Scott Bessent | All-In DC

31:23Spending never changes. Spending never has to get renewed. And I think when I look and think about a mental model and how the systems work, how do they break down, one of the things that has caused this spending bulge is this idea that that you never had to restore spending. Oh, it's not. And the incentive model is when you have a constituency that you represent as an elected representative that's earning from that spending, they're telling you if you wanna get reelected, make sure my earnings stay and get me more. And then every year you've got a set of elected representatives who's, you know, primary objective in a democratic system is to go in and get more money for their constituents.

32:05How do we solve that problem? And how do you think about that? Well, when you got to get what you got to do, I do you think that that's true? Do you think that most politicians are here to just get money for the question? Yeah, I mean it's it's OPM. It's other people's money, but they Danny DeVito have that movie. But you would regard that as being a good politician, like you brought home the bacon for for your district. Yeah, that it because the CR, a lot of people didn't like it, but one of the things that a lot of people didn't like, there were no earmarks in it, but how dare they? Totally.

32:41The Christmas tree bill that kind of shows up at the 11th hour. Where everyone gets a little bit. Yeah. Can you talk about, so we talked about this deregulation as this one very important lever, right? So how do we add 50, 100 basis points of growth back in? We're going to do it through deregulation. How do you undo the financial corset, as you said? What are the, what are the sort of three or four big ideas that you'd like to affect? Yep, so we are re -examining all the bank regulations and why are they there? Why do banks have to, I can't remember, it's 5 % or 7 % to hold treasury bills? What are the regulations?

33:22Why do I have a whole group of community bankers or small banks here last week? And why do they have to hold the same amount of capital that JP Morgan and Wells Fargo and City hold when they don't have the complexity that they don't have, why do the regulators, one of these small bankers said, well, you know, Bank America does it this way. Bank America has a trillion dollars in deposits. This was $183 million dollar bank. Yeah, well when you look at the regulatory overhang of some of these things Basil one basil to you have all of these frameworks And then as a result all these Organizations that are running around trying to help you administer this complexity all it does is just lower economic activity in the end Well, and but it's I know you all talk about incentives a lot back to incentives.

34:13What's the regular regulators incentive? Just to keep keep tightening the core said. They don't care about growth They don't care about the common sense. Turn off, turn off every red. Get their job. If you had to create a metric then to say, OK, here's how we're going to measure this undoing of the financial course. Is it sort of the lending velocity by private lenders so that the private re -leveraging can occur? Is that a good way to think about that? Of course, of course, rates the way to think about it? Well, it doesn't have to be rates. If we do all the things I was just talking about, If we deregulate, if we have cheap energy, if we should access labor from the government, if we get government spending down, then inflation should come down, rates should come down.

35:05But on the question of how are we going to measure it, I don't have any problem with private credit. I actually think it's exciting. It's dynamic. It meets the business where it is. Yeah, I can. And the strength of the US financial system is the depth and now the breadth. But you could see that what's happened, that so much lending is being pushed outside the regulated banking system that tells you it's over -regulated. Right, yeah. So now, once we, so one test will be, how has bank lending, especially small regional small banks, community banks that come and and the small banks, the small banks and community banks.

35:54There's 70 % of agolones, there are 40 % of small business loans. And that's one of the reasons main streets been stifled. So can you talk about then how you will work with the Fed in sort of the change of all of this financial machinery? And do you need to work with Congress too to make these changes? And also just generally maybe your thoughts on just the Fed in this process of helper foe like where where do they sit? Well the Fed I 100 % support the Fed's autonomy in monetary policy. Yeah, I don't agree with it all the time, but the How it is it's how it is and And so, and I said, I won't comment on perspective policy.

36:43I can talk about their mistakes in the past, which have been numerous. But I think, like with any system, as it expands beyond sort of the core, I actually think that some of the things they've done in regulation, some of the things they've done in kind of climate and DEI, some of the things, maybe even non -standard monetary policy, threatens their independence. And I want them to stay strong, robust, and independent in monetary policy. On regulation, I think that they have been much too harsh on especially the smaller banks, medium banks. So there's three main bank regulators. There's the Fed, Office of Control, or the currency, OCC, and the FDIC.

