Pod Insights No Priors Reshaping America’s Economy for the Superintelligence Century with Jacob Helberg About this episode AI doomers say that the technology will be the ultimate job-killer. But Jacob Helberg wants people to see AI as a tech that will boost, not replace, human workers and give them superpowers. Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jacob Helberg joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to talk about AI’s role in reshoring manufacturing in America, supply chain security, and transforming the US energy grid. He also discusses the CapEx revolution, why he sees opportunity for tech and energy partnerships in the Middle East, and the path to more nuclear energy for the US. Plus, the three explore what the “superintelligence century” could look like.
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Chapters:
00:00 – Jacob Helberg Introduction
00:50 – Jacob’s Agenda for Capitol Hill
01:53 – Reshoring the American Supply Chain
04:38 – Areas of CapEx Growth
06:56 – Importance of Supply Chain Security
08:52 – Reshoring Rare Earth Minerals
11:12 – How AI Can Help America Reindustrialize
15:37 – AI and Productivity Gains
17:38 – The Superintelligence Century
22:56 – Creating an Open Source AI Ecosystem
24:41 – The Middle East and AI
26:24 – Growing Energy Resources in the US
28:28 – The Path to More Nuclear Energy in the US
35:50 – Essential Domains for Strategy and Security
38:20 – The Tech Industry and the Administration
40:29 – Conclusion
Transcript 0:05 Speaker 00 Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, Alad and I are here with Jacob Helberg, the Undersecretary of State Designate for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, co-founder of the Hill and Valley Forum, connecting Silicon Valley to policymakers in DC, and author of the book The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power. We talk about what America needs to change about its global supply chain, why nuclear is the key to energy abundance, the return of American manufacturing, and superintelligence as a means for productivity and economic growth. Jacob, thanks so much for being here.
0:37 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me.
0:39 Speaker 00 So, very exciting in terms of your new role as Undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment. Can you start by just telling us a little bit about what your initial agenda is or what you're excited about?
0:55 Speaker 01 A few of the topics that I discussed in my opening statement and my signing confirmation are focused on securing our supply chains. Our economy is extremely over-reliant on a supply chain system that's very brittle. We have 90% reliance on critical minerals that are refined in China, on semiconductors that are manufactured in Taiwan. We have one of the best innovation ecosystems in the world, but that innovation ecosystem is sitting on top of a supply chain system that is very exposed to potential geopolitical disruptions. And so, helping move the needle to forge new partnerships with other countries to secure that is indispensable, as well as supporting ongoing efforts by the administration
1:40 Speaker 01 to reshore as much as we can right here in the US would really go a long way to help give our builders the tools that they need to do what they do best, which is build products people love that are disruptive and that help grow the American economy.
1:53 Speaker 02 What are some of those things that you think are most important to be sure? And I think you also have sort of a broader purview of the anatomy of the US economy changing and mutating. And could you actually give us the big picture and then kind of the specifics in terms of how you think things are shifting? And then what do you think is most important to kind of bring back?
2:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally. So, one of the fascinating things about this current era and decade that we're in is we're actually really seeing the juxtaposition between the macroeconomic effects of the policies implemented by the Trump administration juxtaposed with incredibly powerful technological shifts, especially in artificial intelligence. And what I mean by that is President Trump came in and instated a blitzkrieg of policy reforms, fast-tracking data center permits. On day one, he rolled out an EO to unleash American energy to facilitate and support
2:50 Speaker 01 the production, to surge production capacity for energy sources like oil, gas, and nuclear, as well as clean, beautiful coal, as he says. And so, the net effect of all of these different policies, combined with incredibly fast-paced progress in artificial intelligence, is actually changing the makeup of our economy. And we're starting to see that in the data because, for a long time, the American economy was primarily a consumption-driven economy. We have, at different points in time, for the last few decades, been between 70% and 80% consumption-driven.
3:33 Speaker 01 Over 2/3 of our economy have been entirely driven by services, and about 10% has been manufacturing. And we're starting to see those numbers move. And the manufacturing makeup of our economy as a share of GDP has remained, as of now, roughly the same, but that's a lagging indicator. The more interesting one is we're seeing massive CapEx investment, as you guys know, that has really picked up in a statistically Significant way. It's it's over 2% of GDP right now and it's probably going to double by next year. Part of that is the result of tax incentives. Part of that is just making it easier to to get permitting.
