PragerU: The Best Investment I've Ever Made

How's this for a claim to fame?

I was an early investor in PragerU. 

It’s not an investment that has made me money. PragerU is a non-profit.

But I tell anyone who will listen that it’s the best investment I’ve ever made. 

By far.

Because it’s done more good for more people than any investment I’ve ever made.

By far.  

It’s why I’ve increased my donation every year. 

And it’s why I urge you to join me in supporting this special organization. 

There’s no other enterprise like it that I know of in the nonprofit world. 

I know something about that world.  I sat on boards of colleges, community organizations and hospitals. Nonprofits tend to be run like, well, non-profits. They plod forward… slowly, rarely, if ever taking risks. 

PragerU is run like the best Silicon Valley start-ups. It moves fast and breaks things.

I also know something about running a for-profit business.  

I was the CEO of Best Buy until I retired in 2009.

Best Buy, like PragerU, disrupted an industry.

Best Buy, like PragerU grew very fast. 

And Best Buy, like PragerU, faced more than a few near-extinction events — moments when we were this close to losing the company because we were trying to do something no one else had ever done. 

You can’t disrupt an industry and expect it to go smoothly. 

But, again, like PragerU, each time we faced a crisis we worked our way through it, emerging stronger on the other side. 

The business Best Buy disrupted was consumer electronics retailing. 

The business PragerU is disrupting is education. 

Thank goodness they are. 

Because if anything needs disrupting, it’s our educational system.  

The current one has completely failed.

Nationally, we spend four times more money per pupil than we did in 1960. Does anyone believe students are better educated for all that additional cash?

How was it that an ordinary Civil War soldier educated in a one room schoolhouse wrote beautiful, clear prose and many students today can barely write a single declarative sentence. In my former home state of Minnesota, once a bastion of good public schools, barely half the students can read or do math at grade level.

Worse, our schools are teaching our children to have contempt for America.

Imagine raising a generation of children to think their own country is a bad place! In the history of the world, this has never happened.  But it’s happening right now in the greatest country in the world.  

PragerU is confronting this problem head on.

Its innovative content is short, informative and fun. 

It’s an invaluable resource for parents and teachers who want to inoculate children against the nonsense they are learning in government schools.

Everything PragerU offers explains and promotes traditional Judeo-Christian, American values. 

Watch Dennis Prager’s video on The American Trinity, the values of E pluribus unum, liberty and In God We Trust, and you will understand the foundational principles of America — in five minutes! 

Everything PragerU offers instills pride in America — not mindless, jingoistic pride. But real, earned pride. 

Watch PragerU’s Presidents series — all of it or any part of it — and you’ll understand what I mean. You’ll also learn more about American history than you did in high school and certainly in college. 

Everything PragerU offers is free. It wants to reach as many people as possible.

That’s why it’s a non-profit. It doesn’t want to put any barriers between its audience and its content. Charging a fee would do that. 

The strategy has worked. PragerU gets almost 2 billion views a year across all platforms, including its own website, PragerU.com.

But it’s not just about the massive views. It’s also about the individuals, the young people especially, who now see the world differently because of these videos. I’ve met some of them personally and their stories have a similar thread: “no one explained this to me before…” No one explained that free market capitalism is the only way to lift people out of poverty, no one explained why happiness is a moral obligation, or that the police are the good guys, not the bad guys — until PragerU did.  

This drives the establishment crazy. 

It should.

The only way the educational elite can continue to spread their poison is if they have a monopoly on the system.  

PragerU effectively challenges that monopoly. And elites know it, hence the antipathy.

When I first invested in PragerU it was just a great idea. 

Now more than a decade later, it’s an educational powerhouse — getting important information out to our kids (and their parents) every day.  

As big as it has become, it’s not nearly big enough. It’s still a David against an educational Goliath. And while it might not seem like a fair fight, I like PragerU’s odds. They have one hell of slingshot. 

I’m Brad Anderson, former CEO of Best Buy, for Prager University.