Is the American Dream Still Alive? | Steve Ballmer
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My college buddy from down the hall, Bill Gates, gave me a call and said, hey, look, we've been building our company. We need a business guy. We don't have a, quote, business guy, unquote.

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, and man, oh man, I was the big businessman, if you will. And

You know, we kind of grew from there. Steve Ballmer is a prominent American businessman and philanthropist, best known for his role as CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. 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. Beyond his corporate achievements, Ballmer launched USA Facts in 2017, a nonprofit 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.

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

In today's episode, Balmer 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. Balmer also discusses his work with USA Facts, his advice to entrepreneurs, and the shifting landscape in big tech today. Steve's enthusiasm for business and clear passion for his charitable work are all evident to those who meet him. Don't miss hearing from Steve Balmer on this latest episode of the Sunday Special. ♪

Steve Ballmer, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. 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. They either know you from your days at Microsoft or they know you as owner of the Clippers. I want to start with sort of the general idea of the American dream. 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. So how does someone...

like you, you're, I guess, the 30th employee at Microsoft, end up as the head of Microsoft, CEO of Microsoft. Can you take us through that journey? - Yeah, maybe I'll give you more than you want. You cut me off if I go too long. And in a sense, I'll say our two-generation story, if you will, is an American dream.

My grandparents on my mom's side were immigrants from what's now Belarus and the Ukraine, Jewish immigrants trying to avoid the pogroms, etc. came here before, if you will, World War I. My dad himself was an immigrant. He came here after World War II. He'd been an interpreter at the war trials at Nuremberg. So I'm pretty recent, as my folks would have said, off the boat.

Neither of my parents went to college. My dad didn't finish high school. My grandfather didn't, on my mom's side, didn't finish second grade. So while asking for no empathy, I will say, you know, we're recent, recent in the country. And I was brought up, I would say, solidly middle class. My dad

Worked his way up from payroll clerk at Ford, but they were able to give us a good education. I got a scholarship to a nice fancy private high school that helped me a lot. And then went to Harvard, and after that, if you will, I was quite set up. I no longer was at the bottom of the American dream. 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. We need a business guy. We don't have a, quote, business guy, unquote.

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. Man, oh man, I was the big businessman, if you will.

We kind of grew from there. We were a partnership. We had to incorporate. We were 30 people. The year I started, we did, I think, $7.5 million of revenue.

Maybe a million of profit. I can't recall. So we incorporated the business. We put in stock option plans. First thing Bill and I had a chance to quote fight about unquote after about a month and a half. I wanted to add another 18 people to the 30 people we had.

Bill said, "You're going to bankrupt us. I didn't ask you to drop out." And I was going to go back to school. And then Bill said to me, "No, no. We're going to put a computer on every desk and in every home." And that sounded like a big, broad ambition. And he said, "All right, you hire one good person and we'll figure out about the other 17." And it kind of all came together. And when I left the company, I think it was about 88,000 people.

We had about $27 billion of pre-tax income, and they've taken it now to higher heights, if you will. Yeah, 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. I know that when we started our company, obviously my sort of family history is actually quite similar to yours. My grandparents on both sides ended up coming to the United States

very early on in the 20th century. I was raised very middle class. My parents were college graduates, but they certainly weren't rich. And he says, my mom was a secretary. My dad played piano at a restaurant. 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. And so this bizarre idea that the American dream is dead, that something is fundamentally shifted in the United States such that those sorts of stories are not possible. And that really all the people you see who are very, very rich, they're just privileged.

as opposed to being beneficiaries of the American system, which means that we're all privileged. We live in a great system that allows for meritocracy, it allows for free markets, it allows for generationally advancement to be made. Not everybody's gonna 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. Do you feel like the American dream has fundamentally shifted over the course of your lifetime or is that still a possibility for people? 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 we can look at specific data, if you will, would show that the economic mobility for African Americans born in the country, particularly African American males, and for Latinos are not as good.

And, you know, is the American dream alive for some folks?

Not clear. I'm not saying it isn't, but certainly the data would say tougher for some groups to achieve that kind of mobility. 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. It is possible. I believe in it. I totally believe in the American dream of

I want it to be equally available to everybody in the country. And it's not just race and ethnicity that factors in. I just think there are some situational factors. Ironically, economic mobility today is better for women in the country than it is for men, particularly if you're of color. So it's just sort of a broader package. But do I believe in it? Yes.

