In this episode, I had the privilege of sitting down with Governor Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history and former U.S. Secretary of Energy. Governor Perry has played a pivotal role in shaping Texas’ energy mix and fostering innovation, and he shared his views both on the current state and on the future of energy.

We explored his energy legacy, including the deregulated electric market, Texas’ leadership in wind and solar power, and the critical need for an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy. Governor Perry shared his strong support for nuclear energy, particularly the potential of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), as well as his vision for leveraging American innovation to export innovative technologies worldwide.

The governor also highlighted Texas’ growing water challenges and presented some ideas for addressing the state’s water needs, including the potential for underground canals powered by innovative technologies like SMRs.

Our conversation explored:

* The meaning of conservatism and the role of government in incentivizing innovation while prioritizing free-market principles;

* Lessons from his time in office, including the need to find middle ground;

* How bipartisan opportunities, like clean energy manufacturing under the Inflation Reduction Act, can strengthen American competitiveness;

* The importance of supporting veterans through plant-based medicine research to address mental health and addiction issues.

Governor Perry’s insights are both pragmatic and visionary, reflecting his unique experience at the state and national levels. Whether you're interested in energy policy, water infrastructure, or the intersection of technology and leadership, this episode has something for you.

As always, please like, share, and leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for being a listener!

Timestamps

00:00 - Introduction to Energy Capital Podcast and Governor Perry's Legacy

01:45 - Governor Perry's energy legacy and influences

06:00 - George Mitchell and the complexity of energy and environmental tradeoffs

09:00 - Governor Perry’s support of an all-of-the-above energy strategy, the need to balance growth and sustainability

15:00 - The meaning of conservatism and the role of government

20:00 - The economic mess and the rise of Republicans the 1980s in Texas

24:00 - The potential for nuclear energy in Texas

28:00 - Small modular reactors and AI data centers

33:00 - Government as a partner, future directions for Department of Energy under Chris Wright and the Trump Administration, potential for exporting American innovation

38:00 - The future of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), including the 45X manufacturing provisions

40:45 - The need to incentivize critical minerals in the US for energy independence and connection to the IRA

45:00 - The need for North - South trade within the Western Hemisphere

46:30 - The national security need for domestic energy development, including renewable energy

48:45 - The Department of Energy and the 17 national laboratories; the possibility for a national lab in Texas (!)

52:00 - An out-of-the box water supply strategy

54:30 - Epic gubernatorial “butt-chewings” from two billionaires

57:30 - Governor Perry’s advocacy for plant-based psychoactive medicinal treatments for veterans to address the veteran suicide epidemic

Shownotes

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Nuclear Power

* NuScale Power – The first U.S.-approved Small Modular Reactor (SMR) design.

* X-Energy – Developer of advanced modular nuclear technologies.

* Abilene Christian University Nuclear Research – Developing research reactors to advance nuclear technologies.

* RELLIS Campus at Texas A&M – Site for advancing SMR deployment and innovation.

* Regents submit test-bed proposal to Nuclear Regulatory Commission

* DOE Office of Nuclear Energy – Supporting SMR innovation and funding for nuclear development.

Energy Policy and Critical Minerals

* Round Top Rare Earth Minerals Project: USA Rare Earth – Mining critical minerals, including lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, in West Texas.

* Texas Mineral Resources Corp.’s Round Top Project

* DOE Loan Programs Office – Federal funding to support clean energy innovation, including SMRs and geothermal.

* Title 17 Clean Energy Financing

* Inflation Reduction Act (IRA):

* 45X Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit – Incentives for U.S.-based clean energy manufacturing.

* Clean Energy Investments Dashboard – Track the 115K clean energy jobs and $131B investments under the IRA.

* Texas Enterprise Fund – State program for attracting businesses and job creation

* George Mitchell and Hydraulic Fracturing:

* Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation – Continuing Mitchell’s philanthropic and energy work.

* Book Recommendation: George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet by Loren Steffy

Water Policy and Infrastructure

* Senator Charles Perry’s Water Plan – Texas Senate Committee on Water.

* Resources: Committee’s Interim Report, Rio Grande Guardian, Texan Article

* Elon Musk's The Boring Company – Innovations in underground tunneling and infrastructure development.

Veterans' Mental Health and Plant-Based Medicines

* Ibogaine Clinical Research:

* Stanford’s Ibogaine Trial – Read the research HERE and HERE

* Learn more about Ibogaine treatments: MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies).

* Marcus Luttrell and Veteran Support:

* Lone Survivor Foundation – Supporting veterans and their families.

* Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s Advocacy – Promoting plant-based medicine research for PTSD and addiction.

