Dawn’s Early Light Podcast
Empowering and strengthening Americas civil foundation through faith, service, and dialogue.
Dawn’s Early Light Podcast
Dawn's Early Light Podcast Episode 12: Interviewing Senator Brian Hardin
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Hello. How are you? Good, Senator Hardin. How are you? I am dandy, thanks.
SPEAKER_02Where in the world are you?
SPEAKER_01I am in Fremont, Nebraska at the moment, and Caleb, I I'm assuming you're at home, right? Yep, I'm in Omaha, Nebraska right now. Yep.
SPEAKER_03Ohma man. I will be there next week. So, but right now I'm uh a seatbelt model, and so I'll be modeling this for you for as long as we're on the Zoom call together.
SPEAKER_01So as long as as long as you can do your best analy, I think we'll be okay. There you go. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Senator Hartman, for taking time out of your out of your day to talk with us and to um kind of discuss uh some topics that we have in store. Um first off, I'd just like to introduce ourselves. We are uh cooper and Caleb. We are uh both co-founders of Act America Accordion, which are nonprofits, uh we specialize in skill discourse and talking to people about politics and other skills and skill discount of our day. Um to something like uh Charlie Curse did where we've got the table because we talk to people.
SPEAKER_03Um Wow, how does that go? I know I'm not supposed to ask the questions in my family.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, that's fine. Yeah, it's it's it's something that people and I are both very passionate about. We love doing it. Um most of the time it's a very respectful, um, very uh civil uh uh encounter with uh people on all ends of the political spectrum. We've we've even uh met a couple monarchists before, people who believe in a king and a queen. It's very interesting to talk to them. Uh well, I know one of them's name is David, but the other one, I'm not sure what her name was, but our interaction I've I've I've heard the name before, so I might need to come up with something a little more unique, but okay. But yeah, it's uh it's always uh it's always a good time to get up there and talk to people and um we're excited to uh talk to you today. Thank you for having me. That's good.
SPEAKER_00I think uh I thought it was after at one point and uh got it uh um and uh by itself and how you end up here.
SPEAKER_03Well I grew up in the area where I find myself right now, and so I grew up on a farm and ranch operation in western Nebraska. So the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express, they travel through, they traveled through this area. This is the Old West where we live. And so this summer, if you guys are looking for something new, fabulous, and whatnot to experience, come out here about the second week of August, and we will have the Old West Balloon Fest. We'll have more than 120 hot air balloons out here for about five days, and it attracts thousands of people, and we have a beautiful landscape here, and so it truly is the most beautiful part of Nebraska. That's not just me. Uh, everybody who comes here admits that, and so that's a great thing, but that's what happens with the old West, and that's where I grew up, and so I grew up finding arrowheads and that kind of thing. It was just a part of life here, and so we raised beets, sugar beets, and beans and corn and hay and cattle, and some chickens, and some hogs, and it was kind of the quintessential grow it up, there's the pasture after school, go do chores, and then go play in the pasture and up the hills and that kind of thing. And so um that's what I loved about this area. Grew up here. I went to a small state college called Shadron State.
SPEAKER_05Danny Woodhead.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Did I lose you?
SPEAKER_01No, no, sorry, yeah. Danny Woodhead, uh, he was a running back for the Patriots. I know he's from Shadow and State.
SPEAKER_03Danny Woodhead went to Shadow and State, and that's right. And so, yeah, the University of Nebraska passed on Danny. Big mistake. Yeah, and so yeah, Danny's about, oh, I don't know, three foot six or something like that, benches 600 pounds, runs uh about a 2040. Yeah. Um I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit, but yeah, he was a mighty mite. And um he broke all of the college records at that level at Shadron State when he was there, and then the pros found all kinds of uses for Danny Woodhead.
SPEAKER_05Mm-hmm. Yeah, he was a great.
SPEAKER_03So anyway, after that I went to Denver Seminary, and uh after that became a pastor. I was a pastor for a number of years in uh southeastern Pennsylvania and back in the Denver, Colorado area. Then I went into the business world, and that's mostly where I've been in the years since, and God kind of changed my ministry focus, if you will. I got into the insurance world, didn't mean to, it just took off and went, and ended up with several thousand insurance brokers as a part of our organization from all 50 states, and I found that my world morphed, it changed. I went to chain to training insurance agents all over and that kind of thing, developing what are called white-labeled products with insurance companies, got quite an education doing that. Then along came what is known as the Affordable Care Act, March 23rd, 2010. It destroyed the business that I spent years creating. Not that I'm bitter about it or anything, um, and so I got into a number of other things in the business world, mostly consulting. And so learned a lot about small business and that type of thing. And so that's kind of what I have been doing, and and most of that consulting landed in financial services and creating insurance products and that sort of thing over the years. But I work in biofuels, I work in commercial child care, still do some benefits things with uh large restaurants in South Florida, and so I think the word is entrepreneur, which my wife says is the French term meaning I cannot find a job.
