- Hi everyone, welcome to our Daily Homeroom live stream.
This is a way that we're trying to keep everyone
in touch during school closures.
It's a place for us to answer any questions you have,
talk about how we can just navigate this crisis together.
We have a really exciting guest today, Ray Dalio.
I'll give him a more formal introduction in a little bit.
But before we get into the meat
of that conversation with Ray,
I'll just remind everyone Khan Academy
is a not-for-profit organization.
We exist because of philanthropic donations
from folks like yourself.
And I wanna give a special shoutout to several corporations
who stepped up in the last few weeks to make sure,
Khan Academy was running at a deficit even
before this crisis and our deficit has grown
through the crisis,
and special shoutout to Bank of America,
to Novartis, to Fastly,
to Google.org and AT&T
for helping us respond to this crisis.
But we still need more support,
so if you're in a position to do so,
please think about making a donation to Khan Academy.
But with that, I'd like to introduce our guest
that I'm super excited about.
Ray Dalio has been something a hero of mine
back from my previous career
when I used to be a hedge fund analyst.
For those of you all who don't know Ray,
Ray is the founder of Bridgewater Associates,
which is the largest hedge fund in the world.
And so I think we're gonna have a really interesting
conversation about finance, the economy that we're in,
and a lot of the work that Ray and his wife, Barbara,
are doing around philanthropy to try to help address issues
around education and other things.
And so if anyone has questions,
feel free to come on Facebook and YouTube
on the message boards, we have team members
looking at questions.
Ask questions about the economy,
ask questions about hedge funds,
ask questions about education.
Ray's going to, and myself,
will hopefully be able to address a lot of them.
So, Ray, thank you so much for joining.
- It's always great to be with you.
- And, Ray, maybe a good place to start,
and full disclosure, Ray and Barbara have been
long-time supporters of Khan Academy
and philanthropy in a lot of different dimensions,
so thank you for that.
But when you say "the largest hedge fund in the world",
I think a lot of people have heard of the word
hedge fund, but then they say,
"What is a hedge fund?"
(laughs) So what do you do?
How is that different than other types
of investment vehicles?
- Well, most investment vehicles
go up or down with the markets,
like the stock market goes up,
they make money, stock market goes down,
they lose money.
Some go into bonds and so on.
A hedge fund doesn't have a bias,
so you can make money if it goes down,
you can make money if it goes up.
It just depends on whether you can make money.
So we can invest in all the markets in the world,
and we can do it in a way where if they went down
or went up, you have opportunities to make money.
The only thing that limits us
is our own abilities.
- Yep.
With the explanation I always used to give to folks
when I was an analyst at a hedge fund
is hedge funds have more flexibility
to make more different types of investments.
Now, there's a huge variety of them,
of different strategies.
But to your point, they don't necessarily
just track the market type of thing.
- Yes, and ours,
it's an extension of my own personal passion,
which is to understand how the world works,
economically, every country.
So we're in just about every country,
just about every market,
and so we have to see the world
and try to piece it all together.
So that's my passion.
- And maybe that's a good place to start,
at a very high level,
because even before the COVID crisis started,
this was many months ago,
you have been a very vocal speaker and writer
about wealth inequality.
And when you speak, people are listening
because, obviously, you understand the economy,
you manage a lot of assets.
What's your view on this issue of wealth inequality?
- Well, I think it comes down to values, you know?
I was born in 1949.
In 1945, we began a new world order.
What I mean is we created a new monetary system,
the United States won the war,
and we began an American era.
And at that time,
it was clear what an American dream was.
And so I grew up in a household
where I've got two parents,
my dad was a jazz musician, lower-middle-class family.
But the notion of equal opportunity
through good education, I went to a public school,
and that notion of what was fair,
equal opportunity on a broad-base basis,
was what the American dream was.
I'm not sure that everybody would know
what the American dream is or state it that way,
but in any case,
it's become lost to where it certainly doesn't exist,
in that when we take education, for example,
I looked the conditions
of the different top quintile, top 20%,
next 20%, and I found
that the top 40% of the population
spends on average five times as much money
on their kids' education as the bottom 60%.