* Texas Monthly article on Rick Perry’s advocacy for psychoactive drug treatments and his friendship with veteran Marcus Luttrell

* Suicide Among Veterans

Transcript

Doug Lewin

Hey everyone, I'm Doug Lewin. Welcome to the number one Texas energy podcast, Energy Capital. Thanks for joining us today. My guest this week is none other than Governor Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in the history of the state of Texas and the 14th Secretary of Energy. I loved this conversation. I could have talked to the Governor for another several hours. We covered a lot of ground with a particular focus on possible areas of priority for the incoming Trump administration, including nuclear power, geothermal. We talked about the prospects for the Inflation Reduction Act, particularly as it pertains to critical minerals and competitiveness for the United States.

We talked about the need for balance in energy policy and the importance of finding middle ground, building on the podcast I recorded with David Spence a few weeks ago. It really was a great conversation. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. As always, please like and share the episode so that others can find us. Please leave a five-star review wherever you listen to your podcast. This is a free episode. We cannot do this without your support. Please become a paid subscriber today if you aren't already and get access to the full archives of nearly 200 articles at the Texas Energy Empowered Newsletter.

You'll get subscriber-only content like our Grid Roundups, invitations to subscriber-only events, and much, much more. Thank you for your support. Thank you for listening and please enjoy this extraordinary episode with Governor Rick Perry. Governor Perry, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. It's so great to have you as a guest.

Governor Perry

Yeah, thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Doug Lewin

So, I want to start just with, obviously, you were the longest-serving governor in the state of Texas. You were Secretary of Energy. Can you just describe for the audience, in your mind, in your view, what is your energy legacy?

Governor Perry

Well, interesting one. And I was also the Agriculture Commissioner for the state of Texas for eight years. You can't talk about, you know, you can't talk about energy without having the energy world. And it's tentacles that go out into practically every aspect of it, agriculture in particular. With that said, with the news that Brooke Rollins, a very brilliant, smart, capable Texan, is going to be the new Secretary of Agriculture. And so that's going to be a fascinating one for me to watch. I've known her since she was 18 years old and then came and worked with me, ended up at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, then at the Trump First Trump White House as a domestic policy advisor.

So, the legacy that we leave, if you will, and I don't like to talk about just me because it wasn't just me. It was a group of people that I was able to recruit to state government initially and then up to Washington as the Secretary of Energy. It's this team of very capable men and women that are leaving a great legacy for this country. I'll tell you a really funny story. I loved George Mitchell. George Mitchell was a Renaissance man. I think class about 1940 at Texas A and M, had a petroleum engineering background, but he, he was more than just the fossil fuel industry.

We, you know, he literally changed the world. They say that about a lot of people, "Oh, you know, you changed the world." Well, most of you really don't change the world. George Mitchell did. George Mitchell changed the world because of his extraordinary engineering background and having this concept that you could, under very high pressure, push these sand, little sand kernels, if you will, little grains of sand down into these shell formations and crack them apart and allow for the escape of petroleum products. In most cases, it's natural gas, literally. Hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling changed the world as we know it today in a very positive way, from my perspective.

And George Mitchell was one of those great Texans whose legacy is going to live for, you know, I think, centuries into the future because of his vision, because of his passion, because of his commitment to mankind. Not only was his vision in the energy sector extraordinary, I mentioned it. I think he was a Renaissance man. The Woodlands, that first planned community just north of Houston, Texas, was George Mitchell's vision. That was his baby, so to speak. So not only was he this guy who really changed the world from a fossil fuel standpoint, development of hydraulic fracturing, but he also was a developer, the Strand, that beautiful part of Galveston, Texas.

He redid that. He oversaw all of that. And just an amazingly capable person who I had the privilege to get to know. As a matter of fact, I had two really good butt-chewings as a sitting governor, and George Mitchell gave me one of those.

Doug Lewin

Okay, I'm going to have to follow up and ask you about that before. Before I do, though, I love that you brought up George Mitchell, because this is a lot of the conversation I wanted to have with you, Governor. I think too often people are too reductive in their conversations, whether it's about politics or the economy, and this includes energy. And George Mitchell was certainly a man who contained multitudes, right? Like the father of fracking, he kind of put that innovation together of fracking and horizontal drilling. Also, he was a person that believed deeply in sustainability, right.

And put his money where his mouth was and did a lot of philanthropy. That philanthropy continues through this day through the great work of the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation. And we'll put a link in the show notes. There's a great book by Lauren Steffi about George Mitchell. I encourage folks to check out, but I feel like you're kind of in that similar vein of somebody that you talk about oil and gas all the time in oil and gas development, but a lot of the wind and solar that Texas has can trace back to you. You were a supporter of energy efficiency.

The deregulated electric market was put into place when you were lieutenant governor, and improvements to that were made when you were governor. I don't know. Is that a fair characterization that you're somebody that kind of has that kind of. I don't want to call it a dual nature. What is it? It's like there's a complexity to this stuff and you have to embrace it.

Governor Perry

Well, yeah, I think that's a good observation. Is that so? Listen, I grew up on a dry land cotton farm. I would say I was one of them. I grew up watching one of the original environmentalists. My dad understood that you take care of the land. If you don't take care of the land, then you're going to go broke. So, taking care of this environment that we live in, I was trained up in that from a very early age. I grew up in a place that didn't have a lot of water, so conserving water was important.