unknownSo that's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, something like that, right? I went to a little country school here in western Nebraska, and a very evil man who was my principal in the little country school. I'm joking. Um was my was my principal anyway. Um he recruited me. I moved back home to this area from Denver, Colorado, where I'd lived for about 27 years. Oh wow. And I had a my sister-in-law passed away very unexpectedly a few years ago. And so I'm very close with my brother. And Lily and I looked at each other and said, you know what, let's go be of some use in the world. We're empty nesters. And so we moved back home to be close to family, and we can do what we do from anywhere. And so while we were here, that mean man that I was telling you about said, Hey, didn't you used to be involved behind the scenes in politics in Colorado? And I said, Yes, I did. And he goes, Do you want to run for the legislature? And I said, No, I don't. And here I am.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So I have a long memory, and someday I will get my revenge. So, but anyway, yes, I have dinner with that principal who retired long, long ago, and we're good friends, and he's the one who actually got me involved in this stuff.
SPEAKER_01Good deal. That's awesome. What a good story. All right. Um I'm very fortunate. Absolutely. Um, I guess the um the first thing I'd like to ask you, Senator Hardin, is um what your kind of top priorities are for um the legislature um kind of in this season. What are what are some of the um the bills or um things that you're trying to get get through the legislature at the moment?
SPEAKER_03Let me answer that by not answering that and then I'll come back to that. How's that?
SPEAKER_01That sounds great.
SPEAKER_03Um here are the what I consider the the two biggest issues going on in America right now. One of those issues is health data. So let me paint a picture for you. I say this in part because I'm the chairman of health and human services, and that's the expensive part of any state. And so here in Nebraska, we spend eight billion dollars with a B every two years, every biennium. And so we're just a little state of two million people. So imagine what that looks like in California with 40 million people. But it the math goes something like this, guys. So Nebraska pumps in about$2 billion of state funds. The feds come back and pump in about$5.3 billion every two years, and we have about$700 million in cash accounts. That's about$8 billion. And keep in mind that neither the state government nor any federal government, anywhere on the world in the world, has its own money. They take your money and mine, right? They don't make money, they take money. Okay. Having reset that that world, let's take a look at a few things. I have a question for you. I promised I wouldn't ask questions. I lied. Sorry.
SPEAKER_01That's fine.
SPEAKER_03Um, how much money did we spend on COVID as a nation? Do you guys know? Too much, I know, but I I uh when we're when we're done here, I I encourage you guys to take your AI of choice, go with Gemini or Chat GPT or Grok or go over wherever you will, and ask it how much did it cost the United States to have COVID 2020 through pick your year 2023, 24? And almost all of them will come back with an answer kind of like this six trillion.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03How much did it cost the world? 12 trillion.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_03Wait, put that checkbook away, there's more because of how we handled COVID, we printed money. What is the way that you build inflation anywhere? You print money. So what did COVID cost after we printed money? And not only in America, but almost everywhere in the world, they printed money, creating worldwide inflation. Wait, we're not done yet. Have the kids who were in school during those years at any grade level recovered academically? Or they or will they forever be behind for the rest of their lives? Guess what the educational measurements are showing us in 2020? Those kids are never going to fully recover what they had going on before COVID happened. That means their earning potentials are going to be lower in the macro. Wait, there's more. COVID changed the way we work. Everybody prefers to work from home. You guys are doing it right now. Look at you. You're not checking in wearing some kind of, I don't know, khakis and a button-up shirt and sitting in your cubicle, banging your head against your desk saying, Lord, just kill me, right? And guess what? Most of the rest of the world agrees with you. And so during COVID, we started working from home, right? And that's across the world for the most part as well. I cheer that on, but what's the downside with that? Well, we have somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of every corporate building on the globe sitting empty right now. What's wrong with that? Well, companies use buildings, both leases for the buildings or when they own the buildings, and that's a big part of what anchors their loans, their assets, their value for how they run their business. Can you say bubble? That's reality right now. What did that cost on top of everything I've talked about? There are other factors too, but if you're using Chat GPT or some other AI like I did, when I got through those things after about four hours of continuing to ask questions, Grok waved the white flag and said, Brian, we're up to$300 trillion. Wow. Are you sure you want to keep going? I serve on a national board of a particular organization, and it's made up of four-star generals who are retired, some retired politicians and myself, and it has a dual focus national defense and health data. Think of it this way: we reset the world economy in 2020 through 2023 without firing a shot. Do you see why these generals are interested in this? When you look at our when you look at our$39 trillion debt.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I think so.
SPEAKER_03Okay, great. When you look at our$39 trillion debt, is most of that debt from national defense or is most of that debt from health care?