37:39And then there are other regulators, the SEC, CFTC, but the banking regulators at the federal level, or those three, here at Treasury, we have something called FSOC, financial stability oversight council. and I chair that and via that the President's working group, which is another convening mechanism, that I plan to just keep pushing for safe sound and smart deregulation. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? Again, there's a capital charge to banks for buying treasury. totally. So I actually think there's a chance that if we take it's called the supplementary leverage ratio, if we take that away, it becomes a binding constraint on banks, we might actually pull treasury bill yields down by 30 to 70 basis points.

38:42Every basis point is a billion dollars a year. Can we talk about that for a second? So I think and I've said this for a year probably, but one of the biggest mistakes that I think Janet Yellen affected was this continued issuance of money on the short end of the curve to finance these deficits, which gives you, you inherit an incredibly difficult challenge, I think, over the next nine months. I think there's like nine or ten trillion that has to get refinanced. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, look, I thought that it that when rates were low, you're supposed to turn out rates. Exactly. And instead, the the Treasury for the past few years has pulled rates in.

39:29And I think part of that was to keep rates lower that they they change the issuance schedule when rates move back up towards 5%, I have maintained that policy, but I'm maintaining it because it's going back to David's question. When are we going to see the results from this, getting the government spending under control? And I don't think the market's recognized it yet. Yeah, like again, if we don't they're not sure what to believe. I mean we hear this commentary a lot like what do you really what we? There's just a lot of uncertainty. There's a big spectrum of opinions there. Yeah Like the central value tendency you're right the central value tendency like what's the center of it?

40:21Because the range of outcomes is so so broad and And we know there's a problem there. We know there's waste fraud and abuse. Quantify it. Quantify it. So I think as we are more able to quantify it, we will get credit for it. So let me go back. So outside of waste fraud and abuse, as it's termed, I want to go back to the question I asked earlier, how much does this administration need Congress to act to get to 3 to 3 .5 % deficit to GDP? And how what's your read on the Congress and how willing and able they are to take the action that's needed here? Yeah, I think there are a lot of headlines, especially after the CR about the Democrats being in disarray.

41:10And media like, media likes to write about disarray. I think the under or untold story here is Republicans have for a change actually been very disciplined. And I think a lot of that President Trump is kind of shepherding the party, shepherding the movement. Imagine he said, oh, that Mike Johnson will never get reconciliation instructions out of, he's got such a slim majority. Well, he did it. He did it. Yeah. That he'll never be able to pass a clean CR. He did it. You did it. So let's see what happens with the budget. So we need Congress to be our partners on the budget. They're very engaged, the House and the Senate.

42:01That everybody recognizes that if we don't give this done, it's going to be the biggest, it's pass fail. It's the biggest tax hike in history. Where does Doge come in? Well Doge, that's the cost -cutting. And it's the first time we've really ever had business people look at it. That this Clinton Gore Commission that we hear a lot of like, or hear a lot about, I think it was a bunch of business school professors. And - But here you've got real CEOs, you got Lutnik, you got Bergham, you got Elon - I mean this cabinet is stock full of experienced operators that can go in and identify where there's an opportunity for saving the taxpayers money and still getting the results.

42:44Well, it's sad. And we had this crypto council meeting the other day, and I was sitting and looking at myself, secretary, and Kelly Lauper. Everybody was a market person. I forget business. But with Doge, that I am completely aligned with what Elon's doing. And everyone said, would you have to do it so fast? You have to do it. Like I said, I've only been in this business for seven weeks. I've only been in DC for eight weeks. The thing I can tell you is if you don't move fast, the vested interest will weigh you down. Like the quicksand will come up or the claws get set. The claws, yeah. Everybody's got lobbyists, everybody's got it.