And so through intimate contact, and so on,
we can see that there is not just a wealth gap,
there's an opportunity gap
and a productivity gap that's a problem.
And it's a problem in terms of its outcomes,
the wealth difference.
But it's also a structural problem
in that all the people can't be,
have an equal shot at being productive.
And when you see some of the conditions,
kids who are living in neighborhoods
of poverty and go to school to get food
because they don't have enough at home,
and the services, something's wrong.
So I wrote a piece that's on LinkedIn,
which is Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed,
because I believe that,
first of all, if you don't have a situation
where people have opportunity,
you're not only tapping, failing to tap
all the potential that exists,
which is uneconomic,
but you're also threatening the existence
of the system, and I think that's coming to home
very clearly with this downturn in the economy
and the virus.
- And to be clear, I'm looking at some of your blog,
you wrote Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed,
the data is very clear, that's not under debate,
that inequality has gotten worse
over the last several decades.
You have charts like, you look at per capita GDP,
and for the bottom 60% of earners,
it's grown much slower than per capita GDP,
and for the top 40%, it's grown much faster.
And that leads to what you just talked about,
people at the upper quartiles
are able to spend more on their children's education,
so that kind of becomes a self-perpetuating thing.
Why do you think this has been the case?
What are the structural elements that have caused this?
And in your opinion, what needs to change?
- Yeah, great question,
because I don't think it's anybody's evilness,
at least not many people's evilness,
it is structural.
So, for example, the profit-making system
is a system in which it's a very effective resource
allocation because if what you are putting out
is worth more than what it costs you to make it,
you grow and you get capital that's invested in it,
and it grows that way.
But it's not effective in a number of ways.
The profit-making system, for example,
is not effective in creating educational resources well.
And so that large gap becomes a self-reinforcing gap,
particularly in this age
when there's a change in the economic rewards
for production workers, the average worker.
There's a hollowing out there.
And so profit margins increase,
and then, as you point out, it becomes self-perpetuating
because those who earn more money
take care of their children differently,
so it creates an opportunity gap.
They spend money on different things,
and so resources of the country go into those things.
And then naturally in a desire
to produce most cost effectively,
they go internationally
and find the most cost-effective ways of operating,
which has narrowed the wealth gap
between countries, but widened it within countries.
And then, also, we have a monetary policy
with the Federal Reserve
that buys financial assets.
In other words, the central bank,
the way it has been operating
when you hit zero interest rates
is to print money and then buy financial assets
which helps those who own financial assets
more than those who don't.
So the profit-making system and the capitalist system
in which you can invest in profitable enterprises
is good, generally speaking, as a resource allocation
but far from perfect.
So we just have to see those outcomes,
and you would say, "Are we producing
"a broad-based opportunity?"
And so it can't do everything.
So think about, let's say, a school system,
a budget for a school system,
it's budget based.
In other words, they don't have capital,
but yet, think about the economic impact simply
of educating children well.
So the point is that it's by and large
a pretty good system,
but it's not delivering the results
that I think we want.
And so my concern is that if it's not engineered correctly
to achieve that,
it can become less productive.
So from an engineering point of view,
you have to engineer it to increase the size of the pie,
which means increase people's productivity,
because you only get to consume what is produced.
So to raise living standards,
you have to increase productivity and, at the same time,
so you have to increase the size of the pie,
you also have to divide the pie well,
and it's gonna require a better engineering system.
And that is gonna have to be done, I think,
in a bipartisan way.
I'm really worried about the battle between the sides
causing more problems.
Because history has shown that this is a period
very much like the 1930s,
and when you have wealth problems and wealth gaps
and difficult times,
there tends to be a fight over how to divide the pie.
- And so I'm hearing, just to paraphrase what you said,
several levers that might have maybe gotten us here,
and once again, it's not anyone's negative intent,
it's just the reality,
technology has made knowledge work maybe more productive
and has maybe commoditized some labor type of work.
