The Dispatch Podcast - In Data We Trust | Interview: Steve Ballmer

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Why does one of the world’s wealthiest men want to fund a database full of U.S. facts and figures? Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft executive and founder of USAfacts.org, joins Jamie at Dispatch HQ to discuss his philanthropic efforts. The Agenda: —Saying no to Mitt Romney (back in the day) —Figures on immigration, healthcare, and debt —Data-based decision-making —The aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack —The impact of AI —Funding Harvard Show Notes: —The Atlantic: The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Save when you fuel up for your next road trip. Get up to 7 cents per liter in value every time you fill up at Petro Canada. That's 3 cents per liter in instant savings plus 20% more points when you link an eligible RBC card to your Petro points. Find out more at RBC.com slash Petro dash Canada. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein.

My guest today is Steve Balmer. After meeting Bill Gates as a student at Harvard, Balmer would be ultimately recruited early on to Microsoft, where he, spent over 30 years of his career rising to the role of CEO and ultimately becoming one of the 10 wealthiest people on the entire planet. Today, these days, he is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA basketball team and spends much of his time working on philanthropy, including the organization USA Facts, which he founded and was the reason he was in Washington, D.C. this week and the reason he sat down with me at the dispatch headquarters to talk about that organization,

the importance of it, why he started it, as well as other issues, including the future of artificial intelligence, his thoughts on the October 7th tax in Israel and their after effects here in the United States, and his influences, among many other things. I think you're going to enjoy this podcast, but without further to, I give you Mr. Steve Ballmer. Steve Baumill, welcome to the dispatch podcast. Pleasure being here. Thanks for having me. Steve, I want to get into why you're in town.

But first, we did an off-the-record dinner last night, but he gave me permission to bring up this story because I found it so interesting. You were, I guess, at Stanford Graduate School, you were trying to, you're being recruited by Bill Gates to go to Microsoft, and there was another gentleman at the same time recruiting you to go elsewhere, who was Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney. Do you tell that story? I found it pretty funny. Sure.

I was finishing up my first year in business school, and two consulting firms, Bain and B.CG, both put up two, five, they both put in two $5,000 prizes. They were going to select people. You sent them your business school application, and I got one from both Bain and BGG. So I was on Bain's radar, and I decided before picking a summer job, I'd go visit. The last place I stopped on the visit was Bain & Company. Mitt Romney was one of the two or three senior partners in the firm, and they had made me an offer and put the full court press on. Now, just before I left for this trip, I'd gotten a call from my old college mate, Bill Gates, saying, hey, look, you know, it's too bad.

don't have a twin. We could use somebody like you. Microsoft was 30 people at the time. So I just added it in. I stopped after I was at Bain, stopped in Seattle, saw Bill, and I wound up having to decide between basically those two choices and some others. And I said, let's drop out. Bain and Company was a very prestigious place to go work and Mitt had sold hard. This is when he was still Mitt, although I'm from Michigan, his dad had been our governor, so the name Romney was a bit larger than life. It's a long form of this story. But you are now in town to meet with people like Mitt, Senator Mitt Romney and others. So tell me why you are in Washington. And also if you have run into Mid, if that story has come up at all. When I retired from Microsoft, which is

2014, one of the first things, I was looking forward to a little time off. And my wife said to me, look, it's time for you to get involved in our philanthropy. We focus in on kids in need who might not have the same. How do you give people opportunity who are born into tougher situations? And I said, look, government takes care of that. And she said, no, you're going to help me. But got my interest piqued, and I was trying to prove I was right in government by the numbers. Where do the tax revenues come from?

Where do they go to? How much wealth could you say? transferred through the system, hard to figure it out. And so we started an effort called USAFax. USAFax.org for your listeners. I know that was a little promotional, but we are a, I pay for it, no revenue. All we do is take government numbers, make them digestible, numbers about what has happened. It's the kind of facts you would think both parties should agree about.

So I spend time at least once a year coming in, meeting with legislators, people in the executive branch, media, and talking about the need to use data, to have decisions grounded in data, to have the public understand data. Don't have to agree about policy forecasts, but at least let's start with the same data. So I was on Capitol Hill yesterday, and Senator Schumer and Senator Romney convened a bipartisan group of senators. I think we had nine or ten folks show up, and most of them spent better part of an hour, which I felt very privileged, but right at the start.

