Why AI Could Fuel America's Next Economic Boom | David Blumberg

These bots, they never sleep, they never take breaks, they don't take vacations, they can speak any language. They're not thinking for us, they're doing for us. David, you're an investor. You certainly have your finger on the pulse on what the future is going to look like. Help us think through AI. How do we build a society that is not just going to feed us lies? To inject, essentially, traditional American views, traditional biblical views, traditional enlightenment views into the AI project. I'm not trying to be Pollyannish and say everything's perfect and there are risks, there are greater risks by slowing us down. It's like the data centers is the new version of the anti-fracking. There are two main groups against it. One are environmental community and the other is China. China is lobbying for America not to have data centers, but they're building data centers. They're building them. It's going to be a very bright future. It's coming very fast. Look for the signal. Avoid the noise. David Blumberg, we've been working closely together building PragerU. People oftentimes want to know who are the leaders behind PragerU. I mean, they've seen me. They obviously know Dennis Prager. They met Alan, but they haven't fully met you yet. And so I wanted people to get a sense of who's the new chairman of the board of PragerU and why have you really dedicated yourself to this incredible venture that we've built together? Thank you, Marissa. It's a pleasure, honor to be here with you. And I don't to serve a central stage. I'm a supporting actor here in this. You're certainly a star. Dennis is a star. Alan's a star. The team are really the stars. And I'm just so pleased because I approach philanthropy much like I approach venture capital in my career. In venture capital, we're looking to deploy our money and our investors' money in the most effective, most efficient growing companies. With this endeavor and PragerU, I find the bang for the buck awesome. The way that you are able to use relatively small amounts of budgets, hopefully growing every year, it's bigger and bigger, to reach literally billions of views and millions and tens of millions of people is very inspiring. And I find it affirming because you're succeeding. So I see you going from strength to strength, from success to success. We have some setbacks from time to time, mostly by others trying to stop us, but you don't take no for an answer. And the Dennis Prager virtues start with courage and gratitude and these very powerful human motivations that drive us upward and making us have progress and making us have a better world than our parents lived in. So to summarize, I just feel being blessed by being involved with PragerU. It's fun, it's stimulating, it's intellectually engaging, and I think it's for ultimately a very good cause. Now, you have a very interesting background because you're a tech investor and you have done very well investing in all kinds of companies, and we can talk about that a little later. But in so many ways, your passion for PragerU is similar to many of your other passions, and that is a blend of intellectual curiosity, truth, some of the great books and the great lessons that we would consider timeless truths, combined with the view onto the future, using technology, sitting on the cutting edge of the most recent innovations. And as you've coached me and pushed me and our team at PragerU, we have really been able to blend those two important facets of PragerU, right? Technology and innovation, as well as just timeless truth. Well, what I like about, again, about PragerU and the way you're leading this organization is that I find we're taking the timeless truths of our forefathers and foremothers, the powerful lessons from the Bible, from ancient Greece, from ancient Rome, the three pillars of the founding of America are Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. So we take, you know what we learned from those great classics and then using the latest technology to get to the biggest audience in the most efficient and effective way possible people constantly come up to me when i mention about prager that they love the style the format this the the short pithy um five minute video classics that we do our flagship product and then some of these longer format events like the ones you're doing with real talk and others so it's that combination of timeless and timely of evergreen and topical and i think you're threading that needle really well just to bring it back to my background i consider myself something like an intellectual stalker and i had i went to a jewish kid from a small town central california called fresno california and i grew up there and i knew that there was something bigger something out there more important than just suburban life that i grew up in middle class you know and so i was looking for something i i think i sort of started to find it um by my intellectual engagement with a youth group, a religious youth group that I was involved in and the Boy Scouts, those are very formative um influences on my on my early life and then going to Harvard for college, it was very intellectually stimulating and we had constant visits by you know prime ministers and senators and foreign policy people and foreign ministers and all that. That was very exciting because I thought originally my career would be something in government because I thought governments would solve problems. And then when I was at college, I had some very formative experiences. One was working three times in Washington during summers and had three internships. And after my three internships, I realized that Washington is often the place that causes the problems instead of solving the problems. And I'm not trying to asperge or cast aspersions on the people many brave people wonderful people who try and work in government and they go often with very idealistic motives, it's just that the mechanism of government is not terribly well suited to solving fast-changing dynamic problems of society and we could take so many but take Social Security as one, Social Security was created you know decades ago at a time when people retired at something like early 60s and then died a few years later and there were 12 people working for every one retiree, now the pyramid is inverted or inverting and people live a lot longer and so the whole numbers don't work anymore and the government finds it so difficult to change things because again as Dennis Prager says, once you've sort of hooked the public on a public benefit um giving them money in a sense pulling it away is harder than breaking a heroin addiction, so I think that again, government tries. I'm not casting aspersions on motivations, but as Dennis also says, that motivations don't really matter. What we should evaluate is the output. What kind of effect are we having? So I moved to becoming, instead of an idealist who wanted to use government to solve lots of problems, to more of a person who's more of a skeptic about government and more of a champion for entrepreneurship. So you have the most unusual background because you grew up in Fresno, California. You end up at Harvard. Were you a Democrat? I was. Our family was not very political. I do remember my father voting for Reagan and I was appalled. Now I think