4:18 Speaker 01 Because as you guys know, a lot of this stuff boils down to how do you compress the window when you want to make a capex investment? You know, the business people make a decision about whether or not it's going to take seven years or five years to actually get something up and running. And compressing that window as much as possible actually really moves the needle.
4:38 Speaker 02 Are there common areas, sorry to interrupt you, but are there common areas of capex that you're seeing in particular? Is it defense? Is it space? Is it industrial? Are there types of manufacturing? Is it biotech? I'm sort of curious if there's like a clear breakdown of.
4:49 Speaker 01 I I've seen analysis that has that basically says that it's added a full point of GDP just for AI in the last year. Which is a lot because the economy grew 3%. So if a third of that came from AI infrastructure, that's that's that's a lot. Energy infrastructure is is another really big one. For the first time since 2008, we're actually seeing an uptick in in national demand for energy. Our total electricity supply has remained has flatlined since 2008, which is just an interesting statistic that I've recently come across. And and now we're seeing that trend change.
5:29 Speaker 01 And the other one is raw industrials, so things like mineral production. The DOD has forged a strategic partnership with a firm called MP Materials for $750 million to reboot domestic rare earth magnet production. And the last one is to, you know, one that you touched upon a lot, which is we're seeing a global trend across the world where governments are spending a lot more on defense. A record high was reached this year with 2.7 trillion in global spending on defense. 60% of that came from, you know, countries that very large countries like the the US, China, Russia, India.
6:13 Speaker 01 And Germany. And and the big trillion dollar question is, what will they spend that money on? And the answer might actually really define the shape of hard power in the 21st century. As you guys know, I mean, a government is a little bit like a company. If you don't allocate capital efficiently and you actually end up wasting it, you could have a situation where some of these governments have militaries that are paper tigers. And and that's where, you know, and you're kind of seeing a little bit of a window into this in Ukraine, where AI is really, AI and autonomy is really changing outcomes on the battlefield. So those different trends are incredibly fascinating to watch.
6:57 Speaker 00 What made you decide that you wanted to make supply chain security like the, one of the primary things you addressed early? Like, how does the vulnerability to China and others for minerals and components end up mattering?
7:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that's such an important question. And the answer is that China is obviously a systemic rival. You know, some people say it's an adversary. Regardless of of the flavor that one wants to characterize it with, they're definitely a rival. They have fundamentally a different view of how the world should be run than we do. And and a lot of what they have been doing internationally to compete with us really flows from, is an outflow of the fact that they are the world's factory floor. So their presence in Africa, I'm sure you guys have read articles that lament how China's taken over Africa. They're all over Latin America. They have the Belt and Road Initiative.
7:55 Speaker 01 All of that is a byproduct of the fact that they produce the lion's share of the world's manufacturing output. So they import raw materials from Africa, they manufacture it in China, and they re-export it everywhere else. And so if you solve the trade imbalance issue with China, you actually address all of the peripheral issues with their influence in all of these third markets. And so it is. A national security issue to do that because obviously their footprint in some of these places has proven problematic, but it's also good for our companies because as we've seen with their export controls on rare earth magnets, the last thing we need
8:39 Speaker 01 as a country is for our best companies to beg Beijing for permission to get licenses for rare earth magnets in order to manufacture cutting-edge technological products.
8:52 Speaker 02 What's the solution to that? Because if you look at rare earth minerals, for example, end magnets are sort of a subset or, you know, they actually aren't that rare, right? There's huge deposits in Canada, there's big deposits in the US, there's deposits in India. You know, fundamentally, they're not actually rare, but they're called rare earth. And then they're fundamentally mined in a small subset of countries that actually have access to them. Should the US be changing its mining policy around this? Should we be, should Canada? I'm sort of curious how you think about how to address that because there's a few different ways to approach it. One is just to mine more in certain places.
