The Ben Shapiro Show - Is the American Dream Still Alive? | Steve Ballmer

00:00:00.000 My college buddy from down the hall, Bill Gates, gave me a call and said, hey look, we've been building our company.

00:00:07.000 We need a business guy.

00:00:09.000 We don't have a quote, business guy, unquote.

00:00:13.000 And my vast business experience I'm an ad manager of the school paper, football team manager, publisher of the literary magazine in college, plus learning a little bit about advertising at Procter& Gamble.

00:00:28.000 And man, oh man, I was the big businessman, if you will.

00:00:33.000 You know, we kind of grew from there.

00:00:34.000 Steve Ballmer is a prominent American businessman and philanthropist, best known for his role as CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014.

00:00:41.000 Microsoft grew to $80 billion in revenue under Ballmer's tenure, and Ballmer himself became an institutional figure in Silicon Valley, well known for his distinctive management style and marketing talent.

00:00:50.000 Beyond his corporate achievements, Ballmer launched USA Facts in 2017, a non-profit organization dedicated to equipping Americans with the big data points on the biggest issues that face our country today, like the economy, immigration, and healthcare.

00:01:01.000 Ballmer and his wife Connie also co-founded the Ballmer Group, whose philanthropic mission focuses on improving economic mobility for families across the United States.

00:01:09.000 Notably, Ballmer also purchased the NBA's LA Clippers in 2014, where he has financed the construction of a brand new stadium and can often be found courtside at games.

00:01:16.000 In today's episode, Ballmer shares the circumstances of his upbringing in Detroit, Michigan, the early days of Microsoft, and his concerns about the public's wavering faith in the American dream.

00:01:24.000 Ballmer also discusses his work with USA Facts, his advice to entrepreneurs, and the shifting landscape in big tech today.

00:01:30.000 Steve's enthusiasm for business and clear passion for his charitable work are all evident to those who meet him.

00:01:34.000 Don't miss hearing from Steve Ballmer on this latest episode of the Sunday Special.

00:01:38.000 Steve Ballmer, thanks so much for taking the time.

00:01:49.000 Really appreciate it.

00:01:50.000 My pleasure.

00:01:51.000 Thanks for having me.

00:01:52.000 So, I want to talk to you about USA Facts in just a few minutes, but I want to begin with sort of your business career, because that's how most people know you.

00:01:58.000 They either know you from your days at Microsoft, or they know you as owner of the Clippers.

00:02:01.000 I want to start with sort of the general idea of the American Dream.

00:02:04.000 There's been a lot of talk politically from all sides about how the American Dream is dying, how it's dead, but your story is an American Dream story.

00:02:11.000 So, how does someone like you, I guess the 30th employee at Microsoft, end up as the head of Microsoft?

00:02:18.000 CEO of Microsoft.

00:02:19.000 Can you take us through that journey?

00:02:20.000 Yeah, maybe I'll give you more than you want.

00:02:22.000 You cut me off if I go too long.

00:02:25.000 And in a sense, I'll say our two-generation story, if you will, is an American dream.

00:02:31.000 My grandparents on my mom's side were immigrants from what's now Belarus and Ukraine, Jewish immigrants trying to avoid the pogroms, et cetera, came here, you know, Before, if you will, World War I. My dad himself was an immigrant.

00:02:51.000 He came here after World War II. He'd been an interpreter at the war trials at Nuremberg.

00:02:56.000 So I'm pretty recent, as my folks would have said, off the boat.

00:03:01.000 Neither of my parents went to college.

00:03:03.000 My dad didn't finish high school.

00:03:06.000 My grandfather, on my mom's side, didn't finish second grade.

00:03:10.000 So, while asking for no empathy, I will say, you know, we're recent, recent in the country.

00:03:18.000 And I was brought up, I would say, solidly middle class.

00:03:24.000 My dad worked his way up from payroll clerk at Ford, but they were able to You know, give us a good education.

00:03:34.000 I got a scholarship to a nice fancy private high school that helped me a lot.

00:03:40.000 And then went to Harvard and, you know, after that, if you will, I was quite set up.

00:03:46.000 I no longer was at the bottom of the American dream.

00:03:51.000 Graduated, worked for a couple years at Procter& Gamble, one year back in business school in Stanford, and then my college buddy from down the hall, Bill Gates, gave me a call and said, hey, look, we've been building our company.

00:04:06.000 We need a business guy.

00:04:07.000 We don't have a, quote, business guy, unquote.

00:04:11.000 And my vast business experience, ad manager of the school paper, football team manager, publisher of the literary magazine in college, plus learning a little bit about advertising at Procter& Gamble.

00:04:26.000 And man, oh man, I was the big businessman, if you will.

00:04:30.000 And We kind of grew from there.

00:04:33.000 We were a partnership.

00:04:34.000 We had to incorporate.

00:04:36.000 We were 30 people.

00:04:39.000 The year I started, we did, I think, $7.5 million of revenue, maybe a million of profit.

00:04:47.000 I can't recall.

00:04:48.000 So we incorporated the business.

00:04:50.000 We put in stock option plans.

00:04:52.000 First thing, Bill and I had a chance to, quote, fight about, unquote.

00:04:57.000 After about a month and a half, I wanted to Add another 18 people to the 30 people we had.

00:05:04.000 Bill said, you're going to bankrupt us.

00:05:06.000 I didn't ask you to drop out and I was going to go back to school.

00:05:10.000 And then Bill said to me, no, no, we're going to put a computer on every desk and in every home.

00:05:16.000 And that sounded like a big, broad ambition.

00:05:19.000 And he said, all right, you hire one good person and we'll figure out about the other 17.

00:05:23.000 And it kind of all came together, and when I left, the company I think was about 88,000 people.

00:05:31.000 We had about $27 billion of pre-tax income, and they've taken it now to higher heights, if you will.

00:05:40.000 So, that story is an amazing story, but it also happens to be a fairly typical one in the sense that I know a lot of people who have made a lot of money in the United States, and very few of them were born to the silver spoon.

00:05:51.000 I know that when we started our company, obviously, my sort of family history is actually quite similar to yours.