Do I view it as part of what we're trying to do philanthropically to make sure it is alive? Yes. So those things are, I think, quite important.

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So when we look at your story over at Microsoft, you know, obviously we started business. We're not nowhere. We're nowhere near Microsoft's level of success. 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? And what are some of the biggest fights that you had with people like Bill Gates along the way? Because as somebody, I have a couple of business partners. Those fights are fairly constant. 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.

Yeah, I'd say a few things. Number one, folks have to find something that they're either passionate about or they develop passion about. Not every job or not every career will you have passion about at the start, but sometimes that can really cascade.

but you need to look. You actually have to have a plan to see what's out there. I'll give an example. When I was an undergraduate, 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? What does it look like to be an accountant? What does it look like to be a salesperson?

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. So that'd be number one.

Number two is hard work. There's absolutely, if you're working harder than the person who's doing your job in your competitor, that gives you more grace. It gives you more opportunity to, if you will, make a mistake because you're going to work it through. You're going to catch up. So I absolutely believe that hard work is critical.

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. If you become a dreamer, not going to work. If you become totally a grinder, not going to work. So that would be number two. And then number three, let's face it, there is an element of luck. And I think people like to...

act like, well, I'm a master of the universe because I didn't have any help before. I did it all on my brain power, my hard work, and energy. And I think that's unfair. I think there is a clear element of luck in this game. So I would highlight those three things.

Then if you become a leader of a business, I think there's important things to really think about. Number one, be long term in your perspective. If you're trying to build something, things don't arrive overnight.

Number two, I like to tell businesses to get in the weight room. Build new skills. Before you know you need them, you have to be building skills, building talent, do the recruiting. Create a sense of optimism in your business. Colin Powell, we had him come speak one time to our executive staff, and he emphasized that optimism is a force multiplier. Businesses really need that kind of optimism.

Leadership. Leadership is about thought leadership. It's not just about people leadership. If you're very charismatic and you're running off a cliff,

more people are going to follow you off the cliff. So damn, man, you better pick the right direction. Just a little bit of food for thought. Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things there that I want to hone in on a little bit. The first one that you mentioned, which is passion for the thing. 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. Not a single person I know who has founded a successful company originally thought predominantly about money.

the money, they thought more about the idea of the business and why they were enchanted with the idea of spreading that business. In fact, it's almost the reverse. If you think too much about the money when you're first starting a business, you actually end up doing the wrong thing. 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.

And so I remember being in an interview and somebody said, so why do you want to work at a law firm? And I gave the honest answer, which was for the money, because the starting salary was like $180,000 a year. And that was the wrong answer, as it turns out. And I thought to myself, well, but that's true. I mean, nobody's joining a law firm because they want to work 2,200 billable hours a year, you know, doing doc review in the back room. 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.

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. I agree with you. If you're trying to have that kind of drive to do something new. Now, for some people, I think people elect a profession where they say, hey, I can make money.

With greater certainty, I can have a very nice lifestyle if I pick this profession. I'm sure some lawyers do that. It's not all about the money. It's not about getting rich. But hey, with relatively low risk, I have a chance of doing relatively well.

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. Those jobs pay well, or consulting. Capitalism works on this in the sense that if you look at top graduates of top schools who go into business, guess what?

While the kids will say they don't care about the money, the jobs that pay do attract the highest percentage of the people. I'm a big believer that markets actually are very efficient. If you put an incentive out there and it appeals to somebody, it's going to work.

One of the other things you mentioned there was the luck aspect. And there certainly is a luck aspect to what works and what doesn't. And sometimes things you don't think are going to work definitely do. 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.

And when you're an unsuccessful leader, you tend to attribute bad things happening to luck. So if you're a successful leader, you think everything that's going wrong is my fault. Everything that's going right, that's luck. And if you're a bad leader, you tend to think everything that's going right, that's me. And everything that's going wrong, that's luck.

And so I think that, you know, you're almost naturally doing that when you say success is luck. 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. And if I fail, then that's something I can fix. That's probably something that's my own fault. The minute that you attribute your failure to luck, you're now saying that your own success is outside of your purview.

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, to me, it's another way of saying not everything is controllable. You can control, we say this in basketball too, as owner of the LA Clippers, you know, control what you can control. You can control how much work you put in. You can work on your kind of mental mindset so you really can be, okay, missed that one, next play, next play, next play.