43:35I mean, think about it within a 10 mile radius of here. 25 % of the GDP of the US pulsates through here. Pulseates. Every day. And everybody wants to just gimmel it all. I said to Elon, we're in a meeting, and I said, you know, people are mad at you because you're moving their cheese. And it's not their cheese. It's American people's cheese. 100%. Every dollar spent goes into someone's pocket, and that person's gonna fight to the nail to get that dollar to keep flowing into their pocket. And it's a very like there is no winning in Elon's role. There's every single time he takes action, there are people that are gonna come after him, that are gonna come after the administration.

44:20There's no situation, and obviously gets recast, reclassified in the media as being something different, but there's nothing but downside as you make these changes to individual organizations that participate. And then it takes a while for the flow of that money to find its way or those individuals to find their way back into the productive private economy, that's where I think there's a big gap and a big challenge in the perception of the actions that are going on with the changes right now, is everyone sees the cuts but they don't see the benefits. And that's nine months, 12 months, 15 months down the road, and that's a really hard thing to reconcile for most.

44:55Yeah, and I'd say there are a couple of things too, is one, everyone's hearing cuts and they think their government services are going to get. That's right, And they're not. I keep saying, it's the Department of Government Efficiency, not government extinction, not government elimination. And can we make it run much better with fewer people, with fewer calls? And I don't want to demonize any of these federal employees as I take in this building. I've been so impressed with the quality of the people. I would have hired them in my private firm. They are a great public servants. I need to stay for the weekend.

45:36I need a 25 page memo in 72 hours. The super high quality. I actually think when all this is done, there will have been two big savings. One will be on these contractors. Which we were just talking about this. We were just talking about this. We were just talking about the one in the West Wing. It's incredible that he said, I'm not going to name the firm, but he said this one organization gets 98 % of their revenue. I was in the newspaper so we can say it. It's Booz Allen. So we were talking about this. And then we were going to do the numbers on the other terms and it's just the whole thing. It's shocking.

46:13What kind of risk management is that, by the way? But it tells you that they didn't manage the risk. That's right. Tells you how entrenched they believe they were. And how good it is for them. And how good it is. You're absolutely right. And the way the grip works, you can only have six month contracts. but they're people who have had 46 -month contracts. They've been in situ for 20 years. Incredible. And it's this whole... I'm so happy there is transparency and visibility into this. If for nothing else, the administration providing this level of insight and data, I think is so important for taxpayers and individuals in this country to see, to recognize and importantly to understand just how much of this grift is going on.

47:00and it's frightening and I'm glad that it's like being addressed. And the American people can see that they want it. Well, this is what I was going to ask you. Let's just say that somehow the board slows this whole thing down. You know, what people say is that the conventionalism, well, then the only place to look will be things like entitlements. Good question, now. Do you think that that's true? Well, I think that now that the cat's out of the bag that the American people are not going to stay with us is that maybe, again, here, maybe in the Northeast quarter, there's some pushback. But when I've seen the polling data and the rest of the country does not want this to stop, And this administration is not going to stop.

47:53The courts, they're trying to throw sand in the gears with the courts and how some judge can say, oh, all these workers have to come back in. But I also think we move really quickly. Now I think when we start putting out some of the anecdotes and the messages and talk about what's happening. Like, I'll talk about it. I'll be talking about it soon, but there's one very large department that everybody deals with on April 15th, that their help desk is fully staffed 24 -7, 365 days a year. They have the same number of people on Christmas Eve as they have on April 14th. This, by the way, is something that I've seen being a lightning rod theoretically every dollar you spend on the IRS, you get $3 back or whatever it is, that's not necessarily true.

48:50Like, I just want to be clear that there's, you can still get all your tax revenue at the federal level, but you don't need to waste. Well, look, I mean, I'd be the ultimate chump if I said, oh, we're going to cut spending. But I also cut revenues with the IRS, which Treasury controls, my three goals are very simple. revenue enhancement, privacy, and customer service. Totally. You know, there's a body of knowledge that says, if we just fed in, and by the way, four or five of these companies can do this now, if we just fed in this entire federal tax code into these AI models, what you can give to Americans is a very guaranteed resolute ability to file taxes with the assurance that there is no waste fraud in the abuse.