00:05:56.000 My grandparents on both sides ended up coming to the United States very early on in the 20th century.

00:06:02.000 I was raised very middle class.

00:06:04.000 My parents were college graduates, but they certainly weren't rich.

00:06:08.000 My mom was a secretary.

00:06:09.000 My dad played piano at a restaurant.

00:06:11.000 And they gave me the basis to do things like go to a private high school and then go on to UCLA and Harvard Law School and then launch a business.

00:06:19.000 And so this bizarre idea that the American dream is dead, that something has fundamentally shifted, We live in a great system that allows for meritocracy, it allows for free markets, it allows for generationally advancement to be made.

00:06:44.000 Not everybody's going to make it from the bottom of the mountain all the way to the mountaintop, but you can move up the mountain such that your kids can make it the rest of the way.

00:06:52.000 Do you feel like the American dream has fundamentally shifted over the course of your lifetime, or is that still a possibility for people?

00:06:58.000 I think it's a possibility for sure, but I also feel as if it is, and the data from Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, who's been working in collaboration actually with the IRS, so he can look at specific data,

00:07:15.000 if you will, would show that the economic mobility of For African Americans born in the country, particularly African American males, and for Latinos, are not as good.

00:07:31.000 And, you know, is the American dream alive for some folks?

00:07:37.000 Not clear.

00:07:38.000 I'm not saying it isn't, but it's certainly, the data would say, tougher for some groups to achieve that kind of mobility.

00:07:46.000 And I'm sure if we went to Appalachia, just as a specific example, we'd find some of the same, if you will, for white people growing up in certain pockets.

00:07:56.000 So it is possible.

00:07:58.000 I believe in it.

00:07:59.000 I totally believe in the American dream.

00:08:02.000 I want it to be equally available to everybody in the country.

00:08:07.000 And it's not just race and ethnicity that factors in.

00:08:12.000 I just think there are some situational factors.

00:08:15.000 Ironically, economic mobility today is better for women in the country. 0.99

00:08:19.000 Than it is for men, particularly if you're of color. 0.97

00:08:24.000 So it's just sort of a broader package.

00:08:27.000 But do I believe in it?

00:08:29.000 Yes.

00:08:30.000 Do I view it as part of what we're trying to do philanthropically to make sure it is alive?

00:08:35.000 Yes.

00:08:36.000 So those things are, I think, quite important.

00:08:40.000 We'll get to more with Steve Ballmer We're good

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00:09:43.000 So when we look at your story over at Microsoft, you know, obviously we started business.

00:09:46.000 We're nowhere near Microsoft's level of success.

00:09:49.000 So when you give business advice to people, which I'm sure you do all the time, what are some of the biggest lessons that you learned during your course of business?

00:09:56.000 And what are some of the biggest fights that you had with people like Bill Gates along the way?

00:10:00.000 Because as somebody I have a couple of business partners, those fights are fairly constant.

00:10:03.000 I think people don't really tend to see that outside the company, but that sort of stuff is happening all the time behind the scenes.

00:10:09.000 Yeah, I'd say a few things.

00:10:11.000 Number one, folks have to find something that they're either passionate about or they develop passion about.

00:10:19.000 Not every job or not every career will you have passion about at the start, but sometimes that can really cascade.

00:10:26.000 But you need to look.

00:10:28.000 You actually have to have a plan to see what's out there.

00:10:33.000 I'll give an example.

00:10:34.000 When I was an undergraduate, my You know, my dad worked for Ford, but I interviewed with about 32 different companies on campus just to learn, okay, what is it like to work in the back office of a bank?

00:10:48.000 What does it look like to be an accountant?

00:10:50.000 What does it look like to, you know, be a salesperson?

00:10:53.000 I think it's really important to take that on as a mission to find a passion, not hope you randomly luck out and find one.

00:11:02.000 So that'd be number one.

00:11:04.000 Number two is hard work.

00:11:08.000 If you're working harder than the person who's doing your job in your competitor, that gives you more grace.

00:11:16.000 It gives you more opportunity to, if you will, make a mistake.

00:11:22.000 Because you're going to work it through.

00:11:23.000 You're going to catch up.

00:11:25.000 So I absolutely believe that hard work is critical.

00:11:29.000 The thing I have learned, I think, a little bit since Microsoft is you need to still retain a little bit of brain space, a little more brain space to speculate on what may come next.

00:11:42.000 If you become a dreamer, not going to work.

00:11:45.000 If you become totally a grinder, not going to...

00:11:49.000 It's not going to work.

00:11:50.000 So that'd be number two.

00:11:52.000 And then number three, let's face it, there is an element of luck.

00:11:56.000 And I think people like to act like, well, I'm a master of the universe because I didn't have any help before.

00:12:04.000 I did it all on my brain power, my hard work.

00:12:10.000 You know, energy.

00:12:11.000 And I think that's unfair.

00:12:14.000 I think there is a clear element of luck in this game.

00:12:18.000 So I would highlight those three things.

00:12:21.000 Then, if you become a leader of a business, I think there's important things to really think about.

00:12:29.000 Number one, be long-term in your perspective.

00:12:33.000 If you're trying to build something, things don't arrive overnight.

00:12:37.000 Number two, I like to tell businesses to get in the weight room. 0.63

00:12:42.000 Build new skills.

00:12:43.000 Before you know you need them, you have to be building skills, building talent, do the recruiting.

00:12:50.000 Create a sense of optimism in your business.

00:12:53.000 Colin Powell, we had him come speak one time to our executive staff, and he Emphasize that optimism is a force multiplier.

00:13:02.000 Businesses really need that kind of optimism.

00:13:06.000 Leadership.

00:13:07.000 Leadership is about thought leadership.

00:13:10.000 It's not just about people leadership.

00:13:12.000 If you're very charismatic and you're running off a cliff, more people are going to follow you off the cliff. 0.98

00:13:18.000 So damn, man, you better pick the right direction. 0.98

00:13:21.000 Just a little bit of food for thought. 0.99

00:13:24.000 Yeah, I mean, there are a couple things there that I want to hone in on a little bit.

00:13:26.000 The first one that you mentioned, which is passion for the thing.