Reagan's one of the greatest presidents we ever had. But at the time I was sort of in that Harvard brainwashed mindset. How can I describe it? I'm an idealistic person. The ethics of Judaism teach that we should try and leave the world a better place than we found it. And so that was important to me, the Boy Scouts teach that you should leave a campsite cleaner than when you found it. So those kinds of things were my motivations to try and improve things. I'm a problem solver. You are as well. I think PragerU is trying to teach people how to solve problems. We don't want everything to be solved by some big entity out there, the government or anything else. We want to roll up our sleeves and get involved and do something to help make things better. So my background, when I was at Harvard, I had this government experience. I had a very interesting experience starting a company at Harvard, a company called Harvard Student Agencies and one of the divisions I started called Harvard Distribution Services. We distributed flyers and newspapers to the kids' undergrad dorm rooms. The thing was not that it was so interesting, the work, but the process of being a capitalist, of having a customer ask you to do a project, fulfilling the project, getting paid, getting feedback, succeeding, giving them fulfillment, making them happy. Or if you screwed up, getting negative feedback and trying to improve the process. You do better next time. That was very gratifying. Whereas in Washington, I saw so many mixed motives. Can I give you one story? Sure. Give me one example. Okay. This is at the Export-Import Bank. This was many, many years ago. They probably changed and maybe they're doing a lot better now. But in those days, the boss that I had at that time in the summertime said to me, David, you're studying both economics and government. So we're going to give you a double project please analyze the hard currency foreign hard currency foreign earnings of the South American cone countries Argentina Brazil Paraguay and Uruguay they're buying a lot of Boeing airplanes and Caterpillar tractors and other equipment they're developing their farmlands and for export we want to know how their economies are going to do whether they can pay back the loans i did my regression analysis i did all kinds of interpretation analysis and i came back two months later. I said, boss, I have the answer. You're not, you may not like it. We have to stop lending because all these countries are going to go bankrupt. This was many years ago and most of them did go bankrupt. And, but back in the, in the moment, he said, David, why, what will happen? I said, well, if they go bankrupt, then these loans will go bad and the taxpayer will be left on the hook. And he said, David, you get an A in economics and you get an F in politics. And I was just shocked. And, you know, what do you mean? I said, why is that a good thing? He He said, well, David, the way politics works in America today, this was, that was a civil servant. I don't think it was even partisan at all. He said, look, at that time, Boeing was in Washington state. He goes, the senators from Washington state are very concerned about Boeing success. And there are a lot of employees that live there and the Congress people in that area are also concerned. So they will get together and hear from Boeing. They want X and then maybe counter pillar tractors headquartered I forget where, and I'm not picking on these companies per se. It's generic, right? So big companies get together, they get their Congress people and senators involved and they log roll with other people and then they get things passed that have concentrated benefits and diffuse costs and that's the way too much of washington works and who's not represented at the table the average middle class taxpayer they're not there brought you to conservatism did you is did it basically teach you that what left is big government and therefore but how does a young mind recognize that there is a connection between the left and this cronyism within the government yes okay it's a step-by-step process one was this experience at government that the cronyism and that it was not as idealistic it was not as pure as i had thought okay that was my naivete being evaporated away from my my face um then there was the positive experience of starting the company then i had a very interesting intellectual experience writing my college thesis and that was at harvard at harvard yes we do college thesis and for undergrad, to get honors in your field. And this, I won't bore with all the details, but it was on the Israeli-African relationship between 73 and 81. And what happened in 73 is most African countries broke diplomatic ties under the pressure of the Arab oil boycott of 1973. And yet in the next eight years, when you would expect ties would go down and trade would go down, it all went up about 800%. So why? That's a non-obvious finding. And what I realized, To summarize it in the words of one African diplomat, David, what we say at the UN is one thing, what we do in reality is entirely another. So the gap between the rhetoric and the reality really shocked me as well. And then I said, well, who really made things happen? Why did the trade increase? Oh, business people pursuing their real interests. Military people pursuing what was security interests for their countries. Pastors, priests, and imams bringing their flock to the Holy Land. That continued and increased in volume. So all these things saying, oh, it's not government that leads, often government is following, and people will do things to pursue their own interests, despite government, you know, prognostications or, you know, mandates, they'll do it under the table, around the corner, another way. So those three things started me to get very skeptical of the, oh, government is the solution to my problems. The 9-11 really shocked me out of the Democrat Party because Al Gore came to San Francisco. He spoke at the Commonwealth Club and he renounced the preemptive doctrine. Preemptive doctrine is you have to wait to be attacked before you can go out and attack. To me, that sounded completely nonsense for a government leader to say and dangerous. Hmm. There's something that you mentioned being that you're Jewish, and I want to remark on that because many Jews believe that it's incumbent upon us to leave the world in a better place than where we found it, right? You've heard this probably, tikkun olam. Correct. And I want to make sure that our listeners know this, and I don't know if you've ever heard this, but it's tikkun olam b'malchut shadai. Nachon, correct. Because it really, what we are commanded to do is repair the world under the kingdom of God. Absolutely. And I've explained this so many times, but I don't know if our listeners here have heard me explain this. The difference between a Dennis Prager, who is a Jew, and a George Soros, who is a Jew, is that Dennis Prager recognizes that it's repair the world under the kingdom of God and not repair the world based on what I think in my mind and in my heart. When people ask us all the time, why are Jews social activists on the left? The answer is because they have only heard Tikkun Olam. They've only heard Repair the World. They have neglected the Hebrew Bible element. And that is what Dennis has been teaching both of us