Just a short Microsoft story that sort of confirmed my view of luck. Within a month after me coming to Microsoft, we got a call from some guys from IBM. And IBM was the behemoth of computing in 1980.

People might not know that now younger people my kids who are in the you know late 20s and 30s They'll say what does that company do anyway? But back then they were the computer industry and these guys call and they say hey we want to come talk to you about something we're not going to tell you what it's about and you know you'll sign a non-disclosure agreement and then we'll tell you and that's how it'll work and

And we said, okay, when do you want to come? And they said, well, you know, we're down the street now. I don't know. I may be being a little bit exaggerational, but it sticks in my head. And so all good. And they wanted to buy an operating system from us for the PC they said they were going to build.

Now, we didn't have an operating system. We had a bunch of language software, and there was some confusion because we had licensed one for a variety of reasons. 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. Treat them right, right?

And IBM talked to them, same spiel they gave us. They fly down there, but the CEO at the time was out flying. His wife, who was a business partner of his, was there, refused to sign the non-disclosure agreement. We then said, hey, we'll get you an operating system, and if there isn't some luck in that,

I don't know what luck is. Early on in my business career, we were the great beneficiary of good luck.

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So one of the other questions I asked earlier was sort of about how you navigate conflicts in the boardroom. How do you deal with top-level conflicts? And I'm going to take this advice, again, with my own business partners. Yeah, I would say, you know, you really have to work things out. And people have different personalities.

From the time Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft, retired in about 1983 after dealing with Hodgkin's disease, I was basically the number two guy at Microsoft and number one business guy. Bill and I would tussle about things, and there was a certain way we'd work them out.

They were never decided in one cataclysmic meeting. There was a lot of struggle and body punching and minor gives and you know, we worked it out. 20 years later, Bill asked me to be CEO of the company. 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 and you're going to do the tech? And he said, yes. Well, guess what? We barely talked for that first year.

It was very hard for us to figure out how to reverse roles. And even after, I would say it took a while before I really felt comfortable in taking freedom of action.

So, it is tricky. It is absolutely tricky and I suspect if you get two hard heads, I call Bill and I two hard heads, 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 hard head.

And then, you know, everybody works it out in their own way, I guess. Or don't work it out and things blow up. So I'm going to come back to the clippers of it in a bit, but I want to get to USA Facts. So this is a new venture that you've started. It's a nonprofit that's designed to essentially provide just the facts. And obviously we live in what people have termed a post-fact environment where everything is narrative. 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. And so one of the sort of rubrics that I've used historically is listen to my show, then listen to Posse of America. If we say things that are the same, those are the facts. Everything else is probably the opinion that's being drawn from that set of facts. USA Facts is an attempt to sort of distill down what those facts are. Where did you come up with this and how has it been developed? Now, let me origin first.

I retire and I'm thinking, isn't this great? I don't have to do anything for a while. I can relax. And my wife says, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to help with our philanthropy. 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.

I say, "No, no, no, the government takes care of those things. We don't do philanthropy, the government pays for them." And she said, "No, we're going to do philanthropy." And so I jumped in.

it got me keyed up to understand what does wealth transfer look like in America, which got me more interested in taxes, who pays them, what the government spends the money on. From there I got interested, well, government's not a business. What kind of outcomes though do we get for the money that gets spent? 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." Why? That report is comprehensive across everything the business does. It has to break the business into a clear segments that you can understand. The report can't forecast the future.

which I consider a biased activity. It just has to report the numbers that have happened in the past. There's a caveat: pension plans do forward progress and we do publish those. 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. We don't even take an opinion about what should happen.

It's very hard to grade things. Take spending on transportation infrastructure. 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. Great. That's super. Then somebody comes along and says, "Let's do an infrastructure bill to spend more."

Well, if you're me, you'd say, hey, is that a good use of tax dollars? Because I can live with the balance. If you're my daughter-in-law with our grandchild, guess what? You might say, if there's even 1% of roads or bridges that are deemed unsafe, we should spend more. 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 things things look very different. I

I mean, I'll give you one example. 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. Now, there's a lot of feelings from politicians. There's a lot of feelings from citizens. I don't dispute any of those.

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. All of that becomes partisan. I majored in applied math and economics, and I used to think economics was a science.