00:13:28.000 Again, when I talk with folks who are very successful, there is this kind of bizarre idea out there that they became very successful because they're constantly thinking about money.

00:13:36.000 Not a single person I know who has founded a successful company originally thought predominantly...

00:13:42.000 They thought more about the business and why they were enchanted with the idea of spreading that business.

00:13:48.000 In fact, it's almost the reverse.

00:13:49.000 If you think too much about the money when you're first starting a business, you actually end up doing the wrong thing.

00:13:54.000 I remember when I was in law school and I was interviewing for law firm jobs and I really had no interest in working at a law firm.

00:13:59.000 And so I remember being in an interview and somebody said, so why do you want to work at a law firm?

00:14:02.000 And I gave the honest answer, which was for the money, because the starting salary was like $180,000 a year.

00:14:07.000 And that was the wrong answer, as it turns out.

00:14:09.000 And I thought to myself, well, but that's true.

00:14:11.000 I mean, nobody's joining a law firm because they want to work 2,200 billable hours a year doing doc review in the back room.

00:14:17.000 But the reality is that The employers looked at that answer, and what they were recognizing is that if you are in it for the money, you're not going to stay in it.

00:14:24.000 If you start a business because you think that that's the thing, that's where the money is, then you're not going to have the passion to go through the hard times, because the minute that the money doesn't come, you're just going to move on to the next thing.

00:14:35.000 I agree with you if you're trying to have that kind of drive to do something new.

00:14:43.000 Now, for some people, I think people elect a profession where they say, hey, I can make With greater certainty, I can have a very nice lifestyle if I pick this profession.

00:15:00.000 I'm sure some lawyers do that, and that's okay.

00:15:05.000 It's not all about the money.

00:15:07.000 It's not about getting rich, but hey, with relatively low risk, I have a chance of doing relatively well.

00:15:15.000 This will sound a little bit off, but I think some of that is also true in getting into the investment business, whether it's venture capital or private equity or even advising corporations on finance.

00:15:29.000 Those jobs pay well or consulting.

00:15:33.000 And capitalism works on this in the sense that, you know, if you look at top graduates of top schools who go into business, guess what?

00:15:43.000 While the kids will say they don't care about the money, the jobs that pay do attract the highest percentage of the people.

00:15:49.000 I'm a big believer that markets actually are very efficient.

00:15:55.000 If you put an incentive out there and it appeals to somebody, it's going to work.

00:16:01.000 One of the other things you mentioned there was the luck aspect.

00:16:04.000 And there certainly is a luck aspect to what works and what doesn't.

00:16:07.000 And sometimes things you don't think are going to work definitely do.

00:16:09.000 But there are some studies that suggest that one of the things that distinguishes successful leaders from unsuccessful leaders is actually how much they attribute their success to luck in a way that you wouldn't sort of expect, which is successful leaders, when something goes right, they tend to attribute that to luck.

00:16:24.000 And when you're an unsuccessful leader, you tend to attribute bad things happening to So if you're a successful leader, you think everything that's going wrong is my fault.

00:16:32.000 Everything that's going right, that's luck.

00:16:34.000 And if you're a bad leader, you tend to think everything that's going right, that's me.

00:16:37.000 And everything that's going wrong, that's luck.

00:16:39.000 And so I think that you're almost naturally doing that when you say success is luck.

00:16:43.000 What you really mean by that, I think, and what a lot of us mean when we say that is because I'm expected to put in the work.

00:16:49.000 And if I fail, then that's something I can fix.

00:16:51.000 That's probably something that's my own fault.

00:16:53.000 The minute that you attribute your failure to luck, you're now saying that your own success is outside of your purview.

00:16:59.000 Yeah, I agree with that.

00:17:01.000 I mean, to me, it's another way of saying not everything is controllable.

00:17:05.000 You can control, we say this in basketball too, as owner of the LA Clippers, you know, control what you can control.

00:17:12.000 You can control how much work you put in.

00:17:15.000 You can work on your kind of mental mindset, so you really can be, okay, missed that one, next play, next play, next play.

00:17:25.000 Can I tell you just a short Microsoft story that sort of confirmed my view of luck?

00:17:33.000 Within a month after me coming to Microsoft, we got a call for some guys from IBM. And IBM was the behemoth of computing in 1980.

00:17:44.000 People might not know that now.

00:17:47.000 Younger people, my kids who are in the late 20s and 30s, they'll say, what does that company do anyway?

00:17:53.000 But back then, they were the computer industry.

00:17:57.000 And these guys call and they say, hey, we want to come talk to you about something.

00:18:00.000 We're not going to tell you what it's about.

00:18:04.000 And, you know, you'll sign a non-disclosure agreement, and then we'll tell you, and that's how it'll work.

00:18:10.000 And we said, okay, when do you want to come?

00:18:12.000 And they said, well, you know, we're down the street now.

00:18:16.000 I don't know.

00:18:16.000 I may be being a little bit exaggerational, but it sticks in my head.

00:18:22.000 And so, all good, and they wanted to buy an operating system from us for the PC they said they were going to build.

00:18:31.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:18:32.000 Now, we didn't have an operating system.

00:18:35.000 We had a bunch of language software, and there was some confusion because we had licensed one for a variety of reasons.

00:18:41.000 Anyway, we say we don't have one, but we really wanted them in the PC business, so we literally called the number one operating systems company at the time, a company called Digital Research, and said, we're going to put some guys on the phone.

00:18:58.000 Treat them right.

00:19:01.000 And IBM talked to them, same spiel they gave us.

00:19:04.000 They fly down there, but the CEO at the time was out flying.

00:19:09.000 His wife, who was a business partner of his, was there, refused to sign the non-disclosure agreement.

00:19:15.000 We then said, hey, we'll get you an operating system.

00:19:19.000 And if there isn't some luck in that, I don't know what luck is.

00:19:25.000 So early on in my business career, we were the great, you know, beneficiary of good luck.

00:19:32.000 We'll get to more with Steve Ballmer in a moment.

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00:20:36.000 So one of the other questions I asked earlier was sort of about how you navigate conflicts in the boardroom.

00:20:42.000 How do you deal with top-level conflicts?