for so many years. And it is so important because it is literally the reason why you're seeing so much social activism amongst Jews who believe that they're doing well, but they're doing well and they're doing good. They're doing good for the world, but it's based on what they think in their heart is good and not under the kingdom of God. So just such an important remark. But I want to go back to, okay, so you basically find conservatism at Harvard, which is almost unheard of. And then fast forward a bunch of years, you live in San Francisco. And in my mind, you're practically the only conservative in San Francisco. It's not quite true. Probably an exaggeration. I think it's between 13 and 17% of the voters. Prager, you, right? You're living in San Francisco. Now you're living here in Florida. You fled amongst, along with many other very successful entrepreneurs who hopefully California might be able to pull back in if it gets its act together. But tell us a little bit about how do you go from a Harvard graduate who lives in San Francisco to becoming so actively involved in the conservative movement in so many levels? Yes. It's more complicated even than that. Not only am I Jewish and not only do I go to Harvard and not only do I live in San Francisco, but I'm also gay. So four strikes out. And yet I learned that political activity often follows social change. I learned this from a very prominent leftist woman flying on an airplane from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. Name was Kate Michaelman. She was head of NOW, National Organization for Women, and then she was head of NARAL, National Abortion Action Rights League. And we were sitting next to each other and I said, you know, Ms. Michaelman, you're so famous, you're such an incredible lobbyist for your issues and so on. I'm as a citizen lobbyist going back to lobby for AIPAC for a pro-Israel-American relationship in Washington at this big conference. What kind of arguments do you find most successful on Capitol Hill? What convinces senators and congresspeople to change their mind? And she said, well, David, on our issue, we don't really change minds. And I was surprised. I said, really? Well, what do you do? Then she said, well, we just confirm things because most politicians adopt or already have the point of view that their district advocates. So people are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. the congressperson or the senator will adopt that view even if they don't already have it they want to win election they don't care about the truth they just care what they believe their population some of them may believe it strongly but if they don't believe it they will adapt to their their well i guess that's their job and one would say that they're representing the people who vote for them maybe i think it's a little bit we think about different way i mean you and i think about the same way but many people believe that a politician getting up on a soapbox can say to you, I believe that abortion is wrong, or I believe that abortion is right. And that's going to change the people's attitudes in the audience. No, it's not. So politics is, as Breitbart said, is downstream from culture. So what that did is it liberated me. A light bulb went off over my head and I said, oh, so this social issues stuff, that's secondary. I can vote on fiscal discipline. I can vote on foreign policy, strength of American representation in the world. I can vote on limited government, all these things. Now I've become more socially conservative as I've got to know more about Republican politics and policies and conservative views and so on and philosophy. But right there, she separated those two things from me and I realized, oh, so voting for somebody for social issues is not the right way to do it. That doesn't work. You can try and influence people in the social realm, like in media, for example, or through being a good citizen and showing, hey, I'm not a threat to your marriage, I'm not a threat to your kids, something like that. And then that will lead to better acceptance of people. But politics is not the way to force social change. That's a classic Edmund Burke learning that I remembered from my principles in government undergraduate, which I loved. I loved Burke and Hobbes and Montesquieu and de Tocqueville. Those are John Locke. And those are the kind of people that I really resonated with when i was reading them so this this transformation was learning some of the right i did have some of the right education at Harvard I did take some of the professors that were a little bit on the more conservative side not no I'm not aiming there I wasn't trying to I just happened to fall into that but I had to go back to them and think about it when I was changing my political registration and say oh dummy that's why I liked those things so much because they were greeting me with real truths with with with deep profound knowledge of human nature and I think that's the insight that Dennis Prager brings to all of this. Technology changes, but human nature is remarkably resilient over probably hundreds of thousands of years, but at least in the last 10,000 years when we've had civilization, family lives are remarkably similar probably to what they were, you know, when we were gathered around a campfire in a cave, you know, in Central Europe during the Ice Age. So David, you have this remarkable ability to look at companies, especially in the technology world and have a hunch I guess for what's going to do well while you're founded in timeless truth you certainly have your finger on the pulse and what the future is going to look like and many of us are really worried right now about the future because data centers and AI and all of these things that our kids are getting exposed to with the internet can become very very scary so I'd love for you to help us think through this new revolution that we're going through, because it is a revolution. There's an AI revolution. And unlike the agricultural revolution, which happened many years, close to 200 years, this revolution is happening within months, right in front of our eyes. Help us think through AI and help us even define AI for those of us who are not so knee deep in that environment right now. Okay. So first of all, artificial intelligence has a relatively long history. It's about 80 years old. It started during World War II. Alan Turing and the project in Britain to code break the Nazi codes, the Enigma project, that was sort of the starting of it. And then it went into universities and probably in the UK, I don't know, but MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley and Stanford and so on. And these great universities started doing what I'd call neural network analysis, mostly on the most primitive kinds of organisms, worms, and how do they think and what response do they respond to, stimuli do they respond to. And then it moved into more sophisticated things, neural networks, and then into expert systems and into machine learning machine learning just to make it simple is really a pattern recognition an anomaly in a set of data and that's very useful for certain things if you're trying to detect that when a motor is going to break down you can listen to the sensor of the sound of it and then it's about to break so that's kind of machine learning then we