Pod Insights The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe 494: Scott Bessent—What's Up with Those Trump Accounts About this episode Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joins Mike for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of the U. S. economy, the ideas behind his influential speech While America Slept, and the policies he believes can restore long-term American prosperity. Then they take a deep dive into the new Trump Accounts—how they work, who qualifies, and why Secretary Bessent believes they could give the next generation a stronger financial foundation.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Mike Rowe? Hey guys, this is The Way I Heard It. This episode is called "What's Up With Those Trump Accountants."
0:09 Speaker 01 What's up?
0:10 Mike Rowe? Full disclosure, that was a headline I saw recently somewhere, and I was curious, so I read the article. And then, fortuitously, not too long thereafter, I found myself at the Ronald Reagan Economic Forum in the Ronald Reagan Library, listening to a bunch of big shots mouth off about various policy issues.
0:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:31 Mike Rowe? And guess who I met, Chuck?
0:34 Speaker 01 Secretary Bessent.
0:36 Mike Rowe? That's a pretty good guess, I should have known. As the erstwhile producer of this podcast, you would have access to that kind of information. Scott Bessent delivered a remarkable speech while I was there, and I just happened to have a small crew with me, and we set up camp right there in the library. And I wound up hanging out for a very long day and left with four or five really, I think, super interesting interviews with some very consequential CEOs and people in the aerospace industry and various experts on this and that. But it was Scott Bessent who really got my attention with the speech he gave called "While America Slept." You would have loved it.
1:18 Speaker 01 "While America Slept."
1:21 Mike Rowe? Yeah, yeah. And where were you, Chuck, while America was sleeping and I was recording this podcast?
1:26 Speaker 01 I was slumming it at an all-inclusive in Cancun, probably swimming down a river or ziplining, I don't know, I was doing something fun.
1:38 Mike Rowe? Well, I hope so. This probably can't compete with that, but I don't know. Listen to the conversation and tell me what you think, because this guy, first of all, he's everywhere.
1:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true.
1:49 Mike Rowe? He is everywhere, and we laugh about this early on, because I was like, Scott, you were on TV last night before I had nodded off, and you're right there in the morning in the Oval Office, talking about this, that, and the other. Oh, and let me also say, before we get into this, fear not, friends. The way I heard it is not morphing into some polemic. Or some political podcast. Yes, it's true. J D Vance was last week's guest. And yes, his mere presence triggered.
2:20 Speaker 01 Caused a stir.
2:22 Mike Rowe? Yes, yes. I just want to say for anybody who actually listened to our conversation, it was micro works 101.
2:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:30 Mike Rowe? It was not a political conversation. This conversation with Secretary Bessent is probably more political than the one I had with the VP. But in some ways, I think it's even more important because these Trump accounts, you know, they're not perfect. Like any other thing, there's, you know, there are rules that you need to be aware of. But I've never seen a better attempt to get people involved in the market.
2:59 Speaker 01 Right.
3:00 Mike Rowe? Who otherwise never would be. It's pretty great.
3:05 Speaker 01 I mean, I think it's great. It's great on several levels and the whole idea of compound interest is starting early. And how much earlier can you start than when you're born? You know what I mean? It's like you can really help your kids have a great advantage from the get, even if you don't do anything, even if you just do a little bit.
3:25 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
3:26 Speaker 01 That's going to, over the course of a lifetime, that's going to double and double and double and double.
3:31 Mike Rowe? I kind of think of it like an allowance in a way, like my allowance was very paltry when I was a kid. But it was my first experience with, you know, sort of managing money and thinking about, okay, well, I made a couple bucks this week. Maybe I can get this or that, or maybe I should save some. Well, this isn't so much about money management as it is about financial literacy in general and investing in particular.
3:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:59 Mike Rowe? So you're right, to get a kid at the earliest possible age aware of the fact that they have money that belongs to them, that's growing in this thing called a market, in indexed funds. And like, once you've got a little bit of skin in the game, then you become interested in ways that I think are really important because, look, man, we've got like half the country or more is not invested in the markets at all. Why would they care? This is such a great way, I think, and by the way, you're talking about a thousand dollars from the government. If you have a kid in the next three years, you can contribute to that account.
4:42 Mike Rowe? Talk to your financial advisor, if you have one, about how this compares to 529s and IRAs and Roth IRAs, right? There are all kinds of options and there are rules. But look, you put a thousand dollars in somebody's account and you just don't touch it till you're 59, 60 years old. It's gonna be worth about 300 grand, at least historically speaking.
5:04 Speaker 01 Wow.
5:05 Mike Rowe? So, you're giving people a real opportunity to participate in the market. And now, of course, you've got guys like Michael Dell, who just put in billions of dollars.