And then you add globalization there,
that also puts wage pressure, at least domestically,
especially in rich countries if some of that work
can go other places,
and then that can be self-perpetuating.
The people who have more are able to invest more
in their children and have more opportunities.
What do you think is the--
- And the Federal Reserve, as they buy financial assets,
helps people who have financial assets,
which they needed to do.
The policies that we're now seeing
now are more targeted than they were before.
- And that goes to a question from Twitter,
Ken asks, "I wanna understand
"what the Fed-printed money or government stimulus
"is going to."
And you just explained, the Fed-printed money
is going to go buy financial assets,
traditionally Treasury bonds,
but other things when it gets more aggressive.
"I wanna understand how the new money
"is flowing to the system."
So I guess you could go over that a little bit,
but what do you think are gonna be the main implications
of this kind of aggressive action
of where the money is flowing in,
either from fiscal or monetary policy?
- Well, thank you for that question.
Is it Fred?
Thank you, Fred.
- Ken, Ken.
- Ken, thank you, Ken.
Yeah, what we had before was what I described,
that the Federal Reserve would buy bonds
and then it would go in the financial system
'cause the seller of bonds
would get the cash, and they were an investor,
so they would buy more investments,
and it wouldn't trickle down in the same way.
What we have now is exactly what happened
in the Great Depression.
April 9th of this year was exactly
like March 5th, 1933.
And in March 5th, 1933, the newly elected
President Roosevelt got on a fireside chat
and explained that they were going
to produce a lot more money by central banks,
and they were going to devalue the dollar,
and they were going to enter into a lot of programs.
So these programs,
but I should explain,
the central government has the right to tax
and spend and determine how they do that,
but it doesn't have the right to print money.
The Federal Reserve, the central bank,
has the right to print money,
but they don't have the right to determine how it's spent.
And so in coming together, the Federal Reserve
and the government, central government, target programs.
And so they're now targeted at individuals which,
so the government, central government,
is targeting individuals, companies, and so on
in a number of ways,
and the Federal Reserve is buying the debt
so that they do that.
So they're producing new money and credit,
and that'll have implications for the value of money
and credit, but it's much more targeted.
So we now see those programs targeting,
of course, they're complex,
but they really are targeted more
for individuals and small businesses,
although there are big businesses targeted as well.
So that's the nature of the dynamic.
That money and credit, like in the Great Depression,
will reverse deflation.
I could explain if,
I worry that sometimes I answer the questions too long,
but there are economic holes.
You can think about it as a hole in income
and a hole in balance sheets.
And if you don't fill those holes,
then there will be less spending
and there'll be asset sales.
So that produces a deflationary depression.
So the actions that are now being taken
are meant to fill those holes
for Americans, others outside the country
will not have that benefit.
But they're targeted to fill those holes,
and it won't be inflationary
because it's negating deflationary.
But we're entering a whole new period of time,
which I hope we can talk about.
- Yeah, and that's talk about that a little bit.
From YouTube, Rochan Sante asks,
"So is it confirmed the economy will go
"into recession after this coronavirus?
"I'm more worried about the recession than the virus,
"because I'm afraid of jobs being lost."
What's your view there
of what's likely to happen as we go
out of the coronavirus?
Or maybe just what's likely to happen
over the next 18 months where it still might be out there.
- I think of the virus like being a tsunami
that's come, and then when it goes away,
let's say it was to go away forever,
there's still terrible damage.
And the terrible damage is to incomes
and to balance sheets.
Every individual, every company,
and every government has a certain amount of revenue
and a certain amount of expenses,
and then they have a savings,
a certain amount of balance sheet.
Those have been severely damaged.
So the loss of income, and bring it down relative
to expenses, is necessitating cutbacks.
And then the balance sheets means great losses.
Think about companies like Disney,
by way of example.
You think where was Disney?
Well, Disney will have that yet,
many, many companies,
many individuals, many small businesses,
that financial damage
is a great, great damage.
This will be the worst economic downturn
since the Great Depression.
The unemployment rate will approach 20%,
the downturn in the economy will be the largest
since the Great Depression,
and the financial consequences, the financial wreckage,
of this will be of that magnitude.
