Hi, this is Paul Zelizer and welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs. Thank you so much. Today our guest is John Clark and our topic is New Mexico is Building America's Sovereign Wealth Fund. Let me read you John's bio. John Clark is an Albuquerque native and is the State Investment Officer for the New Mexico State Investment Council, which manages a portfolio of $67 billion for the state. Yes, that's billion, not millions, making it one of the three largest sovereign wealth funds in the country and on track to become the largest in the next five to seven years. The SIC's investments produce substantial revenue for New Mexico, revenue that is now projected to overtake oil and gas as the largest contributor to the State General Fund by 2043.

The permanent funds already contribute more than a quarter of all funding for K12 education in the state, along with more than three quarters of all funding for early childhood programs. And we're going to talk about some exciting things in that department in this podcast. I'm super excited about that. John is also committed to fulfilling the SIC's role in helping build the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the state and the SIC has committed 1.7 billion to New Mexico Focused Venture Capital funds over the last three years. These investments into advanced energy, deep tech, aerospace and defense will help build these economic sectors where New Mexico has a right to win, bringing billions of dollars of additional investment in thousands of high quality jobs to the state with the goal of growing the state's economy and elevating the standard of living for New Mexico residents. Before joining the SIC at the start of 2024, John was deputy Secretary and later Acting Secretary for the New Mexico Economic Development Department and while there launched the Office of Entrepreneurship within the department. Prior to that, John works as a Fiscal Analyst and then Chief Economist for the Legislative Finance Committee for seven years where he specialized in tax policy, revenue forecasting and economic development analysis. John also previously worked with the New Mexico Partnership for more than five years to recruit new jobs and businesses to the state and before that worked with scientists at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to help commercialize technologies develop at the labs.

He has a Master's in Business Administration and Finance and Marketing from the Anderson School of Management at Unmute. And in his spare time, do you actually have any spare time, John? How do you have spare time after all that? And in his spare time he enjoys Outdoor recreation in New Mexico's beautiful landscapes and weather. John Clark, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thank you so much, Paul. I really appreciate you having me on here today.

That is quite a bio. You've been working hard for New Mexico for at least a year or two.

It sounds like, yeah, maybe a couple of decades at this point. But it is a state that I grew up in. I care a lot about, have a lot of family and friends here who are raising their families here. So I want to make sure that this is a good place for them to raise their families.

And we're here to talk about something that can really help move the needle in that arena. John it's called the New Mexico Sovereign wealth Fund, is called the permanent fund. But before we get into the specifics of New Mexico, let's just start at the beginning. What is a sovereign wealth fund and how do they work?

Sure. So a sovereign wealth fund is a dedicated fund that either a state or a country can set up and typically either is funded through surplus revenues that the state or third country has or through a dedicated revenue stream. So in New Mexico's case, we decided as a state decades ago to start putting some oil and gas revenues that the state receives into permanent funds as well as revenues that we receive from use of our state lands throughout our state. And so we manage these funds as well as a number of others. It's a total of 14 different funds that we manage. And the goal is to take this either surplus revenue or dedicated revenue stream, invest it, grow it, and then send more money back to the state year after year.

And remind us, how much are we talking here when you put them all together?

So you got the number right. It's $67 billion with a B. And we are on track to become the largest sovereign wealth fund probably in the next six, seven years. We project that we are going to hit $100 billion by 2032.