got to another stage deep learning and that's good for image recognition of faces cars how the automatic cars or not how self-driving cars or vehicles operate and then we've gotten to this breakthrough in 2022 from ChatGPT which is a generative AI and that's where it's following a very simple pattern sounds very simple but it's very profoundly important and impactful and that's what's the next logical word that follows in a sentence so i'll give you the test to be or not to be correct you know your Shakespeare and you're just as good as ChatGPT very nice or Claude not quite because Claude can do that incredible scale and then with incredible speed and when you got the right answer it could then go on and cite the whole thing where you might not know that whole soliloquy by heart so that is the generative part it's creating either language or code that's where i come in most of the things that Bloomberg Capital invests in are not for the consumer they're more business to business technology and that's where this revolution is happening fastest it's happening with the biggest corporations adopting it very quickly and making incredible productivity gains. I'll come back to that in a moment. So there's another step. After Generative, we get to CodePilot, I think for Microsoft and other code development programs to help you automate the speed of development of your code writing as a software programmer. And just as an example, in one of our portfolio companies, I went, this is about three months ago, to a board meeting. And after the board meeting, we went out and had lunch with all of the engineers. And there were about 20 of them in this startup company. And I said, so what's changed since the last time I was here? It was about six months earlier. We hadn't had a meeting in person. And they said, well, we don't write code anymore. We're just supervisors. We look at the code that's already been written by the AI, and then we adapt it, evaluate it, tweak it, et cetera. But they've graduated themselves. They've promoted themselves into supervisors instead of coding software programmers. It's kind of amazing. So that's, I mean, there's one more step. So that's CodeAgent or CodePilot. These are for software writing tools. The next step, what we are most excited about, and this is where a huge revolution is about to happen and it's happening now, but so fast, it's almost going past us at breakneck speed, is called agentic AI. Agentic AI means as an agent, like a travel agent does work for you that you could do yourself, but it's much more efficient to have them do it. They know they would have to know your credit card and your ID and your passport and which seat preference you have and which airline and which route you want to go and when you want to go and all these things. But then they can do all of that very quickly. You don't have to cut and paste and post this and type that. These agents, software bots working on your behalf can do this. And I'm giving the consumer example. But now imagine an insurance company processing thousands of claims. So much of that can be automated and be done almost instantly. These agents, these bots, they never sleep. they never take breaks they don't take vacations they work 24 7 they can speak any language so it's really amazing they're not thinking for us they're doing for us so what i like to say is this is like putting a machine on our mind just as we talked about the agricultural revolution we replaced animals and human power including children power and slave power we replaced it with tractors and machines that was a good thing for society and then in the factories we used to So by hand, and now we have machines that do it, now we're going to add machines for our minds. This is going to make us much more productive. And just, I want you to think about it, everybody in the audience, how much of your day is pretty much wasted by doing kind of the mundane drudgery tasks of cut and paste and change the format and change the font and do this. And a lot of that could just go away and you can really get to the point of what you're trying to accomplish. Does that make sense? Okay. So, David, you're an investor, so you're very excited about it because for you, you're going to get great return on financial investment because the companies that you're providing money to are going to become more efficient for you. But for a lot of the people who are listening to this, David, they're hearing this and they're saying everything you just described is my livelihood. Everything you just described is what I do every day. I am a secretary. I'm an operations manager. I am a coder myself. I'm a graphic designer. This is my job. And now you're going to give it to a machine because the machine is not going to take time off because the machine is going to work all through the night. But what about humanity? What about the people who need jobs, who are now going to lose it virtually overnight because it's happening so quick? Okay. Very fair question. A lot of people are asking it. I'm mostly a techno-optimist, meaning that I think we're going to grow so much as a society that we're going to produce more jobs. There'll be different jobs. Some will be the same. Some people will be so much more empowered. Like, for example, I just gave a talk at the Economic Club of Miami about two weeks ago, and there was a radiologist in the audience. And I talked to him in the cocktail party before the talk. And I said, you know, so are you guys adopting some AI for your radiology practice? He said, yes, we've spent $250 million, which is a lot of money. It must be a very big practice with many clinics. And I said, are you laying people off? He said, no, we're hiring like crazy. Our guys are so much more productive. They can do more. So first of all, let's go back in history. The agricultural revolution, 250 years ago, 95% of Americans at the time of the revolution worked in agriculture. Today, it's 1.5%. All those jobs have been lost, but I wouldn't say they've been lost. They've been transformed. I think that's a better word. There'll be some people who do the same thing much more efficiently. We still have a few farmers that now produce for not only America, but we export to dozens of other countries. So our few farmers are extremely productive. Now, what do the other people do? Well, as far as I know, in 1776, there were no professional sports teams. There were no vacation industries. There was a tiny education establishment. There was a tiny medical establishment. All those industries grew enormously. We're going to have some change. That's going to be happening. And change is accelerating if we haven't noticed it. I mean, you and I lived in the period when we didn't have phones, cell phones when we grew up. I miss those days. Somewhat. We've lived through some change. We're going to have to live through more change. It is accelerating our kids your kids and my kids will probably some of them work in space which is an amazing thing to think about right it's incredible our grandkids certainly so this is very exciting and scary at the same time fire was the first thing that could warm a man's you know cave and cook his food and also cause the whole forest to burn down and his whole village so we have had these revolutions or these technological innovations that are both incredibly