5:15 Speaker 01 Right, right, yeah.
5:16 Mike Rowe? So, this is a whole other story and we don't get into it in our conversation, but, you know, our friend Jeff Childers, who was on the podcast earlier this year, wrote a really interesting column about how billionaires, like for real, like the most serious players in the, in the country, are contributing massive amounts into these funds after they're established. And like the practical impact of that, Chuck, is really been amazing to watch, because you're, you're sort of disenfranchising NGOs. It's opened up this whole conversation about should people have the right to handle their
6:01 Mike Rowe? own charitable receipts or not?
6:05 Speaker 01 Right.
6:06 Mike Rowe? So, these Trump accounts, never mind what you think about the guy in the Oval Office, it's really worth looking at and understanding. And I just thought, who better than the Secretary of the Treasury to explain them to me, which he does? I also want to give one other shout out to, to what I heard when I was there. I was a little late, it was a breakfast thing and he had just started his speech. But this is what I heard when I walked in from the Secretary. The truth is that for too long, America has been asleep. We mistook comfort for strength. We treated efficiency as a substitute for resilience and consumption as a measure of our prosperity.
6:51 Mike Rowe? We told ourselves that so long as goods were cheaper overseas, it didn't matter whether factories went dark in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. We assumed that supply chains would always function smoothly, adversaries would always behave responsibly, and the invisible hand would somehow correct vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront. And while we reassured ourselves with those assumptions, risk accumulated all around us. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of a foundational principle that previous generations
7:31 Mike Rowe? understood instinctively, that economic security is national security. For a nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship, or refine its needs gradually cedes its strength and its sovereignty to others. That is a dangerous dependency for any country, and it is unacceptable for the United States. Wow. I found myself in such violent agreement with that sentiment.
7:59 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
8:00 Mike Rowe? Anyway, he agreed to sit down and chat. You're gonna hear some weird creaking in the background during this conversation. It's because it was windy and we were out on the patio and, you know, our lights and rigging and stuff was kind of moving around. But it's a worthwhile conversation, and it delves into a whole lot more than just the Trump accounts, which again, are absolutely worth your time and worth understanding. The Secretary of the Treasury, right after this.
8:34 Mike Rowe? Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meatpackers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising.
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10:23 Mike Rowe? I sure appreciate you making the time.
10:25 Speaker 02 Glad to do it.
10:26 Mike Rowe? Are you really? Because I've been to these things before, and everybody is pulling you in every direction at the same time. They all want to tell you a story, and they all want to thank you and congratulate you for this, that, or the other. It's got to be exhausting.
10:37 Speaker 02 I tell you, it's exhilarating being here at the Reagan Library. I was 18 when I met Ronald Reagan, just-
10:44 Mike Rowe? Where'd you meet him?
10:45 Speaker 02 Next to the Yale campus. Only five of us went to see him speak when he was candidate Reagan. I shook his hand, and he was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for, so it reminds me of my youth. And just the photos of him and the First Lady are so hopeful.
10:58 Mike Rowe? Gosh, it's amazing. Have you been through the ranch before? I assume you have been up there?
11:02 Speaker 02 Uh, once, once.
11:03 Mike Rowe? It is so stunning. I mean, it's so shockingly modest. People don't believe it, you know, that little single tiny bed and the, it's all extraordinary.
11:13 Speaker 02 Well, it's, it's an incredible American story. Incredible American story. I'm sure they, a lot of your viewers know, but his nickname was Dutch because he used to get a Dutch boy haircut with a bowl because they did it at home. And then he was in the White House and one of the most transformative presidents in history.
11:30 Mike Rowe? Well, I've been to a few presidential libraries. This wins partly because of that, but it's just mostly because you can just, just walking through it, you can still get a sense of the guy and a sense of the, uh, the footprint he left.
11:45 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, it was so consequential when you, when you look like, well, there's bringing, bringing down the iron curtain and just bringing America back.
11:52 Mike Rowe? Yeah. You were on the TV. When I fell asleep last night, you were on it when I woke up this morning. You were here when I showed up. What is happening? I mean, are you on a kind of tour of sorts?
12:05 Speaker 02 No, well, I'm, I'm, I'm out here for this keynote speech here at the library, which was called While America Slept. We printed away our sovereignty and our industrial capacity for about 25 years. We're bringing that back. I did do the weekly White House press conference yesterday, which was fun. Fun. There, there are a bunch of animals there in the press.
12:30 Mike Rowe? Okay, okay. Hey, he said it. No, but it, it was really going to be one of my first questions. When you're standing there and the press is all clearly so eager, maybe even desperate to ask a question, are you actually calling on them? Are you, does the loudest question get the? Get your attention?