Senator Romney told the story about how he first met. And then the second time, yeah, I saw him after that was years later, and he was governor, he was governor already, Massachusetts. And he was up for a governor's conference. And that was our next time to sit down and talk. Yeah. Well, you know, one thing that jumps in my mind about this Project USA Fax is why you think it wouldn't be, You think the government would have data, like for politicians and leaders to be a decipher

that they wouldn't need someone from the private world to come and hear, the philanthropic world, to do it. Why is this data just not available without you coming in and putting it together? It's all government data. So it is all available. But man, these databases are deep and thick, and there's many of them. There's 91 different, 90 different government databases we use to put our stuff together. There's a lot of different places to go.

And government may produce the data, but there's nobody in government who's chartered to actually try to put together a comprehensive view of what's going on. An agency will focus in its area, a committee would want to focus in on its area, and we're here to talk to the American people. Should government produce such a thing? Should all legislators have to say, yes, we've read something that we can understand, that represents Dems, Republicans, sign it. Yeah, we read it.

That's the current state of affairs. And we don't disagree. We don't agree with anybody on the other side, on anything we should do about it. But at least we're talking about the same thing. We're going to measure the same things going forward. There's nobody chartered to do it. So forget with Congress, with the American public. We find that our unique niche.

There are certainly think tanks. Most think tanks to me seem like they're either, you know, kind of our supporters or de-supporters. To find a truly independent think tank, I think, is hard to do. Most people want to do their own forecasting and recommendation on policy. We don't. We don't. We want citizens to see the data and then make up their own mind. Getting to the data, is there any fact or chart that you've put together that was particularly surprising to you?

Yeah, there's a few. I'll pick one example, maybe. and we can go from there. And I'll start with maybe a more, a less complete chart because we don't have all the data from government to tell the story. What's really going on with immigration in the country, both authorized and unauthorized immigration? It's not hard to understand authorized immigration.

There's good numbers. It's clear. People understand, oh, I came here temporarily to, to work or to go to school and I have to go back. Oh, I'm here and I'm on a path to citizenship if I wanted or I'm on a permanent work visa. Great. But the numbers are interesting. They really are. If you look at unauthorized immigration, interesting fact, there's about 11 million unauthorized, and I'll use the word unauthorized. That's the word DHS uses. It doesn't use undocumented. It doesn't use illegal. It uses the word unauthorized.

immigrants in the country. But that, and it's an estimate, that estimate has been constant for the last 10 years. I think that blow people's minds. Yeah. People think that number's flat. Now, the number of encounters at the border are going up. The number of repatriations went up during COVID and now has come actually back down some. And so how does this compute? Then you have to look at what happens to people who get encountered. Did they come to the, to the, and most of them are through the southwest border, and do they come and knock on the door and I'll say El Paso and say, hey, look, I want asylum. It's a way into the country, but we let you in, but you are unauthorized. I think most people have the view that all unauthorized immigrants came into the

country kind of sneaking over the border. You do have people who come in, but, Ports of Entry, i.e. they were not trying to knock on our door. They get apprehended. If they say, hey, I need asylum, we welcome them into the country. So different kind of asylum application. Then there are people who really get in undetected. It's an estimate. There are people who overstay their visas. But how do you get to 11 million with what's going on on the border now is remains It's confusing. Yeah. But at least we have a structure that we can talk about and we can push Homeland Security

for better, for better data. Because the suggestion is from the other data that that $11 million can't be constant for 10 years. It's hard to believe. Unless the number of people who are leaving, which we don't see, is also high. And we don't know. And I'm not going to say causality, but I'm a mathy guy. I want to understand.

So I think of it this way. businesses have to produce both a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. The equivalent is DHS needs to produce a report that says how many people are going in, but we don't see the number of people necessarily going out, estimate it, without our knowledge, and we don't see a current, called a balance sheet, the current state of who are those 11, or, yeah, about 11 million people and where do they live? That's one I say is interesting and incomplete. There are other places where I can give you an observation that says, wow, somebody would be surprised by this.

Well, I mean, I want to tie that to the previous question about, you know, why doesn't the government have this data? I guess one of the answers is, you know, the databases are hard to get to. Is it also that sometimes for political reasons, whether it's a Republican reason or a Democratic reason, they make the data intentionally hard to find? So because the data will, you know, go against whatever their viewpoint is on a particular issue? I don't think politicians hide the football, so to speak. I think what they do do is any time they present any data, they present data that makes their case. They're not trying to give a holistic landscape. They're not actually trying to help you understand the data.