9:24 Speaker 01 China only emerged as a rare earth mining superpower about 10 years ago. It came out in 2015 with its Made in China 2025 Plan. And from that date onwards, we actually saw China's refining activity of rare earth materials skyrocket. So what happened was they pursued a very aggressive industrial policy to build refinering capacity in China. And they started to flood the market, which sunk the price, and started to really squeeze refineries located in the West, in Australia, in Canada, and in the United States. We actually
10:06 Speaker 01 have refineries. Historically, we have had refineries. And there is a huge refinery in Tennessee. There are refineries in Arizona and Georgia. And so the solution to help put the genie back in the bottle is, I think, actually, the DoD's deal with MP Materials offers a good template, which is you need an anchor buyer and an end customer. And you need a price floor. So you need to agree with the supplier, in this case, MP Materials, on a floor for a price. Because what happens when these big offtake agreements, when a Western refinery tries
10:49 Speaker 01 to compete with China is China will artificially sink the price, the global price, depress it, in order to put Western alternatives out of business, and then they raise the price again, which is classic monopolistic behavior. We can fix that with offtake agreements and a price floor. And I think the MP VOD deal offers a good blueprint for that.
11:11 Speaker 00 When you project forward from, as you're talking about, some of the leading indicators on capex and what's possible in terms of reengineering trade flows, like, if it's not just consumption, like, what do you imagine makeup of the American economy can be in terms of manufacturing other elements over the next 10 years? Because I think a lot of people took as a given, like, oh, American labor costs are just too high, like, it's a service economy now.
11:38 Speaker 01 In school, they used to teach us that it was almost part of a natural evolutionary process, that when you reach a mature stage in economic development, you know, your economy evolves into a service economy, and it's just the natural order of things. And I actually think AI offers advanced economies, so to speak, a massive opportunity to violate that narrative.
12:05 Speaker 02 Isn't that narrative violated traditionally by Europe as well? So if you look, for example, the German industrial base, or, you know, there's lots of examples in the Western world where that didn't happen. And so it seems like the underlying premise was kind of something that became self fulfilling in the US, but didn't necessarily translate into a number of other Western economies at all.
12:24 Speaker 01 Completely, completely. And I think, so, I mean, the fascinating thing is, you know, as you guys know, in Peter Thiel's Zero to One, he talks about how you can either compete vertically or horizontally. Horizontally is globalization, vertical competition is innovation. And I think the basic paradigm is, for a lot of the 2000s, we were really growing our economy horizontally through globalization, and we weren't really growing a whole lot vertically. And the interesting thing is... The last, you know, seven years or so, I would argue, um, vertical and vertical
13:06 Speaker 01 growth has actually picked up a lot. And, um, and, and to, to really appreciate the potential impact that AI can have on productivity. If we increase productivity, it will totally erode the competitive advantages, uh, in labor costs that developing countries have, and we have an opportunity to re-industrialize. And to appreciate the extent to which AI can give us that opportunity, I think you can look at history and the first industrial revolution, when industrial output in Britain, because Britain industrialized, China at the time did not. So it's, it's an interesting compare, you know, comparison, because Britain was
13:49 Speaker 01 obviously a tiny country by population, from a population standpoint, and a much more advanced country than China. But because of technology, Britain had an industrial output per capita that was over 50 times the industrial output, uh, per capita of China. And Britain's GDP far surpassed China. China's GDP in, um, in the 1800s totally collapsed. Uh, it went from being about a third of the world economy in 1800, down to, uh, about seven and a half percent in 1913. And so it just shows the power of technology. Today, you can see differences
14:29 Speaker 01 between Israel and Nigeria. Nigeria is a huge country, but from a population standpoint, and Israel, a tiny country that's smaller than New Jersey, has a bigger GDP and a stronger military, and it's all because of technology. And so the people who say that we can't re-industrialize because China has a bigger population, or, you know, our people are more expensive, I think are totally missing the plot. Um, I think, I'm a believer that AI will, uh, far from replacing humans altogether, will actually give humans superpowers, um, workers superpowers, and will massively increase productivity and
15:09 Speaker 01 I've become somewhat fascinated with this macroeconomic theory called Jevon's paradox, which is that the the basic economic principle that when you have a technology that massively increases efficiency, demand for in a resource, demand for that resource actually increases, it doesn't decrease, because the relative cost of that resource goes down. So that's my basic take, my optimistic take for manufacturing in America.
15:37 Speaker 00 So I feel like you are perhaps the first policymaker I've talked to whose first instinct on AI is like, it's about productivity versus, you know, addressing some very real risks. But, you know, we were talking and you said to me, like, what if the economy was 45 trillion? Right? Like, there, there are historical analogies for that kind of increase in productivity. But as you also recognize, it's not the dominant narrative today around AI. Like, what do you think will help more people see that opportunity? Or what do you think they should understand about that potential productivity gain?
16:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I guess, I mean, the way that I would frame it differently is if you believe that agentic AI is going to make each individual worker be able to do a lot more stuff, if you're a company, or if you're a country, you're basically looking at two outcomes. If you're a country with a GDP of 10 trillion and all of a sudden, you only need, you know, a 10th of the workers to perform the task that 100 workers previously were able to perform, you either need a lot less workers, or the totality of your workers will produce
16:56 Speaker 01 10 times more. And, and I actually think companies will choose, far from laying off workers, I think companies will choose to increase output, because if they don't, their competitors will. And, and if, and if you believe that, from a first principle standpoint, that human wants are Unlimited, which I would argue they are. I mean, just look at our, you know, everything we consume today compared to our grandparents. I think we're looking at a world that's just going to produce a lot more stuff. And workers will just do a much bigger range of things because of AI. And so I'm actually quite optimistic about the future of work.
17:38 Speaker 02 You've talked a little bit about this being kind of the super intelligent century. Could you explain what that means? Has it started? Is it about to start? Like, how do you think about that concept?
17:49 Speaker 01 We're starting to see the contours of a totally new world. And if you think about what the narrative was 10 years ago, 10 years ago, the narrative was the 21st century is going to be the Chinese century or, you know, the century where the East rises, so to speak. What it's proving today is I actually think the defining feature of this century is not the rising of the East or the rise of China. It's really the rise of super intelligence. And the way that we're seeing this change the global landscape is, on the one hand, I think we're going to, we're likely to see a second great divergence. So for the first time since the first industrial revolution,
18:34 Speaker 01 I think we're going to see the economies that are first movers in integrating AI into their economy reap massive productivity and growth benefits and start to leapfrog the rest of the world that is lagging in AI adoption. Number two, and a byproduct of this, is a collapse of the cheap labor, the cheap labor advantage that a lot of developing economies have benefited from for the last 50 years. The third big feature, which really hasn't been discussed a lot in the press, is that Europe's economy has been collapsing. And so
19:17 Speaker 01 You know, the narrative today isn't that China's rising. The plot twist that no one saw coming is that it's actually Europe that's just completely collapsing. So Europe's economy went from being 65% of global GDP in the early 20th century to roughly a third in the 80s and 90s, and now it's down to 15% of global GDP. What are the drivers of that? Like, are there specific policy things that happen, specific decisions? The Europeans blame it on the oil shock of the 70s, but, you know, that was 50 years ago. So I would, you know, reasonable people have different takes.
19:59 Speaker 01 I would argue that you can really just, that they missed the boat on a lot of really big technological revolutions. They missed the boat on, you know, they were very late to adopt the internet. They were very late to embrace the, you know, digital and internet revolution and the consumer app revolution. And now with the AI Act that the EU passed and the digital services tax, they just keep shooting themselves in the foot. And I think the AI Act is basically, single-handedly, ensuring that Europe will not be a first mover in AI, because it's now subject to these incredibly punitive set of rules.
20:43 Speaker 01 And so, you know, the, and that's actually a great segue to another interesting feature, which is, I find to be a total plot twist, is the part of the world that we're really seeing surging is the Middle East, which is just really interesting, because when you consider that GDP per capita in the UAE and Israel is higher than in France today, which is wild, it's higher than in South Korea. And so you're seeing parts of the Middle East actually emerge in completely unexpected ways, because I think in the West, we've long talked about the Middle East as a war-torn region, a region that struggles with all kinds of geopolitical instability issues and regional conflicts.
21:28 Speaker 01 And you're seeing a totally new Middle East emerge. You're seeing leaders in the Middle East that are super tech-forward, and, you know, a silver lining of the recent conflict is... Iran's influence in the region being greatly diminished actually paves the way for a much, much more peaceful region that's not being held hostage every day to terrorist groups. So I find the Middle East fascinating. The last two features are, I think the US and China are going to be locked in a very aggressive race to control the scaffolding of the AI architecture for the world. So they're going to, you know, obviously, the
22:11 Speaker 01 rest of the world at one point or another will need to import intelligence. A lot of them will not need the super fancy black wall chips. They'll need the normal stuff. But who sells them that, whether it'll be Nvidia or Huawei, will really make a huge difference because both companies and the Chinese will definitely bundle the stack. So they'll have AI out of the box with the Ascend platform and DeepSeek and all of these Chinese tools. And the Chinese are very good at aggressively competing for market share. So, so obviously, having a strategy to compete in the global south and third markets will be important. And the last is the one that we talked about earlier, which is the global rearmament across the world.