I really did. Now I know there's left-wing and right-wing economists. It's a little hard to think about it as a science anymore. The last thing, we only use government data, 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. I believe in general we have very professional statisticians in our government agencies. It's imperfect. We don't collect all the data. Sometimes two collection systems lead to things that don't say exactly the same. But if you're a decision maker in this country, I don't know where better to start.

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

That's on you. You politicians are in control, in a position to make the data. If you don't think it's right, push on those statisticians. The citizens can't do that. You want us to believe that. Anyway, long-winded, but that's how I feel about it. 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. Here is something from USA Facts talking about the aging of the American population.

People are more likely to live alone today than any time in the past. 29% of households today consist of individuals living alone without a child compared to 13% in 1960. Second, a greater share of the population is over 65.

increasing from 13% of the total in 2010 to nearly 18% in 2023. More retirees rely on income from Social Security and support from government services like Medicare

So, I mean, obviously this is a breakdown of just basic statistics. And then as you say, the implications can be taken in any of a number of different directions. I think there's some pretty obvious implications from that particular clip. 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. 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. That's just an inescapable conclusion, obviously.

Yep. Yeah. 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. It's absolutely true. We don't make that forecast by a

If you ask me as a nonpartisan person who can use Excel, yeah, I'd say that's probably what Excel would say. I mean, so how do you determine which subjects to focus on? 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. How do you decide which areas you want to put your energy into?

Yeah, we absolutely start comprehensively. There's no question. 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.

you know how much do we spend on if you will crime and criminal justice well you gotta know that now do we give you this much in terms of on your data that might help you understand or do we give you this much so we start wide and just a little deep but we've taken some subjects like immigration I like the budget where we have gone deeper

There's other topics where I'd like to go deeper. 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, does that data exist in a form we can package it? It would be useful. Housing. The number one thing households spend money on is housing. 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. 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. Most people don't care about housing prices nationwide. They take their interest in the housing prices in Jackson, Mississippi, or Seattle, Washington, or wherever.

And so, you know, in making these videos, you know, obviously you're breaking down the stats. Do you get into issues of causation? Like what is causing the stats to move in a particular way or not? Because that obviously does get pretty political pretty quickly. Yeah, no, we don't do causation. We do not do causation precisely because it does get political. And if there was sort of, if economics was a science, then there'd be economists who worked for the government

who would give you what they would call a scientific explanation of what's happened. Not going forward, that always gets political. But even going back, if it was a pure science, causation would be clear. But how do you get causation? Something happens, like COVID. How do you figure out causation on what happened before to what happens now?

innovation. You get some major innovation in society, the personal computer. 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. I loved it when I was selling PCs and software that people were saying that. I can't prove to you there was causation there. So we avoid causation.

We try to avoid adjectives. Adjectives are partisan, numbers are not. You know, some people like to say, God, it went from one to two. They wouldn't say it goes from one to two. They'll say something doubled.

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. It's a huge increase. Instead of saying double, it's a huge increase.

Now it is, but not in context. 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. Now making that interesting, it's a little hard. People want to know why something happened. They want to know what to do about it. Some people don't like numbers. But it is the best ways to set the context in what I would call a very factual way

Some areas don't lend themselves very well to this kind of data because they wind up being issues which are really driven by people's hearts as opposed to numbers. There are some numbers, but not a lot of the numbers, for example, on abortion, pro-life, pro-choice.

It's not an area, we have a little bit of data, but it's not an area we're focused because I don't think, it certainly doesn't affect spending, outcome in that sense. So we haven't spent a lot of time on it, just to give you an example. We'll get to more with Steve Ballmer in a moment. First, October 7th marked the one-year anniversary of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. 1,200 Israelis lost their lives. Over 250 were taken hostage. The war in Israel continues to rage on today. Missiles are flying. Tensions are high. Our allies are under attack. It seems like every time you turn on the news, there's another attack.

Thank you.

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They're doing amazing work on the ground in the Holy Land right now. Ben for the fellowship.org. God bless and thank you. 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. Kamala Harris is visiting the border. President Trump has obviously campaigned heavily all three times he's campaigned on issues surrounding the border. Here's a bit of the video from USA Facts about immigration. Let's step back for a fact check on unauthorized immigration.