They're trying to use the data that they like to make their point. It's a very different. We're not educating the citizenry. We're convincing the citizenry. That's what, if you're running for office, that's what you're doing. And, oh, by the way, we know Americans have a little bit shorter attention span, maybe than not. What politicians like to do is take one number out of context and use that as the thing to make their case. They don't show you how that number is changed over time.

They don't show you how that number relates to maybe take a budget issue, how it relates in terms of size to other numbers in the budget. That's not what politicians do. if you want that kind of rigorous work, it'll need to come from some kind of independent statistical agency, basically. You mentioned immigration. That's obviously one area you wish we had some more data on of how many here. Is there any area that you wish the government kept better data that would help us inform a major issue?

Well, immigration is certainly in that category, but if I was to pick a second, I would probably pick, I'll pick something in health care, which is also from time to time. hot topic. How do we really understand what it is about health care that seems to, if you read the press, make Americans nervous. We focus a lot on who's got insurance and who doesn't have insurance. Now, it's about 92 percent, I think, people have health care insurance. And by the way, of the other 8 percent, some are ineligible. Some unauthorized immigrants, guess what? They're eligible for medicaid so we can't 100% according to our laws is not even what we see so there is a population that has no insurance but of the people who do have insurance the

92% it's still scary co-pays and deductibles particularly are scary how much do people really pay on co-pays and deductibles should they be scary you know you certainly see stories where you'll see somebody says, I had a medical bill of 300,000, and my income's only 60 grand, or I'm living on Social Security. Those kinds of things do happen. But if you really want to know what people spend on co-pays and deductibles broken out well, hard to get there. You can see a broad class of things that includes co-pays and deductibles. And if you want to add in what people have to pay in premium for their health care plan, whether it's government funded or or not, take Medicaid Part C, Medicaid Advantage,

you pay extra. To really put a picture of that together and try to understand what is it and what would you really work on if you wanted to allay people's fears and you would see that probably differently if you're Democrat or Republican, but that's okay, that's not our job.

But if I was to say this to you, take all the money that Americans spend out of their pocket. So they're like really paying for something as opposed to having insurance that they don't really see being spent on their behalf. What percentage of medical costs are that? I can't remember, let's say it's 15%. It might be a little higher.

Then you'd say, well, what's the biggest part of that? Mostly things should be my drugstore, really. Band-Aids. That would be by far number one. I mean, again, by far as an adjective. I think number two is dental insurance. since many employers don't provide dental insurance. It's not co-pays and deductibles.

We haven't gotten to that yet. So insurance is mainly covering most of what it's supposed to cover is what you're saying. It is. It is. And yet, that would not be what you might think by kind of just observing what's in the media, so to speak. I wouldn't have thought it. Debt, that's another issue that you put there. It seems like we have good numbers on debt. It just seems that no one cares about it.

least not when they're in charge. Is it, I mean, I guess it would lead to the question is, is the issue with some things like debt, not an issue of data, but an issue of ideological viewpoint on debt? You know, some people have the modern, modernitary theorists that don't think, you can show them the biggest number of all the data in the world, how big the number is, and not worry about it. I used to think that debt, which is caused by deficits, annual. spending exceeding annual tax revenue. I used to think that that was a partisan issue. I don't think

it's a partisan issue anymore. I think each party has different ways that they want to increase the deficit. I mean, again, I'm not trying to predict. Republicans tend to cut taxes. I would call that cutting revenue. Democrats more likely are to advocate for increasing expenses, but whether you cut revenue and increased expenses, neither one of them is good. When you subtract the two, neither one of them is good. But can I ask you, but can I ask you, you were on squawk pox the other day with Andrew Ross Sorkin. And he asked, you know, well, you could put a wealth tax on someone like you. And you pointed out, I think correctly, that would be a very small piece. So while they both add to the revenue to the deficit, isn't spending way more significant in the long term

like entitlements to the explosion of the deficit and debt, then taxes, what you can get from taxes. If we had the tax, I mean, look, somebody'd have to do the forecast, but if we had the tax rates that we had, you know, when I started working, which were much higher, what would be tax revenue? I don't know. I can't answer that question. If capital gains and dividend rates were 37%, instead of 20%, I can't say. You know, in the long term, What's Social Security policy going to be? Are we going to increase, you know, today, when I started this, I didn't know. You only pay Social Security tax on the first, whatever it is, $127,000 of income.