00:20:44.000 I'm going to take this advice, again, with my own business partners.

00:20:48.000 Yeah, I would say, you know, you really have to work things out and people have different personalities.

00:20:57.000 You know, from the time Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft, retired in about 83 after dealing with Hodgkin's disease, you know, I was basically the number two guy at Microsoft and number one business guy and Bill and I would tussle about things.

00:21:16.000 And there was a certain way we'd work them out.

00:21:19.000 They were never decided in one cataclysmic meeting.

00:21:23.000 There was a lot of struggle and body punching and minor gives and, you know, we worked it out.

00:21:32.000 Twenty years later, Bill asked me to be CEO of the company.

00:21:36.000 And I said, do you really want me to be CEO? Like, the number one guy and you're going to be the number two guy?

00:21:41.000 And you're going to do the tech?

00:21:43.000 And he said, yes.

00:21:44.000 Well, guess what?

00:21:45.000 We barely talked for that first year.

00:21:48.000 It was very hard for us to figure out how to reverse roles.

00:21:52.000 And even after, I would say, It took a while before I really felt comfortable in taking freedom of action.

00:22:03.000 So it is tricky.

00:22:06.000 It is absolutely tricky, and I suspect if you get two hardheads, I call Bill and I two hardheads, it's a little bit different than if you have two different personalities, somebody who's a little quieter but no less steely versus a hardhead, and everybody Yeah, it works it out in their own way, I guess.

00:22:27.000 Or don't work it out and things blow up. - So I'm gonna come back to the clippers of it in a bit, but I wanna get to USA Facts.

00:22:34.000 So this is a new venture that you've started.

00:22:36.000 It's a nonprofit that's designed to essentially provide just the facts.

00:22:40.000 And obviously we live in a, what people have termed a post-fact environment where everything is narrative.

00:22:45.000 And one of the difficulties in the industry that I'm in, right, because I'm in the media industry, and that means that I do opinion journalism, is trying to make clear to my audience what is opinion and what is fact.

00:22:54.000 And so one of the sort of rubrics that I've used historically is you listen to my show, then listen to Pots of America.

00:23:01.000 If we say things that are the same, those are the facts.

00:23:03.000 Everything else is probably the opinion that's being drawn from that set of facts.

00:23:07.000 USA Facts is an attempt to sort of distill down what those facts are.

00:23:11.000 Where did you come up with this and how has it been developed?

00:23:14.000 Let me origin first.

00:23:17.000 I retire and I'm thinking, isn't this great?

00:23:20.000 I don't have to do anything for a while.

00:23:23.000 I can relax.

00:23:24.000 And my wife says, no, no, no, no, no.

00:23:26.000 You're going to help with our philanthropy.

00:23:28.000 And she was focused in on foster kids at the time and kids who grew up in tougher circumstances without maybe that ability to dream the American dream.

00:23:39.000 I say, no, no, no.

00:23:41.000 The government takes care of those things.

00:23:43.000 We don't do philanthropy.

00:23:45.000 The government pays for them.

00:23:46.000 And she said, no, we're going to do philanthropy.

00:23:49.000 And so I jumped in.

00:23:51.000 But it got me keyed up to understand what does wealth transfer look like in America?

00:23:57.000 Which got me more interested in taxes, who pays them, what the government spends the money on.

00:24:04.000 From there, I got interested, well, government's not a business.

00:24:07.000 What kind of outcomes, though, do we get for the money that gets spent?

00:24:12.000 And once my shape of what I was interested in became clear, I said, gosh, I wish I had something like a 10K report that every corporation files with the Securities Exchange Commission.

00:24:26.000 Why?

00:24:27.000 That report is comprehensive across everything the business does.

00:24:32.000 It has to break the business into a clear segments that you can understand.

00:24:39.000 The report can't forecast the future.

00:24:43.000 Which I consider a biased activity.

00:24:45.000 It just has to report the numbers that have happened in the past.

00:24:52.000 There's a caveat.

00:24:53.000 Pension plans do forward progress, and we do publish those.

00:24:58.000 And the thing would also have to be then comprehensive, comprehensible, and because we're talking about government, It makes it almost by definition nonpartisan because we're just reporting on what happened.

00:25:13.000 We don't even take an opinion about what should happen.

00:25:19.000 I mean, it's very hard to grade things.

00:25:21.000 Take spending on transportation infrastructure.

00:25:24.000 If you look at the data from the Army Corps of Engineers, most of our bridges and roads have been getting better and better and better with the roughly $200 billion a year we were investing as a country.

00:25:36.000 Great.

00:25:37.000 That's super.

00:25:38.000 And then somebody comes along and says, let's do an infrastructure bill to spend more.

00:25:43.000 Well, if you're me, you'd say, hey, is that a good use of tax dollars?

00:25:47.000 Because I can live with the balance.

00:25:50.000 If you're my daughter-in-law with our grandchild, guess what?

00:25:53.000 You might say, if there's even, you know, 1% of roads or bridges that are deemed unsafe, we should spend more.

00:26:00.000 so there's no normative way to say what is better and what is worse so no scorecarding just here are the numbers and before you have your damn debate at least let's debate from what's true and let's not be like a politician where boom we just grab one number out of the ether give it no context to somehow alarm people or excite people and if you look at them in context You know,

00:26:30.000 things look very different.

00:26:33.000 I mean, I'll give you one example.

00:26:35.000 If you look at the median wage in our country, the median wage has gone up 21%, essentially, since the start of COVID. At the same time, inflation's been about 19% since the start of COVID. So that's what's true by the numbers.

00:26:52.000 Now, there's a lot of feelings from politicians.

00:26:55.000 There's a lot of feelings from citizens.

00:26:57.000 I don't dispute any of those.

00:26:59.000 But the numbers are what the numbers are, and how people choose to react, what people forecast for the future, what actions people want to take, that becomes partisan.

00:27:12.000 All of that becomes partisan.

00:27:14.000 I've majored in applied math and economics, and I used to think economics was a science.

00:27:20.000 I really did.

00:27:21.000 And now I know there's kind of left-wing and right-wing economists.

