Watch CNBC's full interview with White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett

Sure. First, my heart goes out to Andrea. You could tell that was a couple that was deeply in love throughout their lifetime. I saw Andrea at the Correspondents' Dinner, and we talked about how Alan was doing. And his brain was sharp right up to the very end. In the first term of the Trump administration, I used to meet with him once a month just to pick his brain about what he thinks about the policies we're doing. But my history really began in the 90s, where I was actually the young guy charged with modeling the impact of computers and the internet on the economy with him in the late 90s. I would get notes on my chair: what about this, what about that? Should we change the deflator for this or the deflator for that? He was just an absolutely brilliant mind who saw the computer revolution happening before anyone else did. If you go back and look at the history of the American economy going back over the last 50 years, I think Greenspan's judgment to leave the economy alone and let the internet boom and the productivity boom from the internet happen, even when Bob Gordon was saying, hey, there's no productivity there, he knew it was going to be there. And that judgment created an enormous amount of wealth and prosperity for our country. I want to add one other thing. My very first day at the job at the Fed, I was on leave from Columbia. I was the youngest guy in the room. Greenspan came in. I was in awe. Greenspan was going to be in there with all these giants of the economic profession. And the very first thing he did is ask me my opinion, because that's what a sweetheart he was. He saw there was a young guy here, a new person. We got to show that we care. We care what he thinks. Even though what I thought probably wasn't that valuable to him.

But he didn't just deduce it. He thought about how to figure it out. And one thing that the FOIA people out there should look into is that he had his economic team that worked in the business sector, I was one of those guys, do something. He called the Order Survey, and the Order Survey was basically we would call up his friends that were CEOs of really big companies like GE and machine tool companies, and basically ask them, how are your orders doing? So he had a near-term indicator, but then also we would have conversations. So, hey, is this computer thing making a difference for you? Way ahead of the government data, he had us out there gathering intel with his friends who were CEOs all over the economy. And people were telling us early in 96, yeah, we're starting to use this email thing. It's really helped us with word processing. So we don't have to have typists everywhere. So it really did begin very, very early on because he was innovative in the way he collected data.

Well, Marc Andreessen, friends of mine like Marc and Eric Schmidt, they've said publicly that they saw that thing. Marc really started it with Netscape Navigator. And they think this is bigger. The thing I can say is, in the end, how it ends is something economists could guess about, but we'll have to wait and see. But the thing that's really different about this time is that these AI companies are printing money, and the firms that hire them to improve how they operate, they're printing money. So there are all these profits everywhere in the AI sector. As you might remember, during the dot-com era, everybody had a vision of what the future might be. But that vision wasn't making profits anytime soon. So I think the proof is in the pudding in the sense that AI is there to see already in profits, which suggests you don't have to just have an imagination to value these things.

Getting debt-to-GDP down is a high priority of the president's. As Secretary Bessent has reiterated, it's very much been the anchor point in our presidential budget every year. We've been working hard to take steps that are permanent so that we move in the right direction every year. One thing as an example is that we've reduced federal employment by about 300,000 workers. That's a budget savings that's going to be there forever. When you look at the CBO forecast, they assume we're going to hire those folks back. But that's certainly not our intent while President Trump's in office. So for sure, we care a lot about fiscal sanity. Government spending constraint is really the thing that helps you accomplish that goal. Our objective is that, and we're already seeing it, that the Big Beautiful Bill's tax side is going to have big growth effects. We made expensing last for four years for factories and permanent for everything else. And we just had some of the best capital spending data we've ever seen since I've been following capital spending with Chairman Greenspan in the 90s. We had a month that was sort of 40% at an annual rate for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft. So I think the policies are working. That should help us with the revenue side on taxes, and spending reductions are a big part of where we are.