22:56 Speaker 02 How do you think about open source in that context? Because really, a lot of the Chinese companies are pushing open source models and those are ones that can be optimized in all sorts of ways by, by enterprises and others, by government, et cetera. There's a lot of sort of sovereign AI rising. In the US, obviously, we have Meta as a champion for open source. In Europe, there's Mistral. But my sense is that there's a lot of Chinese government involvement in some of these open source models in terms of funding them or promoting them or accelerating them. What role, if any, do you think the US government should play in our own sort of open source AI ecosystem?
23:32 Speaker 01 Well, I think we need to have a strategy to figure out how we promote the American stack overseas and whether that's through open source or through other models. I mean, I would argue, again, reasonable people have different takes on what happened with DeepSeek. I think the basic building blocks of the main takeaways of how DeepSeek achieved its performance was incremental efficiency gains. They lied about their compute capacity because they have a billion-dollar cluster, and they distilled ChatGPT's model weights. So while DeepSeek is open source, I would argue it's not really open source if they stole
24:16 Speaker 01 the model weights from a model that is closed source. With that being said, it will definitely be an integral part of China's strategy to try to get market share by using the open-source ecosystem. And so in that sense, I think Meta's efforts are very important. But I think having a holistic approach to make sure that we have the very best models and they're as widely used is super important.
24:41 Speaker 00 What do you think is the relevance of the Middle East, given their level of investment and this set of leadership that is very lean forward on AI? And I want to go broadly into energy, but the availability of energy-for-gigawatt data centers there and plus to this fight, right? Is it a swing vote? Is it the capital that matters? Do you believe in these compute partnerships? Should they be a closer ally?
25:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I think the Middle East has the potential for being a completely new kind of partner for the US. And the reason is that, first of all, they actively say they want to move in a much more pro-American direction, which is obviously a good start. Second of all, as a country, we're energy-constrained, so we can expand our energy supply. And obviously, the administration and along with the private sector is actively working to do that, but that's going to take time. We want to move really fast. Working with partners that have abundant cheap energy offers our companies an opportunity to actually compete
25:51 Speaker 01 on raw energy powers combined with compute and with speed against China's approach. The trick there is really going to be finding the right framework that satisfies security concerns that national security professionals have in Washington. Some of those concerns include that we want to make sure that China doesn't get access to those clusters. But I think it's eminently doable. And ultimately, I know that this is something that the administration is looking at, taking a close look at.
26:24 Speaker 00 Maybe we can move to that then, just given we're like in the low single digits at best of actual energy production growth in the US right now. And people have said numbers like we need to double energy production in the United States. Maybe beyond that, if you believe we're going to be a manufacturing hub again, like, how do we, like, what's a feasible way to get there, like, and close that gap?
26:49 Speaker 01 I think we need nuclear energy. There's no doubt in my mind that nuclear energy is, offers the best path. And this is where a partnership with the Middle East could also be very interesting because the president has done a superb job at securing very, very large foreign investment commitments into the United States. There's a lot of room for those commitments to be channeled towards productivity enhancing areas. And I would argue, energy, nuclear energy infrastructure is a productivity enhancing area because it makes our electricity and energy supply more abundant, cheaper. We know from 200 years of history that there is a direct correlation
27:33 Speaker 01 between the cost of energy and economic growth.
27:38 Speaker 01 The cost of electricity in the US is half of the cost of electricity in Europe. And we see that difference play out in GDP growth. And so, but the challenge is that large nuclear plants that actually produce a lot of energy take a lot of CapEx. They're very expensive. They're dozens of billions of dollars. They also take sometimes seven years to build. Now, the administration is doing a superb job at Taking a very hard look at regulations and figuring out ways of actually compressing that window, but it's still very capital intensive. And so, working with partners,
28:19 Speaker 01 including in the Middle East, to make sure that we actually get those projects capitalized could actually potentially really move the needle.
28:28 Speaker 02 I think it's kind of interesting because I think in the US, we're still at, what, 17, 80% nuclear power?
28:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:33 Speaker 02 From the perspective of the overall base. And we haven't really added any capacity roughly since the 70s.
28:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:39 Speaker 02 And so, 50 years later, like 17, 18% of all of our output, which is kind of amazing with minimal accidents, with high safety profiles.
28:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:49 Speaker 02 Clean energy, you know, it's dramatic that that didn't really take off as an energy source. What do you think is the path to actually deploying more nuclear? Because I know that there's some initiatives from the DOD, there's some initiatives more broadly from the government. Is there like an initial entry point or starting point to actually start to rebuild our nuclear industry? Or do you think it's still TBD in terms of the right policy approach?
29:13 Speaker 01 I mean, I think it really starts with policy uncertainty. So, you have, I mean, if compressing the window has a huge impact on the cost analysis that a lot of investors make when they decide whether or not to invest. And then, as far as pockets of money go, you know, there are a lot of-
29:34 Speaker 02 Sorry to interrupt you, but to pause really quick on that first point, I looked into this years ago, and I remember seeing that a lot of the cost of nuclear is actually financing cost overruns where you start building a plant, there's protests and other things organized against the plant, there's other regulatory red tape that suddenly crops up. And a five or six year project suddenly takes 12 years, and you have huge CapEx loans that are sort of put out against that. And so, to your point on the timeframe, A, you're losing time on ramping up the actual plant, right? You start producing energy later and making money later. But also those delays are incredibly costly from a financing perspective.
30:08 Speaker 01 Yeah. And as you know, when you have delays like that, the costs compound because you're paying interest on loans, because you're paying legal fees. And so it's not even just a perfectly linear extension of the costs. It's you're actually, you know, your costs actually go up on a compounding curve. And so, um, yeah. And so the time value of money with nuclear and energy investments is actually super valuable. And the, one of the ways in which the US government has an opportunity and, you know, if confirmed, I hope to help play a role in is, um, is historically, um, this, this government body called CFIUS has scrutinized
30:53 Speaker 01 very heavily foreign investment and critical infrastructure, including in nuclear facilities. My hope is that there's an opportunity to actually create partnerships with strategic foreign investors to be able to absorb foreign investment in order to use that capital to actually boost our domestic energy supply. Because there is so much capital that's been committed, it would be beneficial for the country to use some of it to expand our overall electricity supply.
31:22 Speaker 00 Would you imagine, um, like being more, the administration being more directive in this area? Because if you look at some of the analogies, it doesn't have to take a decade to build a nuclear plant, including in, you know, first world countries like South Korea, right? They chose reference designs and they sort of just made industrial policy about it. Um, like, how do you, how do you think about the feasibility of like that sort of directed investment in the US?
31:48 Speaker 01 I mean, I think it's eminently doable. And I actually think it's doable with just the right incentives. I think there isn't even, uh, that much, you know, state-led direction that's necessary. I think if you, um, if you really, um, reduce the, the barriers, the regulatory barriers and the costs, um, you can, you can actually create the right environment to Direct a lot of that capital and then the government has to has to basically signal to the market that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, CFIUS, will not block foreign investment, you know, from trusted partners into the sector.
32:33 Speaker 01 Because energy has historically been considered, rightfully so, critical infrastructure and therefore foreign investment is subject to all kinds of scrutiny. But we can actually channel investment from trusted partners into this sector to grow our energy supply. And the one point that I'd add is, the one thing France got right in the last 45 years is it actually gets 75% of its total energy supply from nuclear. Now, they don't have natural gas like we do, they don't have, you know, oil rigs like we do, we're very blessed as a country because we have a lot of resources.
33:14 Speaker 01 But they prove that even in a country that has an insane regulatory burden, you can actually get really statistically meaningful numbers of electricity from nuclear. A lot rightfully pointed out that some statistics say that our data center capacity will require us to double our overall electricity production in the 2030s. I think it's possible to do that and Sarah, you pointed out that if we want to reindustrialize, you know, those numbers might even be higher and that's totally true. And the way we get there, I think, definitely runs through nuclear. It also runs through natural gas, through clean coal, through, I think we really need
33:59 Speaker 01 an all of the above approach, but nuclear just provides a massive amount of very low cost energy. So whatever we can do to turbocharge that, I think would be very meaningful.