productive and helpful to humanity and harmful. Let me just go into one area that is, I think, undoubtedly going to be a very positive thing for humanity, and that's healthcare. We can make healthcare much less costly and much better for humanity in terms of solving terrible problems of cancer and diseases that have been very difficult to solve. We can now evaluate using AI much faster, many, many compounds and find what ones work instead of slow testing in the lab, very slow and take vacations. And we take breaks and we don't do it 24 seven. Now it can be done much faster. So there are going to be changes. I'm not trying to be Pollyannish and say everything's perfect. And there are risks. We'll get to it in a moment probably, but there are greater risks by slowing us down. And one of the biggest risks, let me talk about this. One of the biggest problems you mentioned about data centers and people being afraid of that. I'll address the details in a moment, but here's the biggest problem I'm worried about. One is over-government regulation. The other is if we don't make AI a utility that's affordable for everybody, that would be terrible. I don't want just rich people, governments, and big companies to have benefits of AI. I want a sewing machine to be available for everybody, not just a big corporation. So I want AI to be available to everybody, poor people in a village and another country, as well as right here at home. So we want this to be a utility. We want the data centers to provide reliable, cheap power and data center services, not be restricted, not be narrowly available only to those who can afford it with huge budgets. So here's how the data center argument goes. Many people say, oh, data centers are loud. They take a lot of water. They take a lot of land. They're going to take away my jobs jobs well some people think data centers are are dangerous how so they think that it's going to emit some form of of i'm not sure what it is exactly but some form of is it 5g if somebody is going to have electricity in the air i don't know okay i haven't heard that so i can't debate it but it sounds like a conspiracy theory well some people say i don't want data centers in my town or in my neighborhood because i think it's going to be dangerous that some people are worried about the utility bills uh and so that's one piece of it but the other the other piece of it is yes all over the internet you will watch videos of people saying you know data centers are are dangerous for the environment okay so again back to fire fire can be extremely dangerous you can burn down your house you put on your fire your your family you can burn your clothes your hair everything terrible if fire used in the proper way extremely helpful okay so now about the data centers let's see land there's plenty of land for data centers in america they don't have to be in the middle of a city although they can be if you want them you know 10 miles outside of town that's fine you can do that there's plenty of room around you can put forests around them plant trees so the noise is minimal the water argument is pretty bogus because you can recycle water these these systems are not wanting to use water and destroy the water you can have this water recycle use it over and over and the newer plants their data centers are using antifreeze or a variant of antifreeze, which is better than water. And then the newer, newer, newer versions of these data centers will be using photonic or light communication interconnections, not metal. And so that'll be less heat, less need for water and cooling. And some, Elon Musk and others are talking about data centers in space. So I think that the future will be very, very good. Just like the semiconductor that we have in our phones today is the equivalent power of really the computing power that put a man on the moon what is it 70 years ago um we're living through incredible technological renovation we're going to do this better and better more efficiently more safely it will not take too much water will not take too much land and again expensive ai is bad for society cheap ai like electricity cheap electricity is good for society we do not want a world where when thomas edison invented the electric bulb and so on and i think he lighted up Madison Avenue or Fifth Avenue or something like that. That'd be terrible if only Madison and Fifth Avenue in New York got electricity and the rest of us had to sit by candlelight. So you're saying that limiting data centers will simply limit data centers' ability to serve the greater population of America. It's not going to limit the people who are wealthy. It's going to limit the growth on that front. Why do you think people do say the data centers are dangerous? where is this coming from maybe conspiracy theory or whatever but like if you're saying your claim is that data centers are not dangerous and we do have the land and we have the space and the ability to build them why would anybody be against them okay first of all there are nimbies not in my backyard that's that's a thing happens i'm more of a build it in my backyard i want things to be growing but again we have zoning people can debate it and some communities will accept and some communities will reject our friend alex epstein from um often does things on prager u has a beautiful way of saying it he said i think these things should not be called data centers that sounds a little scary they should be called friendly neighborhood cash dispensers and i would say an intelligence dispensers because they're helping provide answers to real problems for people they want to solve medical remember data centers supply all kinds of answers the medical stuff uses data centers our race for space um you need data centers to calculate the orbits and all the launch stuff. So there are a lot of good use cases for it. Now, the big issue about why they're a neighborhood money dispenser is they can pay taxes. So these places can pay for schools and fire departments and police because these big companies that are building the data centers are willing to pay top dollar. And what you can do for the money, for the power so that you don't raise rates of local people, is you can say, bring your own power. If you're going to build a data center in our community, you have to bring enough power for the modular nuclear reactor or small gas fired power plant or whatever you want to use bring more energy than you need and give the rest to our local grid it's like the data centers is the new version of the anti-fracking yes people basically it's like anti-progress and if i may there are two um arguments two main groups against it one are the um environmental community and the other is china and I know because China is lobbying against America not to have data centers but they're building data centers they're building them fast as they can that explains it all and I heard this I was just with Mike Johnson the speaker of the house and I asked him I said is that true and he said yes he said it's absolutely true we know I mean not everywhere so it's propaganda on the internet that's coming from China to convince us Americans that we don't want to engage in a race against China and then again there's another thing there's Some people are against AI in general or want to slow it down. I'm not one of the ones who wants to