I grew up in a house that didn't have electricity until I was, you know, probably two or three years old. We had a carbide plant outside of this house. Rea came in and delivered electricity to where we lived. So being conservative with our resources, which I still, I still cut off lights when I go into rooms. My wife will tell you that I'm kind of anal about it. But conserving things is a good thing from my perspective. And so I had a. I had an interesting history where I grew up, how I grew up, and it stuck with me through life.

So what we did in the state of Texas in the early 2000s on wind and then later was solar. Excuse me. And I'm an all of the above energy guy. I don't say, you know, this one is the holy grail and nothing else. You need to. We're going to need it all. When you look at what we face right now, the challenges that we have in this state, I think the number one limiting factor in our state is water. How are we going to create more water? How are we going to move more water around? How are we going to make it more available?

We can talk about that in more detail in a minute. But that's one of our challenges, that we have infrastructure. How are we going to move these people around like it or not? And part of this we brought on ourselves. And I will stand up and, you know, admit my culpability here. I worked really hard in the early 2000s through the 2000s, recruiting businesses to come to Texas and we put policies into place in the state to make our state appear and to be appealing to people governing. I tell folks, look, govern, governing is not rocket science.

This is really pretty simple. Don't over tax, don't over regulate, don't over litigate and have a skilled workforce. Skilled workforce to me translates into accountable public schools. By and large. That's how you're going to get that workforce. So those are the four things that if you'll put those into place, then the private sector will do what the private sector does. And that is it will go risk its capital if they know they're not going to be overtaxed, over regulated, over litigated, and that they can find the workforce that they need to develop. We did that in the early 2000s as well as deregulated the electric marketplace.

And, but all of that fits into that little simple four issue bucket, if you will. And then we went out and recruited, promoted Texas around the, the country and literally around the world and in some cases and over the last 20 years, and Governor Abbott has been absolutely steadfast in keeping those programs in place and expanding them and putting his own imprint on it appropriately. But it's been highly successful and it's hard to argue that Texas is not, if, if it's not the number one state in the nation to do business, which I think it is. I'll let you know.

Rick Scott over in Florida argue, and Governor DeSantis argue that Florida is okay. But, you know, and competition is a good thing. That, that's one of the things that, you know, Jerry Brown and I competed a lot and I won overwhelmingly. You know, we recruited, you know, Hewlett Packard, Toyota, you know, all of these California companies have relocated to the state of Texas. And some of my friends say, God dang it, Barry, you know, you're the, you're the reason we got all these problems in Texas now because y'all made it so appealing. And all these people moved over here and they brought their politics.

And I say, you know, I'll accept A little bit of that blame. But here's what I think happened. I think the people that left California in particular and came to Texas were the givers. These were people who philosophically understand about giving back. They wanted to live somewhere where they were not overtaxed, over regulated, over litigated. They wanted to come to a state that had more freedom. And the takers, the people who had their hand out want government to give them stuff and quite frankly aren't real productive in their, in their societies per se, their takers. And the taker stayed in California because California's got a, you know, a government that basically says here, we'll do this, we'll do this, we'll do this and we'll do this.

And. But the people who are kind of like, you know what, we want to go live where we have more freedom, where we're not, we get to keep more of our money, where there's a sensibility about, you know, capitalism and free market and they moved to Texas. So yeah, we got a lot of people from moved into the state. I think that's good. I think that it's a two edged sword. I don't like driving in Austin, Texas anymore because it's really, they're doing crowded. But the point is, you know, those are challenges, those are good challenges to have.

We need to deal with it. We need to build more roads. We need to, you know, we can have the, the conversation about transportation infrastructure. I got criticized a lot about toll roads.

Doug Lewin

Trans Texas corridor.

Governor Perry

Yeah. Oh my God. The Trans Texas corridor. There's still a guy here in Roundtop, Texas, where I live, that's got a sticker on the back of his pickup truck and it's got Trans Texas Corridor and a big circle with a slash through it. Like, like it was going to get.

Doug Lewin

That reminder driving through.

Governor Perry

Yes. Yeah. Yes. Every time I go into town, I still see it and I laugh about it. I said, you know, the fat chance that the Transtexas corridor is going to come through Fayette County. But you know, the point is we needed to build more infrastructure and we did. And I tell people, I said, listen, here's simplistically how you need to look at it. There's only three ways that you're going to get infrastructure built. Tax roads, toll roads, or you believe in the asphalt ferry. Pick one.

Doug Lewin

So let me just ask you about this. I want to drill a little deeper on this because I think this is really kind of fascinating and you're sort of, you know, everybody has different definitions of what Conservatism means and all these things. So first of all, when you talk about California and Texas and comparisons, I catch a lot of flack on Twitter and other places, at substack, wherever I post, because Texas is actually beating California now on renewables. We have about twice the amount of renewables California has. And lots of people can come up with different reasons for why that is.

