 So we're about to hear from three leaders in the impact investing space from vastly different angles. First let me tell you about our wonderful moderator. Liesl Pritzker Simmonds is the co-founder of Blue Haven, a single family office dedicated to impact investing and the office just won the GSG Impact Asset Owner of the Year Award. Backstage Liesl was candid in sharing with me that coming from her family she was tasked with determining how to live in a way that confronted the privileges she was afforded and made the most out of her potential to create positive change. It was from that place that she determined that a purely philanthropic focus wouldn't have as broad an impact as an impact investment portfolio and use this frame as motivation to take a holistic approach with the use of her time and assets for good. Liesl will be moderating two distinguished guests who have created a very unique partnership. One that marries capital investment with social impact investing. Bobby Turner is the chairman and CEO of Turner Impact Capital, an impact asset management firm based in Los Angeles and one of the nation's largest social impact investment firms. Over the past 25 years Mr. Turner has established himself as one of the country's most prominent private equity real estate investors as well as a pioneer in the area of social impact investing. As former chairman of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors he was responsible for launching several groundbreaking funds facilitating more than six billion in real estate investments that have helped define the triple bottom line or social impact investment movement. Andre Agassi needs very little introduction. After turning pro at the age of 16 Andre Agassi rose to international fame earning 60 men singles titles including eight grand slams and a gold medal at the 1996 Olympics. In 2011 he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Off the court Agassi established the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education which has raised more than 185 million dollars for at risk children in Las Vegas since 1994. The foundation focuses on transforming public education so that all children have a shot at success and in 2001 the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy a tuition free public charter school opened with 1200 students grades K through 12. Together these gentlemen have formed the Turner Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund a series of real estate funds that have to date built over 88 public charter schools serving nearly 46,000 students in some of the most underserved communities in the United States. Please welcome to the stage Bobby Turner Andre Agassi and Lisa Pritzker Simmons. Thank you all. Thank you. Hi. All right, hi everyone. So you are in for a treat. We have two fantastic gentlemen here who are going to tell us about a really exciting partnership and investment opportunity and a lot of SoCAP I think we talk about the how of investing and a lot of the strategies and get into the details of fun structures and things like that. But I really wanted to take a step back and start with the why because this is a very interesting route that has taken you given your background to partner up with Bobby given his background and actually create something that is pretty unique and amazing. So I wanted to start with you Andre and tell us a little bit. So I can see Liesl too. Sorry. I'll scoot back and lean forward. Okay. I'm more comfortable this way. All right. So the why? Yeah. So why education? Well I got an education of 1997 starting with my foundation which was focused just on helping kids which kind of naturally led to the most, to the greatest need that children have which is a future of their own choosing and for me that was my inspiration for getting involved. I mean on a personal level I was number one in the world at something that I actually hated for most of my life and that disconnect, that lack of choice that I had in my life really led to some pretty dark times and during that time I saw this show on 60 minutes, a KIPP program, Knowledge is Power. I watched these two gentlemen who rolled up their sleeves and built their charter school and started to change these kids' lives systemically and generationally and I knew overnight that that's what I wanted to do. And it did feel like overnight where I took out a $40 million mortgage and decided to build K-12 charter school in the most economically challenged area of Las Vegas. It was a huge Herculean undertaking. I can assure you Ambien is no match for a $40 million mortgage but it did allow me to get out of my own way on a tennis court and have a different reason for what I did and it wasn't easy to do it. There was a lot of pitfalls and a lot of struggles. Maybe an eighth grade dropout wasn't the most ideal person to start a school. However I was so committed to doing it that I would eventually out raise and outspend a lot of my mistakes but those mistakes kind of came and went but I think the toughest part of all of it was not raising the money and not sort of getting the charter and finding the right leaders and all that. The toughest part of it was 1200 kids in the school and 3,000 on the waiting list and so I spent about 10 years being frustrated with that, trying to figure out ways to solve for scalable needs and came up empty most of the time and that's when kind of my life took a turn and this beautiful, follically challenged brother from another mother came into my life and he shared, he read my book, he shared my passion and frustration with education for underserved children and together we sort of put our heads together and came up with another way. I had done it philanthropically but it was pretty limited. We can't wait for government to solve these issues, they're failing, we're not getting better and so we said we can still innovate and we