00:27:25.000 It's a little hard to think about it as a science anymore.

00:27:30.000 So the last thing, we only use government data.

00:27:33.000 Much as a corporation only uses its own data, We're not asking people to look at survey data from a think tank that might be biased.

00:27:43.000 I believe in general we have very professional statisticians in our government agencies.

00:27:51.000 It's imperfect.

00:27:52.000 We don't collect all the data.

00:27:54.000 Sometimes two collection systems lead to things that don't say exactly the same.

00:27:59.000 But if you're a decision maker in this country, I don't know where better to start. 1.00

00:28:03.000 And if you're a politician and you want to complain about the data, then I say to you, damn you. 1.00

00:28:09.000 That's on you. 0.99

00:28:11.000 You politicians are in a position to make the data, if you don't think it's right, push on those statisticians.

00:28:19.000 The citizens can't do that.

00:28:21.000 You want us to believe that.

00:28:23.000 Anyway, long-winded, but that's how I feel about it.

00:28:25.000 So to give people a sort of a sample of what you're talking about, I wanted to play a clip from a video that is about budgetary issues.

00:28:32.000 Here is something from USA Facts talking about the aging of the American population.

00:28:37.000 People are more likely to live alone today than any time in the past.

00:28:42.000 29% of households today consist of individuals living alone without a child compared to 13% in 1960.

00:28:53.000 Second, a greater share of the population is over 65, increasing from 13% of the total in 2010 to nearly 18% in 2023.

00:29:05.000 More retirees rely on income from Social Security and support from government services like Medicare.

00:29:13.000 So, I mean, obviously this is a breakdown of just basic statistics.

00:29:17.000 And then, as you say, the implications can be taken in any of a number of different directions.

00:29:21.000 I think there's some pretty obvious implications from that particular clip.

00:29:24.000 When you have an aging population, that means that you're going to need more money going into the services that pay for that aging population.

00:29:30.000 Or, if you don't have more money coming in, you're going to have to cut the services that are available to that aging population.

00:29:34.000 That's just an inescapable conclusion, obviously.

00:29:37.000 I mean, I'll let you make the conclusion, but strictly by my math lessons, I think kind of anybody else's math lessons, it's true.

00:29:37.000 Yep.

00:29:48.000 It's absolutely true.

00:29:50.000 We don't make that forecast, but if you ask me as a nonpartisan person who can use Excel, yeah, I'd say that's probably what Excel would say.

00:30:00.000 I mean, so how do you determine which subjects to focus on?

00:30:04.000 So you say facts is pretty comprehensive, but it can't cover everything, and you have to put your focus some places as opposed to others.

00:30:09.000 How do you decide which areas you want to put your energy into?

00:30:13.000 Yeah, we absolutely, though, start comprehensively.

00:30:16.000 There's no question.

00:30:17.000 We don't hide anything, because if you don't talk at all about some area, in a sense, you're not true to this notion of keeping things in context.

00:30:29.000 How much do we spend on, if you will, crime and criminal justice?

00:30:34.000 Well, you've got to know that.

00:30:36.000 Now, do we give you this much in terms of data that might help you understand, or do we give you this much?

00:30:44.000 So we start wide and just a little deep, but we've taken some subjects, like immigration, like the budget, where we have gone deeper.

00:30:56.000 There's other topics where I'd like to go deeper.

00:30:58.000 I don't think our crime data is as deep as I would like it to be for people to really have the numbers to make decisions, whether it's in their mayoral races or typically the mayoral races or county prosecutor races.

00:31:16.000 Does that data exist in a form we can package it?

00:31:21.000 It would be useful.

00:31:22.000 The number one thing households spend money on is housing.

00:31:22.000 Housing.

00:31:26.000 And yet, people say there's homelessness, houses are not affordable, There is a depth that we can provide in that topic that we do not today.

00:31:37.000 So we do a good job on some, and I wouldn't say we do a bad job anywhere, but we have an opportunity for increased depth, particularly if you look at these things in a local context.

00:31:48.000 Most people don't care about housing prices nationwide.

00:31:51.000 They take their interest in the housing prices in Jackson, Mississippi, or Seattle, Washington, or wherever.

00:31:58.000 So, you know, in making these videos, you know, obviously you're breaking down the stats.

00:32:02.000 Do you get into issues of causation?

00:32:05.000 Like, what is causing the stats to move in a particular way or not?

00:32:07.000 Because that obviously does get pretty political pretty quickly.

00:32:11.000 Yeah, we don't do causation.

00:32:13.000 We do not do causation precisely because it does get political.

00:32:18.000 And if economics was a science, then there would be economists who work for the government who would give you what they would call a scientific explanation of what's happened.

00:32:31.000 Not going forward.

00:32:32.000 That always gets political.

00:32:35.000 But even going back, if it was a pure science, causation would be clear.

00:32:40.000 But how do you get causation?

00:32:42.000 Something happens, like COVID. How do you figure out causation on what happened before to what happens now?

00:32:50.000 Innovation.

00:32:51.000 You get some major innovation in society, the personal computer.

00:32:55.000 People speculated during the Clinton era that the advance of technology really stimulated the growth that caused budgets then to, even during I think one or two of those years, run a surplus.

00:33:10.000 I loved it when I was selling PCs and software that people were saying that.

00:33:15.000 I can't prove to you there was causation there.

00:33:17.000 So we avoid causation.

00:33:19.000 We try to avoid adjectives.

00:33:23.000 Adjectives are partisan.

00:33:25.000 Numbers are not.

00:33:26.000 You know, some people like to say, God, it went from one to two.

00:33:30.000 They wouldn't say it goes from one to two.

00:33:33.000 They'll say something doubled.

00:33:35.000 Well, it might have gone from 1 to 2, but if it's in the context of 100, 1 to 2, the doubling doesn't help you understand the full context.

00:33:48.000 It's a huge increase.

00:33:49.000 Instead of saying double, it's a huge increase.

00:33:52.000 Well, it is, but not in context.

00:33:55.000 So the more we can avoid adjectives, and we're not perfect on this, the better off we are in terms of just presenting the numbers.

00:34:04.000 Now, making that interesting, it's a little hard.