SPEAKER_01Don't imagine healthcare now.
SPEAKER_03When you look at the last decade just as one example, guys, and that included COVID, but you'll see tens of billions of dollars spent nationally on national defense. You'll see an average of about five trillion dollars a year in health care. Which one is a bigger concern? So when you're looking at the 39 trillion in debt, most of it is health related. As Dr. Phil would say, how's that working for you? Is our health outcome in America better than most places in the world? Or maybe not as good. The fact is, our health outcomes are not very good in America. We spend more on it per person, but we don't get great outcomes. How's that working for you? And so this organization that I work with is in a nutshell taking a look at these issues. Back to your earlier question. What's a priority for me inside the legislature? Well, it starts way up there in the stratosphere and comes down, and we have to get a handle on what is going on with health data because we have no real-time health data in America. We didn't, and that was the problem with how we handled COVID. It was like driving a car with a blindfold on. And we're still doing it up to this moment. I can tell you that of the things that the Trump administration very much wanted to fix when they came back into office, one was to fix the most corrupt Department of Justice in the history of America, but another one was to get a handle on never having COVID-26. The only way to do that, the antidote to that poison is real-time health data. So we're working on that right now. Wonderful. So that will affect bills that I will support and other kinds of things that will help those outcomes. And by the way, that needs to happen in all 50 states. So that's one of the big issues that we will work on. Another is this issue of affordability. That's a big word. What the world is that? Well, I can tell you in Nebraska, it looks this way. Three pieces. How come the markets are doing great, but it feels like most middle income people are looking at it going, it doesn't affect me. It doesn't help me. I'm struggling inside the economy that we have to make ends meet. Why am I struggling so much when I'm hearing such good news in other places, right? Well, in Nebraska, I'm going to blame it on three big things that just sort of happen or come out of your bank account. And there's not a lot left over when you take out these three big things. The one is property taxes. In Nebraska, we use property taxes to predominantly pay for school. It's 60% plus. Six dimes out of every ten dimes or more go for paying for public school. And so, gosh, our houses are expensive. We're we're in the top six in the country for how expensive our property tax rates are. Okay, well, that's painful. Add on to that that we have literally the most expensive homeowners insurance in the country. It's more expensive here than it is in Florida where they have hurricanes. That's because of wind and hail. We have epic amounts of wind and hail in Nebraska, and it's been so bad for so long. We literally have the highest home insurance rates in the country. So you add that in with the property tax that goes on that's high, and you also add that in with the fact that state by state, the average incomes here are not as high as it happens in other states. You add a third thing in. So you got property taxes, you got homeowners insurance, friggin' health insurance, the cost of health insurance, and whether it's major medical or you get it from work, or you get it because you're older and you're on Medicare, or you are using Medicaid, all of those are a form of health insurance. And our health insurance rates are higher than anywhere else in the world. And the other problem is near it. You don't have health insurance because you look at it and you go, Well, I'm a middle income. If I apply for subsidy through the Obamacare world of the ACA, I either make too much money to get any help on it, or I'm right at the top. They do four times the federal poverty level, right? It doesn't save me much money. So you know what? I'm just gonna go without insurance. I'd rather do stupid things like food, clothing, and shelter. And so when you add that stuff up and you look at it and go, I'll just roll the dice and hope I don't get a big medical bill. Unfortunately, that's where our biggest medical bankruptcy scenarios come from, is from a middle class person paying their taxes, they have a job, they're working their rear ends off, and then something happens to their health. Now they go in and they don't have any coverage. How affordable has that affordable you know, world worked for you? How's that working for you? So we've got to fix the affordability problem. A lot of states struggle with that too. So all the bills need to work on those two issues healthcare-related issues, particularly health data, because that's how we fix our national debt problems. That's how we fix there's a lot of waste, fraud, abuse, neglect, guys, going on inside the world of health. Elon Musk quipped at the beginning of 2025 when he was forming Doge, he was asked how much waste fraud abuse is going on inside the healthcare system in America. And he said, Oh, I don't know,$1.5 trillion. What I can guarantee you is he's wrong by half. It's twice that bad. Ever heard of Minnesota?