can still figure out ways to do that in this country and we can go to the private sector and possibly solve huge societal daunting issues in a very scalable, sustainable way. And so, now Bobby, you spent a lot of the early part of your career working with Michael Milken who is not usually known as an impact investor, how did you go from that world to sort of the funds that you're creating now? I think that for the vast majority of my career I was a capitalist and I was also a philanthropist and I struggled at both. As a capitalist in the early 80s I did work for Mike Milken at Drexel Burnham and then when Drexel failed, myself and two other partners formed a firm called Canyon Partners which we grew into about a $25 billion dollar all sort of investment company and I struggled in being in an environment where the sole metric of success was making money. In fact I developed not a self-loathing but a moral discomfort that came from being an environment where for me to win someone else had to lose and I would guess in my desire to get the sense of balance or maybe by redemption I became a philanthropist in my early 30s and I struggled at that too and it wasn't with the moral discomfort that came from making money off of people's misfortunes but rather as a philanthropist it was almost an emotional discomfort that came from making money or actually throwing money at people's misfortunes. As a philanthropist, very quickly my wife and I discovered that we were really just putting band-aids on issues. The vast majority of organizations that we were funding really weren't being held accountable. They weren't scalable, they weren't durable and in many instances they were just funding legacies of dependency. I would say that in my mid 30s I came to the following conclusion that if one wanted to treat a problem in society then the government and philanthropy are just fine but reality is that our reliance upon government and philanthropy have actually handicapped our outcomes and if we really wanted to create curable, durable solutions you had to harness market forces and that is when I did something my wife thought was impossible of me, maybe most men and as I evolved, because men don't evolve, I think we devolve and I evolved from a capitalist who's so metric of success was making money to one who believed that I could do good and do well. I read Andre's book and realized that we shared so many things in common. He and I shared the same barber. Number two, I mean imagine this, we were both championship tennis players between the two of us, we actually have eight Grand Slam titles. Andre has all eight of them, but the reality was is that we shared such a passion and frustration about education and the failure to really create sustainable, meaningful change that I actually, I made, I like to call it a warm call, Andre used to refer to it as a cold call. It was a cold call, unquestionably. I didn't know you. So you just called him, picked up the phone and called him. I just, one, eight, seven or two, eight, whatever. I did call him and said that he was a big fan of Pete Sampras' and that got him engaged immediately, but spent about 15 minutes on the phone with Andre talking about what I was working on in education, how he and I could complement each other's skills as a recovering or an evolved capitalist and a philanthropist, and I will tell you, it was not an easy date. What I wanted to do was get Andre on board to help me raise a for-profit fund to help scale best-in-class charter school operators. And Andre was very skeptical and very hesitant to start. I was, in essence, asking him to be a hypocrite. How could you make, I was asking him to make money off the very issue that was so important to him as a philanthropist. Yeah, and it wasn't overnight. It was, took me about three months of really working through not morphing. I mean, there's a place for philanthropy and I'm still a philanthropist and I have a pretty big endowment and right grants for very specific educational needs and definitely help those that are doing a good job at helping others. But there needed to be a bigger solution and a better solution. And I got to a point, you talk about, you know, men not being as smart as women. Well, my wife is smarter than me regardless how smart I think or don't think I am because she said, you've been going through this for three months. She goes, let me ask you just one question. Finally, I'm like, anytime she says something, I just, please tell me because it's never without a lot of thought and care. And she said, what's the alternative and not doing it? And I just said, wow. There you have it. We had this vision of raising a multi hundred million dollar fund and building tens of thousands of high quality educational seats. And and if I don't do this, they don't get built and these kids don't have it. And that's the moment I basically warm called Bobby Beck and said, you know what? Let's let's take this on. Let's impress upon the private sector the merits of investing and set it just giving away and then let's go out and get the best in class operators and build and scale them in a way that isn't leaning on taxpayers or leaning on them. But that really fits the like-minded scenario of a win-win. So how did you think about that? Because also, I mean, as you as you both will know, well, charter schools can be like a third rail issue for a lot of people, right? The idea of private sort of private provision of what we all should think should be publicly available for free and it should be perfect. But of course is not. How did you think about about that dynamic of, OK, we could we could raise a hundred million dollar fund and we could work with with charter school operators and real estate or what if that hundred million? Is it better served in advocacy for government that's going to increase funding to public schools? How did you think