34:10 Speaker 00 I think it's actually just like very promising to me that even the scale of some of the shape, scale and shape of demand really matches nuclear in the US, right? I mean, like, I look at the data center demand all the time, but people are very committed to large-scale data center projects in 28 and 29, and like, that's not quite long enough, but like, you have the desire to build data centers that actually take all of the energy from a single, large nuclear plant. And so like, the matching problem should give us a huge advantage here.
34:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's where I think you really sort of start to see a picture of a totally new American economy, where, you know, we used to be consumption-driven, very low investment, you know, stagnant energy supply, to, and a GDP growth between 1% and 3%, and we're moving to this new world where it's, we're going to be a high-investment economy that's basically going to invest between 2% and 4% of GDP in private CapEx investment, which is massive. The growth band could pretend, you know, a high productivity, a country where productivity is actually increasing meaningfully in a way that compounds and
35:28 Speaker 01 starts to shift the GDP growth band from 1% to 3%, potentially somewhere between 3% and 5%, according to a Goldman Sachs study. The makeup of GDP starting to shift from consumption and services back towards a healthier balance with manufacturing and industrial activity. It's a totally new country, and I find that super exciting.
35:50 Speaker 00 One last question for you on just like, what other parts of the economy you focus on? So, there's energy, there's obviously intelligence, there's sort of inputs in rare earth magnets and minerals, and like, what other, are there other domains where you think competitiveness is like? Essential from a security perspective or from a strategic perspective?
36:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I tend to think of my work being very supply chain focused is because it allows, it gives me a mental framework for thinking about these issues holistically by looking at the supply chain as a layered pyramid that includes energy, minerals, component manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing, data centers, models and apps. And, and I think, you know, you, you, as a country, we kind of need a strategy that is holistic at the different layers of the supply chain. We're actually in a really good position at most of them. We have abundant energy, although we need to increase our supply.
36:56 Speaker 01 We, where our, our biggest exposure points are component manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing and minerals. And, you know, there's a lot that we can do to move the needle there. But, but transportation logistics is another really interesting, really interesting area where a policy can actually help play, play a role. And the Chinese have been masters at, you know, through their Belt and Road Initiative, and actually having a supply chain plan that includes a global transportation logistic network to get minerals from Africa, back to China, refined in China, exported back everywhere else. And, and I think we need, as, you know, we used to do this with the Panama Canal, with,
37:41 Speaker 01 you know, these big investments that we used to make in transportation logistics infrastructure. And I think the president's appetite for having a very robust economic policy agenda is exciting because it gives us an opportunity to actually take a hard look at things that as a country we haven't done in a while, including in, you know, reimagining how we move goods in a supply chain system that looks different than the one that we have today. And we can use technology to leapfrog, we can use autonomous technology to leapfrog old infrastructure. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
38:21 Speaker 00 One last question for you, Jacob. We, you know, have a predominantly tech focused audience. Like, what should they understand about? The way they should interact with the administration or the administration's stance on the technology industry's role in economic growth and over the next few years.
38:39 Speaker 01 Sure. So, part of what we've seen over the last six months is that this is fundamentally a builder-friendly administration. We have a builder in the White House and that's really been reflected and the policies rolled out. And so fundamentally, the policies of the administration, I would argue, have really amounted to shock therapy to help facilitate building in America as much as possible, removing roadblocks through deregulation, through lowering taxes and lowering the tax burden, promoting foreign investment in the US. And so ultimately, the job of the White House is really to help empower builders
39:21 Speaker 01 as much as possible and make America the best destination for capital. And so, and I believe that we fundamentally already started achieving that.
39:33 Speaker 00 Amazing. And I think your view of like, America can be a country potentially of builders rather than just services is also like really compelling in terms of broader opportunity.
39:44 Speaker 01 David Sacks and I hosted not too long ago, an AI summit with the president. And it was incredibly inspiring to see the president declare that America would win the AI race. And in that statement, he acknowledged we were in a race and he declared that America started the race and we're going to win it. And it's inspiring because in a way, it was kind of reminiscent to John F. Kennedy's moon speech. And so, and that's the kind of optimism and bullishness and boldness that frankly, we need from the White House. And I think is eminently reflected in policy. I mean, this is a pro-builder administration.
40:29 Speaker 00 Great. Thank you, Jacob.
40:30 Speaker 01 Thanks so much, Dennis.
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