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yep, a lot going on there. And did you know that that's just the tip of the iceberg? So those are the things that I'm focusing on, fix those kinds of problems. And you know what? If we don't fix them at a state level and we wait around for the feds to figure it out, I'm not sure they can find shoes in a shoebox. So I think it's up to the states. And if we get some things harmonized with the feds, top down or bottom. Them up grand, but we cannot stop working on these issues together.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, change has got to come at some level. And I yeah, that's um that's a huge I I had no idea the problem was that bad either. So um I'm sure our audience is a good idea. I'm here to help you get less sleep. That's why I'm here. That's politics, baby. Oh man, that's uh yeah. Um well thank you so much for for that. Um Caleb, I know that you wanted to touch on some educational questions as well, correct?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you I know you mentioned it briefly. Um I don't I believe Cooper was also affected by COVID. I know I was. It's my freshman year of high school. Cooper, would you have been I was a senior. Senior. Okay. So COVID definitely hit both of our high school lives. We remember that. Um, but education is a pretty big passion of mine because I think the the system is corrupt in a lot of ways. Um, my mom was a teacher for well, she still teaches now, she just got recently back into it, but just kind of hearing from her too. There's obviously layers to it, but I know that's a big uh talking point for you as well. Kind of the how education pans out and maybe uh less government intervention in education. I guess I know that kind of ties with your stance of less maybe spending. I'd like you to kind of go into that a little bit, maybe.
SPEAKER_03I agree with David Barton from Wall Builders that there are basically three institutions God has created in the world that hold back evil. The most fundamental is the family. The next would be the church, the third would be government, and that's not just this culture, that's around the world and throughout all time. I would add a fourth lane to it and say that God also talks about in his word my responsibility individually. So before you get to the family, you gotta start with a person, right? I think when the world starts feeling wonky is when somebody in the individual lane decides they want to be Robin Hood and so they're going to steal from the rich and give to the poor, right? That's weird, okay, and then that's may sound like a great transitional thing, but that's not a way to live life. What we see more commonly is the government interfering in the family and stepping into that world. And frankly, when you take that slice of education and when you say, wait a minute, we're gonna take away from the family their options like school choice. Um, hmm. So, guys, how many states are there again in the United States? Remind me, you're brilliant. Uh, how many are there? Okay, 50, good answer. And so, um out of those 50, 49 of those states have a school choice option where they're saying the government is not the only source of schooling. There can also be another option or two that we're gonna make available, right? There's one state that provides no other option. Go ahead and take a guess which state that is. Go ahead. I'll wait for your answer. Starts with an N. It's in the middle of the country. Tick tock, tick tock. I'm waiting. I'm gonna go with that in Nebraska, yeah. That that would be right. We we are the only ones. How embarrassing. Even North Dakota beat us to the we got beat by North Dakota, okay? And so, sorry, I know I have friends in North Dakota. Hello, friends. It is. And so um, you you gotta have choice. We need to fix that because we're not helping people to get there. So, yes, I was one of a few senators who stood in the way of passing the budget this year in Nebraska because we tried to get$3.6 million for the poorest kids in Nebraska to be able to get access, scholarship money, if you will, for private school. It got blocked because there were enough squishy in the middle Republicans, along with the Democrats, who said, no, we can't have that. The bigger picture is we'd actually passed something, and then through a voter referendum, they took our school choice away in 2024. And that was like a number of other things that we can talk about even later in this podcast, and that is the dangers of what happens with outside money coming into a state to affect what goes on inside a state. I have a numerous examples of that, and that would be one of them. But yeah, education is something where unfortunately the Trump administration talks about this, and that is only three or four kids in the school systems, take even eighth graders across the United States, are proficient in math and English according to standardized testing. That's basically six or seven out of ten can't do it. Well, that's a problem. It's also not new. So they're shining a light on it now, but the problem's been there for quite a while. And so it's fascinating. Here in my own area, I'm in District 48, Nebraska. That's as far west as you can get before you fall off into Wyoming or south before you fall off into Colorado. That's where I am. Nebraska's unique. We have two, count 'em, two southwest corners. See if anybody else can match that. Um I'm in I'm in the one a little further up. And so, anyway, in our area, we have standardized testing in the various school districts in my legislative district. One of those is actually at about 60 some percent versus about 40 some percent. That's a pretty big deal. That's 20 percentage points. That's two more kids in 10 that are proficient. You know what? I I talked with some of their school board members. I talked with some of their teachers, I talked with their superintendent. Why and and they're not the highest paid? They're astonishingly average. But why are you guys so much better than the other schools in our district and frankly, even across the state? You know what the answer was? They require their teachers to meet with parents in the home once a year. Why is that such a big deal? Because the biggest influence in any child's life is mom or dad or mom and dad. Ian Do you guys remember that show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
SPEAKER_05Did you ever watch it? Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03Did you sit there and Twitch going, man, I'm glad I'm not on that thing. Uh I can't do it. Yeah. Yeah, me too. And frankly, are you guys parents?