about sort of what could be and why did you go with this sort of a private sector solution? Well, it's interesting you asked that. I don't mind me jumping in here because we were having our investor committee meeting once, you know, annually and we were having it at my school and it's funny you mentioned the the the number one hundred million and we've raised more. We've deployed ten times that but but separate from that. You mentioned that number that that really reminds me of this investor meeting we were having and as it's kind of going on and continuing. I'm looking around the school thinking how far things have come. We're talking about how much we've scaled and I started looking around this incredible campus and and what I've had to raise and spend and write checks for and how much did this cost? You know, and it came out pretty quickly to about a hundred million bucks to create this this in perpetuity great education for 1200 kids. And then I thought to myself if I could go back in time and I could take that same hundred million and I could give it to us now, not only will we build 17000 seats with that hundred million dollars, but we would also return there upon returns that would allow that person to choose to invest again. So that hundred million would look more like 17000 seats and 170 million. So what a what a what a wonderful thing. Let's start with the understanding and recognition that charter schools are public schools. Children don't pay to go to a public charter school. So whereas a lot of people like to look at the charter school industry saying you're privatizing education, you're doing nothing of the sort. Public charter schools are public charter schools are public schools that operate independent from the public school unions and the public school districts. Our mission was to basically empower the very best in class charter schools to succeed. Andre and I were not in the business of scaling mediocrity, but we recognize and let's be honest, the vast majority of public charter schools don't outperform the school districts. In fact, many underperform the school districts and we're big believers that bad charter schools should be shut down. I should bad public schools, but there is a small subset of charter schools to top 15 percent who are dramatically outperforming the public districts consistently, both academically and financially. And what we wanted to do is empower those great schools to scalability. Now, someone says, well, how do you make money off of public education? Well, who doesn't make money off of public education? Software companies make money off of education. Pencil manufacturers do calculator. Everybody's making money off of public education. Our job is to recognize the following. Again, if you want to treat a problem, philanthropy is fine. Andre spent 15 years, raised $150 million to build one school. In seven years, we have raised now over half a billion dollars. We have built 88 schools for nearly 46,000 children. With our second fund, we'll build another 50 schools at the end of the day between fund one and fund two. By seat count, we will be the 22nd largest school district in the country, in the country. And you couldn't have done that with philanthropy, nor could you have done that with government spending. And by the way, while we're on the road to changing the trajectory and the opportunity set for tens of thousands of children, we're delivering 9 to 10 percent returns for our investors net of all fees. How could you ever not think that's a great day? So tell me, tell me how then the mechanics of the fund work. So how are you, how are you selecting sites? How are you thinking about picking operators as you build the fund? Go for it. Oh, well, I mean, listen, there's the economic model is pretty straightforward and one that is predetermined and negotiated with our with our operator that fits inside their their ability to expand their footprint in a way that puts zero pressure on them. So this is pretty negotiated. What we do is we bring X amount of dollars to the table to build the school for these operators and instead of playing landlord in their life. Right. So just so everybody here who doesn't know when a child goes to a charter school, the money from the state follows the child to that school. So if your state say gives 10,000 per child to go to that 10,000 will go to this school. If you have 800 kids in that school, that's eight million dollars of revenue. So if you buy, if you build a 10 million dollar facility, turn it over on in an area where there's a high demand. You got 800 kids that show up on day one instead of playing landlord in their life and taking rent. We take that rent through the taxes and bond market, give them an opportunity to get a purchase power to buy back the facility that satisfies a pre-negotiated deal with that they were looking for and that our investors were looking for. And the investors that we're looking for is not an investor that's looking for huge returns. It's not an investor that's that wants to give away their money anymore. As an investor that recognizes the only way to make sustainable change is to do it in a sustainable way. I want to invest my money in something that changes society. So we were able to help scale, like Bobby just mentioned, 88 schools. Now, remember, this is the top 15 percent of best in class operators. And out of out of all those schools, I would say, how many operators do you think have come back for more schools with us now? I mean, there are multiple schools for for a very select group of operators that that that keep coming back. It was it was quite the education that we had to go on when we raise them. When we raise the fund, we had to do a lot of educating to the investors. This is incredible. So when I thought I told Andre that raising a private equity real estate fund to address the issues of charter schools