49:38And now, all of a sudden, you take this incredible weight off of people's shoulders. Sometimes it is said that you get audited for almost political reasons it seems like. People that... Not almost. We had a big announcement on Tuesday and we brought in the two hundred Biden whistleblowers who have a lot to say about who gets audited, who doesn't. They're going to be sitting in this building, working on IRS matters, and understanding exactly how these audits get triggered, how these political witch hunts happen, and trying to change the ethos of the building. And again, 99 % of the people at the IRS are good people.

50:28It's just like all these other agencies where they're bad folks. But to your point, this is where technology can create very reliable guardrails for the American citizen. You're aware it's like, okay, well if this model says I owe a thousand dollars in tax, this is it, I'm not trying to change anything. I've felt all the effort. Software first, then you just know. Let me go back to entitlement. I talked last week on our podcast about social security. Social security has a $2 .7 trillion balance, which is just basically a treasury bond that they can't trade out of. Should social security have invested in the S &P or invested in equities, and why don't we turn social security into a sovereign wealth fund and invest it for the benefit of all Americans going forward?

51:17Yeah, I think like there's the optimal than there's the possible. George W. Bush tried to privatize social security And I saw your numbers, listen to your numbers going way back. 1971. 1971 and with 15, 16 trillion that we'd have. I don't know what the numbers are since W tried it. Yeah. They'd be substantial. We wouldn't be thinking about a problem in a few years. But I think now you gotta play the hand your dealt. I think we are dealt with Social Security hand. and I think maybe we could re -engineer it if we could create the sovereign wealth fund and have that on the other side. There are a lot of philanthropists who are looking at baby bonds.

52:09So if you can create an investment account for newborns, then that would run on a parallel track to Social Security. So that would be compounding. the other thing would be a safety net. Yeah, but it's still sitting in treasuries on the other side. Yeah. And that's where there's an opportunity, not just to drive up returns, but participate in American economy and give all Americans today the ability to know that they have some participation in American economy rather than having their retirement funds being sitting as a loan to the federal government for spending, which I think could be a big dramatic change.

52:49I don't know if they need to be independent, but I would, I think it's a, it's a real opportunity for us. Are you excited by the idea that sovereign wealth went? I am. I'm excited by the idea. This is President Trump. Everything he does isn't an straight line, but I guarantee you, he has a destination in mind. And the idea that he's going to be the first president in generations who is going to, he wants to create assets for the American people, not just debt. So he wants to take the debt down and then this idea of assets There's a lot of talk about this economic deal. We're gonna do with Ukraine That would have gone in the sovereign wealth button.

53:35Right. Yeah government has big stake and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yeah When it comes out of conservatorship where does that go? Where does that go? As you meant Doug Doug Bergham did great work when he's governor of North Dakota North Dakota has the equivalent of two states sovereign wealth for The seven eight nine hundred thousand people. I think they had twenty five billion dollars, right? And Alaska permanent the Alaska permanent, but all that's from the natural resource money going in yeah So to the extent we start the other day when the sovereign wealth fund was announced, President Trump surprised me and the Oval and said could you make a few remarks and said well, we're gonna mobilize the assets side of the balance sheet.

54:27And all the gold must have is gonna re -value the gold. I can say today we're not re -valueing the gold. But what we are gonna do, Doug Burrum, and Interior, every other department head is looking for the assets that we can mobilize. So if we have energy leases, federal government owned back to the housing shortage, federal government owns a lot of land in downtown urban areas. Can we or in suburban adjacent things in Nevada and Utah, can we use that land? Do you see a wave of privatizations as a way to sort of both pay down the deficits and debts and also just to? That's important to me like why put it in a sovereign wealth fund versus paid on the dead help help kind of do the finance math for us Oh, could you think you get a higher return right well Anything that beats our current return our current interest rate.