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_03No, we're not. Not yet. Gotcha. Okay. Well, here's the thing. When you become a parent, let me spell out for you how this is going to work. You're going to forget everything you knew in the fifth grade. You probably already have. Okay? And then you're going to have a fifth grader one day, and they're going to come to you and they're going to ask you really, really hard math, science, and English questions, and you're not going to know how to do it. But you know what you're going to do? Just like our parents and their parents before them, you're going to fake it till you make it, buddy. You're going to go, you're going to sit there and you're going to work on this. Uh, get your older brother or sister in here to help you. Or we'll we'll get, you know, we'll turn to the AI or something else. But you're going to sit your butt down and you're going to learn and you're going to do that homework and you're going to have it right by tomorrow morning. What I just described is happening more in that school in my district than it is in the other schools in my district.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01That's how it gets done right there.
SPEAKER_03The parents there are not abdicating. Right now, we're all on screens to make this happen. Screens do not make you smarter. They just don't. I'm sorry, but all the latest grades, including AI-oriented stuff, is that screens do not over the course of a school career make you smarter. They make you dumb. And so we need to figure out how to use the tool without being addicted to the tool. And so that's true of the schools, that's true of the parents, that's true of the responsibility of the kids as they grow up. Once again, I come back and go, there's all these lanes of responsibility: the individual, the family, the church, the government, right? And so what can we do so that the family remains the main lane for society to grow? Let families make decisions about education. It's going to be the family, mom and dad saying, hey, this is a group effort. Sit down and do your homework before you look at the screen, and so forth. And so it's simply got to happen.
SPEAKER_00That's good. I think that actually ties right back into uh affordability. I know it's kind of a big uh talking point right now in politics, is we had the kind of the feminine, like the feminist movement where it was, you know, women empowerment and they need to get in the workforce and and get out of the household. And now we see that divide on where it's it's hard to have a household live on one income. Uh, you know, like traditionally, how a household could live off of a man's income. And now we have gone you know straight so far from that that the parents sometimes it's difficult for them to interact with their kid, like you said. Like, you know, sit down and team effort, we're gonna do math tonight and just knock it out, you know. Um and that lets, you know, then the school system have the childs themselves, basically. And I think that's that's a pretty big issue right now.
SPEAKER_03You guys are closer to it than me. You're you're you're both old. Sorry, you're old. Um, but it was a shorter period of time since I've been. What do you guys see um when you were in high school? How how have things changed in the last few years as you're looking back at younger friends or younger family members, younger neighbors? You guys interact with the culture. Uh, I see it, Caleb. You got ink. You got ink on your right arm there. I can see it. And so you you're in it. You you are the culture. What are you what are you seeing? Because you're experiencing it in real time.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah, I mean, I can give you a little bit, because like I said, this is a huge uh passion of mine whenever this comes up in a in a debate setting. So I like I said, I caught COVID on kind of the the rear end, or like right at the beginning of my high school career when you're really supposed to, I'd say, socially figure out your life. And so I was a private school kid. Uh Cooper, I believe, was public school, right? So that's also kind of a difference. I was in private school, third grade, all the way through uh high school. So that definitely helped. But when we caught COVID and we went into our my sophomore year of high school, we were mostly online for the first, I'd say half at least, we're we're most online, and the back end of that freshman year. It it really changed a lot. It changed really how people were willing to learn. And it's it was it was crazy to see like how you would study for a test and go to classmates and like, hey, we're gonna have like a study group, or you know, maybe during like the fifth period, we're all gonna study for this test or this final, whatever. And then you go into online school, and unfortunately, like the the human instinct was to like immediately learn how to cheat and how to like cut corners because you don't want to do it. You're not the school building, you're at home, you're like, Oh, how can I cheat the system? And that has now digressed into now we have AI, and you have I mean, my my younger sister's 10, and she has access to a phone, a tablet. I mean, you're you're saying these early teenagers, 12, 13, 14, have access to AI. I mean, I I think the the willingness to learn has just gone down tremendously. And when you have access to that um it is a tool, AI is a tool, but that just easy way out.
SPEAKER_03Like I could just Can you unpack that for me? You you've you've used the phrase a couple of times that I find fascinating. Willing to learn. And what does that feel like? What does that mean? I mean, it sounds like there's been a a betrayal of some kind. I mean, unpack that for me.