Two and a half million encounters with unauthorized immigrants at the southwest border in 2023. Of these encounters, 1.3 million people were released into the country. 430,000 more people were transferred to ICE or Health and Human Services. 765,000 people were repatriated or expelled, plus an estimated 600,000 who entered the country undetected.

That means 2.3 million new unauthorized immigrants came over the southwest border into the country.

Yeah, again, that's that that is just perfectly statistically accurate. 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. You might get offended by the simple statistic. Have you found that response from people to any of your videos, just people getting randomly offended by the statistics themselves?

Yeah, I think there are people who look at that, certainly, and have said to me, wow, I didn't know those numbers. Those are bigger than I thought. And some with times with annoyance or not.

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 because otherwise who would be doing all these jobs that we need done in our economy? So I can get multiple reactions to a set of data and what to do about it. Now, myself, I'm a math guy.

And I just think about immigration as kind of instead of, 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 immigrants.

So all we're talking about is the number. The number and the ways in which we bring people into the country. 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. 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.

We've got another half a million people in the country who have a path to citizenship. I can't remember, I think it's 17, 18% of our population was foreign born. The highest essentially since the early 1900s. That's all context. And if we can make a numerical, maybe instead of screaming at each other, it's like a business deal. Maybe somebody can actually agree on what number and in what form.

So it sounds like you spent some time in Washington, D.C., talking to politicians about all of these sorts of stuff. 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, that there's just not a lot of bipartisan talking between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, that you will get some areas of agreement, particularly China policy. You seem to have some agreement between the Republican and Democratic Party.

But the amount of talk, just general amount of talk between Republicans and Democrats seems to have declined at an extraordinary rate, that there's actually an incentive structure that punishes people who talk across the aisle. What's your impression of that?

I'll say two things. Number one, we've been fortunate. We've been able to have a set of bipartisan meetings to discuss the facts, more so in the Senate, Senator Romney, Senator Schumer. But we've had very conservative Republicans and very liberal, so to speak, Democrats,

sit with us together and go through the numbers. Now people may process them differently, but at least I found that there's some bipartisanship in this notion, at least of some group of people in looking at the numbers. With that said, some politicians said this to me, which I found very interesting. We now live in a world because transportation is so good that everybody goes home every weekend.

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. The second thing these politicians highlighted for me was we now have kind of this format of

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. 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. I find it unfortunate, and yet there were certainly bipartisan, bipartisan, mostly bipartisan or semi-bipartisan bills passed in the last year. It might have been one or two Republicans agreeing with the Democrats or vice versa,

But, you know, we did get a CHIPS Act. We did get the IRA. We did get the infrastructure bills. And I'm not going to argue whether those are good or bad. People have to assess that on their own. But there was some, okay, you know, at least a few of us are going to agree with a few of them.

CHIPS Act, obviously, was a little bit different than that. It was more clear. And I think that probably had a lot to do with China policy. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to actually ask you about some sort of technological issues that are arising. 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. With that said, the big talk of ever

of everybody in D.C., in Silicon Valley, is now about the rise of AI and how transformative AI is going to be. 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. Like how they enter daily life for the vast majority of people. Most people are

are kind of using them informally. Like when you use Google now, probably you're finding, you're reading the AI answer at the top of Google rather than actually scrolling through the pages of results. Or you might use chat GPT to ask it a quick question that you might not Google. But the sort of transformative effect in terms of the output has not yet been felt. How transformative do you think AI is going to be? And how quickly do you think the markets adapt to AI? How fast are businesses going to integrate this technology? Yeah, I think it's,

I think it is as big as the rise of microprocessors. And with microprocessors, I guess I can include PCs, phones, all of that, the internet, and now AI. Why? Because most of the scenarios I was describing that customers were interested in when I left, they're all AI scenarios. Get me ready for my...

European trip business trip okay you can know what customers I'm seeing it can tell me what our sales data is for those customers it can show me with the most recent contacts it can find the briefing documents that our team it can summarize all that it can put it together

That's a very valuable scenario from my perspective. 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. I'll give you another example that's more in the personal realm.

Plan my trip. Now you may put a little extra prompt data about yourself. Plan my trip to France. You know, here's my budget. I can give you a couple other things. Boom! Come back with a proposed alternative. And if you've never been to France before, hey, this is an astonishing thing that you can go do. I'll give you another example. Not today.