would be more difficult than winning a grand slam. He originally looked at me and said, I call bullshit. After a year of going out on the road to raise the fund, he said, I give up raising a private equity real estate. I mean, social impact investing, you know, I don't really particularly care for the word social impact investing because there's a misperception that when you superimpose the word social on investing, you're going to sacrifice yield. The reality is, is just not the case. Having been a capitalist and an investor in urban communities going all the way back to my partnership with Magic Johnson, we've proved over the last 30 years that one can do good and do well without sacrificing yield. And in fact, because we're investing in underserved communities where there's an existing mismatch, we're not really speculating on demand, which means we'll tend to outperform more traditional, more speculative real estate investments. When we got on the road, the tour of that year, we visited four kinds of investors. We visited with the Unionist at Canyon. I managed a number of billions of dollars for organizations like the California State Teachers Employment Plan, CalSTRS. Imagine the conversation that Andre would have with the gentleman from CalSTRS. I had managed a couple billion, and I would say to the gentleman there, I'd like you to invest in my new fund. And they say, Bobby, you're a fantastic money manager for us. How big is the fund? And I said, $200 million. They said, we'll take the entire fund. What's the asset class? And I said, well, let me tell you something more about the opportunity. It's about the health of America. It's backed by the taxing authority of the government. The gentleman said, that sounds great. What's the asset class? I said, well, let me just tell you a little bit more. I'm going to throw in a set of ginsu knives. What's the asset class? He says, I said charter schools. Now, for those of you who are old enough to remember what an analog phone looks sounds like when someone hangs up, you get the dial tone. And I got the dial tone. So I called back the gentleman and said, why in the world would you have hung up on me? He goes, you're asking the teacher's school union to invest in a fund that's undermining the public school teacher's union, to which I responded, oh, quite contrary. We're incredibly pro-union. It's just the children's union that we're representing. And if education is going to be about adults, we're in trouble. So the unionists weren't particularly good. The capitalists, we had a great time. We met folks like George Soros and Mike Bloomberg. And these are some of the most brilliant capitalists you'll ever meet. And they're incredible philanthropists. But none of them believed that profits and purpose could play nicely in the sandbox. We met with the communists, which were amazing. So the unionists not so good. The capitalists were the communists. We met with the government of China, CIC. And at the end of our presentation, the gentleman from China looked at Andre. That happens a lot. People tend to ignore looking at me. And they looked at Andre and said, Mr. Andre, I love your fund. We'll take the entire fund. To which case Andre leans in. And I've known Andre now for a year and I know we're in trouble. And the best way to describe Andre's thirst for knowledge is when I first met Andre, about six weeks into our dating, he called me on a Sunday morning. And he said, my son, Jayden, I need some help, Bobby. And I said, what's going on? He goes, my son Jayden has an exam in mathematics on Monday. And I cannot explain to him in what universe the minus three times a minus three can be a positive nine. So I said, Andre, this is good. That's a good question, right? Fair enough, right? I mean, you got three shit things happen to you times the times three more shit things happening. And it sounds like you're up to your ears and shit. So of course. Yeah. So I'm laying in bed with my wife and she and I are both graduates of the Wharton School. And of course we've got the answer. We just hopefully one of us does. So I roll over in bed and I ask my wife, how do I explain to Andre why minus three times minus three is a positive nine? She goes, explain to Andre the following. If you do a bad thing to a bad person, that's a good thing. She's also smart. OK, great. So I say, Andre, if you do it, and he goes, I heard what Lauren had to say, but what's that got to do with minus three times minus three? So I said, you know something? I don't know. But the reality is, Andre, it's just one of those rules in mathematics that you've got to memorize and accept. And I kid you not, Andre said to me, maybe you can live your life that way, but I can't. I need to know. So now we are fast forward about a year and we are sitting with the government of China and they've just said, we'll take the entire fund and Andre leans in the table and asks the obvious question. Why? Why does the government of China want to invest in a private equity real estate fund to focus on education in America? It's a good question, right? Great question. To which the gentleman said, Mr. Agassi, you may not be aware of this, but your country is indebted to my country to the tune of nearly $2 trillion. Whoops. Yeah, it was earth shaking. And it rattled us to the core. And what you might not know is you owe us $2 trillion as we look around the table. None of us here at this table today will be alive to see that debt repaid. Therefore, we the government of China have got to rely upon the next generation of Americans to grow your economy out of the debt you owe us and you all are failing to educate them. So we need to hedge our bets. So we'll take the entire fund. That is a very long-term play there. That's incredible. But it's funny, a generational investor versus the unionist example of somebody is thinking more short-term or not