep America at the forefront of the global economy. So I think government plays an incredibly important role in our society.

You know, our formula for success is simple. We try to keep it simple. We wanna keep taxes low, we wanna keep people safe, and we wanna lean into innovation. That's sort of our formula. Do you think that's a scalable formula? Do you think that American cities should be following that formula, should be amplifying that formula, or how do you see that sort of national landscape?

So it's, I will just, we're at the Economic Club, and I'm gonna say something that's like, you know, that's gonna be thrown out of here. Taxes were not part of our decision to come to Florida. People want to know that when they pay taxes to the government, whether it's income tax, property tax, or otherwise, that they're getting value for the money they pay. And a government that delivers value for taxes paid is a government that people respect and have positive association with. Florida does an incredible job on that metric. And I think that's a much more important metric to think about than just what do you pay in taxes. It's are you getting value for what you pay for? And the focus, whether it's from

The county leadership, the governor, your leadership is consistently in every conversation about providing great public safety, providing strong public schools. We're here at a college that serves 125,000 students. That's just breathtaking. The largest in the country. And then protecting the environment. And I feel that when I, as a taxpayer, think about, again, value for what is paid for in taxes, Florida ranks remarkably high in that metric. I think that's a much more powerful draw than just low taxes. Because when you've got great schools, when you've got a great environment, when your streets are safe and clean, you've got a place where people want to live and call home.

You know, you've differentiated yourself, not just obviously in terms of the businesses that you've built, which are phenomenal, but you've also differentiated yourself in what you've given, the scale of what you've given philanthropically and the causes that you've chosen to give to. And here in Miami, you've already been incredibly impactful from The Underline, which is a hundred—you know, yeah, it's okay. You can clap for all of them, by the way. They're all great. Miami Connected, giving every underprivileged child in our community access to the internet, to our resiliency efforts, to the one that we just announced recently, which is one of the things I'm most proud of, and Madeline was a big part of it, which was this STEM scholarship program for all kids in Miami

that are FAFSA, Pell Grant recipients. So every young adult of need in our community that's getting a STEM education at Miami Dade, Florida Memorial, University of Miami, or FIU will go to school for free, thanks in large part to your gift. I think private sector activism is essential to a healthy ecosystem. You have done that your entire career. What are you looking for? Other than the mayor giving you a suggestion, what are you looking out for? How do you want to be impactful? Talk to us a little bit about why you chose some of the programs that you chose to engage in.

Well, first of all, it's one of the great parts of the ethos of American culture, which is this sense of giving back to our community. I was recently in a country in Europe, and they were trying to raise money for, to support the men and women who serve in the military. And you could just watch the foreign concept of charitable giving on the faces of my European contemporaries. Whereas in the United States, there's just a tremendous sense from most of my peers in the commercial realm: we're going to run our businesses to be successful, we're going to develop our talent, and we're going to hope that they have great careers with us, and if they leave us, that they continue to be prosperous in their lives.

And we're going to give to our communities. We're going to make a difference in where we live. And I think part of that is just representation of the American story itself. I mean, my grandmother grew up with no running water. She grew up with no running water and saw a man step on the moon at the same time. Right? In one lifetime. It's just unbelievable what that journey entails. And then that ethos of, you know, we all want our children and grandchildren to do well. She was my scholarship program to Harvard. My grandmother paid for the tuition for all of her grandkids to go to Harvard. Her and her husband ran a very successful small business in the Midwest. Good Midwestern values, successful business—they did right by their customers, and they were prosperous.

And seeing that story of how my grandmother was so committed to her grandchildren gives one a perspective about what caring means. And I truly believe that education is the on-ramp to the American Dream. And unfortunately, in too many parts of our country, there's too many potholes in that on-ramp today.

Absolutely.

Right? And what can I do to help clear those potholes away to give more children in this country a chance to get onto that on-ramp to the American Dream? So Miami Connected, for example, is a great vignette of this. In the pandemic, what you found was that inner-city children and children who were... from loving parents but just didn't have access to the internet at home, were going to be left behind in a profound way. And so we supported both Miami Connected and Chicago Connected as important projects to bring the internet into the homes of children who—this was their lifeline to school, to education. And fortunately, this concept was brought up in the Infrastructure Bill, and we will have access in our country for every child to be digitally connected to help to reduce the education gap between the wealthy and the poor and to remove potholes from that on-ramp.

So that's a program that we're really, really enthusiastic of having funded—my team at Citadel and myself.