slow it down. I do want guardrails, so to speak, but we have a lot of guardrails in our society already. We have liability for corporations. If they do something and they produce a product that causes liability, they're responsible. They're liable. There can be civil and criminal fines and penalties. So I think we have that more or less already under control. You might not think it's sufficient. The thing about it is if we slow down, China and our other rivals are not going to slow down. So, you know, what if we had said in 1942, oh, we should slow down this nuclear bomb stuff. That might not work out so well. It might be dangerous. It could fall into the wrong hands. Well, guess what? It did fall in the wrong hands. And Russia and North Korea and China have nuclear bombs. No nuclear bombs have been exploded since then. So we've been able to ford that river. um i think that ai promises so much goodness for society so much benefit we can do things we could never do before we can do things more efficiently the the jobs issue you know in the u.s in the last five years we've we've gained about five million jobs in the last year and a half i believe we've gained a million jobs i told you about the radiologist he's hiring like crazy because these very sophisticated high-end jobs are even more productive there may be some i would say more friction at the early job entry point because some of the stuff that is very mundane and basic, like filling in a spreadsheet, can be done much better. But that means that the people who are not going to do those spreadsheets can probably do something more productive. Here's an interesting thing for Freakonomics. The only way that we ever have wages increase is if the worker is more productive. And I'll give you a very simple example. Remember the sewing by hand versus a sewing machine, who makes more money? The person who's sewing by hand and make two dresses a day or the one making a sewing machine who can do 20 a day or 50 a day? Productivity is a help to humankind. We want people to be more productive. And then again, the new novel thing about AI and especially agentic AI is it allows us to do things we could never do before. There was no ability to do it at scale. There was no ability to do it at reasonable cost. So that's why it's very important that we push forward on this. It has massive national security implications. If we do not pursue this, our rivals are going to, and that would be a disaster. So you're basically saying AI, agentic AI, it's happening. So the question now that America is facing is, do we allow China and some of our adversaries, some communist countries, to be the only ones who use AI? Or do we believe still in America being good and wanting the good guys to actually have this technology as well? Because it's going to happen no matter what. There's another thing, and it's based on the word called trust. Follow me with this argument. The biggest companies in the world are American and European and perhaps Japanese and Chinese ones. The service economy, which is the main part of the U.S. economy now. Remember, in 1776, America was 95% agriculture, a few percent manufacturing, and almost insignificant service economy. By Civil War, about 40% agriculture economy, 40% industry, factories, and 20% service economy. Today, we're about, I think, 87, last time I checked, percent service economy, law firms, insurance, doctors, what you do, what I do, venture capital, media, all that service business. Then there's about 10% in manufacturing and about 1.5% in agriculture. okay we lead the world in service businesses the best law firms are american insurance companies media etc etc because partly they have trust okay there's not a lot of trust in chinese institutions they don't have the rule of law they don't have the same historical culture that we do for enforcing contracts the government there can break contracts and so on they put some of their best entrepreneurs in jail or they disappear them and so on. So our country is well represented in the trust meter. There are other countries that are trustworthy, you know, countries, it's obviously it gets down to the individual, but our institutions and our corporations are more trusted, I think for good reason. And so we're going to succeed. So this is a go long America investment strategy. America is going to really boom because of AI, especially because it's going to be used mostly by these white-collar companies, insurance, banking, law, et cetera, et cetera, to make themselves much more efficient, much more effective, and do new things they could never do before. I'll give you one little example. Right now, if you're a small company in Peru, and you want to do a deal with a small company in Indonesia, the credit quality verification of each company would be very hard to establish. How do you know if they're creditworthy? What's your counterparty risk? Well, now with AI, we're going to be able to do at such low cost data sharing in a new way that allows people to opt in and share what data they want to share in a very simple, maybe even blockchain intermediated manner, such that we can have a kind of a global credit risk, credit bureau, so to speak. Sort of a Dun & Bradstreet, but for the world. That couldn't really have been done cost effectively in the past. And now with this automating of the mundane, of the basic, which is expensive, we're going to make it inexpensive and therefore liberate a lot of data that's useful to the world. You know, David, many countries in the West are importing many immigrants because we are not meeting replacement rate. We're not having enough children and we're not having enough humans. And sometimes the answer has been, well, in order to maintain the workforce, the economy, you need more humans. Do you think AI will help with that as well? Do you think some countries may not need to import as many immigrants into the West because they're able to make their local workforce more efficient? Okay, this is another great question. I don't know if we can spend days on this, but let's do a couple things. One, having children is a reward in itself. You and I have children. It's amazing. It's the greatest blessing. And I only wish we had more. I don't know if you feel that way. I feel the same way. I wish I had like six. So that's a good thing in itself. And I'm not trying to make light of it. I'm sure their parents would have difficult children and things can go wrong and so on. But in general, generic parenting is a good thing for fulfilling your life ambition as a human being. It's part of the life plan. Number two, there are only a few societies in the world, Israel is one of them, that is repopulating more than the birth rate required. And I think there's something into that. If you look at Asia, almost all the Asian countries are shrinking dramatically. Korea, Japan, Singapore, China, they're dramatically shrinking, even in most of Europe and Russia and so on, really shrinking. So, there the promise of AI will be helpful for an aging society that doesn't have enough physical workers to do things like nursing work and factory work and agricultural work. So, there will be robots that can be employed very effectively and very safely to do a lot of that kind of work. So, that's a good thing. Now, in America, I think we need a certain kind of immigrants. We