long-term, or capital is not long-term. And it's a process and education to show people the merits of why this is so important. I mean, ask the question today. Everyone here, raise your hand. Who knows when the Dow Jones industrial average is within 1,000 points? Pretty much. Who knows where Bitcoin is trading? Who knows what the iPhone 10 costs? Who knows what the pumpkin vanilla chai latte is going to run in Thanksgiving time at Starbucks? Everybody knows. No one fucking knows how many kids dropped out of high school last year. And which one of these is a more determining factor of how we're doing this as a society? Obviously it's education. We are conspicuous consumers and we're conspicuous investors. And here is the government of China setting us straight. So Andre goes, we don't really want that money, do we? And I said, no, we don't because we need to solve this problem ourselves. But if we can't raise the money ourselves then you are definitely jumping on an airplane and playing every exhibition match necessary in Shanghai to get the money back. But so the unionists didn't work, the capitalists, the communists didn't work. Luckily we came across folks like Liesl, what we would call the realists. And the realists are those who recognize the consequences of not investing in for-profit solutions to tackle the most daunting challenges like education. It's unconscionable. And we were able to go out and raise $210 million and that ended up leading us to build 64 schools in our first fund for 35,000 school seats. And to tell you how excited our investors are about being involved, this is an anecdotal story and you don't know this, but it happened a few hours ago because I walked in literally seven minutes before we came on stage because my flight got delayed, I was at the airport and I was, I didn't think I was gonna make it, right? So one of my investors happened to call, I'm not even gonna say who it was, but and I was just, here's my drama, but Bobby's waiting for me up in San Francisco and we've got a few thousand people there we gotta talk to but celebrate what it is we're doing and I'm just, I don't know if I'm gonna make it, I'm sure he's not too thrilled right now. He goes, can I send you my plane? And I was like, no, I'm good, I'll make it there one way or another. But he's so, he's not just investing and making money, it's preaching the word that there are always smarter ways for things to be done and they're so happy that they want me here talking about it because it matters that much to them that others learn to see it the same way. And so how do you think about performance and measuring sort of the outcomes of your fund not just financially but in terms of, I mean you've mentioned a number of seats that are built. What other metrics or measurement do you put in? Let's start with the following basics. We are investors and we have a fiduciary responsibility to our investors, okay? So in fact investing shouldn't be deemed as philanthropy, it's not, it's not the government, it's just a business strategy that recognizing that profits and purpose can play nice in the sandbox. We go a step further, we actually believe that we can deliver better risk adjusted returns in traditional investing because we're not speculating on supply and demand. So we measure and report three metrics to our investors. Number one is financial because when we think about our evolved capitalists who are investors that have woken up and said, gee, doing good and doing well drives alpha and diversification for our portfolio, they typically stop at asking the following question, how are we doing financially? But then we have also the enlightened philanthropists who are the other 50% of our investors who are folks like you and me and Andre who gave money to organizations that just kindly didn't create or generate the kinds of returns that we were hoping for. And societal returns. So what we report to those is number one, of course, financial returns. We also report environmental returns because again, 40% of all CO2 emissions in the environment are caused by conditioning the as-built environment. We're building the as-built environment, we're responsible for 40% of the emissions. So therefore we pay particular attention to what our carbon footprint is and what our water consumption is. And we monitor that and we report that to our investors. The third is impact. What is the impact, the direct impact we have? So number one is we know how many school seats we've built, but that's not enough. In our leases with our schools, we require them to report quarterly academic performance so that we can see that they are outperforming the school districts themselves and we hold them accountable to that. So we get to look at how the school seats are performing and what that has on the impact of our kids. How many kids are going to college and following up how many kids have dropped out of college? The other thing we've recognized is that social impact investing can be a reinforcing mechanism and or a catalyst to the surrounding community because we're building infrastructure. Andre and I and the team, we built an amazing K-7 public charter school for rocket ship academies out of San Jose. In the Anacosta area of Washington DC, Ward 8, one of the most challenging economically depressed environments in neighborhoods. Directly across the street from our property was and is the Woodland Terrace Public Housing Project, one of the most violent public housing projects in the country. In less than a year from when we opened the doors of the school, violent crimes had fallen by 50%. Now is that because we built a school or maybe it's because the local liquor store closed down? But Andre and I and I think all of you have to believe that when you invest new capital, when you build a $35 million school in an economically depressed community, a community that has seen no