The good thing is that the government
is acting quickly to fill those holes in.
However, it's not being felt
by everybody the same way.
When you think of the economy,
there's the rich and the poor,
and it's going up and down,
I think we think that when it returns,
it's just gonna come back to what it was.
There's gonna be a restructuring of that.
There's gonna be a restructure.
People will think, policymakers will think,
who's going to pay what?
What bills?
And what should it be going forward?
So there'll be a reallocation of resources,
tax rates are going to change,
and also thoughts of spending to,
I think to establish more of an acceptable bottom.
Because it's so disproportionately felt
by those who don't have savings
or don't have conditions.
We can see just even
groups that have social contact, the poor,
live closer together.
And so in many, many different ways
that will be rethought about.
- And what do you think is the limit
of government action?
As you mentioned, the government can borrow money
in the form of Treasuries
to spend on programs, the interest rate can stay down
if the Fed keeps buying those Treasuries
with printed money,
and just in the last few weeks, they've issued
$2 trillion of programs.
How many trillions can the government spend
to try to do this
before you start seeing things like inflation pick up?
- You have a situation where we're testing
the limits of our monetary policy,
the capacity to print money.
This is very much like the war years.
So in the Great Depression, there was this kind of spending
and these kinds of deficits,
and then when we went into the war,
those increased a lot.
And the Federal Reserve, in one fashion or another,
monetized that particular debt.
The real question is whether we can use that money
productively or whether it's wasted.
If it's productive, and also most importantly,
if our society is cohesive,
I think that we can get through this
in a managed way much like a war.
However, what really worries me
is the fragmentation, the anger,
or the carelessness of one extreme or another
to mess up the continued improvement of the pie.
I think there's an opportunity here
to restructure the system to be in a better way,
but it really requires, I think,
a cohesiveness, a bipartisanship,
a respect and understanding and empathy
for the various sides involved
so that that's done intelligently
and the country is brought together,
rather than fighting.
Because history has shown, like in the Great Depression,
if you go from country to country,
the reactions were very different.
In fact, in Europe and Japan,
for countries that were democracies,
the internal fighting was so bad
that the parliaments, their congresses,
chose to have autocratic systems special rights.
Hitler came to power 1933
because the internal fighting was so great,
and there could be a move to a more autocratic
and confrontational types of policies.
And because this is a world problem,
this is not just a US problem,
this is a world problem,
and there's competitions going on in the world.
China's a rising power.
And then there's a lot of part of the world
that won't have the support
that the United States has because we're blessed
to have the world's central bank.
We can produce dollars,
and dollars are a reserve currency.
That means they can be spent all around the world
and they're accepted.
Very few currencies are like that,
no currency is like the US Dollar.
So in a lot of parts of the world,
they're not going to be able to fill those holes
that the Federal Reserve can fill.
So we're gonna see a change, I think,
in the world order.
And it's gonna be, there'll be anger
and there could be fighting,
so how that's handled, I think, is the most important thing.
- And that's related to this question from YouTube.
Pearper asks, "Are you seeing any geopolitical risks
"or limitations of what the government can do?"
I mean, you're touching on this.
I mean, how do you think that'll evolve,
and what advice, how do we navigate?
You mentioned there's polarization in this country,
there might be polarization globally,
what can people do proactively
to get to the better outcome?
- Well, first,
I'd like to draw your attention to a series
that I'm writing on LinkedIn,
which is called The Changing World Order,
and what it is is it looks at history
going back the last 500 years,
because the same things happen over and over again
for almost the identical reasons.
And one could see where we are now,
as I said, very similar to the '35,
the 1930 to '45 period, or other cycles.
And so what happens is when you have a great empire,
the world's leading empire,
and it becomes more vulnerable
if it becomes financially overextended,
if the education isn't the same,
when rivals rise to strengthen it,
that's a time that it becomes challenged by,
in other words, it can be perceived
as a time of weakness.
And history has shown that it's also a time
of economic difficulty
and that leaders tend to be more populist,
more nationalist, more confrontational.