As a mayor, I love the pothole analogy, of course.

You actually don't know what potholes are until you've been to Chicago.

We quietly cover them at night to the extent that there are any. We're very efficient. Let's talk about sort of the world economy and the volatility of the world. Obviously, we have historic inflation in the U.S. and other parts of the world. We have... Is there any Cuban coffee in there?

No, there's no water either.

Oh, okay. What's up with that? We've got to get some water. We'll figure it out. We're... We're having a Marco moment here. Okay. Sorry. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. I don't have a joke. It's a joke. I love you, Marco. I love you. Good luck tomorrow. You'll be fine. You'll be fine. You'll be fine. I'm never going to hear the end of that one. I even lost my train of thought. Goodness gracious. Okay, I got it. We're... we're in the volatility of the world. Inflation is at a historic high. The Fed is now raising, uh, rates at 75 basis point increments. Um, conventional war in Ukraine, uh, South America seems to be, or not seems to be, is tilting to the left, uh, supply chain issues throughout the world. How do you see world markets, uh, in the near term and medium term and long term, and sort of what's your vision or view of

of where we are and where we need to be. Here's the water. Here it comes. Thank you. Yeah, I'm gonna need a bottle of water after hearing that question posed to me.

Take your time, by the way. So let's take a huge step back and talk about, I think, the issue that's front and center in most people's minds, which is inflation. We've seen inflation in the United States running at roughly 8% year over year. And this is a level of inflation that we haven't seen in many of our adult lifetimes. I mean, this was a story of the OPEC oil crisis back in the '70s and not modern society in the concept of the last 30 years. Why so much inflation? What's been the cause of this? It's a combination of ultra-loose monetary policy that was in many respects rightfully used during the pandemic. We wanted to make sure that we were able to keep the economy going through a period of just unprecedented turmoil.

Combined with a level of fiscal stimulus, we spent as much money in the pandemic as we would have spent to have fought World War II as a percentage of GDP. I think that borders on reckless. And in particular, the first of the stimulus bills passed by Biden was just fuel on the fire of trying to... Fuel on the fire. Yeah, fuel. I mean, we're just pushing way too much money into the economy, and there's not enough goods to meet the demand because of supply chain challenges. Right, and people have forgotten all the container ships lined up off of the coast of L.A. Those were goods that couldn't come into the United States. I mean, it was a complete train wreck in terms of the supply chain with consumers awash in cash, hoping to spend money.

And that was the starting point of this inflationary spiral. And on top of that, a set of energy policies that I find perplexing. I do not understand why we want to buy oil from Venezuela when we can produce it domestically. If somebody can explain to me the logic behind this, I'm really curious to know. Because the United States has this incredible luxury: we can be energy independent from the world easily. And it's really, it's almost a gift from God to have that ability to be energy independent in this day and age, where we don't need to depend upon any country, whether it be our allies or our enemies, to give us the energy that secures our livelihoods. And yet we've embraced this concept of not harvesting what we have here in America.

And that leaves me perplexed. It's left the consumer at the gas pump equally perplexed. Why is he paying $5 a gallon for gasoline? This was just incredibly short-sighted policy decisions out of Washington. And then, of course, there's always, in moments like this, the exogenous shock, and that was the events in Ukraine, where we have a war in Europe. And we have a real war in Europe with incredible loss of lives right here, right now in 2022, involving two major global powers. And that, of course, is creating an enormous energy shock in all of continental Europe and pushing their entire economy towards recession. So it's the worst of all worlds. It's stagflation in Europe, incredibly high prices, accelerating inflation, and declining economic growth.

So I'd be negligent in my duties as an interviewer if I didn't ask you about tomorrow, which is Election Day, of course. And I think you were quoted in an article saying you were the third-largest giver or something like that. You got a bronze medal. I don't know if they actually gave you the bronze medal or not.

There was a recent article in Politico that went through the largest donors to American candidates in federal elections, and I was told that I was the third-largest contributor to candidates in this election cycle. And I did ask, "Do I get a bronze medal?" And it's not a place that I want to be. It represents the reality that I've seen 20-some years of significant charitable giving undermined by incredibly poor policies. And when you watch that play out, it is like soul-crushing. In Chicago, we were making real progress in fighting crime. In fact, the use of predictive analytics to better dispatch our police officers, better training for our police officers to be more effective in dealing with tense moments, we were getting a real win-win in the battle against crime.