Beyond that, you don't pay. If you take that up to $200,000, what does it do? How much, you know, so tax and benefits in that way combined. We know we're going to get more old people. And so one thing we know we're going to get is more old people. So Social Security and Medicare will go up. The thing we don't know is if we're going to get more workers into the economy who can help contribute to Social Security and the money that has to pay for Medicare,

and that's a function of birth rates, death rates, and immigration. So if you really want to take a look at the system that will affect deficits, I think you have to look at both of these things. You know, we know the benefit side, unless we change policy in a significant way, we don't see the brakes. We don't see how you put the brakes on. I mean, we're ever going to say, hey, look, you can't collect Social Security until you're 70. You wouldn't do that to somebody I'm 68. You wouldn't do it to me.

I'm too close. But if you said, hey, look, if you're born in, I'll just use it this year, you're born in 2024, you're not going to be eligible for Social Security until you're 70. It would change the cost without changing how people think of the benefit. I think there's a lot of vectors, but it's tax, I mean, if you just look at it by the numbers, it's tax revenue, the biggest, you can account for 90, 92% of all government spending, state, local, federal, and the following buckets. Social Security, Medicare, Defense, interest in the debt. Medicaid, interest on the debt, police and correctional officers, transfers to benefit less fortunate

people. And if you get to roads, you're at 92%. You just look at that bundle of stuff and say, what do you want to cut? Yeah. What do you want to cut? And I'm not saying there's not stuff that could be cut or not, but then you can look at the breakout of expenses. And then you make a decision.

And on the tax side, you say, hey, look, can we increase? tax revenue. I mean, again, if you were, I worry about the debt. My experience is in business. I worry a little bit about that, not that I think we'll ever get to no debt. I don't think that's probably sensible either. But you've got to look at those factors. Look at those. Oh, education. I knew I forgot one important one in our spending. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10. 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Can data tell you when a tipping point is going to be reached? Because no one knows how much debt we can take. And maybe we can, I mean, Japan has 200% debt to GDP. But it kind of happens suddenly from what I understand when debt crisis. Is there data that can tell us, you know, at this point, it becomes a serious issue?

At this point, at that point, I would say, here you go forecasters. You tell us. Yeah. Forecasting to me, unfortunately, I think I may have said this to you. When I was in college and I majored in economics, I thought it was a science. Now I know that there are people called, you know, right wing, if you will, economists and left wing economists. Can't be a science.

It can't be a science if there can be a political bias in this stuff. But, you know, people have to look at the forecast, then make their decision on what seems most sane. We don't make the forecast. Let me ask you about the philosophical. You could have done, gone a partisan round. Some people, your peers have done that. You know, Sheldon Adelson on the right, you know, George Soros, maybe on the left. What was your decision to take the nonpartisan route to put data there, use your resources to do that instead of, you know, backing, you know, a presidential candidate?

Well, I'd say a couple of things. number one I think we have a more unique role doing what we are doing number two I'm not sure backing political candidates with a lot of money necessarily makes a difference anyway I'm not an expert but I'm not sure

I think we have evidence now that you know the power of movements and PR may well be as important or more so is the power of money in these elections and number three in a way I don't feel a right to try to twist other people's arms to agree with me. I want you informed, then you go make your decision. You and I might disagree.

Guess what? It's okay. It's okay. We live in a democracy. Is it my job to try to twist people's arms to agree with me? Or is it a job to get people educated and let them make up their own minds? There's an imperialism to try to convince everybody to. to agree with me that just somehow doesn't feel quite right to me.

Well, let me ask you this. This is out, you know, I'm not saying people are wrong to do it just for me. Yeah. You're not, this question you couldn't find on USA facts. But I'm interested in your thoughts. You know, the, I saw one of the last few tweets that you don't tweet very much was Bill Ackman's tweet about the congressional hearings where they asked the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT about, you know, is genocide?

a calling for genocide violation of code. The Atlantic published an article recently calling at the end of the golden age for Jews in America. You were born half-Jews. You had a bar mitzra late in your life. I wonder, what have your thoughts been since? I know for a lot of Jews since 10-7, they've been rethinking a lot of things they thought they knew about the world, about maybe even American politics. I wonder what your thoughts have been.