12:49 Speaker 02 Uh, no, no, no, it is. Well, first of all, I'd walked out and uh, three weeks ago, went back to my home state in South Carolina, University of South Carolina, gave me an honorary PhD. So I walked out and I said, if you want to get called on, you gotta call me Dr. Bessent.
13:05 Mike Rowe? And it worked, man.
13:06 Speaker 02 And it worked. So, you know, whoever yelled Dr. Bessent, uh, the loudest and I just went symmetrically through the crowd.
13:15 Mike Rowe? Well, let's just jump into what's most important to you right now. I know you've been talking about the Trump accounts. Um, you've said a lot of things that I think are, are really relevant to my audience, which is, which is kind of eclectic, but there are a lot of people, they're concerned about AI, they're concerned about the market, they're concerned about not being in the market, they're just concerned.
13:37 Speaker 02 They're concerned.
13:38 Mike Rowe? Yeah. So how do we mitigate that concern?
13:41 Speaker 02 Well, uh, again, someone said to me, are you surprised the market's going up on bad news? And I said, well, it's that the news is bad, that the quality of the news that people get is bad, that whether, whether it's newspapers or the uh, television, that people now present opinion as news. And I, I have perfectly asymmetric information on what's going on with the Iran conflict. That we're kicking their butts. But if you, if you were to read, if you were to listen to like some of these crazed Democrats, if you were to read the front page of the New York Times, you wouldn't get that.
14:22 Speaker 02 Right? So I'm not surprised by what's happening, but I can understand how it causes anxiety the, in the American people. And look, I was in the investment business for 35, 40 years to extent that I had success. It was looking on the other side of things, thinking about the medium, the long term, that, you know, the saying, this too shall pass, that this conflict will end, that gasoline prices will go down. But, you know, I, I, I don't know if you remember last year, it was eggs, eggs, eggs.
14:53 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
14:54 Speaker 02 You don't see anywhere now. Egg prices are down 90%, right? They're down 90%. The President posted on his Truth account the other day, there are 12 big grocery items that are all down. And, look, beef prices are up. An unfortunate disease in the Mexican cattle supply, coupled with some problems in the beef cycle. So, look, beef prices are going to be tough to get down, but chicken's down, a lot of other goods are down. And we're working every day on that.
15:31 Mike Rowe? What would you tell, then, the average American, who's willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt, but who is genuinely concerned and who really feels we have no control, whether it's eggs, or whether it's beef, or whether it's policy? People feel untethered, I think, from that. What's the administration doing? And what can, as Secretary of Treasury, you do or say to just bring a little perspective?
16:02 Speaker 02 What we can do is we can give certainty. So, we passed the Working Families Tax Cut, also known as the one big, beautiful bill last year. So, the tax cuts are permanent. It's not student body left, student body right anymore. And that had something for everyone. You know, on the business side, whether you're a big business or a small business, you can fully deduct any capital expenditures, factories, for the next five years can be 100% deducted from taxes. And then, on the other side, you know, the President's four signature policies, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. They reduce taxes on Social Security. 85% of our seniors didn't pay taxes on Social Security.
16:44 Speaker 02 Deductibility of interest for American-made cars. Tax refunds were the biggest they've ever been. They were up 11% last year. So, you know, I think that there is great certainty there. We have great certainty on energy policy, that it is choppy now because of what's happening in the Gulf and in the Middle East. But we never produce so much oil in the US. We're the number one energy producer in the world. Now, for you all here in California, California's made the decision to be the energy
17:24 Speaker 02 Poverty, but which means high prices and California is the only state that depends on foreign imports. I think California imports forty percent of its energy.
17:37 Mike Rowe? What's the matter with us?
17:38 Speaker 02 I know, because I can tell you, there's plenty of energy off the ground and offshore.
17:44 Mike Rowe? We grow more timber in this state, I think, than anywhere else in the country, and yet we import more. I don't know. I don't know why. If I'm confused and I live here, I don't even know how to explain this to somebody in Pennsylvania. What can you do about that?
18:02 Speaker 02 Well, what can we do? We can put in good national policies. In California, a Californian leaves the state. The one person leaves every two minutes. So they're voting with their feet, which is too bad. I mean, look at this. It doesn't get any better. But eventually, you have to believe the democratic system will take over, that there will be some scream for normalcy. I remember seeing Jerry Brown at an event, and it was his second time in office. And it was when Democrats got the trifecta of both houses and the governorship,
18:44 Speaker 02 and he said, it's like running China. It's one party rule. We're going to have one party rule for a long time. And this is what one party rule does.