certainly need more intelligent, trained chemists and biologists and physicists. People can oversee AI. Exactly, exactly. So we really need that. That's a very good thing. It's a very productive thing for America to be this beacon of immigration, of talented, ambitious people. I see it in my venture capital practice. Some of our most successful entrepreneurs are these immigrants who come in from very hardscrabble backgrounds and they don't have the old boy network working for them. They are trying to strive on their own to scrap it up and build something that's really going to be successful and powerful and productive for others. And that's how you get rewarded in society. So we want to keep those entrepreneurs coming here. That's a good thing. Many entrepreneurs in other countries feel stifled. And so this is a great thing about America is we are relatively freer than other places. So about the immigration of everybody else, I think that's really a question more for society. Does America want to have so many people you know coming in sort of unvarnished like just without any regulation without any um border security i think we want to have an organized method of immigration not just random come over the border because there's no enforcement of a border this is one of the things that this administration has done so well it's just completely changed the dynamic if you have just people coming over the border without any uh screening or or or um any reason rationality then you really don't have a country yeah i want to talk to you about morality and ai because many of us feel that morality and AI cannot live in in tandem with each other the problem with AI like ChatGPT or Claude or any of these other companies is that much of the information that gets ingested by these systems is ingested based on majority content so if the majority of- Or what's free and accessible. Right. So if the majority of what is free and accessible on the internet says lies about American history, then ChatGPT, let's say, or any of these other companies will ingest that, and that will become the truth. It's the tyranny of majority of information rather than morality information or even truth in information. And so, David, from your perspective, of somebody who understands what needs to be taught, what is true and what is virtuous, and this complexity of the AI models that are drawing from just majority information, how do we build a society that is not just going to feed us lies? I'm not technically competent to tell you at a technical answer how to do this, how to accomplish this very worthy goal. But you and I had a conversation the other night in New York with a gentleman who suggested that one of the solutions is to inject, essentially, PragerU values, traditional American views, traditional biblical views, traditional Greco-Roman philosophical and enlightenment views, into the AI project. We have to understand a couple of things. AI is not really thinking. AI is a probabilistic mechanical math equation that says, what is the next word that's logical? Now, if they get all of their data from Al Jazeera, it's going to have one kind of answer. If they get their information from PragerU, it'll be a very different answer. So part of it is getting the right content into the models. I think that's a worthy endeavor. And we should be talking to people at the high levels of these organizations to make sure that our content is there. That's number one. On the business side, I'm going to just divert for a little bit. Some of the most important information data sets are proprietary. Pfizer, Merck, GSK, these great pharmaceutical companies, they have proprietary data. They don't put that out on the internet. And so that is very interesting for businesses to know about because that's how you build a sustainable business with an information moat or a sustainable advantage over competition. And that's so much of the world's knowledge is in these proprietary silos. And that's what we look for in businesses. But back to the topic about how do we bring ethics into the equation? Do you remember there was a famous science fiction book that we used to read years ago called iRobot. And I think one of the first, it had a rules for robots. And the first rule was do not harm humans. That was its first rule. And so there perhaps need to be some things built in like that, but that's all about the guidelines and the prompts that's in human control. So we can control a lot of that. Yeah. So one of the things that we've been talking about here at PragerU, and I'll share it with the viewers, is that trust is going to become a very important commodity when it comes to information systems now. Because just like YouTube, you know that if you're going to go on YouTube, you don't know that you're going to trust every video that you're going to watch. And that's going to get even worse because of AI, because there are deep fakes and all of these things. And so nobody at this point goes on YouTube and says, well, anything I'm going to watch is going to be true. ChatGPT, Claude, all of these other systems are going to start dealing with a similar situation where you don't know if you can trust the information that's being ingested there. PragerU, people know what we stand for. Whether you agree with us or not, you at least can trust that if you come on to PragerU, you know that you're going to get our perspective on things. The other thing to consider is that people will start looking for places where they can trust. Yes. And this is where we are starting to develop this concept of whether it's going to be through a rag system or an agent. We are still toying with both those two mechanisms, but being able to give people a place that they can go to where if they do chat with a chat bot, they know that it's not ingesting what I call that tyranny of majority where we know that Al Jazeera, as we speak, David, is actively feeding all of these open AI sources. with free information because they want the world to believe what Al Jazeera wants to teach, right? They're giving it for free. Now, PragerU is willing to give it for free as well, but we don't have the same budget and mechanisms that some of America's adversaries have. And so this is some of the stuff that we're starting to develop here at PragerU, figure out how we deeply appreciate that people trust our brand and that they know that they can come to us to get a perspective about Western civilization, that they most likely will want to put in front of their children. But being able to compete against our adversaries, even on that front, is incredibly complicated. I guess I'll end with, I brought up the issue of children in education. And you brought up that you have kids and I have kids. And how do you talk to your kids about AI? Because you don't want them to forfeit their responsibilities of putting in the extra work. AI makes life so easy that it's very alluring to just rely on chat to do some of the stuff for you. But you and I both know that we wouldn't be who we are today if we didn't struggle, work hard, and apply ourselves beyond our will sometimes. And with all of this technology, it's making it a lot easier for young people to coast. Yes, all right, so let's take other endeavors of, of um, sports for example, you can't just become a champion Olympian athlete and win medals if