investment for the past 50 years, the community wakes up one day and says, gee, if other people believe that we're worthy of an investment, maybe we are worthy of investment and we need to hold ourselves accountable for our own behaviors. And that is the reinforcing mechanism that comes from social impact investing. And so actually when you're looking at site selection, I'm really curious how opportunity zones are weighing in or not weighing in to where you're looking because we're just gonna probably see a huge number of real estate developers that are moving into these areas really just having the tax tail wag the dog. So with a fund like yours and the experience that you have with a more holistic approach to development, what's your take on opportunity zones? Is this a big exciting opportunity for you or do you meet it with trepidation? I've been in the business for 30 years. We're 28 years ago, we had the enterprise zones and the empowerment zones and now we have the opportunity zones. And to some extent it's the tail wagging the dog. For us it won't mean a lot because we're already investing in opportunity zones because that's where the sweet spot is for us. The idea behind opportunity zones was to influence or attract new capital that wouldn't traditionally invest in these communities. Well, these are called opportunity zones because they're risky. Let's not kid ourselves. And just because you're going to wave capital gains on me doesn't make it a good investment. So I actually believe it's a much to do about nothing in the opportunity zones. Number one is it's misunderstood. People think that they can take deferred capital gains, roll them into this new investment and never pay capital gains on that. That's not what the legislation says. The legislation says that if you're rolling capital gains into an opportunity zone investment, you've got to pay those capital gains in 2026. Well, if you've rolled these gains into this new investment, how are you going to pay the taxes without liquidating that investment? Number one. Number two is what I find appealing about it is it will attract capital. New capital because if you hold an investment in an opportunity zone for 10 years, those gains will not be subject to taxes. Notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that it will be gains because, again, to invest in underserved communities is, I think, defined by two words, arrogance and distrust. Arrogance from capital because capital has money and they're smart and therefore they know how to solve the problems of underserved communities and distrust from those living in the communities who suffer the injustices, who assume capital is there just to make money. So unless you actually find an opportunity zone investor who has the understanding, the nuances of bridging that gap between arrogance and distrust, you're likely to lose money. So you're not paying taxes in any way. And what do you do? I mean, there's a lot of different things that your fund addresses. What happens when you find something you are excited about or passionate about that you just have to say no from a financial standpoint? Are there any, do you have partnerships with local community foundations or other things that you do to wrap around those services as well? I mean, that's a great question. Andre and I debate about it all the time because Andre's the good witch and the bad witch. Because Andre came from the philanthropic side, I came from the capitalistic side. At the end of the day, we are fiduciaries to our investors and we cannot deviate from a very, very stringent discipline that we've set forth. We're not speculators. We're only gonna build schools for the very best in class charter schools. We're only gonna build in markets where there's a huge mismatch between supply and demand. We're not building charter schools in high-performing school districts. And the operator themselves have to have a track record. I mean, listen, there's a lot of great leaders out there that have left a great organization that are gonna become a great operator and have dozens of great schools. They're easy to recognize when you've lived your life in this space, but we have to show the discipline to say you have to prove your track record first that you're not gonna fail these kids because we've promised our investors that we're gonna create returns and change. And if you're not changing what's already broken, you're not part of who we wanna expand with. So the track record is crucial. We suffer, we always joke about it. One of the biggest challenges we face is we suffer from empathy burnout because we got to say no to so many well-intentioned operators of schools, but having good intentions doesn't make you a good operator of a charter school. And as, I hate the word pioneers, in impact investing is pioneers, I think of people getting shot in the back by arrows as the original pioneers, and that's not what we wanna be. We kinda got shot in the front. You get shot in the front, most of the time. You know, we don't have the luxury to take risks because if we're not successful in social impact investing, there actually are a lot of people rooting for our failure. There are people who don't want to believe that doing good and doing well can play nice in the sandbox and they're rooting for our failure. And if we're to fail, I think it sets back the social impact movement by a very long way. So we don't have the luxury, we've got to say no. Can we supplement a new school with philanthropy? The answer is yes, because our risk as a fiduciary to investors is the big risk for us is that the school fails and they don't pay the rent. Well, there are many instances where we can go and we can get credit support from a local philanthropist who's willing to guarantee that lease for a period of time. So sometimes there's workarounds, but nine times out of 10, there's not. And what