55:21Yeah, I mean Not not that in keeping score not that I watch it closely, but the tenure treasury today is 428 428. Yeah, so Can we responding well? Can we can we do better? Yeah, for can we do better than 428? And I think with this group and this cabinet, and if we can put in right now, we're working on the study group for the sovereign wealth fund and we want to do best practices. We're talking to people around the world. We're talking to investment people. We're talking to a lot of the other big sovereign funds. And we're going to do best practices. And we want this to be a legacy of that. Totally.

56:03Well, well, Dan Loeb made this comment that the Australian superannuation, They've got 30 managers and they have as much on their balance sheet today and their fund Then social security does about three trillion dollars and they have seven percent of our population No, it's incredible. It's incredible I was with one of the Middle Eastern funds and I said something about oil running We haven't had an injection into the fund in 20 years. Why was this such a mis for America? What happened in the United States was that we took every excess dollar we had and we invested it in the future. We built infrastructure.

56:42What happened that kept us out of this model where others were so successful and clearly have now gotten ahead of us and their people have a greater kind of safety net than we do. Yeah, I think it was just this idea of it is supposed to be a safety net, not some kind of prosperity ramp. The old age and survivor's disability insurance fund. That's what it's called right under social security. You've mentioned cheap energy as a critical part of this holistic program. I think three times now. Where do we make mistakes in that path where energy gets out of control? What do we need to do to make sure that energy actually the incremental cost of the electron basically goes to zero?

57:27Well, I think the biggest challenge we're having right now is trying to get private sector to lock in for some things that might not have a payoff for five, ten years. And how do we avoid student body left, student body right, with administrations coming and going? So we're trying, we're working on that. Well, this is an incredibly nuanced and I think an important point because we have this very vibrant as you know tax equity and transferability market that allows a lot of these organizations to make these five and ten year investment cases. And you know for all the issues with the IRA of which there are many.

58:08I think the one narrow aspect that it did was it calmed the markets about the future of those specific ITC credits and transferability. And it's a critical thing because there was a report, you probably saw it, but, you know, FURK said 90 plus percent of our incremental electrons as of December were from sources that were leveraging these ITC credits and that transferability. So to your point, we have this very delicate balancing act of making sure we... There's the tax side, but then the regulatory side with fossil, it's tougher because it It crosses a lot of state lines. There's a lot more permitting, a lot less permitting for solar farms, for wind, for geothermal.

58:52Yeah. Yeah. And nuclear? Nuclear is going to be a big part of it, but it's not going to happen tomorrow. We got to fix the supply chain and the regulatory. Well, we got to fix the supply chain. We got to fix the regulatory.

59:09We've got to decide which model are we going to go with. And I'm told that YouTube probably know more about nuclear than I do, but it's okay. Well, no, I don't hate it. I mean, I like nuclear. I just think it's 10 years old. He's a loser. Go listen to him. Yeah. It's just not an investible thing for the next one. Well, but it's important because the question is when it becomes one, that's when we know we fix the problem. But to the point that it's not investible, that's where the government needs to step forward. That's a hundred percent. That's where we have to bridge to the technology. We have to do the time arbitrage.

59:49And also I'm told especially with the smaller plants that you need to cluster them. And you've got to find somebody who wants to cluster them. Let me ask you one more question as we kind of get to the end. but what's been the most surprising thing for you in this role since you've been in office? The national security aspect. I would say 40, 50 percent of my day, Treasury does a lot of national security work. Whether it's syphias in terms of foreigners who want to buy U .S. assets, whether it's sanctions, whether it's OFAC, anti -money laundering. we've just designated the Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

1:00:41We present Trump over the weekend launched a very aggressive strike on missile strike on the HUTI assets. Well, underneath that, we'd already been working for several weeks on their bank accounts. So, or anyone who's adjacent to them, the Iranians supply the Houthis with the their ecosystem previous to my getting here a Treasury had just ruptured the ecosystem so much that The Iranians used to hand them cash now. They're just handing them here take take this oil tanker and try to sell it Right, so like there is the ability to break that down when you go home and you're talking to your kids, you're talking to your husband, and you're like, this was so cool.