I think there are two separate issues that sprouted out of 10-7, and I want to talk about them separately. One is, do people agree or disagree with the actions of either Hamas or Israel in the conflict that's going on? Now, I have a view of that. My view is Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel counter-attacked, and, you know, that's a form of war. war is horrific what people what should be done by anybody to end that war i don't know on the other hand and and i certainly i certainly regret that there are so many Palestinian innocents who are dying and i respect israel's right to defend itself and i have no idea what you have it's related but it's a separate vector is anti-semitism in the united states and that's

not okay. There's just no basis on which people should be discriminating against Jews or anybody else, African Americans, Asians. There are plenty of people get discriminated against based on race, religion. And I think in our country, the freedom of religion, with lack of discrimination, had disappeared or at least faded into the woodwork. Let me say it that way as an issue. And what happened on 10-7 has brought it right back into the forefront. And, you know, I grew up in a family where my dad who was Christian, was an interpreter at the war trials in Nuremberg. He certainly had a very clear view about anti-Semitism. My grandparents on my mother's side were Jewish and came from what was Russia at the time. It's now Belarus.

in Ukraine because of discrimination against Jews in Russia. My grandfather talked about it. He said, oh, I taught myself to speak high Russian. They couldn't tell why it was Jewish. I mean, that was like a source of pride. And, you know, he had skepticism every time I tell him about a friend of mine to bring something home. Is he a Jewish boy?

And, you know, I'm not saying there's not, cannot be, that's the right way to say, skepticism that can lead to you. to bias from Jews to non-Jews, but overwhelmingly it's discrimination against Jews or just negative and hate speech. So, you know, how can preaching genocide, whether, you know, if somebody had said, let's, let's have genocide on, I'll take one that's particularly silly, let's have genocide on women. I'm sure that would have violated something in the code of conduct in those universities and I would say I can't divorce my opinions completely from the fact that I'm Jewish but I do know if somebody had said that about any other race gender religious group I would

have had a problem with it and it happened to be about you know my my I'll say religion but it's Judaism in a way I think a lot of people don't understand is both a religion and an ethnicity, both. There's been a lot of donors who have, who, you know, at Harvard and elsewhere, have questioned whether they will donate and held, have you thought about reconsidering? I don't know if you continue to donate, but I know in the past you have given the computer science lab at Harvard and other places, has this made you rethink whether donating to those major universities is a good cause?

But even before, you know, the congressional hearings, et cetera, I had sort of, sort of to put the break on giving, not just because, hey, I know what's going on at Harvard and I don't want to give money to Harvard. No, I'm out of touch. The institution of Harvard today is different than the institution that I attended, when I started 51 years ago with the freshman at Harvard. It's a different place. Should I go investigate to see whether I'd like this place or I don't have the time for

that? So I said, these responsibilities for supporting these institutions should pass to what I call the paying customers, the kids who are attending, their parents, more recent graduates who have more perspective, prospective parents, current parents, you know, guys like me, 50 years removed, we can't assess. I wouldn't do this with any other not-for-profit we support in our philanthropy, just saying, sure, we're not. not going to know what they stand for. We're just going to give them money. So I had pulled back not out of any kind of determination that Harvard was doing good stuff or bad stuff, just that I didn't know what it was about anymore. And I can't say these comments made me want to go dig down deeper and learn. Let me just close on some more high-level kind of philosophical questions. This one's not so philosophical, but how does Steve Ballmer consume news? So when you wake up,

What does your news diet look like? First thing I do is check Twitter. Always. Now, people say, Twitter, you know, false news, la-la. There are three things that Twitter means to me. It is my news clipping service. I follow major publications, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Economist, it's L.A. Times, Detroit Free Press, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I see what they think are their most important articles because they show up my Twitter feed. So I use that as a way to decide where to start my, I don't have time to read papers, you know, sort of papers or websites daily end to end, but I use it as a news clipping shirts. So that, to me, is no more fake news than reading the newspaper, whenever that means.

That's number one. Number two thing, I think it's really important to read what people say about themselves. If you are a powerful, important person, I want to read what you say, because it matters. If Elon Musk said something, I'll use, it matters. He's got an important, powerful position in the world. If Microsoft or Google says something, it's important if the president says something,

if the president's, you know, rival in the election. So that's number two, to hear from people in their own voice. And then number three, I follow every back. basketball sports reporter out there as the, you know, as the chairman of the L.A. Clebers. And I know there's a whole bunch of hogwash and some of that, but I get a real kick out of it. Same basketball. Someone told me you're a boxing fan as well. Is that true or no? No, no. No. No. I'm a fan. So I thought I was excited. Oh, you're a boxing fan? Oh, you don't meet that many boxing fans anymore. Not very many. I used to ask these questions as closing questions on my old podcast, the Jamie