And so that is why there's a tendency
of conflicts, geopolitical conflicts,
world conflicts, that follow depression periods.
And so it's something that we have to be aware of.
There are tensions with Iran,
tensions with China, tensions there,
and if it's perceived as a time of vulnerability,
it can produce conflict.
History has shown that to be the case
over and over again.
So in that piece, we go back to 500 years
and we see the patterns.
- And--
- So it's something to be scared about.
Now, the second part of that question
is what do we do about it?
The question is we.
We, we're common people.
We each have whatever influence we have.
The most important thing is the behavior
of the people who have their hands
on the levers of power.
And so they will make those decisions.
And so I guess we affect them,
and we have a right, to some extent, to choose them.
And we also, hopefully,
don't make it so polarized
that we're in this battle together.
And so countries dealing with each other,
just like the individuals of the political factions,
those of the left and those of the right
within the country,
hopefully realize that the path
of doing it peacefully and productively
is so much better than the path of conflict.
Because if, and maybe that's the thing to pass around.
Because if there's conflict,
that conflict creates its own problems,
its own economic problems, its own social problems.
And that creates the worst economic output.
So it's really comes down to how we are with each other.
- Yeah.
No, and speaking about that,
from YouTube, Andres Pineronda asks,
"Please walk us through the restarting process
"of the economy," and maybe even how that might relate
to the geopolitics, but especially the economic.
"Would it be possible to come back suddenly
"from a 20% unemployment rate
"while after the 2008 recovery was quite more slow?"
And what you're suggesting is this might be a deeper
recession or even depression than 2008.
- Yeah, I think it's important to understand
that there's a productive economy,
so if there were no financial pieces,
no balance sheets and income statements,
there's just imagine there was no savings
and no financial assets,
that's kinda one part of the economy.
And it works with the other part of economy,
which is the financial part of the economy, assets.
You lend somebody money, they have to pay you back
and so on.
And they're both operating together.
So if we didn't have the financial part of the economy
and didn't have to have a debt restructuring,
you'd almost imagine, okay,
you can go on and work and the economy produce.
Well, they can't even produce at whatever level
it's capable of,
and so if it was not impaired by the virus,
why not go do the other things?
But when we have money and we have credit,
we have accounting.
And so we have companies with debts.
Like I live in the state of Connecticut
and the state of Illinois and so on,
they have their own financials.
And so the financial consequences of that,
meaning that certain people
are gonna need payments,
and when they go financially broke,
then that's going to be the impediment.
So the impediment to growth
is largely the financial impediment to grow.
And that is why that's so important to be dealt with.
We could all hear what we hear about the virus,
and there's a wide range of possibilities.
It's certainly case in past pandemics
that the possibility of it coming and going
and not being easy to deal with economically
could persist for a while.
And those economic consequences are very important.
So we're gonna come out of it with a restructuring.
One day it'll be gone,
and we will have a restructured economy then.
Who will pay what taxes,
who will have what wealth,
and how the resources will be distributed,
I think, will be restructured.
And how that's done will be important
to make sure that it's a productive way.
And that restructuring is historical.
So, as I say, 1930 to '45,
we started '29 to '38, really,
we had a depression,
and '33 they printed a lot of money,
and then we went into a war,
and then we had a giant restructuring.
And 1945 we began again.
And then we were off and had a period of prosperity
and that's normally the case.
Man's capacity to adapt
and invent is tremendous.
That's the greatest force.
So while we go through these restructurings,
I think that, at the same time,
there's this tremendous capacity to adapt
and restructure and get on to doing it again.
So I'm confident we'll get it behind us,
but I think it's probably gonna take a few years.
- And on that, just to break down some of what you said,
in the financial world, when you talk about a restructuring,
this is a company has some debt,
has to make interest payments,
it might have to renew that debt after some period,
and then if, for example, if you're an airline
and you're bringing in no revenue,
there's no way to pay that debt,
that's the type of restructuring you're talking about.
And then, separately,
there's a, I guess you could say, the real economy,
irrespective of how people finance things.