You know, I really am interested in the interaction between changing demographics and changes in our economy and the job situation in the country. Well, right now we just try to bring together a bunch of data and we have to do that ourselves. 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. So yeah, whether it's business, personal, we're actually not a not-for-profit. We don't make any profit

But I pay for USAFax with after-tax money, not pre-tax money. It's my theory that I can now say there's no government subsidy that comes through deductibility on USAFax, which I personally think is kind of a principled thing. So there's no, if you will, tax deduction, which I pass part of the cost on to other taxpayers. So...

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. There's just so many good examples. How many jobs can we automate? I'm a big believer that

our economy is resilient. If we automate away some piece of work, a new door will open. 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. So for me, I'm bullish. Now do I realize there's, you know, not everything's going to happen tomorrow. Not everything's going to happen tomorrow. Are things going to happen?

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

So, you know, that raises also questions of valuation. It seems like the valuation on many of these companies is extraordinary compared to the earnings right now. The P-E ratios are out of this world on this sort of stuff. And that, of course, is requiring a lot of speculation. You know, when you are, you know, you're the head of a massive company,

publicly traded company. How did you deal with that as CEO? How the market was valuing what you were doing? How should people see the stock market as a reflection of the value of a company? In other words, I suppose I'm asking how efficient are markets when it comes to the stock market? I'll say a couple of things. 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. Some of that was built in, but we, Microsoft, have had great earnings from the get-go. The company was profitable essentially after the first four months. So there's been an earnings perspective. With that said, there's been a lot of companies that were not valued on earnings. And I'd point back to the dot-com bubble.

bubble, there were plenty of companies that wound up going away or value dramatically shrinking and getting bought.

Even Netscape you can take a look at if you want to. It was a darling with a very large market cap. Now, let's say those market caps were $15-16 million for startups with no profit that were really just barely startups. If you put 25 years of inflation on top of $15 billion,

you're not you're not the same but you're getting up about to the valuations we see today that don't seem right so I just claim if you think about it inflation adjusted we do have precedent to what's going on now do I think markets are efficient yeah but they're not efficient today and tomorrow they'll be efficient over time so some of these valuations probably will turn out to be right and many of these valuations

probably more will turn out to be wrong. I think, what is it, Warren Buffett says, uh,

It's not a voting machine. It's a weighing machine or something, the markets are. So I do believe in them. And I believe people who make the wrong bets are going to lose money. That's also part of, you know, having highly functioning markets decide things. So USA Facts, obviously, you've thrown this out there. It's getting a lot of traffic. What is your plan for the growth of that? And where have you seen the most enthusiasm in terms of age range and people who vote? Where do you see the growth area for that? I...

let me describe the kind of people I think we will have the most attract and we have different products we'd have what I call the one or two minute product one of our articles or a quick fact check up we today have what I'd 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

And I think 15 minutes gives you a depth which is highly desirable.

And I think our audience and where we go will depend on the range of products. Can we make video a steady part of what we do? Does that bring in new audience? Can we localize our stuff so that crime data, education data, housing data? Because people, if you look at our top queries in the last couple weeks, Springfield, Ohio has been one of them.

I mean things that are very local. So all of those factors will determine the breadth of our audience. But we do require people who are comfortable with numbers and people willing to take the time. I think that's someplace between 10 million and I don't know 30, 40 million Americans. 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. That's kind of how I think of things. We say psychographically we're looking for orators. A lot of the people we look for want to hold forth and explain things to their friends. So it's a certain kind of demographic, which I think is tens of millions.

I'm investing this thing in my pocket. I don't have an unlimited. You could say I have unlimited money, so why don't I put unlimited money into this thing? I think I'm putting on average per year about $20 million into the project. 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 this.

podcasts or TV appearances etc but you know it's a thing that I believe in we'll invest in we'll find out whether AI can help us if AI can help us we'll be able to do more with less but I remain pretty fluid about it I tell our team hey look I love our team we're disciplined it'll help us to stay a little smaller we've got about 45 50 people working on the project

Could that grow some? Yeah, if we start doing new things, it'll grow some. But I like the discipline of bounding the size of the team for now. Well, Steve Ballmer, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with us. Really appreciate the time. And folks, you should go out and check out USA Facts right now.

Executive Assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

Executive in charge of production is David Wormis. Executive producer, Justin Siegel. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2024.