Some of it's natural resources, but at least some of it is. There isn't. The regulatory environment is easier to navigate here than it is in California. You can build stuff a lot easier in Texas, and that includes the stuff that California definitely desperately wants, like, like wind and solar. But on the other hand, you just said, you know, when you were born, there wasn't electricity at your house and it was the rea.

Governor Perry

Right.

Doug Lewin

The Rural Electrification Administration, I think, is what the A was or agency, whatever it was, came and that that was a big government program. Right. So, like, just like we're talking about with Mitchell, there's complexity. There clearly is a role for government.

Governor Perry

Yes.

Doug Lewin

So how do you, how do you kind of square that circle? Because I think it, that that might be a little revealing about, like, what, what does conservatism mean? Because it doesn't mean no government. It's not sort of libertarianism, even. That's kind of a little bit of a character of libertarianism. But like, but conservatism, clearly there's a role for government. So how would you, how would you describe that? Yeah, and water might be a good one, Right? Like, if the government doesn't do something on water, we're probably in pretty big trouble as a state. Right.

Governor Perry

Government's got its row. And what we argue about, which is what democracy is supposed to be about, is to have these conversations, put your ideas out there, defend your ideas, let the other side argue. The whole time I was governor, we had these very rigorous, stimulating debates about government's role. I was a big believer that government's got a role to play in incentivizing one of the other. You know, the four things. Don't over tax, don't over regulate, don't over litigate, have a skill workforce. And then there's a fifth tenet. I would suggest you get more of what you incentivize and.

But it gets to this whole issue of what's the proper balance. And we're always going to argue about it. My friends over at TPPF, I think. I don't know whether it was 08 or 09. You know, we weren't agreeing on Some of the programs that I thought were important for Texas, Texas Enterprise Fund. You know, there are people out there. It's not government's role to be involved in creating jobs at all. You know, you need to be over here, you know, have a few little. Deliver the mail, preferably on Saturdays, and, and then get out of the, get out of the way.

We live in a world where there's, there's this continual friction between those that want government to be engaged and go. Those that want government to just not have any role at all. Finding that middle ground is what good leaders are all about or should be all about. And being able to go out to the public and make your point that, well, in a perfect world, which we don't live in, you wouldn't have a lot of government programs because everybody would make the right decisions and everybody would put the programs or do the things that need to be done.

I'll give you an example. The Texas Enterprise Fund we created to be able to go out and incentivize. Remember, you get more of what you incentivize. We wanted to incentivize companies to come to the state of Texas and build here, create jobs here. And I, in the Cliff notes version of this, the number of jobs that you could create and we'd go back over a three to five year period of time to, you know, see if they had lived up to the, to the agreement. Here's how much money we will give you if you will come into our state and grow and create this many jobs.

I thought that was a reasonable role for government to play, to be a incentivizer of creating jobs in the state. You know, I got, I got friends that are probably further right than I am. That was like, oh, that's not government's role at all. But it, I think history will show that that was probably some pretty well spent money. Did the program need to last forever and go into perpetuity? Absolutely not. And I think Governor Abbott has appropriately backed out of some of those and created some other incentive programs. But my point is this experiment of governing and this was all pretty new to Texas, you think about it.

I came here in the mid-1980s. Texas was just about to go into a very deep recession depression that lasted from about.

Doug Lewin

That's when you entered the legislature, right?

Governor Perry

1985.

Doug Lewin

Elected.

Governor Perry

Yeah, in January of 1985, I was sworn in. I was 34 years old. And Texas was just teetering off the, you know, 30 oil bus, $30 oil. And we went to eight dollar oil, the real estate Market went all to heck in the handbasket, saving Simone. Debacle, debacle, all of that. So Texas went into this kind of dark period. And then, you know, in the early 90s we kind of started coming out of it. MC Squared, George Kosmetsky, Michael Dell, all of these, you know, by the Sematag we had all of these people started showing up in Texas.

I think, I think Southwestern Bell may have moved their headquarters to Texas during that period of time. There were a few little things that happened that were emblematic of Texas kind of starting to come out of that economic crisis that we found ourselves in. And now this is going to sound a little bit political, which it is. It was also a period of time of which Texans started getting comfortable with Republican policies. I switched parties in 1989. Ronald Reagan made it okay for people like me to become a Republican. Ronald Reagan grew up a Democrat. A Democrat governor of.

Doug Lewin

He's a Republican governor.

Governor Perry

He switched parties, switched parties and was a Republican governor. But he, he was, you know, the head of the, the SAG Union out in California. And I admit different, different times, but the, he saw the Republican Party is where he wanted to be. It was more free market, more inclined to be, you know, smaller, less government and that. Ronald Reagan's the reason I became a Republican by and large. Ian Governor Clements. I watched them and I was kind of like, you know what? I'm more comfortable with their policies. You know, I happen to be a pro life Democrat, which is relatively rare even in those days.

