See the Data and Come to Your Own Conclusions - Steve Ballmer | The Dispatch Podcast

Steve Balmer welcome to the dispatch podcast pleasure being here thanks for having me Jam Steve I want to get into why you're in town but first uh we we did a off the Record dinner last night but you gave me permission uh to bring up this story because I found it so interesting you were I guess at Stanford Graduate School you were trying to you being recruited by Bill Gates to to go to Microsoft and there was another gentleman at the same time recruiting you to go elsewhere who was Mitt Romney Mitt Romney CU you tell that story I found it pretty funny sure I was finishing up my first year in business school and um two consulting firms Bane and BCG both put up two thou two five they both put in two $5,000 prizes um they were going to select people you sent them your business goal application and I got one from both Bane and BG BCG so I was on Bane's radar and I decided before picking a summer job I'd go visit uh the last place I stopped on the visit was Bane and Company uh mitt Romney was one of the two or three senior senior Partners in the 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 you 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 Bane stopped in Seattle saw Bill uh and wound up having to decide between basically those two choices and some others and I said let's drop out B and Company was 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 but uh that's a long form of the story but you are you were now in town uh to meet with people like mitt Senator mitt romen and others um so tell me why you are in Washington um and also if you have run into mid if if that story has come up at all uh when I retired from Microsoft which was 2014 uh one of the first things I was looking for it 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 or born into tougher situations and I said' look go government takes care of that and she said' no you're going to help me but got my interest peak and I was trying to prove I was right uh in government by the Numbers where do tax revenues come from where do they go to how much wealth could you say is transferred through the system hard to figure it out and so we started uh an effort called USAA usapa.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 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 forecast but at least let's start with the same data so I was on uh uh Capal hill yesterday and Senator Schumer and Senator Romney uh convened a bipartisan group of senators I think we had nine or 10 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 he told the story about how we first met and then the second time yeah I saw him after that was years later and he was governor uh he was governor already Massachusetts and M yeah and uh he was out for a Governor's conference and that was our next time to next time to sit down and talk yeah well you know one thing that jumps in my mind about this project USA facts is why you think it wouldn't be you think the government would have data like you're uh for for politicians and leaders to to be decipher that they wouldn't need someone from the uh private world to come in here the philanthropic world to do it why is this data just not available uh without you coming in and putting it together all 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 or 90 different government databases we use to put our stuff together and you need to integrate data Census Bureau Bea Bureau of Justice statistics CDC there's a lot of different places to go and government May produce the data but there's nobody in government who's chared 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 it's that's the current state of affairs and we don't disagree we don't agree with anybody you know 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 and 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 R supporters or D supporters the 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 minds getting to the data is there any fact or or 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 and we can go from there uh 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 uh 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 want it or I'm on a permanent work visa great but the numbers are interesting they really are if you look at unauthorized immigration uh interesting fact about there's about 11 million uh 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 that's an estimate that estimate has been constant for the last 10 years H I think that blow people's minds yeah people think that number is 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 do they come and knock on the door and I'll say El Paso and say hey look I'm I want Asylum it's way into the country but we let you in but you were unauthorized I think most people have the view that all unauthorized immigrants came into the country uh kind of sneaking over the Border you do have people who come in between 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 uh there people who overstay their visas but how do you get to 11 million with what's going on on the border now is remains 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 oh 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 right which we don't see yeah uh 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 estimated without our knowledge and we don't see a current call it a balance sheet a 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 be surprised by this well I I mean I wonder what tied that to the previous question about you know why doesn't the government have this data I guess one of the answers is um 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 to find so so because the data will will you know go against whatever their their Viewpoint is on a particular issue I don't think politicians hide the football so to speak I think they I think what they do do is anytime 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 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 other numbers in the budget that's not what politicians do if you want that kind of rigorous work it's kind of 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 of how many here is there any area that you wish the government kept better data that would help us inform a major issue that that we just don't have the data to you can't even compile it to put in front of them but it's really important that we get yeah well immigration is certainly in that category but if I was to pick a a second I would probably pick I'll pick something in healthc care which is also from time to time a Hot Topic how do we really understand what it is about healthc 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 what now 92% I think of people have healthcare insurance and by the way of the other 8% some are ineligible some unauthorized immigrants guess what they're not eligible for 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 yeah 