18:52 Mike Rowe? I'm not a political animal, and I'm certainly not a journalist, but there is an issue that is most central for me. It's workforce. It's reinvigorating the trades. For the first time since I've been running my foundation, I'm talking to the administration. The Department of War is keenly interested in making a more persuasive case for hundreds of thousands of great jobs in the defense industrial base. I would love to know your thoughts on how you think about that in terms of its importance to the country, what balanced workforce and all that entails.
19:26 Speaker 02 I just gave my speech here today and you you can go to the treasury X account and either either watch it or read it and that's my my speech was called while America slept and like two things happened. We lost our sovereignty because we were in real national danger because of the things we no longer produce. You know, a country that the doesn't produce it its medicines, its semiconductors, its steel, critical minerals, which we've seen the Chinese cut us off on and are essential for military production. So you become very vulnerable on one side, but on the
20:08 Speaker 02 other side, you lose those good jobs and you lose, you know, like there is knowledge that goes with those jobs, that people who work in a factory, they who work with their hands, who understand manufacturing process, if we were to get into another conflict, they can immediately move and they'll work on that. So, you know, we are seeing a manufacturing renaissance. Everyone says to me, oh, but we haven't seen like that many manufacturing jobs happen. Well, that just says that they they don't know much about how industry works. What we were seeing now is a boom in construction jobs and those construction jobs will turn into manufacturing
20:52 Speaker 02 jobs. And you know, we we are seeing whether it's the pharmaceutical industry bringing jobs back, you know, we are reshoring our auto supply. Arizona, the next door here is going to be the semiconductor capital of America and one day the semiconductor capital of the world.
21:11 Mike Rowe? Are you worried that creating jobs and creating opportunities is is different than having a workforce that's either enthused or skilled or or willing?
21:26 Mike Rowe? Were excited to avail themselves to it. That, that to me is where the disconnect is and, and trying to, trying to push those two things together seems to be the job.
21:36 Speaker 02 I think what happened was people, people thought the system was rigged against them. I have given two graduation speeches in the past month. One, one was University of South Carolina. One was a high school graduation where my son used to go. And, you know, I, I told the, these kids, I said, look, you, you, you've had, you, you are resilient because that the college kids were children during the GSC. The high school kids were born then, then they saw COVID. So like they've got a lot of resiliency and I really think it's up to us to let people know that the system does work for them.
22:17 Speaker 02 If you do the right thing, if you, they want to work hard, if you want to make good decisions, then there is still the American dream. So, and you got to make sure that they are good paying jobs on the other side where people can move up.
22:35 Mike Rowe? What is the American dream exactly?
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24:04 Speaker 02 I think the American dream is no matter where you start, look, I'm a small town kid from the, I think there were 500 people in my town when I was growing up.
24:13 Mike Rowe? What town?
24:14 Speaker 02 In South Carolina, Little River, South Carolina and a fishing village right on the North Carolina, South Carolina border. And you get to be Treasury Secretary. But the other American dream is you want to be able to pursue your goals. You want to believe that there's a level playing field. You want to be able to, if you want to start a family, if you want to own a home and you want to be able to have good medical care, like see what is waiting at the end of your career. We passed these Trump accounts, which I think are the most important government benefit for young people since the GI Bill.
24:52 Mike Rowe? Explain how it works and who they're for primarily.
24:57 Speaker 02 Well, they're for any child under age 18, TrumpAccounts.gov. You can go on. Any child who was born during President Trump's term, who has the account will receive a thousand dollars from the Treasury as a seed investment. Families can put in money, relatives, anyone can add. We are seeing some of our great philanthropists who want to give back. Susan and Michael Dell have donated $6.25 billion to the children of America. Works out to about, anyone who registers for an account, it's $250. 38% of American households own no equities, so they have no exposure to our great stock
25:39 Speaker 02 market, you know, the American innovation, our capital markets, our great management teams. And people talk about there being food deserts that where you can't get nutritious food. I think. They're they're financial service deserts where people haven't been able to get access to accounts like this and frankly, they they don't know about them. So I think this is going to create like this financial literacy boom because it will be a real time experiment. It won't be a there's a street in New York. It's called Wall Street. There's a stock exchange. People are going to be able to look on their phone every day and watch things
26:20 Speaker 02 go up and down. A treasury that we're very committed to financial literacy. We've got five or six modules for different age groups. And I I think that it is going to create a new class of shareholders and it's going to bring people into the system. So when when you were talking about the way people feel, I think the people feel outside the system. So the more people we can bring into the system.
26:47 Mike Rowe? Well, that was my thought when I when I was watching you do the press conference yesterday. The ticker is in the lower right hand corner and I'm looking at the stock market at fifty thousand six hundred. I feel pretty great about that. I I've been involved in it for a while, but I'm thinking of the thirty or forty percent of Americans who must look at that and either not quite understand what it means or resent the fact that they've got nothing to do with it or say about it. And the thing is, it's right in their face every day. Right? And so I think if I understood you right, what you're saying is kid gets a thousand bucks at birth and that starts to grow. I assume it's vested in.