you don't do the training and the work to get there and not everyone even gets there after they do all the work so there are some preliminaries one has to do if you want to be a great artist you have to start with the basics of learning figure drawing and perspective, and things like that; piano, you have to do the scales and basic stuff So if you want to do anything well, what did they say? 10,000 hours. So I advocate for kids, First, the basics. The basics are things like reading. Not online. Not online. Just reading books. The great books. The great books. The Bible, the classics of Western canon. So important, so valuable, so enriching. And it teaches you how to live, not just how to have a career. It teaches you how to think right, how to think critically, how to think compassionately. All these things are very important. And you learn that really before generally you have an interaction with screens or media. So we didn't let our children have phones until they were 13, in our case for a bar mitzvah, but you could pick 14, 15, any period you want. I think phones are a positive thing, but they can also be very misused. And so having them watch PragerU videos is very different than having them mindlessly scroll on TikTok or YouTube and just watch drivel. So again, it's like you can read a junkie book or you can read a great classic. All these things are choices. We got to try and help inspire our kids and to incentivize them sometimes to do the right thing, to learn these basic steps. And then I want them to have the tools. I don't want people to have to bring the plow with a mule and each one doing hardscrabble farming. I'm glad that there are other people who do farming very efficiently until I don't have to do that. It's very hard work. And so when we talk to our kids about AI, it's a gift, it's a new blessing, it's a new tool. How many of us would use abacuses or do longhand addition if we were accountants or having to add up the books for a company? No, almost nobody does that. We use computers and spreadsheets and all these modern technologies and conveniences. So this modern history, last 200 years, is a cornucopia of innovation founded by entrepreneurs. I want to give a shout out to my people, the entrepreneurs, the people that I invest in. They're changing the world in a positive way for the benefit of God, hopefully, and the rule of morality and ethics and so on. Because I'm going to cite another PragerU video, Walter Williams, who passed away, fantastic economist from George Mason University. He grew up, I think, in very hardscrabble Jim Crow South, African-American, but he became a very noted world respected economist conservative by the way politically and he said a very beautiful thing on PragerU about profit and he explains that profit is misunderstood there's sort of the socialist critique of profit there's maybe a christian critique of profit and both of those sort of see it as greed and it's a misunderstanding of profit profit is a sign that he explains it i think in a very beautiful judeo-christian way of serving your fellow human being if you serve your fellow human being not through exploitation not through slavery not through manipulation but through an honest product that serves somebody's need, they're going to buy it and reach into their pocket and buy something that you produce for them that they couldn't produce or wouldn't produce themselves. So that's a beautiful exchange of value. And that's what profit should be seen as. So if you've made a lot of profit and you've done it the fair, honest way, then you have served more humanity. That's a good thing. So I want to give a shout out to those entrepreneurs. But back to the injecting of when is appropriate way to you know have kids learn about what tools are appropriate in their lives. I don't want them to plagiarize a book. I want them to read a book for the essence of the book, not to copy it and then cheat and so on and so forth. And just like that with AI, they have to learn the basics because if you don't know the basics, you won't be able to critique the results that come out of an AI response, right? We need to be able to understand the basics to understand if the AI actually got the right answer. Yeah, that's such a big problem in education because mostly the kids are writing the essay just for the sake of writing an essay rather than go through the process of developing their thoughts. That's right. And so if in fact the assignment to the child is to help them get through the process of coming up with ideas and developing their own ideas, then the tool doesn't matter. If the assignment is just to write the essay, then the tool is going to help you cheat. That's well said. So many of the entrepreneurs I sit with, especially in technology, are so optimistic about the future. and yet people on the internet seem like the world is coming to an end and it's all doom and gloom and scary and darkness and terrible how do we bring some of this incredible optimism about the innovation the technology the prosperity that you see is coming our way to so many other people who don't have the type of access that you have part of it is to ignore the mainstream media The mainstream media has a business model of scaring people. Fear, scandal, drama is what sells. Not on PragerU, but on so much of what goes on, especially on short-form social media. I want to impress, I want to shine, or I want to scandalize, or I want to shock. And we see it in some people we know, going way off the deep end in terms of trying to shock. Maybe they don't even believe it, but they know it'll get more clicks. So my advice to most children, to anybody that I would talk to is try and ignore that. That's noise. You're looking for signal. Dennis Prager, PragerU, you, Marissa Streit, are great signal antenna and antennae. And that's what PragerU is trying to do. And I think that that's what we need to do is look for the signal, avoid the noise. I love it. Any of us can build these days. We do have access to the internet. We have access to much of AI. And so, you know, I'd want to encourage everybody to become either entrepreneurs like you or go and enjoy and benefit from the prosperity that's coming our way. It's going to be a very bright future. It's coming very fast. There will be some rocking and rolling and roller coaster ups and downs. But overall, the progress from 1800 till now has been relatively nonstop. It's not the technology that's got things wrong. It's bad. human behavior, bad morality, you know, the evils of the world were not brought by gas chambers, but by people using gas chambers. So to put other people inside and kill them. So the point is we need to teach people morality and that's where PragerU comes in and ethics and history. History is such a great teacher of that because we're going to try and avoid some of the mistakes of the past by understanding our history. And that's what you do so well. And that's why I'm so proud to be chairman of the board and try and serve you and the rest of the PragerU flock. Well, thank you and Michelle for believing in us, for encouraging us, for pushing us. And your entire family has been involved in PragerU. So we just love you guys and appreciate you. And finally, a podcast on the internet that gets people to smile. I hope so. I love it. Thank you, David. Thanks, Marissa.