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 oh I medical bill of you know 300,000 and you know my income is 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 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 for their health care plan whether it's government funded or not take Medicaid uh part C Medicaid Advantage you pay extra to really put a picture of that together and try to understand what what is it and what would you really work on if you wanted to elay people's fears and you would see that probably differently if you're democrat or republican but that's okay that's not our 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 thing as opposed to having insurance that they don't really see being spent on their behalf uh what percentage of medical costs are that I can't remember but let's let's say it's 15% it might be a little higher than that 10 15% then you'd say well what's the biggest part of that it's mostly things you can buy at the drugstore really Band-Aids that would be by far number one h i mean Again by far as an adjective I should grab the numbers here from the packet and go through them number two 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 to that yet then I think maybe it's um I can't remember it may be Pharmaceuticals next so so insurance is mainly covering most of their what it's supposed to cover is what you're saying it is it is and yet you know it's not that would not be what you might think by kind of just observing what's in theed so to speak I wouldn't have thought it um 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 or at least not not when they're in in charge is is I mean I guess I guess it would lead to the question is is the issue with some things like debt not an issue of data but a issue of ideological uh viewpoint on debt you know some people have the modern modernit theorists that don't think you can show them the biggest number all the data in the world how big the number is and not not worry about it I used to think that de 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 uh has different 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 or increase expenses neither one of them's good when you subtract the two neither one of them's good but but can I but I can I ask for the deficit yeah but can I ask you were on um squawk pox the other day with Andrew Ros sorin uh and he asked you know well we could put a wealth tax on on someone like you uh and and you pointed out I think correctly that would be a very small piece um so while they both add to the revenue to to the deficit isn't spending way more uh significant in the long-term like entitlements to to the explosion of the deficit uh and debt than than taxes what you can get from taxes if we had the TA I mean look somebody'd have to do the forecast but we had if we had the tax rates that we had you know when I started working which were much what would be tax revenue I don't know I can't answer that question if uh capital gains and dividend rates were 37% instead of 20% I can't say um you know in the long term what social security policy going to be are we going to increase uh 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 so tax and benefits in that way combined we know we're going to get more old people it's the 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 you have to look at both both of these things you know we know the benefits side unless we change policy in a significant way we don't see the breaks you don't see how you put the brakes on I mean we you 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 used this year you're born in 2024 you're not going to be eligible for Social Security till you're 70 yeah 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 9 90 92% of all government spending State local Federal in the following buckets Social Security Medicare defense interest on the debt Medicaid interest on the debt police and correctional officers what did I miss uh transfers to benefit less fortunate people and if you get to ro 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 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 experiences 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 got to look at those factors look at those oh education I knew I forgot one important one in our in our uh spending can data I mean can data tell you when a tipping Point's going to be reached because no one knows how much debt we can take and and maybe we can I mean Japan has 200% debt to GDP uh but it kind of happens suddenly from what I understand when debt Cris is there data that can tell us you know at this point it becomes a serious issue at this 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 and now I know that there are people called you know right right rightwing if you will uh Economist and leftwing Economist 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 for and 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 uh gone a partisan route some people your peers uh have done that you know Sheldon Adon on the right you know George Soros maybe on the left um what was your decision to to take the the nonpartisan route to put data there use your resources to do that instead of you know backing you know a presidential candidate uh well I'd say a couple of things uh number one I think we are 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 as the power of 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 the job to get people educated and let them make up their own minds uh I there's an imperialism to try to convince everybody 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 um you're not this question you couldn't find on USA facts um but I'm interested in in in your thoughts um you know the uh I saw one of the last few tweets that you you you know tweet very much was uh the bill amman's tweet about the Congressional hearings where uh they asked the presidents of uh Harvard pen and MIT about uh you know is genocide a calling for genocide violation of code uh the Atlantic published an article recently uh calling it the end of the golden age for Jews uh in America um you uh were a born half Jewish you had a bar mitro late in your life I I wonder uh what have your thoughts been since I know for a lot of Jews uh since 107 they've been rethinking a lot of things they thought they knew about the world about maybe even Amer politics I wonder what what your thoughts have been I think they're two separate issues that sprouted out of 107 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 Conor attacked and you know that's that's form of war war is horrific what PE 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 should happen like most things in the mid East I have no thing the other com 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 who get discriminated against based on race religion and I think in our country the freedom of religion the 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 107 is brought it right back into the Forefront and you know