27:29 Speaker 02 It's vested low low cost index funds. And when they turn eighteen, they could it's it's compounded for eighteen years. They can either take it out to start a business, down payment on a home for education, or they can roll it into a retirement account at tax free and then it can keep compounding then. And again, they can keep adding to it. And one message that I would want to get to people, and I think it's a great point, that if you feel if you if you look at the stock market doing well and think you're not participating, if you are working.
28:07 Speaker 02 The anywhere in the economy, the fact that the stock market is doing well is good for you because when companies are doing well and a huge amount of the companies aren't listed on the stock exchange, they're small business, but it means the economy is doing well. As the economy does well, people will do better. In President Trump's first term, the bottom 50% of households then did better than the top 10% in terms of the increase in net worth. Hourly workers did better than supervisory workers, and I think we can do that again.
28:43 Mike Rowe? I was talking to the CEO over at Home Depot, Ted Decker, who said that he reckons the amount, the percentage of the GDP represented by housing right now is something like $50 trillion. And again, vis a vis the American dream, if you're renting, if you're not really in that, how can you feel as if you're participating above and beyond the Trump account? I mean, how broadly are you trying to pull people into this through the lens of a financially literate citizen?
29:19 Speaker 02 Problem we have now is a lot of people have very low mortgage rates. They don't want to move. There's probably a group, I'm not going to speak for you, but my age, who they would like to downsize, but the mortgages are so low, they don't want to do it. But this will eventually work its way through the system. One thing that we've done, there's a bipartisan bill up on the Hill to keep institutional investors out of housing. And everyone says, well, they're only 3% of the market. Markets are made on the edges. And
29:56 Speaker 02 in many of the growth markets, maybe Atlanta, some markets in Texas in the Sun Belt, they can be 20 or 30% of the market. So we're trying to push institutional investors out. We're trying to work on schemes for first time home buyers, and we're working with the builders to see what we can do.
30:18 Mike Rowe? You mentioned metals, rare earths, along with energy. And I just think of the things that we rely upon, even timber, to the earlier point. What
30:32 Mike Rowe? What can we do to make ourselves more independent with all of that? Critical metals, rare earths, all of that? If you could just talk a little bit about the relationship with China, why we need them, and is there an impact on the average citizen?
30:51 Speaker 02 Oh, there's a huge impact on the average citizen. I mean, anyone who has an iPhone, they're rare earth magnets. In that, if you go in for an MRI, there's nothing that uses more rare earth magnets than an MRI. And guess what? Ninety-five percent of them come from China. And we weren't paying attention. Largest rare earth magnets company used to be in the US. The Chinese bought it, took it to China, and now they export back to us. So what we are doing, the Trump administration is committed. We have a list of supply chain vulnerabilities where things are a single point of failure, and we are working to bring those back. We are securing...
31:33 Speaker 02 So rare earths, there are two parts to it. There's the mining, and rare earths actually aren't that rare.
31:40 Mike Rowe? Or earth, really?
31:42 Speaker 02 Yep. We have them in the US. There are certain ones that are only in certain locations around the world. And we are accumulating mining assets, but we have to be able to process it here. So we're standing up facilities to process here. We're going to set up controls to avoid the Chinese predatory pricing. And we're seeing which of our Western allies, whether it's Japan, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Korea, want to join us in this and kind of taking back our sovereignty. We are working... The real thing that might freak you out, freak me out, is ninety percent of the precursor chemicals for our medicines are made in China.
32:26 Speaker 02 Anyone who's had a child has given them amoxicillin. That we could be cut off from a moxocillin. So we made a decision. We turned a blind eye because it was cheaper to do it offshore. We worshipped efficiency and gave up resiliency. We wanted consumption, but we didn't focus on production.
32:47 Mike Rowe? Huxley said the greatest threat to freedom was total anarchy, but the second greatest was total efficiency.
32:56 Speaker 02 I like that. I may use that, so thank you.
32:59 Mike Rowe? Well, you're ripping off Huxley, not me.
33:01 Speaker 02 Okay.
33:01 Mike Rowe? But, but I mean, what, how do you think about efficiency versus effectiveness?
33:06 Speaker 02 Well, there's a trade off and a lot of it's invisible because with efficiency, there's a bottom line. And you, you can add your bottom line, but you're accumulating a risk over here. It's, it's kind of like, you know, if, if you think about good health.
33:24 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
33:25 Speaker 02 You could eat a lot of red meat. It's good. You're getting a lot of protein. You're strong, but you're also building up cholesterol and it's a silent killer. And I think about like, if you're not paying attention to efficiency and resiliency, in a way it's a silent killer.
