Winning the AI Race Part 4: Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Chris Wright, and Doug Burgum
Episode publishedPodcast: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sa...All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Secretary Bessant, it's, wonderful to see you. Before we maybe deep dive into AI, do you wanna give us, the high level update on the three three three plan? How are things going? You you had an incredible clip, by the way, with Maria Bartiromo where you talked about some of the things that were happening economically. Maybe just level set everybody on what's going on. So
just just for good framing, during the campaign, the IDA three three three plan
I think his microphone's off. Can we get the microphone on for Scott? Test test? Test.
There it is. Perfect. Okay. Good. So I had a plan that I I called three three three, and the idea was to get the budget deficit, which was running about 6.7% of GDP under the Biden administration, highest that we'd ever had when we weren't at war or in a recession down to 3%, three plus percent economic growth on a persistent basis and to create 3,000,000 more barrels of energy equivalent, so oil and gas before president Trump leaves office. And, look, we're full speed ahead. We had the first June was the first positive June for the Treasury since 2015. We actually had a surplus and we did tha
there's been a lot of talk today about the amount of CapEx spending that needs to go into AI and all of the jobs that it creates. And you, posted as well, actually, a couple days ago and you talked about that there's just been an inflection point that you've seen in CapEx spending sort of as a steward of The US economy. Can you tell us about what what's happening?
So it it's combination and it it's a barbells. So, I I've been in Pittsburgh twice in the past four weeks. Four weeks ago, I went with president Trump when he announced the US Steel Nippon Steel deal, substantial investment by Nippon Steel into an old, very important industry. And then last week, on Tuesday, there there was an a AI summit in in Pittsburgh, all the big players, and pit Pittsburgh Berg is a natural location, for AI, lots lots of cheap energy. Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, are there. And so it was very interesting to see the juxtaposition there, But we are seeing, this incredible capex.
And it's an incredible thing because it's sort of you mentioned alluded to this a little bit earlier, but it does violate a lot of economic theory in the sense that it just hasn't had the negative pernicious effects. Do you think is that is that a yet thing, or do you think that we're in a structurally different kind of economy now? You
mean the AI boom? Yeah. Well, look, we we've seen, throughout history that technology can can drive these things. If you go back I'll talk about the ones I was around for. I was not around for the railroads, but 08/08/1988 but I I used to teach economic history, eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties. The the railroads made it 10 times faster to cross The United States. We had this incredible productivity boom. It was the gigantic GDP growth, and it was disinflationary. So imagine you're having double digit GDP numbers, and inflation was minus two, minus three, minus 4% just because the costs we
You know, I
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