From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. Is the AI economy a bubble?

Are we just in the early moments of a technological revolution?

Or are we overextended and headed for a crash?

And if we are watching a bubble inflate right now, what should the government,

or for that matter, the individual investor, do about it? My guest today has a lot of bubble experience.

He was an economic advisor in the Clinton White House when the dot-com boom imploded. And then he worked for President Obama in the

aftermath of the housing bubble and the crash of 2008. Today, he's a Harvard economist and a

contributing writer for New York Times opinion. Jason Furman, welcome to interesting times.

Great to be with you.

So, Jason, we're going to talk about the economy as a whole and even the long-term future of American growth.

But I want to start in the place where a lot of Americans' thoughts about the economy start, which is with my own stock market portfolio.

I had this moment a few months ago when OpenAI rolled out its latest version of ChatGPT,

and there was sort of a general disappointed reaction.

And you had people who had been AI skeptics finally claiming vindication saying, look, the AI revolution is not delivering as fast as was hoped. And in that moment, I went in and looked at my

very boring mix of mutual funds and index funds, looked at just how fast it had risen in the era

of the AI boom and thought to myself, man, seems like

I'm invested in what might be a bubble. And a lot of Americans have had this thought,

I think, in the months and weeks since then. You've had a lot of talk about how large AI and

AI-related companies loom in the stock market. And I want to start there. Just how big a

part of growth right now is artificial intelligence and everything associated with it.

AI is an enormous part of our macro economy right now. And there's two ways to think about the

economy. One is demand.

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