1:01:35There must be these moments where you're like, this was so cool. Do you have any anecdotes that you're comfortable sharing where you're like, this is like, I can't believe I'm doing this job? Well, there have been several, but a good example, my family is actually there because after the inauguration, I asked President Trump, I had bring my family and say hello, get a photo, and we're sitting in the oval, so it's myself, my 11 -year -old daughter, my spouse, 15 -year -old son, and the President Trump's having a great conversation with them. And then he said, well, Scott, while you're here, let me call in these other two people, and we need to discuss this.

1:02:19So, they actually got to see government being done live. So, there's that. I have to say, I think the moment with President Trump, vice -president Vance, President Zelensky, was kind of a once in a lifetime thing in the oval outfit. I hope it's once in a lifetime. And I was sitting there in the front row of history, a vice president, Secretary Rubio, myself on the sofa, and watching President Zelensky do what I thought was the biggest diplomatic own goal in history. Yeah, I think you said it very well in TV afterwards. It really, really was based on. And you said, because you were there, you tried to negotiate with him in Kiev.

1:03:14It was a very escalated, I think, use the word escalated or high decibel conversation. High decibel, yes. Yeah. So, but it kind of, my job for 35 years was to be outside the room, trying to put my ear to the door, maybe lift myself over the transome, figure out what the leaders needed to do, were going to do, and then how it would affect the market. And now it's fantastic and amazing and stimulating and a little scary being the person in the room who has to what should we do, what can we do, how is it going to affect the markets, how is it going to affect the real economy, that what's it going to do to working people in America?

1:04:03So how do we fix affordability? We're just going to have to go through and where's the problem? What's the solution in terms of like, or are the insurance markets broken? What can we do? There's been no, and I've been involved in the house building business. There's been no technological change in house building in 50 years, maybe 60. Some of the building codes go all the way back to the Chicago Fire. So what can we do that the way we categorize housing, it's stick built or modular? Is there something in the middle prefab? Is the more that comes out of a factory, the more that it's standardized, that neighborhoods from DC, from DC, to Bethesda, to Potomac, to, like, you could be in contiguous neighborhoods, and if they're different municipalities, they'd all have different building codes, not zoning, building.

1:05:11And why is that? Like, they're adjacent. Why do the houses have to be? So, is there some kind of window guidance that the federal government can give in terms of the more that comes out of the factory, the cheaper it will be, the faster we can make it, things like that? Is there pressure that you can apply or influence you can apply? One of the things you mentioned earlier was just, you know, take San Francisco. There's an artificial constraint that's created by the zoning paradigm, and it's not clear how you unlock that. You know, maybe is it up to private citizens to sort of like have regime change at the local level?

1:05:48But how do we sort of unclog that part of it to marry up with this kind of stuff because it would be great if you could just build up in many places? Yeah, well, I think there are a lot of things where you can look around and find what's interesting That something what's something that's interesting this being done somewhere so I I lived in Greenwich, Connecticut for a while. Maybe the richest suburb in America. There's a ton of multi -family there. Very expensive, very nice multi -family. There's some affordable housing. But Greenwich is not all 10 acres and a horse farm. The state of Connecticut has put in a, I guess it's a law, that every municipality has to allocate 10 % of vacant land to multifamily.

1:06:42And if the zoning board won't give you a hearing, you as a developer, you as a nonprofit for housing can go over the top and go to Hartford. And then Hartford will give you the authority. Well, no town wants the state doing on their behalf. So now the town's negotiating. So, I think that there are a lot of things that can be done. Again, on insurance, is there something that I've been thinking about? Is there something the federal government could do for California? Where we come in, everyone's paying homeowners insurance, then there's re -insurance on top of that. Then I think the California re -insurance company is called Fair on top of that.