00:34:08.000 People want to know why something happened.

00:34:10.000 They want to know what to do about it.

00:34:12.000 Some people don't like numbers, but it is the best way to set the context in what I would call a very factual way.

00:34:22.000 Some areas don't lend themselves very well.

00:34:25.000 To this kind of data, because they wind up being issues which are really driven by people's hearts, as opposed to numbers.

00:34:36.000 There are some numbers, but not a lot of the numbers, for example, on abortion, pro-life, pro-choice.

00:34:43.000 We have a little bit of data, but it's not an area we're focused, because it certainly doesn't affect spending, outcome, in that sense.

00:34:52.000 So we haven't spent a lot of time on it, just to give you an example.

00:34:55.000 We'll get to more with Steve Ballmer in a moment.

00:34:57.000 First, October 7th marked the one-year anniversary of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

00:35:01.000 1,200 Israelis lost their lives, over 250 were taken hostage.

00:35:05.000 The war in Israel continues to rage on today.

00:35:07.000 Missiles are flying, tensions are high, our allies are under attack.

00:35:10.000 It seems like every time you turn on the news, there's another crisis unfolding in the region.

00:35:13.000 Israel and its people are facing attacks from enemies on all sides who seek its destruction.

00:35:17.000 But there is hope.

00:35:18.000 The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is on the ground, providing food, shelter, and safety to those in need during this crisis.

00:35:24.000 Since the war started, thousands of reservists, everyday Israeli citizens, have left their families to serve their country.

00:35:29.000 Soldiers have been injured.

00:35:30.000 Their families need our support.

00:35:31.000 Your gift of $45 today helps the fellowship provide food and other necessities to these families to help them survive.

00:35:37.000 Here's what I need you to do right now.

00:35:39.000 Go to benforthefellowship.org.

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00:35:44.000 In the face of these many threats, the fellowship's ongoing work providing security to Israelis has never been more important.

00:35:49.000 Remember, that's benforthefellowship.org.

00:35:51.000 They're doing amazing work on the ground in the Holy Land right now.

00:35:54.000 benforthefellowship.org.

00:35:55.000 God bless and thank you.

00:35:57.000 So one of the issues that you mentioned a little bit earlier that I wanted to play a clip from another one of the videos is the issue of immigration, which obviously is a very hot button issue.

00:36:04.000 Kamala Harris is visiting the border.

00:36:06.000 President Trump has obviously campaigned heavily all three times he's campaigned on issues surrounding the border.

00:36:10.000 Here's a bit of the video from USA Facts about immigration.

00:36:13.000 Let's step back for a fact check on unauthorized immigration.

00:36:17.000 Two and a half million encounters with unauthorized immigrants at the southwest border in 2023.

00:36:23.000 Of these encounters, 1.3 million people were released into the country.

00:36:28.000 430,000 more people were transferred to ICE or Health and Human Services.

00:36:35.000 765,000 people were repatriated or expelled, plus an estimated 600,000 who entered the country undetected.

00:36:46.000 That means 2.3 million new unauthorized immigrants came over the southwest border into the country.

00:36:55.000 Yeah, again, that is just perfectly statistically accurate.

00:36:59.000 And it is funny how we do live in a polarized environment in which watching that video will either make you extremely mad or extremely happy, depending on your political point of view.

00:37:09.000 You might get offended by the simple statistic.

00:37:11.000 Have you found that response from people to any of your videos, just people getting randomly offended by the statistics themselves?

00:37:17.000 Yeah, I think there are people who look at that, certainly, and have said to me, wow, I didn't know those numbers.

00:37:25.000 Those are bigger than I thought.

00:37:27.000 And sometimes with annoyance, or not.

00:37:31.000 And then you'll get people who will also look at our unemployment data, and they see unemployment small, and they say, oh, well, I'm glad we have those people.

00:37:43.000 Because otherwise, who would be doing all these jobs that we need done in our economy?

00:37:48.000 So, I can get multiple reactions to a set of data and what to do about it.

00:37:56.000 Now, myself, I'm a math guy, and I just think about immigration as kind of, instead of a, you know, sort of this huge, what would I call it, religious war, I would say simply, I think most people believe we should have more than zero immigrants, and most people would say we should have less than unlimited.

00:38:19.000 So all we're talking about is the number.

00:38:23.000 The number and the ways in which we bring people into the country. 0.97

00:38:27.000 And if the debate can be grounded in numbers, maybe we can take some of the religiousness out of the argument and start thinking about it.

00:38:37.000 Now, on top of this, we have two million people who we admitted to the country who don't have a path to citizenship but are authorized.

00:38:45.000 We've got another half a million people in the country who have a path to citizenship.

00:38:50.000 I can't remember.

00:38:51.000 I think it's 17-18% of our population was foreign-born.

00:38:55.000 The highest since, essentially, since the early 1900s.

00:39:00.000 That's all context.

00:39:02.000 And if we can make a numerical, maybe instead of screaming at each other, it's like a business deal.

00:39:09.000 Maybe somebody can actually agree on what number and in what form.

00:39:13.000 So, it sounds like you've spent some time in Washington, D.C. talking to politicians about all of these sorts of stuff.

00:39:18.000 And the impression, and I think that it's largely correct having spent some time in Washington, D.C. myself, is that the parties have never been further apart.

00:39:24.000 That there's just not a lot of bipartisan talking between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

00:39:29.000 That you will get some areas of agreement, particularly China policy.

00:39:32.000 You seem to have some agreement between the Republican and Democratic Party.

00:39:35.000 But the amount of talk, just general amount of talk between Republicans and Democrats...

00:39:39.000 It seems to have declined at an extraordinary rate, that there's actually an incentive structure that punishes people who talk across the aisle.

00:39:45.000 What's your impression of that?

00:39:47.000 Yeah, I'll say two things.

00:39:48.000 Number one, we've been fortunate.

00:39:50.000 We've been able to have a set of bipartisan meetings to discuss the facts, more so in the Senate, Senator Romney, Senator Schumer.

00:40:00.000 But we've had very conservative Republicans and very liberal, so to speak, Democrats sit with us together And go through the numbers.