SPEAKER_00So I'll I guess I'll start with kind of my view of school. I always had a hard time. I I was like the ADHD kid in the in the corner, like twirling my fingers and like just always had like something that had to be going on because were you there too? Yep, because you know, when you're when you're told to sit in a classroom for eight hours, I mean some people are better at that than others. Um, and so my sophomore year, I had an incredibly hard time. We just got out of like digital learning, and so I switched schools my uh junior year and I started taking classes at Metro. I don't know if you know much about Metro. They're a community college, they allow like some high schoolers to attend. So they're like A B courses, that kind of thing. Yeah, so I started a firefighting. Yeah, I started a firefighting program. That's what I do now. I have an unfortunate other full time. But like the hands-on aspect was incredible. Like I learned so much better than knowledge just stuck like guns a wall. So kind of why I went there is when you have kids like me, like if I was thinking back when I was 13 and you set them down, and obviously nobody's doing this, but it's the decision in their mind of okay, you can either sit in a classroom for eight hours every day, and then have to go home and like basically redo it. You know, you have to do homework, you have to sit down, you have to power through this, and it's all stuff that you don't really want to do and you don't find super useful when you're 13 and you want to run around with a stick and hit your friend, you know. Or you have the option to just look it up on chat, GPT, cloud, whatever, fill in the answers, and now you have eight hours to play with your friends instead of two, you know. And I I think that's the the willingness to learn. It's not that I think every single kid out there is like, I just I don't want to learn anything, or I don't have like a desire to pursue knowledge. Like I obviously had a desire to pursue knowledge my junior year. It just wasn't in the classroom setting learning English for the 14th time. It was let me go outside and like spread some water and like do some like cool stuff, like with these cool Omaha firefighters that are just like teaching us hands-on stuff.
SPEAKER_03Figure out whether or not you're still alive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, I I think that's like the willingness to learn aspect, at least, is like I I don't think it's like a malicious intent in kids to like, I I don't want to learn, like, I'm just gonna rebel. I don't think it's that. I think it's it's an easy way out to do what you want to do. Just like if if we were able, you know, if you were faced with a decision to work eight hours every day, or you could work one hour every day, you're like, yeah, I'd take the one hour if it was the same pay. It's the same concept as you're you're doing this equal amount of work, just one you're learning and one you're taking the easy route. Wow. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Was that your experience, Cooper?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I um I was a senior in high school when COVID hit. And at that point, I already had a pretty severe case of senioritis. I was pretty checked out. Um, but uh it carried into my first year of college. And in my first year of college, that was uh 2020 and 2021, and that was kind of right when the AI, um open AI was coming out and everything, and people were like, dude, you gotta try this. It's and I I I admit I did one paper that was a full copy and paste of a a chat GPT uh prompt. And it was before the teachers really knew what it was and everything, and I was like, whoa, this is incredible. I I got I just got a 95 on this paper, and I I spent maybe 10 minutes on it. And and then I caught myself and I realized, wait a minute, if I actually want to you know go to college for an actual reason that I'm spending money on, is to retain the information and to you know get a uh get a degree that I'm gonna have to take I'm gonna have to take the ACT or the SAT and I'm gonna sit there and I'm gonna go B C, B, C, B, C, B, C all the way down and hope for the best. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, and that temptation to again take the easy way out, I could only imagine if I had that ability when I was a freshman in high school, I would have I would have totally been one of those kids who uh would have not learned a thing, just copied the question into the prompt.
SPEAKER_04How can you not?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I I can think of myself when I was 14 years old, I did not care about learning things and becoming you know a better man and becoming you know somebody who who is knowledgeable about the way that the world works and things that I need to use for my career in the future. It was all about, oh, this sucks. Oh, algebra, okay, whatever. Oh, US history, okay, whatever. And uh, yeah, I wanted to go home and play video games with my brother and my friends, and uh that was yeah, I uh I got lucky. God God bless me with uh being born just just early enough.
SPEAKER_03So do you guys think that given the fact that we're still on the front end of AI, how you know we got the what are you now? Are you 28? How old are you, Cooper? I'm 23. 23, sorry. How does a 23-year-old Cooper coach a 14-year-old Cooper, the next Cooper, yeah, to not fall in that pit? Because they've got better AI than you did a few years ago. You know, you're that's like I don't know, 7,000 AI years have gone by in the last three years or something.
SPEAKER_01It's like reverse dog years.
SPEAKER_03Yes. And so how do you guys uh uh communicate with younger people about this issue?
SPEAKER_01That's a really good question. Um, I think the way that I would I would do it is you you have to just bear the truth right at them and say, hey, you're gonna be an idiot if you keep doing this, and you're not gonna be able to get a job that's worth anything if you're not able to grasp how to learn things, how to properly learn things, how to problem solve. Because it's not necessarily knowing the Pythagorean theorem and how to apply that to a math equation, but it is learning how to learn something and then take that into a scenario and utilize your knowledge of those things. And that's what AI is taking away from kids right now is the ability to learn, actually learn a concept and apply that to different problems kind of within its own kind of influence. And I think what I would tell a 14-year-old Cooper is that you're gonna be an idiot if you continue to rely on AI for all of your problems. And by the time you're the age that I am now, you're gonna be dropping fries in a fryer, which is it's hopefully I'm not or unemployed instead of working out of church and doing things that you that you will come to know that you really love to do.