And that's where you're saying--
- Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
- No, no, go ahead.
No, no I'm just trying to paraphrase,
make sure I'm understanding--
- Well, on that first restructuring, it'll also
be a restructuring of who pays the bills.
So yeah, there'll be the corporate restructuring,
and somebody'll have an opportunity
to, let's say, buy that airline cheaply,
the debtors, but then we may not fly as much.
And so, I don't know, there'll be less planes,
and it'll all be adapted to in that system.
And then, at the same time, excuse me,
and then at the same time,
we're in a position where there are going
to have to be changes in taxes
and changes in restructuring wealth
and those kinds of changes.
They may affect how states are going to get it.
They may how we spend money on education.
They may affect how we spending money on healthcare.
We're going to have to spend,
we're gonna learn to save more,
because a lot of entities realized
that they didn't have a cushion.
So there'll be more savings and less spending,
and it'll be reconstructed as to how we do taxes
and spending and all of that too.
- And what I'm hearing from you is you're definitely
not seeing kind of an immediate bounce-bank.
If tomorrow the coronavirus just disappeared,
it's not like that everything would just
get rosy overnight.
There might be just the people who've lost their jobs,
they might not be hired immediately.
They have less purchasing power.
So what I'm hearing from you is it could be several years
for it to get back to normal.
- This will go on a while because of those economic
consequences, and then also consider
that it's gonna be worse in countries
that don't have reserve currency central banks,
most of the world.
And also we're going to make an adjustment
for self-sufficiency.
We were on a path to greater self-sufficiency
because of the rivalry, and could-be conflict,
with China and others,
in terms of we're a highly globalized economy
becoming much more of a self-sufficiency economy,
and even individuals are becoming more self-sufficient.
And that meant that the efficiencies that we had
by produce it wherever it's most cost effective
to produce it and ship it easily around the world,
that paradigm is shifting.
So we're going from an interconnected world
to a world that is going to be much more independent,
and that will make for less efficiencies and supply lines,
for example, and so that'll have an effect.
All of those are like sand in the gears.
- And what's your sense, given that this could
be a protracted recession or depression,
the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1930s,
you're a student of the market,
what's your sense of the last few weeks?
The market seems to be getting more and more optimistic.
- Well, I think it's very much like March 1933.
So let me recount,
there was a bubble,
the '20s were the Roaring Twenties
and people borrowed money to bet on it continuing.
That was very much like the time we were in,
people were borrowing money,
companies were borrowing money to buy back stocks and so on.
And then there was the bubble burst.
And so from '29 until 1932,
and then the beginning of '33,
1932 we had the dive, Roosevelt was elected.
He was more of a populist of the left to redistribute.
And in March 5th, 1933,
he announced a program that's very much
the same as the program that we announced,
Americans announced, the President, the Congress,
and the Federal Reserve on April 9th.
And that bottom, that represented the exact bottom
in the stock market, the exact bottom in the economy,
because it produced a wave of money that hit.
And so while we went from the low in the economy
in 1932 into the beginning of '33,
there was a pickup in the economic activity
that carried further along.
So the Depression, reaching its economic activity,
it took about 10 years for the economy to get back,
a little less than 10 years,
and it really took going into the war
to get back where it was.
So I think it'll be somewhat similar
that what happens is there was the big printing of money,
and we call that reflation.
And with that reflation, that is what's supporting
assets like this.
So you see both stocks and gold go up.
However, we're in a period of time
where there's massive differences.
You talk about the stock market as a whole,
but the differences between the winners
and the losers is enormous.
And so when looking at stocks
or looking at any asset,
we have to appreciate the differences that exist there.
And also there's not much leeway in interest rates.
So the best way to get stocks to go up
is to get interest rates to go up
so there's a floor.
So I think we're in an environment
in which you're not going to see the return
to normalcy, but you're seeing this weight
of money force create the bottom,
right around the same time, same way
as March 5th, 1933,
you're seeing that weight of money come in
and have that effect.