And I guess it was August of 89. I may both political parties very happy when I became a Republican. The Democrats were kind of happy to see me go out the door and Republicans well.

Doug Lewin

And of course the Democratic Party up to. I don't know if you would include the 80s in this probably, but there were always like two wings of it, right? You had the like sort of a. Going back to the 50s and 60s. The York was sort of liberal Democrats and the ship Democrats, right. So, so there was one party, but there were sort of two main factions of it. I want to actually come back though to some of the kind of the energy mix and just like you're talking about kind of a balance and a middle ground in politics and in governing.

I think on energy. When you talk about wind and solar and their variability, their intermittency, there's a lot of things you can do about that. One thing you could do is suppress wind and solar and just say we don't, we don't want any more of it. But here we are in an age of there's just a lot of load growth. Right. There's new, there's people moving here. We're vehicles, there's artificial intelligence is needing a whole. Data centers are needing a lot of power. We're going to need it. All right, so. So another way to go, rather than suppressing wind and solar would be to try to build up other resources.

And I know you've been a strong proponent of nuclear energy. There was just a. What I think is a pretty landmark report out of the Public Utility Commission, Commission led by Godfelty and at the direction of Governor Abbott, that really tries to set Texas up as a leader in this movement towards small modular reactors. Really, you were talking about low tax, low regulation and skilled workforce, like building that workforce that can actually deliver these modular reactors.

Governor Perry

Yeah.

Doug Lewin

Would you talk a little about your perspective in nuclear and what role you think Texas might have in that? I know you again, have kind of this unique position as not only the governor of Texas, but Secretary of Energy. So there's obviously a nuclear office and the DOE does a lot with nuclear. So you've got an interesting perspective on this. What do you think is the potential for Texas and what should be done to bring it about?

Governor Perry

Yeah, well, Texas can be, should be and I think will be a real leader when it comes to nuclear power. And, you know, there's a lot of educating that needs to go on. Me being a kid who was born in 1950s and lived through the 60s, in the Cold War, the 1964 election when we saw the nuclear explosion and the Daisy. You're not enough to remember this, but.

Doug Lewin

I know that ad. It's probably one of the greatest political ads of all time, Right?

Governor Perry

Yeah. The threat of nuclear war. And so the word nuclear for a, you know, my generation and had a negative connotation, radioactivity. Hiroshima. We saw all of this. And so we had a. We had a bit of a pushback on it. Then we built nuclear power plants using that technology. And then I don't know what the years were on this, but, you know, in the 90s and the 2000s, we had three Mile island, we had Chernobyl, we had Fukushima. And so again, a raft of really negative news articles and visuals of nuclear power that this is very dangerous stuff.

You had the whole debate about waste. What are you going to do with these rods? And, you know, I think they're in 38 states. We have nuclear waste laying around in rather insecure places, relatively speaking, when we should have, you know, one or two depositories where we could put all of this appropriately and we could. It's just the old nimby, not in my backyard mentality. And if we just forget about something, if we don't talk about it, it will go away. That's not leadership. I tried to get some focus on this and there's just not the stomach or the will to deal with this nuclear waste that we have all across the country that we need to deal with.

That's another issue. But it goes right to why these new technologies, these small modular reactors that there's just an extraordinary amount of interest in it right now. I've been to two nuclear conferences within the last two weeks, one in Austin, one in Dallas. And there's a massive amount of interest, there's a massive amount of capital that's looking at this and looking at these different technologies, new scale. A publicly traded company has the only permitted technology in the United States right now. Now there may be some others over at Abilene Christian Natura. Doug Robinson is the principal there.

They got a license for a research reactor that they're building on the campus of Abilene Christian University, which that's pretty exciting, incredibly exciting and interesting. So Texas A and M, University of Texas, Texas Tech, Abilene Christian, all of those schools have fairly robust nuclear engineering programs. I'm obviously, as you can see over my shoulder here, I'm a bit of a biased towards Texas A and M. While you seem Hassan, Dr. Hassan is doing over at Texas A and M and their nuclear engineering program. What John Sharp has done, John being the chancellor with the Relis campus over there, that's the O'Brien Air Force Base.

And their plan is to build small monitor reactors on site. And I mean literally on. On 40 acres you could build one megawatt of these smarts, that NuScale. For instance, there, I think there are 77 megawatt plants and you can put together a dozen of them and get right at 1 gigawatt of power, which is. That's a substantial amount of power for a data center. And that's where we're going, these big data centers with AI, you know, AI driving big data centers. They're massive energy hogs. So these SMRs walk away safe. They're becoming economically feasible. I will suggest to you within the next three to five years you're going to see a massive build out of these smarts.

Now with that said, our fossil fuel industry, particularly natural gas, is going to be growing as well. The state of Texas recognized that they were getting out of kilter. And last session of the legislature, they passed, I think, $5 billion to build peaker plants. And peaker plants are basically very simple gas powered plants that you just go flip the switch on when you need the demand. And I think that was a. I think that was a thoughtful thing to do. Now I got friends out there. You know, again, it's not government's role to be out there putting their thumb.