do you do when actually you do have an operating partner who is not up to standard or you're not happy with the management of the schools or have you run into that circumstance? We've had a couple of schools that didn't live up to our expectations, but remember one of the mitigations of risk is making sure we build a school in an area that has multiple great operators. That's one thing that's fantastic about this space is there's really no pride of authorship. If you're failing at it, you're getting buried. And if you're really good at it, you want a school that is built and incubated that you can kind of bring your brand to. So we've had times where other great operators in the area have just taken over the school. From an educational perspective, it's created a seamless transition for those kids. It's, in some cases, you can speak to the financial side. It comes with a little bit of a, I don't know, reckoning or how you would phrase it, but we're... I call it a haircut for guys like us. Yeah, it comes with a little bit of a haircut because you're not in the greatest leveraged position. But again, when you've got a portfolio of 88 schools and you're betting on the best in class, and this happened twice, maybe? Once? Twice. Twice. So again, our job is to, listen, I always tell people it's really easy to be an investor. Write a check. Hit send on the right instructions. Great investors are those that are already thinking about how are they gonna return to their capital? And what we're always doing is protecting our downside, identifying, quantifying, and mitigating risks. So as we said before, we're only going to build schools for amazing operators, proven track record, academic, and financial. We're only gonna build in marketplaces where there's an existing demand for the product, and we're only gonna build in marketplaces where there is a multiple selection of alternative users in the event the school were to fail. Because as Andre mentioned, the only thing more disheartening to a public charter school, failing is watching those kids get relegated back to the school district. So you'll have, if you had a great school fail, you'll have one of the surrounding schools say we'll step in and we'll take over the lease. It's happened twice, but again, twice out of 88 schools is a pretty great track record. Yeah, that's pretty great. So what are some of the other, I mean, beyond the school's fund, I know you do things in affordable housing and also in health as well. So tell me about those funds. I mean, so, I mean, Andre and I realized day one that no matter what we did for a child between the hours of eight and five, if they went home to an unsafe and un-nurturing home environment, everything we accomplished went out the window. So one of the focuses that turn around in fact we have is we do focus on the preservation of affordable workforce housing. You know, I think we have this debate. I've never been more anxious in my life. I don't know, raise your hand if you're anxious about the state of affairs in this country. It's hard not to be, okay? And the divisiveness is all consuming for me and for Andre. We talk about it all the time. Regardless of what side of the aisle you're on, we recognize that there are some daunting challenges that will not be solved by political bickering and divisiveness. I think the other issue that we face is recognizing that the pointing of fingers is not doing any good. To say that the problem in society is the disparity of wealth, I think is insincere. The fact that 1% controls 99% of the wealth is not the problem in society. The problem is the disparity of hope. Because as long as the 99% which I grew up as with Andre grew up as, as long as we believe in the feasibility of the American dream, as long as we believe that with hard work, with a great education, with decent healthcare and housing, we could become the 1%, then you played nice in the sandbox. But the problem is in this country today, and you can't disagree, there are tens and tens of millions of families that suffer from the injustices of social determination, being born in the wrong neighborhood. They're subjected to working two or three jobs, spending 60% of their income on rent. Their kids are relegated to failing school districts in many communities in the city of Baltimore. The likelihood of your son graduating college is less than the likelihood of him going to prison by the time he's 28. Where is there hope in that family? And when you take hope out of the equation, the only word that fills that void is despair. And we believe it's the intensive despair that leads to the intensive violence. And the political circuses that we see today. And our opinion has been, we have to take a holistic approach to these communities to provide hope. And hope comes in the form of education, in healthcare and housing. But don't you, I mean, I agree as an impact investor as well, clearly I believe that we can do both, we can do well and do good. But don't you think the inequality has gotten a little out of control? Like, you know, there's been some, I think recently, some good, healthy debate around, you know, what if we all just made a little less money? Like, what if people just weren't so wildly successful and everybody just made a little less? So, disparity of wealth is bad, disparity of hope is worse. But we're unique. I mean, I sit on the board of a major university where I'm on the board of overseers of the Wharton School. Out of the last board meeting, I came in to find that my name tag had been changed to read Bernie Sanders. It says a lot about where business leaders are thinking about what is the purpose of business. Is it solely for the benefit of shareholders or should it also be the benefit of societal good? Now, I actually don't think they need to be segregated. And I'm actually encouraged today because with social media, with the flow