I grew up in a family where my dad was who was Christian was an interpreter at the war trials in Norberg he certainly had a very clear view about anti-Semitism uh my my grandparents on my mother's side were Jewish and came from what was Russia at the time it's now bellus in Ukraine because of discrimination against Jews am I in in in Russia my grandfather would talk about it he said oh I taught myself to speak High Russian I they couldn't tell I was Jewish I mean that was like a source of Pride and you know he he had skepticism every time I tell him about a friend of mine to bring somebody home is he a Jewish boy and you know I'm not saying there's there's not cannot be some um what's the right way to say skepticism that can lead to bias from Jews to non-jews but overwhelmingly it's discrimination against Jews or just negative and hate speech so you know how how can preaching genocide whether you know if somebody had said let's let's have genocide I 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 a religion and an ethnicity yeah both I there's been a lot of donors who have who you know at Harvard and and elsewhere have questioned whether they will donate and and held that have you thought about uh reconsidering I know 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 uh whether donating to those major universities is a is a good cause well even before you know the the Congressional hearings Etc uh I had sort of put the break on on giving not 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 I started 51 years ago with a freshman at Harvard it's a different place C should I go investigate to see whether I like this place or I don't have the time for that so I said these responsibilities for supporting these institution should pass to the what I call the paying customers the kids who are attending their parents more recent graduates who have more perspective perspective parents current parents you know 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 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 um H this one's not so philosophical but how does Steve Balmer consume news so when you when you wake up how what is what does your news diet look like first thing I do is check Twitter always now people say oh Twitter you know false news 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 LA Times Detroit Free Press blah blah blah blah blah and I see what they think are their most important articles because they show up in my Twitter so I use that as a way to decide where to start my I don't have time to read you know sort of papers or websites daily end to endend but I use it as a news clipping service so that to me is no more fake news than reading the newspaper whatever whatever that means that's number one number two thing I think it's really important to read what people say about themselves if you were a powerful important person I want to read what you say because it it matters you know if um Elon must said something I'll use it 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 uh 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 LA Clippers um and I know there's a whole bunch of hogwash and some of that but I get a real kick out of it so 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 you're a boxing F I thought oh you don't meet that many boxing fans anymore not very many um I used to ask these questions as closing questions on on my old podcast the Jamie Wiston show I think they might be interesting just to see what we talked about books are there three books that you can point to that most shaped your worldw uh which Milton fredman book was it there's a Milton Friedman book that I read choose 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 U I'm not going to pick a bone and say you know I'm all fredman are 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 yeah you're voting with your feet in uh political democracy you vote for somebody other people vote for somebody and then you get a dictatorship of the part party in power until the next party gets to come in power uh it is a little less freedom of choose so so maybe it was free to choose it was the book so I put that on the list um 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 uh by Hy Broner 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 uh 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 uh 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 you know how many guys were six feet make it versus guys who are 66 who responds well in the clutch who doesn't but he used all AI to Source the data he put He Illustrated his book by himself using AI I think he used some AI to help draft words uh and then he documents in the back all the ways he would he used AI so I love I love the book happens to be a passionate it's a short book but I really loved the approach and 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 would say for sure Abraham Lincoln when I was a little kid uh I had three pictures up in my room one of whom's Abraham Lincoln and I would definitely say number one and and finally I I think I would be remiss if I if I had you here 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 the 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 some real problems or AI gets out of control I think we still control our world but you know there are there will be problems there will be deep fakes there'll be things where people should be punished put in jail whatever uh the case may be but you know I'm I'm bullish now you'd say hey look and the thing I was joking with the journalists 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 journalist to say what is our real core value added is it unique perspective is it a and the 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 uh is my job to be a great writer is my job now to be able to integrate more graphs or charts and numbers to make my stuff better what is my job what is my core value at it and I think that's going to happen in a I mean but 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 any 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 him about my grandson and I say put it in the in the voice of Shakespeare in five years it's going to be all that much it'll be better it'll be better so it you can say the same thing on the number side is my poor skill that that I can add that I can subtract maybe even that I can set up a table no that 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 will give you 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 I think every a number of professions people have to redefine what their core value ad is you know if you believe me where writing will be less critical skill then we should where should schools be putting their time should they be worrying about people kids uh 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 play ISM but is that a bad thing or a good thing um could be both on that note Steve Balmer thank you for joining the dispatch podcast appreciate it thanks Jamie