And then I don't think it's gonna take it
to anything where it was,
'cause conditions are much worse,
balance sheets, income statements.
And then there's going to be the value of money question.
Gold and other assets and storeholds of wealth
will enter into the picture,
so I think it's similar
and that differentiation's going to be very important
to know where to invest and where not to invest.
- So it's not so much that you're doubting the market,
the market is, as you said,
there's this weight of money flowing in
and it has to go someplace,
and that might be maybe forming something of a bottom,
or do you think that the market as a whole
is being overly optimistic
given some of the more pessimistic scenarios
that might happen?
- Well, if we take the market as a whole,
what we have is the Federal Reserve
and the federal government, I believe,
saying, "We will do whatever it takes."
And so if you saw that amount of money,
we've seen, we're gonna see another two trillion.
I think you'll see whatever amount of money
it takes, and that means,
so we're on that kind of a path.
The question will increasingly also be
what is the value of money
and whether it's a storehold of wealth.
And so that becomes the next risk to worry about.
So that's why I keep referring to storeholds of wealth
and stocks at the same time
as there's that reflation going on.
Because if you go down again,
and the unemployment rate goes up again, and so on,
the money and credit is just gonna keep comin'.
- We could talk `for a hour.
I just really looked at the time,
and I realized I've gone 10 minutes over,
so thanks for staying with us.
I do wanna get a chance to talk you to
a little bit about some of the amazing work
that you and Barbara are doing in philanthropy.
Tell us a little bit about this program
that y'all have just announced.
I guess even before the crisis,
you all were doing some pretty impressive
things in Connecticut,
but especially around device access most recently.
- Well, Barbara, I guess you're referring to--
- The laptop--
- Yeah, Barbara worked in the poor school districts
for the last 10 years helping them,
and we decided that we'd give $100 million
to the state of Connecticut
if the state of Connecticut would match it
to get disengaged and disconnected high school students,
students who wouldn't make it through high school
or stop working, to get them through high school
and to jobs.
And so we put that in place.
And then we just put in,
bought 60,000 computers for those students,
because those poor students don't have computers
and they can't do online learning.
And so that's one of the things that we've done.
We've done a number of other things,
food programs, supports in other ways,
but I think that's what you're speaking of.
And that's why we're excited to partner
with you and Khan Academy to get them
the great education that they otherwise
would not have.
And it was great.
I really wanna shoutout to Dell,
because there was a shortage,
there's a shortage of computers,
and how they were responsive,
and how they priced those computers at cost,
and provided those 60,000,
and then we put in about $25 million to do that.
We're able to get them and provide them education.
But it just highlights the differences
in the conditions between the different populations
and basic things like education or computers.
So, yeah, we're thrilled to do that,
hopefully together with what wonderful work you're doing.
- No, I'm talking to a lot of folks these days,
and Khan Academy, as much as we hope
it can help a lot of folks,
you need that device access, you need that internet access.
So the work that y'all are doing in Connecticut
is incredible, and we're hoping
it can set an example for many other groups
around the country or the world.
So, Ray, thank you so much.
I hope you can join the,
we have so many questions that I didn't get to.
I probably got to 5% of the questions
that people are asking.
I, personally, would also like to go much deeper
on some of these economic questions
to make sure I understand it a little bit better.
But thank you so much for joining today,
and I hope we can do this again sometime soon.
- It was a delight, anytime you want.
Look forward to it.
- Thanks, Ray.
So thanks everyone for joining today.
This was a great conversation.
Thanks for all of your questions.
I think we will be able to convince Ray to join again
and get to more of these questions.
But, once again, thanks for joining.
This is a really fun way for all of us
to stay in touch during this time of social distancing.
I will remind you, if you are in a position to do so,
please think about donating to Khan Academy.
And we look forward to seeing you
in future live streams.
Tomorrow, we're going to have four-star
General Stanley McChrystal on,
and we're gonna talk a lot of questions
about motivation and staying focused
and a little bit about maybe some of the geopolitics
of what we might be going into.
So thanks for joining.
Thank you, Ray, and I will see everyone tomorrow.