33:42 Mike Rowe? Can I ask you about AI?
33:43 Speaker 02 Of course.
33:44 Mike Rowe? And data centers?
33:44 Speaker 02 Yep.
33:45 Mike Rowe? I mean, neither one of those things existed when Huxley wrote that and I think Brave New World. But it feels to me like 75% of the country is uneasy about AI and nervous about data centers. Larry Fink at BlackRock says that we got a $10 trillion infrastructure that has to be built out in the next seven or eight years. It's, it's not really negotiable, but I think a lot of people look at that and they feel like we're doing it in the name of efficiency. Because we have to somehow compete with China in order to get the AI first, which means the data centers, which we don't quite understand either. So we're like in some kind of crazy race and we don't know where the finish line is.
34:29 Mike Rowe? We just know it's really expensive and unnerving. So make everybody feel better about that.
34:36 Speaker 02 I'm mercifully not an economist, I'm an economic historian. So the history of new technologies, people are always worried. People were, there were people who wouldn't get into cars. When cars first came out, you had somebody at night who walked in front with a lantern and kind of did that. And people owned a horse and buggy, maybe weren't happy. Twenty percent of the jobs that people had now didn't exist in 2000. So we've got to keep innovating. The people who've done it, who are building it out, have done a terrible job explaining it. And when you use AI, when you go on Google, Google's AI.
35:20 Speaker 02 When you do spell check, that's AI. It is just growing, it's growing, and it's going to be able to do more for you. Like, the optimistic view of AI, I am very optimistic for small business on AI, because it's going to let the, it's going to let small business compete with big business. You could start a business that used to take 10 people to start, you could start with one or two people. And we've seen no job loss from AI yet. I don't think we have to. I talked to corporations. We see one large credit card company, maybe we'll be able to figure it out. When I say this, they move people from collections to the travel department.
36:04 Speaker 02 And AI is going to make people more efficient. It's a tool, and it is to be used, just like Google didn't exist in 2000. Now it's a verb.
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38:02 Speaker 02 When I was in college, you used to have to go, like, you'd go, you'd look up when something had been written in the newspaper, in this book, then you'd go, you'd get a microfiche, you'd have to print it out. It was like an all-day project as opposed to what's happening now. So like, that's a good kind of efficiency. And you can use that kind of efficiency to make you more resilient. And what I will say is, we are the AI superpower. We are ahead of China. I think we're about a year ahead. I think we will continue moving ahead. We probably used to have 50 or 60% of the compute power in the world. We'll probably soon be at 80. And that is an incredible national advantage.
38:46 Speaker 02 And I think that the best thing that the AI labs can do is do a much better job of educating people on how to use AI, how it can work for them, either whether it's at home or in their business. I did. I was on a call the other day, they have some something they have for my son. And the person on the call said, do you mind if my AI agent is on the Zoom with us?
39:13 Mike Rowe? Right.
39:14 Speaker 02 And this is different.
39:16 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
39:16 Speaker 02 And we went through there's some things and then I got a six page report. Three days later, beautifully written, and it covered everything we'd done. And this is someone who just started a business two years ago.
39:31 Mike Rowe? It really is a tool. And you know, I, I, I think of it.
39:37 Mike Rowe? Sometimes like a, like a firearm. It, it can be used for extraordinary virtue and extraordinary mischief. And I think, um, I think we just don't have our heads around yet precisely how to wield this thing and who ought to have it.
39:56 Speaker 02 Well, so, so that's, that's what we're doing. Yeah, I, I'm running a lot of the AI effort. They have for the administration. And what we are trying, you know, what we are trying to calibrate is, you know, there's an innovation race between us and the Chinese that we just cannot lose. If, if the Chinese were ahead of us in this, I, I can tell you the mischief and the havoc that they would wreak. And that the leverage they would have over us would just be that I, I don't even want to think about it. It's unconscionable. But we are ahead, we want to stay ahead, but we want to balance innovation with safety.
40:35 Speaker 02 So, you know, we, we are trying to find the right equilibrium for the, the best combination of innovation and safety. And we're going to get there. And the, these AI labs, um, they are cooperating and they, they want to be part of the solution.
40:54 Mike Rowe? Why is it that so many truly consequential things? And by that, I mean, things that we really all depend on could be fossil fuels, could be AI. It could, it's, it's a long list, but they all seem to be beset with communication problems. At some point, the very industries most responsible for providing these things that we rely on so profoundly have failed to remind us.
41:20 Mike Rowe? Why we ought to be grateful, maybe, or why we ought to at least understand their actual impact on us. It's a colossal failure.
41:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, look, I don't know what it would have been like to be around Thomas Edison. Like, I don't know.