And then to watch the governor of the State of Illinois with a big smile sign the SAFE-T Act, which means if you commit a crime, you're out with no bail. And generally speaking, with no consequences in the State of Illinois, you're now seeing a city just engulfed in anarchy. It's terrifying. And then equally, having worked for years to improve public education in Chicago, and quite a bit with the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, and before him, the Daleys. Ambassador, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yes, Ambassador Emanuel today. We were making real progress in learning gains in K-through-12 education. And now they want to unionize principals. And principals were the last defense against poor teachers, poor teaching practices, schools that weren't safe.

Great principals put great teams around them and got great results with kids. And they want to unionize principals in Chicago, and they want to turn the school board over to an elected school board, which, for a litany of reasons, is just not the right choice in Chicago. Mayoral control of the school boards has been a big benefit to Chicago Public Schools over the years. So it's heartbreaking to see the loss of the battle against crime, and again, seeing potholes put on that road to the American Dream, and lots of potholes needlessly put on that road. So that's drawn me into politics more and more over the years, which is if I want to see all of your work bear fruit. And I say that as a philanthropist who wants to support visionary leaders who are running, whether it's Eva Moskowitz at Success Academies, it's what you do here in Miami-Dade, it's our great colleges and universities.

You need to see them married with a government, and, going back to the very first conversation, with a government that wants to protect the interests of the students.

Yeah, we've collaborated on a great tech school that's beginning soon, and it's thanks in part to Madeline's very visionary leadership and collaboration.

And you and Madeline and I all know the power of great teachers in transforming the lives of children. How do we pull those people into education? How do we keep them in education? How do we have merit-based promotion and compensation systems to keep the best teachers in the classroom, educating the future of America?

And how do we evolve the education system to teach the things that we know are going to be the needed skills today and tomorrow for our children? You talked briefly about, at multiple points in this conversation, about the American dream. And I think one of the things that we all agree on here in this audience is that our country needs to be competitive. That competition is something that this country was founded on, and it's not something that we need to just be—we need to be globally competitive. Can you give us a sense of what you think it's going to take for the US to maintain its status as a leader in the world, as a power in the world, and as a competitor in a dynamically competitive landscape where—

If you think you're too big to fail in a disruptive world like we are today, you're not. Can you give us your sort of perspective on that?

So, you've successfully led the witness here because I couldn't agree with you more that we are in a global economic competition.

Spoken like a good lawyer.

And the number one attribute that we need to win in this war is we do need to educate our children, and disproportionately today in STEM education. So, the mastery of genetic engineering, of cloud computing, of machine learning is going to be incredibly important for American competitiveness. Now, this is important on just an incredible number of levels. The debt our country has today is almost unparalleled. And if we don't meaningfully improve American productivity, the crushing amount of federal debt and unfunded Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid commitments will bankrupt America. It's literally existential for our country to be raising the next generation of successful entrepreneurs, innovators, business leaders, workers, because we've got a huge wall of debt that we need to grapple with, particularly on the back of the pandemic.

And I'm really worried that that's just nowhere in the dialogue today in our country. It's just not; you don't hear about this in Washington. But we've made enormous promises that we've got to honor as a nation to people who have worked their entire lives for their retirement, and we're just not preparing the next generation with the toolkit to be financially successful enough to make good on those promises and to have a good life for them and their families. And that's a sin. That's just wrong. So, that's incredibly important. And then competitiveness is important. The United States wants to be at the top of the economic food chain. We don't want to be devolved into a mercantile system where we're the colony.

And if we're not careful, we're going to end up there, providing the inputs to somebody else's value-add economy. And for many years, we've been very fortunate to be the country that is buying the inputs from global suppliers, and we're the value-add nation. And I think we take it for granted that that's where we're going to be. But having run a global business for 30 years, having been around the world many times, I will tell you, many of our contemporaries are thinking of a world where the United States is a supplier of inputs, and they own the higher value-add part of the economic chain, which is where the economics rest, it's where quality of life rests, it's where prosperity rests. We don't want to lose our position.

I was a bit frustrated with some of our thoughts on trade with China. The United States is rich in energy. We're rich in food. But we want to make sure that we're not just selling them food and energy, that we're selling them software, hardware, we're selling them medical equipment, we're selling them airplanes, we're selling them the high-value products that pay for a high quality of living, real jobs, real living wages that are earned on the merits of what we create and produce.