1:07:34So it's it will it's a separate plan, but yeah, but it's it's it's it's it's it's It's that's it's that's it's that's it's that's it's it's there's something we could do Where you put another layer of private money in there and then the federal government is the fifth risk Tranche right but it's a federal government comes in Can we mandate down here? proper hygiene changes in the building code. Well, changes in the building code, changes in brush cutting. And material choices. Yeah, right, right, right, yeah, makes sense. Right, so I think there's a lot. And obviously energy, I mean, just getting back to affordability, right?

1:08:13Energy costs come down. That's the thing. That's the way it works. Sorry, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, energy cost or energy cost, but then there's also the, for food, the transportation cost of getting it to the grocery store. or everything that's made out of petroleum products. So I think we can do that. And I think there's a lot to do. Yeah. And it shouldn't be too hard. So we should probably be announcing in about 10 days, we're going to have an affordability czar. But it's going to be someone with a lot of experience in supply chains figuring out what are a lot of the quick fixes is what you can do.

1:08:58Because back to the question, what really has people anxious, it inflation for now is actually pretty close in. And, but the affordability has gotten so away from everyone that how can we bring that down? Yeah, yeah, good. For all our friends at home who talk a lot about The conversation about climate change and carbon -free, I think one of the things that I always point out to people is the cheapest way of driving energy production in this country is there's a low carbon or carbon -free alternative that's out there that's actually cheaper than standing up new plants and there's an acceleration.

1:09:45I don't know how much this administration thinks about that relationship, but it seems to me like if we can unlock energy production, costs come down and this economy transitions. Well, transitions, and I think it's also not being dogmatic. Totally. I saw what the Biden administration did with EVs. I have an EV. I can't wait for it to come up, please. But also have a hybrid, and I think I fill it up maybe three times a year. But this administration had a G -Hod on hybrids because they didn't pass the purity test. Yeah. Well, they were picking winners and losers in a way that a lot of us were left scratching ahead.

1:10:24Yeah. Yeah. And I think cheap energy solves a lot of problems. I think it'll and cheap energy is energy security too. 100 percent. Because that's why Europe's going to over -barrel it literally. And it's why the Russian war machine hasn't again literally run out of gas. And to the extent that we believe we're in an existential arms race for technical supremacy, It's really on one dimension, which is AI, and that is so needy of energy. So if we don't pull all of these issues together and realize that we need to basically take the incremental cost to zero, whatever we do, we need to create incentives and hack us it all together.

1:11:08I mean, we can't compete manufacturing as an energy. We can't compete with that energy. Yep. Yep. I mean, we're not going to crush labor like China and some other countries have done. So we got a crushing energy price. Exactly right. And when you're in the oval, what are the truths and misconceptions of the president? Meaning of the outside and what people know or don't know? Well, how about this? We had a lot of foreign leaders come in and I used someone in one of their entourage as I won't tell you which one. But afterwards he comes up to me and goes, holy crap, because he's really smart. President Trump has perfect recollection because he was talking about something that had happened in that country 30 years ago, and he's sending you really.

1:11:58So the President from Lissons, he is judicious, he is just taking it all in. He likes to see how people react. It's just incredible executive skills. Yeah, and the other thing too, that he's tough, but I went in and I showed him what we were talking about something the other day and I said, well, this is going to cause us some layoffs. Well, let's try to fix it. Yeah, yeah. Let's try to fix it. So I always say he really regards himself as the mayor of America. Right. Yeah. 330 million people. He wants to be personable to everyone. And he cares deeply about all of them. And he doesn't care whether you're Elon Musk or the guy cutting the rose garden, but you're his constituent.

1:12:54Right, well Scott, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been a wonderful pleasure and we really appreciate the insight. We wish you the best. Yeah, and thanks for the service and thanks for doing the role. Good, thanks for the city. Thanks, Scott.

1:13:11I'm doing all of you.