Weinstein show. I think they might be interesting. Just to see what. Steve Bomber thinks is, are there, we talked about books. Are there three books that you can point to that most shaped your worldview? There's a Milton Friedman book that I read. It might have been free to choose. It's the one where he goes through various government programs and talks about the advantages and disadvantages of privatizing or not. And I'm not, again, I'm not, I'm not going to pick a bone and say, you know, I'm all freedmen or all not. I just thought it was interesting, particularly when he points out in a way capitalism is more

democratic than our democracy. In capitalism, you're voting every day. You're voting with your feet. In political democracy, you vote for somebody, other people vote for somebody, and then you get a dictatorship of the party in power until the next party gets to come in power. It is a little less freedom of choose. So maybe it was free to choose, it was the book. So I put that on the list. There are a lot of books I liked as a kid, but I'm trying to see meaningful. I love this book. I was talking about it earlier called The Worldly Philosophers by Heil Bruner. It talks about sort of the history of economics and how thinking developed over time happens to be a passion.

And I think it's highly relevant to the kinds of things we do in our work. And there's what the heck was the name of the book? I just read it recently. It was fantastic. I think it's, I think the title is Who Gets to Make the NBA? The author who also writes for established media organizations, I think the New York Times, he said, I'm going to use AI to write this book. I'm only going to use AI to write the book.

And so he did all of the statistical, he did a lot of statistical research. How many guys who are six feet make it versus guys who are six six, who responds well in the clutch, who does it. But he used all AI to source the data. He illustrated his book by himself using AI. I think he used some AI to help draft words. And then he documents in the back all the ways he would. He used AI. So I love the book.

It happens to be a passion. It's a short book. But I really loved the approach in the way he's kind of pushing. So the inspiration there is not so much for what it said as in the potential of using AI in the future. Is there a historical leader you most admire? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm saying for sure Abraham Lincoln. When I was a little kid, I had three pictures up in my room, one of whom's Abraham Lincoln, and I would definitely say, number one.

And finally, I think I would be remiss if I had a year and I didn't ask you, and we had this conversation last night and scared a lot of people at the table, how AI is going to transform the world for better or worse. I'm a real, you know, bullish, optimistic person about, you know, how AI will positively impact the world. Will there be disruption and dislocation between here and that much better point that I believe in, yes. And will that be painful if people's skill sets are no longer is needed, if we have some real problems where AI gets out of control? I think we still control our world, but, you know, there will be problems. There will be deep fakes. There will be things where people should be punished, put in jail, whatever the case may be. But, you know, I'm bullish.

Now, you'd say, hey, look, and the thing I was joking with the journalist you had me with last night, is will the most important skill in journalism be writing anymore? Or will the AI be able to do the writing, forcing the journalists to say, what is our real core value added? Is it unique perspective? Is it a perspective could be independent or the perspective could be, hey, I'm actually here to sell a point of view, which to me it always feels like every publication is selling some point of view these days, even though theoretically they're not. So is, am I here to have perspective? Am I here to do primary research? Am I here to, which is nowhere on the Internet,

because otherwise, you know, the AI will find it. Is my job to be a great writer? Is my job now to be able to integrate more graphs or charts and numbers that make my stuff better? What is my job? What is my core value at it? And I think that's going to happen. You know, I mean, but I think your point was to some degree the art of writing for journalists, but even, I mean, will there be a next Shakespeare, AI will be able to write as good as anybody the most artistic in your view in a short period of time.

You know, today, if I want to write a Shakespearean sonnet for my grandson to read as a bedtime story, it's not hard. I tell them about my grandson and I say, put it in the in the voice of Shakespearean. In five years, it's going to be all that much better. It'll be better. It'll be better. So you can say the same thing on the number side. Is my core skill that I can add, that I can subtract, maybe even that I can set up a table? No, that's not going to be more.

The fact that I can put judgment on those numbers and what to do, I mean, the A.L. I'll give you an opinion, but ultimately human beings own decisions. AI does not own decisions. Human beings need to do original research. The AI can't find things that don't exist, you know, online. So I think every, a number of professions, people have to redefine what their core value add is. You know, if you believe me, we're writing will be a less critical skill, then where should schools be putting their time. Should they be worrying about people, kids using AI to write their papers? Or is that a good

thing? Because those kids understand what's going to happen in the future. It's different than plagiarism. But is that a bad thing or a good thing? Could be both. On that note, Steve Ballmer, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.