Well, there are some things that government must make sure that we have. I think government must make sure we got roads and bridges and that we have water and then we have power. I think that is a role for government to play. Now we can argue appropriately what is the right amount of incentive. And I get that. And that's never going to be settled because my dear friend Bill Peacock is going to say it was too much. I must say, well, maybe it wasn't. Wasn't too much. It was. Or maybe it was a little bit too much.

But you know, it's good that there's somebody tapping you on the shoulder and saying, hey, are you doing this right? And Bill Peacock, bright guy who worked in the governor's office, love him to death. That type of looking over your shoulder, respectfully saying, sir, you're getting a little too far over here towards this bar ditch. Move it back over. That's what democracy is all about. That's good. Tapping you on the shoulder and going, wait a minute, maybe it's a little bit too much. Let's get out there and talk about it to the public. Find the right place.

But that's what I think you're going to see in Texas. My instinct is this session of the legislature, there will be an effort, I will say publicly that I'm in favor of an incentive program not unlike what they did with the peaker plants for SMRs in the state of Texas. Let's incentivize private sector companies, have them come in and be our partner. And this is where I want to make myself very clear. I'm not for government singularly doing all these things. I'm for government being a part partner. Yep. Not the big regulatory daddy up here that we're just going to regulate and tell you what to do.

But actually be a partner where we have skin in the game. You know, we've got something to get out of this. We've got a, you know, we want to be an equal partner with someone in the private sector, with a University of Texas as they are developing some of these technologies. I. Yeah, be a partner with the federal government. I would suggest that, you know, Chris Wright and what Chris is going to be doing up at the Department of Energy with his loan office, they'll be making some decisions, looking at some technologies and saying, you know what, that makes sense.

Let's go put some money into that. We'll be a partner with Texas A and M. We'll be a partner with this, you know, Nutura, we'll be a partner with this new scale. We'll be a partner with this X Energy to develop smarts that can develop the power source that we're going to need for all of this growth that's out there in the front. I'm really worried about are we going to have enough power to sustain the growth that we're looking at? You know, we hadn't even talked about water yet. And. Well, we're real quick before we go.

Doug Lewin

There, because I do want to talk about water, but I just want, I want to make sure, before we go too far away from that, because I wanted to ask you about Chris Wright and the incoming Trump administration and what they might focus on for energy. But I think that, I don't think people have fully appreciated this yet that like the weak, we could have the stars kind of aligning just right here where you've got this nuclear report and the support of the Governor of Texas and the Public Utility Commission for nuclear and administration coming in that seems to want to focus on nuclear. If the state puts in even a small amount of money, the federal government could be a partner in that for, for much larger amount of money. And that is something that I'm a big believer in.

The, when the ERCOT market, which is highly competitive and, and, you know, less regulatory heavy than a lot of places, you get market forces, a lot of dynamism and innovation in there. But when you have a new source like that that just isn't competitive yet. Right. It. That to me is the right role of government. And if we do this right in Texas, it's a twofer. Not only do we have the power for the data centers and the population that's moving here, we have an industry that's possible to actually export. Export that expertise. Right. So we're building the wealth of the state as well.

Governor Perry

Yeah.

Doug Lewin

And so I want you to, we.

Governor Perry

Export this not just nationally, we export that technology internationally. And one of the things that I found while I was the Secretary of Energy is there is a great appetite for our innovation and our technology around the world. And again, I'm a big believer that the Trump administration, President Trump's vision, his understanding of American innovation, and to go sell that innovation around the world. If you really care about the environment, I mean, if you're a legit environmentalist in the true sense of the word, not some radical environmentalist who just wants to shut everything down, but if you really care about the climate of the world, let American technology be exported into India, into China, places that are building, you know, coal power plants just hand over fist without any regard or very little regard for the environment.

So all of this isn't just about the US and our being able to address our power needs and then both the foreseeable and long term future. It's about exporting this technology around the world. And then when you export that type of product around the world, you make friends. And the more friends we make around the world, the less likely we are to be in wars.

Doug Lewin

Amen. Well, so thinking about the incoming administration and Chris Wright and we were talking earlier about George Mitchell and I'm not going to let you go before you tell me about the butt chewing, as you put it, that he gave you. But you know, the fracking technology actually makes possible geothermal. And I understand that Chris Wright is actually an investor in a geothermal company, so at least knows something about maybe perhaps quite a bit about geothermal. You know, I guess I'm wondering if you have a sense of like nuclear, geothermal, what other things, you know, might be prioritized and kind of as part of that, Governor, I'm also interested in your perspective on certain aspects of the ira.