41:37 Mike Rowe? He was cranky, from what I'm told.
41:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, very cranky and ruthless businessman, like General Electric, monopolistic.
41:44 Mike Rowe? Latigious.
41:44 Speaker 02 Latigious, very, just, just ask Mr. Tesla.
41:48 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
41:49 Speaker 02 And nothing's different. I think it's just more widely known, widely transmitted. So, just, just because you're good at inventing something, doesn't mean you're good at selling it. But, yeah, just about every American at some point has touched a Microsoft product.
42:09 Speaker 02 I don't think Bill Gates was especially a great salesman. He was a great inventor.
42:13 Mike Rowe? What's more important in this modern age, innovation or imitation?
42:19 Speaker 02 Over the long run, innovation. Over the long run, it's gotta be that you, you can't, you can't steal your way. You can have knockoffs, you can have, but Coca-Cola's still number one.
42:32 Mike Rowe? Sure, but the miracle of getting it bottled and into every refrigerator in the exact same way and the exact same quantity with the exact same taste, that's kind of a miracle, too. The guy that was just sitting there has a company called Apex, and they're, they're mass producing satellites for the first time. And I didn't make this point to him because I think he's looking at what he's doing as very innovative, and it is. But it seems like the root of his success is going to hinge upon his ability to imitate himself perfectly, over and over and over.
43:07 Speaker 02 Well, mass, mass production, you, you make more of something, price goes down, right? So, so, and the usage goes up. So, you know, that's what we're seeing. I, I got into the job market in 1984, and you might remember Lotus Notes and these spreadsheets and everybody was, what's gonna happen to bookkeepers? You know what? Demand for bookkeepers went through the roof because it was so cheap to hire a bookkeeper.
43:30 Mike Rowe? Right, right.
43:31 Speaker 02 And, and they were much more efficient. So, like...
43:36 Speaker 02 Imitation, sometimes imitation can set off very good competition and competition brings down price.
43:43 Mike Rowe? Since you mentioned your resume and your past, how did you wind up here? And I don't mean that through an American dream lens. I mean, your, your own philosophy, your own politics, your own ideology. You seem to have arced in, in a way.
44:01 Speaker 02 Give you, give you a little history. Our, our family, early days in South Carolina, and we'd been prosperous for 200, 250 years. Same spot and my dad had some financial troubles. I got my first job when I was nine.
44:16 Mike Rowe? Nine years old.
44:17 Speaker 02 Nine years old, bussing tables.
44:19 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
44:20 Speaker 02 So from biggest house in town to bussing tables. And I can tell you, and also putting out umbrellas on the beach in Myrtle Beach. I can tell you, when you get a W two and you're nine years old, but you, you weren't about money. Like I had spending money so I could save my paycheck and spend my tips. So that's why I like no tax and tips. I wanted to do public service. I think we have a great country, but I was always probably like a lot of your viewers. I was very leery of the conventional wisdom. And to the extent that I had success in the markets for 30 or 40 years, it was not going along with the trial.
45:02 Mike Rowe? The reverse commute.
45:03 Speaker 02 The reverse commute. Like why that, what, what is everybody believe that could be wrong? Or why can you be ahead of the curve? Like a lot of times I, I was just too early. I, in my private business, I think I had a critical mineral stock that I owned from oh nine, 2015 and went bankrupt. Right? My worldview has been that there, there is, there is a path where the system works for everybody. And the great thing about our democracy is it's self-regulating.
45:47 Speaker 02 If, if we go too far one way or too far the other thus far, Ben Franklin said, you got a republic, if you can keep it, it keeps it. And the way we kept it is by moving back and forth. We're here at the Reagan Library. In the seventies, we're the great malaise. Huge inflation, national spirit. Jimmy Carter was a very nice man. You you might remember that speech he gave, sitting in front of the fire and he had his sweater on. We're all gonna have to do, have a little less and suck it in. And then Ronald Reagan came and just kind of reignited the national spirit. And I I think we have a great national spirit,
46:27 Speaker 02 a great platform, and we got to make sure, again, that we keep everybody believing in it.
46:33 Mike Rowe? What would Scott Best have done with a thousand bucks Trump account when he was nine years old, setting up umbrellas in Myrtle Beach?
46:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, I I used to have, I'm dating myself, I used to have a passbook savings, a Christmas club. They used to put my money into that. I would have just put more money into the Trump account.
46:52 Mike Rowe? So I understand it. If I have a kid, I can open an account, Fed's put in a thousand dollars.
46:59 Speaker 02 Well, i- i- if they're born during President Trump's term, otherwise you can open the account, you can contribute up to five thousand dollars. Your your business, businesses, a lot of employers are going to put in the couple hundred, up to a thousand dollars for their employees, children. About twenty states are going to contribute. So the most important thing is to get the account open.