of knowledge, never before in the history of America or corporate America have corporations been held accountable for their social practices. I think it's encouraging. So the new form of activism today is shopping. Hopefully you vote with your purses. You're supporting brands that are practicing good and socially responsible practices and you're rejecting brands that aren't. So I think we're getting there. What I love about it is today, you know, and in the reality is people that control money today look like me, devilsly good looking and follically impaired. But the reality is, you know, the vast majority of capital is controlled by white men between the ages of 55 and 70 who aren't particularly enlightened to the changes in society and look at how it's being demonstrated in politics or holding on to this aristocracy. I mean, the reality is, is aristocracies don't work forever. And with intensive despair, there will eventually be revolution. It's not sustainable. So I'm actually encouraged that as you grow into your position as the next generation of leaders, you're changing the conversation. And I think organizations like SoCAP and a event like this, we're talking about the conversations and I'm optimistic because my generation will die in the next 20 years. And your generation will have a different perspective and a different set of values. Let's hope. I know a lot of my generation. They're an iffy bunch, an iffy bunch. But so as we're coming sort of close to the end of our time, just I'd love to know kind of what's next. So there's this fun. It's incredible what you've achieved in this period of time. So what's sort of what's next on the horizon? Me? Don't leave me hanging. My hands, my hands, yeah. Oh, what's next? What's next? So I don't know. Dream. What do you want to do? Dreaming while we're awake. That's what's next. Dreaming while we're awake. It's too easy to dream while we're asleep. You know, I say dream while we're awake. And we always try to think about new and better ways to impact the future. You know, three years ago, I started an tech company called Square Panda, which is focused on early childhood literacy. You know, we actually plan our prison build-outs based on third grade reading levels. I mean, that's how important this issue is. So is there a way to really scale the ability to individualize helping children do that as an example? So, you know, these are things that, you know, if you fail at it, you're thrilled that this is what you want to fail at. It's what you'd rather succeed at it, but I enjoy the inspiration of trying to impact the world while hopefully doing it in a smart way. And how, I mean, how much, I guess, as the more immersed you get in the education space, do you find yourself just saying to hell with government? Like I can't even wait for them to get on the, you know, for policy change and all of that. So I'm just gonna build this or does it make you frustrated when you see lack of political will? Well, let me put it this way. If the government was a charter school operator, they wouldn't be a partner of ours. Fair enough. They wouldn't, because we need to see a great track record. And what track record are we seeing in our public education? That your education is dependent upon what your zip code is. It's not right, it's not the way it should be, but we need solvents. And that's why this is so inspiring for us to have a seat at the table and one silo. It's not the panacea end all to our educational needs. There's a lot of people that need to come to the table to really solve this issue as a whole. Starting with, as Bobby mentioned, having a children's union. You know, I mean, what business in the world, by the way, would succeed if after three years you have a job for life. I mean, imagine trying to be successful in business, incentivizing mediocrity. It's not, it's not, it's not, and we're doing that with the greatest commodity we have in this country, which is our future. And that's the part that is really frustrating. You know, the one thing that Andre and I talk about late nights on Saturday is everything we're doing is important. But none of it matters if the earth is uninhabitable for humankind. And we talk about, and we talk about what we'll do next together and how we think about the environment, how we'll approach it. Because as exciting as it is to invest in clean tech, as exciting as it is to invest in solar and tidal and wind, the reality is in our, in my opinion, the horse has left the stable. When you invest in solar, when you invest in tidal, I mean, all you're doing is slowing that speeding car that's racing towards the cliff down from 60 miles an hour to 40 miles an hour. And eventually it's gonna go off the cliff. And unless we really think about effective ways to not just slow down our output, but to actually sequester the existing carbon in the atmosphere through carbon reclamation, whatever, extraction. I think that, you know, and we've just talked about it briefly, we need to deploy as much capital as possible. It's important to slow it down the pace of CO2 emissions, but we need to get a little smarter and jump ahead because I do believe that what we are is just kicking the can down the road. So the Turner Geoengineering Fund, that's next? The Agassi Turner. Well, great. Well, so thank you so much to the two of you and for taking this time with us, telling us about this partnership, what motivated you and the things that you've learned along this way. I think it's a really unique partnership. And what I also really like is that they're just, they're really doing it. There's a lot of talk, and then there are people that actually move money, move it quickly and move it with a lot of integrity and impact. So please thank me in joining our panel. Thanks. And that was really fun. Thank you all for being here too, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.