SPEAKER_03Wow. That's a compelling story.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I really appreciate the the interaction and and the thought that you guys have given to this because I think the thing that's hard is particularly for this generation that's that's coming up, these teens, the people in in college right now, I'm 60. They're used to 60 year olds going, yeah, get off my lawn, okay? And so I I I think they're gonna listen to you well before they ever listen to me. They just are. Because they they look up to you and they go, Well, you're you're familiar with it. You're closer to ground zero on this. And so I I think you guys can have enormous, enormous impact in this area. So I really appreciate the leadership, the thought that you're you're giving to cultural things, but this too, because I think AI is very much at the big time. It's it's not go it's not going away.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_03Um here's my sense of it. Can it ruin the world?
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_03Will it? I don't think so. Not yet. Uh first of all, um here's a news flash. God is not quaking on his throne because of artificial intelligence. And why? Well, because he's GI, gen genuine intelligence. There's a big difference. And I think you hit on it a moment ago, Cooper, when you were saying you need to know something, otherwise it's gonna wreck your life, basically. You're not gonna get as good of a job. You might not get a job at all if you don't participate in life. And so I was kind of having a Bible study in the last few days with With some friends, and we were looking at good old First Corinthians 13. Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. And one of the things we talked about was the fact that guess what, even the best AIs in the world absolutely cannot do? Faith, hope, or love.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_03It can't.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And so that's genuine intelligence. God designed life to be that way. So it could emulate things like genuine faith, uh, genuine hope, genuine love. It can imitate those things, but it can't be those things. Do you want a fake diamond or a real one? Do you want a fake$20 bill or a real one? Do you do you want a fake piece of chocolate or a really good one? Right? Uh gee, we could do this all day long. Do you want spam or uh steak? Um there's something about the real thing, and we know it. It's more felt than tilt, caught than taught, but we know when something is authentic.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I think that's that's um something that my generation is really uh enamored with is authenticity. I think that's why um I think that's why Trump was fairly popular with uh younger uh people is that he was he seemed to be very real, like he just he said it how it was. And I think with um my generation growing up online and now with AI coming into the picture, I think authenticity is harder and harder to find. And at least with the people that I've talked to, uh some of my peers and myself, I find authenticity to be uh a very, very high attribute or a virtue that somebody might have.
SPEAKER_03That's uh that's very uh uh uh amazing and uh heartwarming for me to hear. It really is. Every older generation, like mine, looks at the younger generation and goes, Oh, I think we're in big trouble. And they've been doing that, right? We've been doing that, you guys are gonna do it another uh uh 30, 40 years, you guys are gonna be doing the same thing. And so but I think that there is a legitimate piece of that that says, wait a minute, the question's not, gosh, how could something bad happen for you? But how could something bad not happen for you if you just sit back and wait for the AI to do it? Because if you're waiting for it to take the lead, it doesn't need you anymore. Right. So I noticed in Lincoln, uh you guys probably see it in Omaha too. Um there was an article in the local paper in Lincoln about a not only, you know, kiosks have been around for a few years in the fast food places, but it was a much greater level of AI that came in, and this particular restaurant chain invested in it, and it's much, much, much better than the typical kiosk. I'll stand here and push twelve twenty-five thousand buttons and it still doesn't get my order right. And it's it's really good, and they invested a lot of money in an AI solution, and the reason they did was because of minimum wage in Nebraska. So, don't mean to drag us into that other that other realm of well, hmm, ballot initiatives and how do those work, but it was a ballot initiative where essentially somebody came along and said, Hey, would you like to make more money than you're making? And they got a lot of people to go, um, okay, we will. And so, how's that working out for you? Because it's not just a matter of now we have a kiosk, but now we have a really smart kiosk. It's AI. And the AI is doing as good or better of a job than the person who used to stand there and take the order. And so, guess what? We don't need to hire as many minimum wage employees because we got to pay for this contraption somehow.
SPEAKER_00That brings up a good point. There's a there's a Taco Bell right by my uh my apartment and their uh drive-thru. Um like their drive-thru system is all AI now. It'll ask you for order. Yeah, it'll ask you if the order looks good on the screen. Like it's it's very uh sophisticated. And there's no deal. I asked them about it one day. I just went into the restaurant and was talking to him about it the other day, got rid of a couple people because they don't need the drive-thru headsets anymore. It's all AI. Wow.
SPEAKER_03What are you guys hearing? Forgive me for jumping around and changing the subject. What are you guys hearing about LM's learning machines? And it's this notion of we're gonna program a chip, we're gonna use lots and lots of electricity to program a chip. The chip might be for certain things, like the music world. Um, I've been a professional musician in my lifetime and using digital audio workstations and that kind of thing. And let's say that the LM is built for that world, and so we take and we pack into a chip all of the cool stuff that you would use from AI, but you don't need the entire world. You just need that world of music and music production. Goes onto a chip, and then you don't need massive amounts of electricity anymore, or at least for a while. And maybe you're good with that chip, what's on it, and you can live quite well off of that for six months, twelve months maybe, but you don't need an endless supply of electricity and data centers and everything else. Just give me the LM. And let's go to the LM, for example, of medical systems, and you're a doctor, and yes, we say, Oh, it's got to be about the greatest, latest sort of technology uh that goes into it all the time. Not necessarily. What if your world is a particular slice of what happens with medicine and it's reading diagnostic images or that kind of thing? And it's good enough to get you through the next four months before you need to do the next download. In other words, you kind of grab a little socket set worth of tools, and that's good for what you need for a while. Have you guys heard much about LMs and learning machines?