00:40:10.000 Now, people may process them differently, but at least I've found that there's some bipartisanship in this notion, at least of some group of people, in looking at the numbers.

00:40:21.000 With that said, some politicians said this to me, which I found very interesting.

00:40:28.000 We now live in a world because transportation is so good that everybody goes home every weekend.

00:40:35.000 It's not like people's families moved to D.C. like the old days, and people were running into each other at kids' baseball games, and there was more of a sense of, I'll call it, bipartisan collegiality because people had that, I'll call it, social time in which they were mixing.

00:40:53.000 The second thing these politicians highlighted for me was we now have kind of this format, Back when I talked about this probably 10 years ago, cable news, now it would be podcasts and everything else, where there's more good opportunity to sensationalize things, because more voices are coming to the fore.

00:41:18.000 And so between sensationalism and the lack of chance to really meet in some environment other than the dramatic environment of Congress, There has been more polarization endemic in the system, let alone whatever level the policy disagreements really are.

00:41:40.000 I find it unfortunate, and yet there were certainly bipartisan Mostly bipartisan or semi-bipartisan bills passed in the last year.

00:41:54.000 It might have been one or two Republicans agreeing with the Democrats or vice versa.

00:42:00.000 But, you know, we did get a CHIPS Act.

00:42:02.000 We did get the IRA. We did get the infrastructure bills.

00:42:06.000 And I'm not going to argue whether those are good or bad.

00:42:08.000 People have to assess that on their own.

00:42:10.000 But there was some okay...

00:42:14.000 You know, at least a few of us are going to agree with a few of them.

00:42:20.000 Chips Act obviously was a little bit different than that.

00:42:23.000 It was more clear.

00:42:25.000 And I think that probably had a lot to do with China policy.

00:42:27.000 Yeah, I mean, I wanted to actually ask you about some sort of technological issues that are arising.

00:42:32.000 Obviously, this is your area of expertise, although you've suggested before that you're not a technology expert who ran Microsoft, which is a funny place to sort of be in your career.

00:42:41.000 With that said, the big talk of everybody in D.C., in Silicon Valley, is now about the rise of AI and how transformative AI is going to be.

00:42:50.000 And the capabilities really are astonishing, although the reality is that I think the application, sort of the killer apps for AI, have not yet been developed.

00:42:58.000 Like how they enter daily life for the vast majority of people.

00:43:01.000 Most people are kind of using them informally.

00:43:04.000 Like when you use Google now, probably you're reading the AI answer at the top of Google rather than actually scrolling through the pages of results.

00:43:12.000 Or you might use ChatGPT to ask it a quick question that you might not Google.

00:43:16.000 But the sort of transformative effect in terms of the output has not yet been felt.

00:43:20.000 How transformative do you think AI is going to be?

00:43:22.000 And how quickly do you think the markets adapt to AI? How fast are businesses going to integrate this technology?

00:43:29.000 Yeah, I think it's I think it is as big as the rise of microprocessors.

00:43:37.000 And with microprocessors, I guess I can include PCs, phones, all of that, the internet, and now AI. And why?

00:43:49.000 Because most of the scenarios I was describing that customers were interested in when I left, they're all AI scenarios.

00:43:57.000 Get me ready for my European trip, business trip.

00:44:03.000 Okay, it can know what customers I'm seeing.

00:44:06.000 It can tell me what our sales data is for those customers.

00:44:10.000 It can show me with the most recent contacts.

00:44:12.000 It can find the briefing documents that our team, it can summarize all that.

00:44:17.000 It can put it together.

00:44:19.000 That's a very valuable scenario from my perspective.

00:44:23.000 Really game-changing in terms of making people more productive and, frankly, changing what jobs will exist in our workforce and what jobs won't.

00:44:34.000 I'll give you another example that's more in the personal realm.

00:44:38.000 Plan my trip.

00:44:39.000 Now, you may put a little extra prompt data about yourself.

00:44:43.000 Plan my trip to France.

00:44:45.000 You know, here's my budget.

00:44:47.000 I can give you a couple other things.

00:44:50.000 Come back with a proposed alternative.

00:44:50.000 Boom!

00:44:53.000 And if you've never been to France before, hey, this is an astonishing thing that you can go do.

00:44:59.000 I'll give you another example.

00:45:01.000 Not today.

00:45:02.000 You know, I really am interested in the interaction between changing demographics and changes in our economy and the job situation in the country.

00:45:13.000 Well, right now we just try to bring together a bunch of data and we have to do that ourselves.

00:45:19.000 If we can get rid of some level of hallucination, the kind of work we do, Which maybe every citizen can do for themselves becomes easier.

00:45:29.000 So yeah, whether it's business, personal, we're actually not a not-for-profit.

00:45:36.000 We don't make any profit, but I pay for USA Facts with after-tax money, not pre-tax money.

00:45:45.000 It's my theory that I can now say there's no government subsidy that comes through deductibility on USAFAQs, which I personally think is kind of a principled thing.

00:45:56.000 So there's no, if you will, tax deduction in which I pass part of the cost on to other taxpayers.

00:46:05.000 I see so many scenarios like that, let alone the, hey look, we're trying to, as a scientist, we're trying to rapidly do a bunch of experiments for, I don't know, cancer research.

00:46:20.000 There's just so many good examples.

00:46:23.000 How many jobs can we automate?

00:46:25.000 I'm a big believer that Our economy is resilient.

00:46:29.000 If we automate away some piece of work, a new door will open.

00:46:33.000 I don't fear that because there's been so many innovations that have led to net growth as opposed to net shrinkage in what we do.

00:46:43.000 So, for me, I'm bullish.

00:46:45.000 Now, do I realize not everything's going to happen tomorrow?

00:46:49.000 Not everything's going to happen tomorrow?

00:46:51.000 Are things going to happen...

00:46:53.000 I think what happens is that people start discounting what technology can do in the long run because they're discouraged about what it may have done in the short run.

00:47:06.000 I tend to see the long run as always more promising if it's the right technology and I think this one is.

00:47:12.000 So that raises also questions of valuation.

00:47:15.000 It seems like the valuation on many of these companies is extraordinary compared to the earnings right now.