You know, in Miami, we have a concept called Miami for Everyone. We want to make sure that our city creates those opportunities and that prosperity for all Miamians. You've done that not just with Miami Connected. You've done it with a STEM scholarship. We did it by investing in kindergartners having a savings account and teaching them financial literacy through a savings program that we did. How do we—this is sort of an age-old struggle of creating opportunity, of creating prosperity—you've talked about how difficult it's going to be to afford some of these entitlement programs and how we need to continue to educate our population to meet the new challenges of the future. How do we create more opportunity, more prosperity for more Americans and Miamians?

So, obviously, we've talked a lot about education tonight, which is most appropriate given that we are in one of the great institutions of education. That's really important. The second part is to, again, to go back earlier in the conversation, a government that empowers the private sector that is thoughtful about the right trade-offs between regulation and empowerment. Regulation plays an important role. You and I don't want to drink our water and wonder if it's safe or not. Government plays a very important role in regulation, but undue regulation becomes just too bureaucratic and weighs businesses down. It discourages entrepreneurship. We want to continue—and I don't say this because I view myself as an entrepreneur, but we want to continue—to celebrate entrepreneurism.

It's been such a powerful growth driver of jobs in America. The large companies in America, they pick the resumes they want to hire. The entrepreneur takes bets on people who have resumes that look very different. Maybe they didn't finish college. Maybe they just immigrated to the United States. It doesn't matter what their background is. If you'll do the job and you'll do it well, I'm going to hire you because I don't have the option to hire people with the perfect resume. And so, entrepreneurs are really important to increasing the vibrancy of the job market because they're the firms that take bets on people. And I love meeting people in startups. And you see these bets that were made, and you see people rise to the occasion.

That is what makes this country special. I was at a Robin Hood event in New York. Robin Hood does a lot of work with trying to help people stand on their own feet. And they had a man there who grew up, and his mother was a drug addict, so he grew up in crack houses and he found himself in prison. I won't have all the details right—it won't matter—but he got himself out of prison and struggled to find a job because he had been in prison. And somebody at Robin Hood coached him on what to wear: don't swear during the interview, own up to having been in jail, and tell the person you're gonna work hard and you're gonna make a difference. And he got a job. Today, that company that he went to work for, he owns.

And 50 people work for him. That's what we want to do in this country is we want to see people have those forms of transformative life stories. That's what we need to think about making happen in America.

I think this is my last question. So, the current president, close to 80 years old, past president, close to 80 years old—it's inevitable that there will be a new generation of leadership. You've spoken about this country, present and future, in very aspirational ways. What's your hope for the next generation of American leadership?

What's remarkable is we're in a state where we see many of those people in leadership roles already. And I think there's something very special about Florida and government in Florida and the focus on delivering for the community and the focus on delivering traditional American values to the community. My children went to a phenomenal school in Chicago, but their indoctrination in woke ideology was just, it was just crushing. And they came home very confused about whether or not the United States was a good country. And they came home very confused about what they could or could not say to a student who was Asian or otherwise of color. My son was reprimanded for telling a fellow Asian student that he was good at math.

For stereotyping. And it's unbelievable to see how that just destroys the minds of children who are otherwise... Innocent and good. Innocent and good, and they don't even think about—

These kinds of things.

These kinds of things. And to watch them transformed here in school in Miami is perhaps the greatest gift that Miami has given my family.

We are incredibly blessed to have you and your family, and incredibly grateful. I can't tell you the number of places that I go around the world where people say, "I cannot believe the Citadel is in Miami." And, you know, you could have chosen anywhere in the world. You chose to be here. We're incredibly grateful. Thank you. And as is my custom, every time we do a Cafecito Tech Talk—a lot of you in the audience probably have already done one—this is our sort of "How can I help?" swag bag, complete with coffee cup, which you can put coffee in it, by the way, just because there isn't any in here. I know you don't smoke cigars, but, you know, nice shirt, the whole thing.

So my father was a two-handicap, and I'm the black sheep. I can't keep a golf ball on a golf course if my life depended on it. We won't talk about my golf skills, then. But thank you so very much. And I'll say that, you know, "How can I help?" really summarizes our experience here in Florida over the last few years. When you did come to Chicago, when you came to Chicago, it was a meet-and-greet meeting, and it was really appreciated, because I said, "You know, we're thinking about going to Miami," and 10 minutes later, the mayor has Google Maps out, and he's talking about various places that we could build an office tower. That is just leadership. Thank you so much.