At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.
I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.
After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.
By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.
The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.
The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).
I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.
When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.
Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.
Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.
Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.
Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.
We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.
Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.
Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.
If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.
With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.
We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.
We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.
Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.
The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.
While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.
On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.
Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.
Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.
Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.
The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.
Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.
We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.
Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.
We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.
We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.
If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.
We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.
We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.
For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:
https://t.co/gZKafCw6Ia
The progressive theory of racial progress has a fatal flaw: It has never worked.
Thomas Sowell looked across the entire world and history and could not find a single country where the policies now pushed for black Americans actually lifted people out of poverty.
Coleman Hughes explains why this insight is so devastating. Most American intellectuals start with America and then invent theories. Sowell started with the rest of the world and asked what actually worked.
Groups that rose did it through culture and behavior. Groups that received lowered standards and handouts did not.
There is still no serious answer to this from the left.
You’ll never coach anyone as much as you coach yourself.
Mike Krzyzewski said it best.
“Who do you talk to the most? Yourself. So when you talk to yourself, why not be yourself’s best friend?”
https://t.co/SGYUQG9QOz
This roughly 25 min message may change your life and more importantly, your eternity.
Blind from Birth - Program - Truth For Life https://t.co/QBGdMGiL2v
"Just as surely as Jesus opened the blind man's eyes physically, so Jesus opens the spiritual sight of men and women." —Alistair Begg
Listen to today's program: https://t.co/fdx4iYVnzE
"Just as surely as Jesus opened the blind man's eyes physically, so Jesus opens the spiritual sight of men and women." —Alistair Begg
Listen to today's program: https://t.co/fdx4iYVnzE
"In stock-market terms, parenthood is not day trading; it's long-term investing. It's amazing how a monstrous four-year-old who is constantly treated with godly love and discipline can become a thoughtful and loving young adult by her late teens." —Alistair Begg
Read today's devotional: https://t.co/pJmymm3ddX
In 1963, the largest crowd ever recorded at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena was not for a football game or concert. It was for a Billy Graham Crusade, with 134,254 people inside and another 20,000 listening outside.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, our nation’s founders took an extraordinary step, declaring that liberty and self-government were the birthright of a free people.
One of the most remarkable stories in human history emerged from that moment.
For generations, we have carried forward the enduring belief that every person possesses inherent dignity and that freedom is the ingredient needed to unlock human potential. Across our nation, countless men and women have risen from humble beginnings to lives of extraordinary achievement. Our citizens, from every walk of life, have inspired innovation, enterprise, discovery, service, and sacrifice on a scale few could have imagined.
As we celebrate our 250th anniversary, we honor those who built, defended, and strengthened this nation across the generations. The principles that animated our founding remain as vital today as they were in 1776.
May we reflect on the remarkable inheritance we share as Americans, and look with hope toward the future.
JORGE POSADA: “I CAN’T WATCH TODAY’S BASEBALL.”
Yankees legend Jorge Posada, a 4-time World Series champion and one of the faces of the dynasty years, (The Core 4) did not hold back during his interview on Abriendo El Podcast.
Posada said today’s game has become too robotic, too obsessed with formulas, and too accepting of strikeouts.
“The baseball being played today is garbage,” Posada said.
He also pushed back hard on the analytics crowd trying to judge Derek Jeter’s defense strictly through modern numbers.
“You can’t judge Jeter through a computer.”
That line right there is pure old-school Yankees.
Posada came from an era where putting the ball in play mattered. Moving runners mattered. Taking pride in not striking out mattered. He said back then, striking out 100 times in a season felt like you were not doing your job.
Now? Guys can strike out constantly, hit 30 home runs, bat .202, and still get paid like stars.
His message was simple:
The game got smarter on paper, but dumber between the lines. #yankees #repbx
Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth.
It communicates with us using a 23-watt transmitter.
Less than a refrigerator light bulb.
The signal takes 22 hours to reach us, traveling at the speed of light.
By the time it arrives, it's 20 billion times weaker than the power of a digital watch battery.
NASA's Deep Space Network picks it up using 70-meter dish antennas cooled to near absolute zero to reduce electronic noise.
The engineering required to hear a 23-watt signal from 24 billion km away is arguably more impressive than the spacecraft itself.
Launched 1977.
Still transmitting.
Still being heard.
We built something that works perfectly, 47 years later, in conditions no one has ever tested in.
That's what engineering for the long term looks like.
On June 6, 1944, a 56-year-old general with a secret walked onto Utah Beach under fire, armed with a cane and a pistol.
The secret: his heart was failing. He had hidden it from the army doctors so they wouldn't pull him from the mission.
His name was Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Son of the President. He had begged three separate times to lead the first wave ashore at Normandy before his commanders finally said yes.
When his landing craft drifted 2,000 yards off course, every instinct said redirect the following waves to the correct zone. Instead, Roosevelt walked the beach himself, alone, under artillery fire, cane in hand, reading the terrain.
His verdict: "We'll start the war from right here."
He then stood on that beach and personally greeted every regiment that landed after him, pointing them inland, cracking jokes under shellfire, steadying 18-year-olds who had never seen combat. He did this for hours.
Years later, Omar Bradley was asked to name the single most heroic act he had ever witnessed in combat.
His answer, without hesitation: "Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach."
Roosevelt's son, Captain Quentin Roosevelt II, also landed at Normandy that same morning. He was named after his uncle, Quentin Roosevelt, who had been shot down as a fighter pilot over France in World War I.
Three generations. Three wars. One family.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. died in his sleep 36 days later. Heart attack. The thing he had been hiding finally won. He never learned he had been awarded the Medal of Honor.
He was buried at the Normandy American Cemetery.
In 1955, his family had his brother Quentin, killed in WWI, exhumed from where he fell in France and reinterred right beside him. Quentin is the only World War I soldier buried there.
Two brothers. Two world wars. The same French soil.
Their father had once said: "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
Both of his sons did exactly that.
37 years ago today, the CCP launched its brutal crackdown on the peaceful student-led protests in Tiananmen Square. What made this atrocity especially shocking was that it unfolded before the eyes of the world, broadcast live on TV.
In the decades since, the CCP has worked relentlessly to erase this chapter of history. Many younger Chinese have little knowledge of this horrific event, and this year, for the first time, authorities banned families from visiting the public cemetery where many victims are buried.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S., leftists attempt to rewrite history by drawing false comparisons between rioters and the Chinese students who stood up to a tyrannical regime, and between ICE enforcing immigration law and the CCP’s military opening fire on protesters.
We must not forget the history and horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre. We must teach future generations about the horrors of communism and how precious liberty truly is.