The AI Race: Why the Future of Power Is at Stake with U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright

Hi everyone, I'm Tony Robbins. Welcome to the Holy Grail of Investing podcast.

I love the world where America is the preeminent power.

And to keep that in place, we need to be the leader in AI. But we can't have the AI power if we don't have the electricity.

The electricity sector is very heavy government regulation, very difficult to get a permit.

Imagine a world where China is the preeminent military power.

And I don't want to know what That world is like I don't know at all. What are you seeing that no one else is seeing that makes you confident that we can win this war?

The world has a massive amount of energy. We just need to get regulations and bureaucrats out of the way.

This is the power of an entrepreneur working with entrepreneurs in government. That's exactly right. We're going to make cancers that are death sentences today manageable conditions.

We're going to have quantum computing. We're going to harness fusion energy because AI is just giving us that extra horsepower.

Fusion, will it be available in electricity in the United States in our lifetime? Absolutely. Wow.

What are some of the best opportunities for them? They want to make a difference in America. They want to make a nice return.

Our dream is in this administration, which means in the next three and a quarter years, we're going to have.

Hi, everyone. I'm Tony Robbins. Welcome to the Holy Grail of Investing podcast. This is my partner. Christopher Zuck. Thank you for joining us.

We're going to have an amazing day today. We're here in Washington, D.C. at the nation's capital. We're here because energy is the topic. You know, everyone talks about energy.

We know it affects everything, the quality of our lives. But today, energy means intelligence.

The AI race is the most important race in the world today. We need to beat China.

If we're going to be the superpower we've been and continue to dominate, we need to make sure we win that race.

There's a lot of fear of scarcity of energy, concerns about energy.

And so we thought maybe the best thing to do is bring you to meet one of our dear friends who happens to be the Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright.

Chris, great to be with you again. Thanks for making the time. We really appreciate it. Tell me something. You've been given a pretty giant task.

You're supposed to give us energy dominance, or as the president talks, the golden age of energy dominance for America again.

And there's some pretty big challenges ahead of us. We're a little bit behind China and so forth. But we can talk about the challenges.

I'd like to first find out from you, in your unique position as Secretary of Energy, what do you see are the greatest opportunities right now in energy that people may not be aware of?

We hit a couple. You know, one is just bringing realism back to energy.

You know, energy, as you and I know, energy matters so much and there's so much politics and superstition and myth around it that just got us in the wrong direction.

You know, we were the last administration was about energy subtraction.

We've got to get rid of the big energy sources and then grow the little energy sources. Well, the math just doesn't work on that.

So we're and I think, as I say, common sense is contagious.

I think we're getting around the horn people to realize the real goal is more energy, massively more energy.

In the United States, around the world, more affordable, reliable, secure energy is just the road to a better lifestyle.

And so we'll come back to that. The second thing I'm super excited about, Tony, is in the Department of Energy is our 17 national labs.

These are just incredible institutions. They're gems of our country.

They're the biggest physical sciences Nobel Prize factories on the planet.

So we have these incredible scientific institutions, and we're on the cusp of massive breakthroughs in science.

So we've got four big efforts, or three huge efforts. Artificial intelligence, right? Hitting critical mass now.

That's a partnership with the private sector. Quantum computing, we have at small scale today.

But if we can scale quantum computing, that's also game-changing. Changes everything. Fusion energy.

I went to college over 40 years ago to work on fusion energy. What powers the sun and the stars?

And that is making massive progress now because of artificial intelligence advances in material science.

And so I think we're going to see pathways to commercial fusion energy in the next few years. Wow.

And think of breakthroughs in semiconductors and materials in general. So it's an age of scientific discovery right now.

So to have a science geek turned tech nerd like me in this position, it is a kid in a candy shop.

Well, you aren't the typical energy secretary. Last time we met, we were talking about a project we're working on, Breakthrough in Hydrogen, and you were describing yourself as a nerdy guy, not a buttoned-up energy secretary.

And you really aren't. But first of all, you were approved bipartisan. You had seven Democrats, one independent.

And most people look at someone in your position as a bureaucrat, but you're an incredible entrepreneur. You've built some of the most successful companies in the energy sector.

I'd love for you if you'd share that with us. But also, I know one of those companies was involved with fracking, and I heard from a mutual friend that at one point on camera you drank some fracking fluid just to show people it wasn't dangerous.

So give us a little sense about your origin story. How did you come to be here? That's true.

So I grew up in Denver, Colorado, you know, suburban area, you know, loved sports, loved outdoors, loved all the things young kids like.

But the different thing, my brother and I really loved science. Like so we read science fiction. We wanted to learn about science.