Right. The Inflation Reduction act, obviously controversial and not particularly popular among Republicans, but there are parts of it like the 45x tax credit that are for manufacturing. So we're seeing tons of particularly southern states, including Texas, but Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, getting really large factories to make things like batteries or electric vehicles or solar panels or drilling equipment for fracking for geothermal or nuclear, you know, modular reactors. I'm curious if you have either a sense or an opinion of kind of what aspects of clean energy might continue over the next four years where there might be areas that across geographies in the United States, across political ideologies, we might be able to come together as a country and actually make a positive difference?

Governor Perry

Yeah, well, my instinct is that President Trump, we saw it in his first administration, he is a big dereg guy. I think we were working on a 22 to 1 ratio, if my memory serves me correct, he was going to get rid of 22 regulations for every one that they passed. So President Trump truly gets it about deregulation from a cost standpoint, from an owner standpoint, from a timeline standpoint, regulations are frankly more onerous than taxation, and they're both onerous. But regulation in the world we live in today and the Washington that I saw was one of the big problems.

So I give you a quick I think you're going to see this president move very quickly to change a lot of the regulations that were stifling LNG exports. For instance, the pause that was put on lng, that will go away, I suspect, probably day one, as it should. American lng, we refer to it as freedom molecules. And we got ridiculed about that by the media. But the fact is that's exactly what it is. You were defending freedom, particularly in the European Union, particularly in Ukraine. And so that's one of the things that we'll see happen very quickly.

I want to you talked about the renewable side and one of the things that is a limiting factor for the renewable side, particularly solar or critical minerals and incentivizing Let me, let me make it an aside here. Every piece of legislation that's ever been passed, I may be overstating a little bit, but I don't think so there's probably a good thing or two that you could point to. And every piece of legislation that's ever been passed, you know, whether it was Obamacare or whether it was the IRA or whether it was, you know, go, go name it that that my friends on the other side of the aisle passed when they were in charge. Overall, I might not like them at all, but there were probably some things in there that were helpful that were thoughtful.

Ira is probably one of those. 45 is a good example, giving incentives so critical minerals, China controls it when you look and see what they've done. How do we incentivize the development of critical minerals in this country? So we don't we're not held hostage by, by China because, you know, again, I'm speculating here, but and I understand full well how or pretty well how President Trump negotiates. He is a, he's a tough negotiator. He knows how to negotiate this. Talk about tariffs right now, that is, he's, he's teeing this up for a reason. And the Chinese are coming back and saying, well, okay, cowboy, if you want to do this, we're not going to send you any critical minerals for and so that's how negotiations work.

It's how do we incentivize while that negotiation is going on, how those conversations are going on. How do we incentivize the development of critical minerals. How do we develop our uranium sources that we have in this state that are substantial? How do we, how do we, how do we bring that to, to bear where we don't have to rely upon outside sources for some of these critical minerals that we have in the natural farms in the United States? But for whatever reason, how do we, how. What's the right word I want to use here?

Doug Lewin

How do we foster and grow an.

Governor Perry

Industry here, but, but environmentally sound for things like uranium and for lithium. And because the byproduct is one of the problems, you know, we send them off to be mined somewhere else because they don't have the environmental concerns, unfortunately. But we, we can use our innovation to come up with these new ways to, to mine critical minerals. You know, there's a big deposit out in West Texas out around Sierra Blanca. There's a formation out there called Round Top Mountain that's. Well, it has massive amounts of rare earth minerals, cobalt, nickel, lithium, in a very substantial amount.

So give those folks incentives to minus mine it environmentally properly. But that's a great example of how we as a country need to be rethinking. You know, when I ran For President in 2011, I talked about a concept. I called it the Western Hemispheric Marshall Plan. We had relied on an east and west trade for way too long, in my opinion. I think when you look at South America, and this is still a real challenge for us as a country, China and Russia have really stuck their flag deep into south and in some cases Central America.

But we need to focus on creating this North, South, Canada, Mexico, South America, the trade north and south. You look at Venezuela, one of the largest, if not the largest reserves of oil and gas in the world, and somehow another. We've not been very effective in being able to create man. Why not? Why not go figure out a way to. I don't want to be too radical sounding here, but find out a way to send Maduro off to go wherever he could go and for us to come back in, really develop that oil and gas resource in that country and build a pipeline from South America to the, to the U.S.

Doug Lewin

Look, I mean, whatever energy source you're talking about, if you're able to develop it either in the United States or what is often called like friendshoring, right? If you've got, if you've got friends, whether it be like Mexico or Canada or whatever you are, then Chile, whatever it might be, you're then increasing your security, right? Because whatever anybody thinks about the increase in oil and gas, and there's a wide divergence of views out there on whether that's good, bad or somewhere in between. One thing that is, I think, inarguable is it has strengthened America's hand abroad.

Governor Perry

Right.

Doug Lewin

I mean, you look at opec, OPEC rather OPEC and OPEC plus trying to get together to figure out how to control prices. And they can't really do it anymore because there's so much production out of the, out of the Permian, particularly, but also the Marcellus and the Haynesville, whatever else. But the same will be true of clean energy. This is, this is a source. Again, whatever you think about it, people have wide, different, you know, views on good, bad, or somewhere in between. The world is investing literally trillions of dollars now in clean energy. And if we're totally dependent upon China for it, that could be an Achilles heel.