00:47:21.000 The P.E. ratios are out of this world on this sort of stuff, and that, of course, is requiring a lot of speculation.

00:47:27.000 When you were the head of a massive publicly traded company, how did you deal with that as CEO? How the market was valuing what you were doing?

00:47:36.000 How should people see the stock market as a reflection of the value of a company?

00:47:40.000 In other words, I suppose I'm asking, how efficient are markets?

00:47:42.000 When it comes to the stock market?

00:47:44.000 I'll say a couple things.

00:47:47.000 Number one, we versus many, many tech companies were always more or less valued in part on our earnings, not some grand long-term view of what our earnings might be.

00:48:01.000 Some of that was built in, but we, Microsoft, have had great earnings from the get-go.

00:48:07.000 The company was profitable essentially after the first four months.

00:48:12.000 So, there's been an earnings perspective.

00:48:15.000 With that said, there's been a lot of companies that were not valued on earnings.

00:48:18.000 And I'd point back to the dot-com bubble.

00:48:21.000 Dot-com bubble. 0.96

00:48:23.000 There were plenty of companies that wound up going away or value dramatically shrinking and getting bought.

00:48:31.000 I mean, even Netscape you can take a look at if you want to.

00:48:36.000 It was a darling with a very large market cap.

00:48:40.000 Let's say those market caps were 15, 16 million for startups with no profit that were really just barely startups.

00:48:48.000 If you put 25 years of inflation on top of 15 billion, You're not the same, but you're getting up about to the valuations we see today that don't seem right.

00:49:03.000 So I just claim, if you think about it inflation-adjusted, we do have precedent to what's going on.

00:49:10.000 Now, do I think markets are efficient?

00:49:12.000 Yeah.

00:49:13.000 But they're not efficient today and tomorrow.

00:49:16.000 They'll be efficient over time.

00:49:18.000 So some of these valuations probably will turn out to be right.

00:49:22.000 And many of these valuations, probably more, will turn out to be wrong.

00:49:29.000 I think, what is it, Warren Buffett says, It's not a voting machine.

00:49:34.000 It's a weighing machine or something the markets are.

00:49:37.000 So I do believe in them.

00:49:39.000 And I believe people make the wrong bets are going to lose money.

00:49:42.000 That's also part of, you know, having highly functioning markets decide things.

00:49:48.000 So USA Facts, obviously you've thrown this out there.

00:49:50.000 It's getting a lot of traffic.

00:49:52.000 What is your plan for the growth of that?

00:49:54.000 And where have you seen the most enthusiasm in terms of age range and people who vote?

00:49:58.000 Where do you see the growth area for that?

00:50:01.000 Let me describe the kind of people.

00:50:05.000 I think we will have the most, and we have different products.

00:50:09.000 We have what I call the one or two minute product, one of our articles or a quick fact checkup.

00:50:16.000 We today have what I call our hour and a half to two hour products, which are our annual report and we still do a 10K. We don't have as many 15 minute products, which is what the videos are.

00:50:29.000 And I think 15 minutes gives you a depth which is highly desirable.

00:50:35.000 And I think our audience and where we go will depend on the range of products.

00:50:40.000 Can we make video a steady part of what we do?

00:50:45.000 Does that bring in new audience?

00:50:48.000 Can we localize our stuff, you know, so that crime data, education data, housing data?

00:50:53.000 Because people, if you look at our top queries in the last couple weeks, Springfield, Ohio has been one of them.

00:51:01.000 I mean, things that are very local.

00:51:03.000 So all of those factors will determine the breadth of our audience.

00:51:07.000 But we do require people who are comfortable with numbers and people willing to take the time.

00:51:14.000 I think that's someplace between 10 million and, I don't know, 30, 40 million Americans.

00:51:20.000 It'll include some students, some young people who are interested in getting active, older people who have the time, middle-aged people who are worried about some set of factors in their life and want to learn more.

00:51:35.000 That's kind of how I think of things.

00:51:39.000 We say demographic or psychographically, we're looking for orators.

00:51:45.000 A lot of the people we look for want to hold forth And explain things to their friends.

00:51:51.000 So it's a certain kind of demographic, which I think is tens of millions.

00:51:57.000 I'm investing this thing in my pocket.

00:52:00.000 I don't have unlimited.

00:52:01.000 You could say I have unlimited money, so why don't I put unlimited money into this thing?

00:52:07.000 I think I'm putting on average per year about $20 million into the project.

00:52:15.000 This year is much bigger because of the election, the videos, the stuff we've been doing on TV, the amount of time I've been doing.

00:52:25.000 Podcasts or TV appearances, etc.

00:52:28.000 But it's a thing that I believe in.

00:52:30.000 We'll invest in.

00:52:31.000 We'll find out whether AI can help us.

00:52:34.000 If AI can help us, we'll be able to do more with less.

00:52:39.000 But I remain pretty fluid about it.

00:52:42.000 I tell our team, hey, look, I love our team.

00:52:44.000 We're disciplined.

00:52:46.000 It'll help us to stay a little smaller.

00:52:48.000 We've got about 45, 50 people working on the project.

00:52:52.000 Could that grow some?

00:52:53.000 Yeah, if we start doing new things, it'll grow some.

00:52:56.000 But I like the discipline of bounding the size of the team for now.

00:53:02.000 Well, Steve Ballmer, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with us.

00:53:05.000 Really appreciate the time.

00:53:06.000 And folks, you should go out and you should check out USA Facts right now.

00:53:08.000 Ben Shapiro's Sunday special is produced by Samana Morris and Matt Kemp.

00:53:18.000 Associate Producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

00:53:20.000 Production Coordinator is Jessica Kranz.

00:53:23.000 Production Assistant is Sarah Steele.

00:53:25.000 Editing is by Jeff Tomblin.

00:53:26.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koremina.

00:53:28.000 Camera and Lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:53:30.000 Hair, Makeup, and Wardrobe by Fabiola Christina.

00:53:33.000 Title Graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:53:35.000 Executive Assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

00:53:43.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 20, 2024

Is the American Dream Still Alive? | Steve Ballmer

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