47:24 Mike Rowe? Get it open.
47:25 Speaker 02 Get it, get it open, and a lot of good things are gonna happen. Accounts are gonna go live July 4th, which is the 250th anniversary. Monday, July 6th, they're gonna go live, and then it's gonna start compounding.
47:40 Mike Rowe? And if the index is any indication, that compounding is gonna basically double every seven, eight years.
47:46 Speaker 02 Exactly.
47:46 Mike Rowe? Right? So you contribute as you go. You go from zero to fourteen years old. Your money's doubled twice, at least.
47:54 Speaker 02 At least.
47:56 Mike Rowe? And now you look at that little ticker in the lower right hand corner and you feel like you're a piece of it, part of it.
48:03 Speaker 02 And you want to learn about it, you want to be much more financially literate because financial literacy, I always tell people there are two sides to it. There's a great program, my hometown in Charleston, South Carolina, College of Charleston, a lot of kids, they're first generation students or they're on financial aid and all the credit card companies are waiting out on the freshman lawn. You want a credit card, here you go. And they've never had a credit card before and boom, they max out and they're not in college anymore. So there are two sides, there's making it and then there's managing debt responsibly. And I can tell you now, there's so many of these like programs, buy now, pay later, that
48:47 Speaker 02 the people can really get sideways very, very quickly.
48:51 Mike Rowe? If I were to ask you for one bit of advice, and I know I hate cookie cutter advice, but as a man in your position right now, if you could just flick your fingers and get America to understand, really understand one core financial truth about their own personal economy, what would it be?
49:13 Speaker 02 Gauge your personal risk level. So a young person should take more financial risk than somebody our age. That the worst thing you can do is to get out over your skis and then the power of long-term compounding. Like, people used to come up to me and said, well, how do I make money fast? I said, rob a bank. Because the market might go up, it might go down, might stay the same. But over time, it goes up. Warren Buffett said, never bet against America. And what is your risk tolerance? I always tell people that you don't want to panic at the bottom, you don't want to be euphoric at the top. The main thing is, it's a long game.
49:58 Speaker 02 It's a very, very long game.
50:01 Mike Rowe? Patience.
50:02 Speaker 02 Patience and predictability and resiliency too. A lot of people can't afford to put money away for a rainy day fund, but it's good to have that cushion. It's good to have the cushion. And I think what's going to be very interesting about these Trump accounts is like they're going to be sitting there and compounding and these children are going to know that they have it.
50:30 Mike Rowe? And the place to go?
50:31 Speaker 02 Trumpaccounts.gov. The site went live yesterday. We are number one in the app stores now. Everyone's downloading it.
50:41 Mike Rowe? Amazing. All right, you got a treasury to run and the wind is going to blow us off the mountain.
50:45 Speaker 02 Exactly.
50:46 Mike Rowe? I really appreciate your time. And the speech was called, "While We Slept."
50:51 Speaker 02 "While America Slept." So it's a takeoff. Winston Churchill wrote a book, "While England Slept," and what Nazi Germany was doing during that time. And he said, "England was ill-prepared for what the Nazis were doing." And my point is that if we let this go on much longer, we were ill-prepared for what non-allies were doing.
51:18 Mike Rowe? How terribly political of you, Mr. Churchill.
51:21 Speaker 02 Well, I'm trying to be diplomatic. There would have been a point of no return.
51:25 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
51:26 Speaker 02 There would have been a point of no return where it's just too big a project to bring back. And I tell you, there's a group of us in the administration, and we are just all out, pedal to the metal. And we believe if we leave in January 2029, and we haven't accomplished a lot of the goals that I talked about in my speech today, we will have failed.
51:50 Mike Rowe? Well, the most optimistic thing about your speech is the title, because it implies that we're no longer asleep.
51:55 Speaker 02 Nope. It's that we slept at this, we slept at this, and America has awakened and...
52:03 Mike Rowe? Not woke.
52:04 Speaker 02 What?
52:04 Mike Rowe? Not woke.
52:05 Speaker 02 Not woke.
52:06 Mike Rowe? But awakened.
52:06 Speaker 02 Awakened, awakened, and full speed ahead. And when we put our mind to something, nobody does it like we do.
52:14 Mike Rowe? I sure appreciate your time.
52:15 Speaker 02 Glad to do it.
52:16 Mike Rowe? Pleasure.
52:17 Speaker 02 Good to see you.
52:18 Mike Rowe? Thanks. When you leave a review, only five stars will do. Not just one, or just two, or just three. We were hoping... Four more. As in, one more than a four. Please, one more than four. Just a quick review with five stars, too. From a you, five stars will do.
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