SPEAKER_05No, not at all.
SPEAKER_03Check it out, because you'll learn it faster than me, and you'll come back and go, yes, you're right. We don't need to be building all of these giant electrical grids and so forth the way we think we need them, because LMs might actually make more sense because you could actually drop the LM into your phone and not have to be online.
SPEAKER_01Interesting.
SPEAKER_03Interesting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'll have to look into that a little bit more. That's that is interesting.
SPEAKER_03So I I think there's a lot of really compelling things that will be coming down the line. And yes, I can see the dangers with AI. I can see the dangers in the context of education, in the context of, you know, will it take over the world, as they say? Gee, if it takes over the factory, will the factory then basically go out and if it the factory makes nails, will it make and use up all the metal in the world so that it crashes everything and we all perish because we have billions and trillions of nails and you know, gosh, everything's gonna wry. Um, I I don't think so. I don't think so. But I I think historically, society has had lots of fears. You guys are too young to remember, but believe me, everybody was freaking out when 2000 was coming, the year 2000. Okay, all the computers are gonna crash, the stock markets are going down, not only in the United States, but all over the world. It was all gonna be Y2K, and life's over on that day. And uh it didn't happen. I just thought I would let you know uh we're still here. And we've had a lot of these kinds of reactions to technology, right, over the years. When the car came along, everybody thought that was the end of it, right? Before that, when the train came along, that's the end of it. Printing press came along, that's the end of it. I kind of look at this and go, it's AI, and it could be very, very dangerous, and we need to respect that. But God is sovereign, he's on his throne. It'll end when he says so, not when we are clever enough to come up with a new invention that confuses the Almighty.
SPEAKER_01Yep, yeah. That's right. We know how it ends. We know how it ends. Absolutely. Well, Senator Hardin, uh, you know, out of respect for your time, um, please feel free to um to cut us off whenever. But if you're if you're willing, uh I'd be willing to uh to ask you a final question if that's okay.
SPEAKER_02Take it away.
SPEAKER_01So um with all of these things uh that we talked about with um AI and education and um with with uh health data and and all of these things all put together, um what do you think is um the average citizen's role in helping support um getting all of these uh all of these things to the forefront and getting these on the minds of of your average everyday Joe? Um making sure like what is I guess your um your way for us to best stay informed about what's going on in the Senate and how we can do our part in helping bring about the changes that we want to see.
SPEAKER_03Uh to be honest, I think keep doing what you're doing right now because I you know worked on a newspaper paper article last night, and they asked some of these same kinds of questions. And I said, first of all, let me dispel a myth, and not only about the Nebraska legislature, but all legislatures and including Congress. That is this myth. That the decisions actually get made and minds get changed on the floor of the chamber of the legislature. No, they don't. Those minds are made up when they walk in there way over 99% of the time. And not just me. The other 48 in the case of Nebraska. Where do minds change? In the hallway, listening to podcasts, over coffee, text messages, maybe an email, but uh not really. We get too many emails, and so that's noise. It's phone calls, right? Where do your minds change? Literally. Would your mind change sitting in a big room with 47 other people and you don't agree with a lot of them? Your mind doesn't change there. And you also don't get exposed to astonishingly new revelations that you could not have learned or did not learn on your own because that's why in Nebraska at least we have a staff, and they pile that stuff on us and they summarize it for us, and they're brilliant. I have five staff members in my world of health and human services and my own staff, and so they're brilliant and they work really hard, and they make sure that I have all the best cliffs notes on the information that summarize things concisely, accurately, and guess what? It's really hard to change my mind on the floor, and I'm not alone. The other 47, 48, they're the same way. Okay, so you want to influence and and actually change minds, do podcasts, do them in a timely place to share information ahead of time. Because by the time you get to the floor, I'm sorry. It's over. The decision's been made. It's over. So that's what I would say. Lots of this interaction.
SPEAKER_01Wonderful. Yeah, and that's what we're all about here at at PAC, um PAC's Americana Concordium, is is just talking to one another and getting civil dialogue and discourse going. Um that's kind of our that's our main drive.
SPEAKER_03Well, I appreciate it, guys. I've got to jump on a two o'clock mountain, which is in in uh four minutes from now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But so I really appreciate it, and thanks so much.