So that's where I think, to your point about there's always kind of something good in these different bills and the Inflation Reduction act. If President Trump really wants to emphasize competitiveness. America first, whatever, whatever the words you want to, you want to put on that are, there's a lot in there that could actually be leveraged to strengthen America's hand.

Governor Perry

Yeah. Find the good stuff. And I'm quite confident that the President and his team will, you know, sort through it, leave the good things in there and get rid of the bad things. That's what elections are about. And I think this one was a, a clear message to this administration, to this president, to his vision that we like your vision. Go implement it. And, and we're going to have, you know, a couple of years at least, having the House, having the Senate, having the presidency, and the burden's on the Republican Party now. Go implement your vision.

Go show us what you can do. And I'm, I'm pretty excited about what I'm seeing right now from the standpoint of the, of the people he's putting in place, staying focused here on the energy side of things. Chris Wright's going to be a very, very effective energy secretary. I think he brings a lot of industry understanding. Now, that agency, I will tell you from personal experience, Chris is going to find it to be stunningly interesting and he's going to find something new in that agency every day. The 17 national labs that cover the watershed, whether it's, you know, coming up with new technologies to improve our war fighting capability.

Obviously, on the nuclear weapon side of things, they're the depository for all those Nuclear weapons, the upgrades of the, taking care of them, you know, the Department of Defense is just the delivery system of those weapons. The actual weapons belong to the Department of Energy. And the oversight, the building out, the plutonium pits out at Los Alamos, the work that's done at Sandia, you got the Manhattan Project that was started at Oak Ridge National Lab, you go out to Livermore, I mean the labs up in the Chicago area. And one of the things I would like to see this administration do, and I'm going to talk to Secretary Hopefully Wright and the Texas delegation.

Get a national lab in the state of Texas, number one, let's make that happen. It makes a lot of sense and, and small modular reactors and the development of those small modular reactors could be the real core of a national lab in the state of Texas. Makes abundant good sense. I talked to Michael McCall about it. Michael was very supportive of that as I'm sure the entire Texas delegation, Senator Cornyn, Senator Cruz would be as well.

Doug Lewin

And again, every Democrat, every Republican would probably support that. I would hope so. Yeah.

Governor Perry

But if, and this makes sense to me, I know I'm biased, but let's have a conversation about the development of these small modular reactors. Let's have a modern day Manhattan Project to develop the power that this country needs and develop the clean, emission free, walk away safe, economically feasible power that these small monitor reactors can do. While that's going on and while that's being developed, obviously expanding our fossil fuel industry and particularly the natural gas side of things to develop power that we're going to need to drive the AI and the data centers that are going to be going on out there. But really focus on these SMRs and Texas could be the epicenter of that.

Create a national lab that's dedicated to the proposition that we're going to lead the world in the development of these small monitor reactors.

Doug Lewin

That would be amazing. I know we're at time, I sort of cut you off earlier when you were starting to talk about water. So I want to give you some more time to talk about water. And then we just have to hear about this blood chewing from George Mitchell and we'll end this. Good.

Governor Perry

That sounds like, that sounds like a good way to finalize it. So here's an idea where I recruited SpaceX to Texas back in the late 2000s and got to know Elon and what a fascinating person he is. And then you know, you know, Governor Abbott took the hand, took the hand off and he continued to work and to recruit and done a fabulous job of Recruiting businesses to the state including not only do we have SpaceX now we got the boring company. We got Tesla, we you know, Trump, excuse me, Musk world is in Texas now and I think that's a good thing.

So here's an idea. This is the kind of big stuff that Elon Musk this is the way he thinks take his boring company, take the SMR industry and develop the power to drive The Boring Company. 12 foot underground canals, power desalization facilities and we have literally oceans of Brian Bri and a Bryan water underground that we could desal. And then with this pipeline system underground where you get away from all the right of way problems and pipelines have and what have you put this boring company to work building 12 foot concrete line canals to where the population centers are and we know where they are.

They're I45 to Dallas, I35 back down to San Antonio and I10 back. 85% of the population of that of our state either resides inside or contiguous to that. So those you could, you could water this state very easily with that type of a concept. And so you're going to see Charles Perry who's just a visionary young senator from Lubbock who's got the water plan that's going to be going forward. This may be a concept of which they can talk about and that Texas could become well watered going into the future. So to finish up George Mitchell in the early 2000s had a piece of legislation that was an interesting piece of legislation but it was completely and absolutely self serving to George Mitchell and his interest.

And he had a very, very dear friend of mine, Ken Hanz who was overseeing this for him. And I told him, I said I can't sign that. I said I understand what you're trying to do but I said this is a totally self serving piece of legislation that the only people in the state of Texas help is the Mitchell companies and I can't sign this. I said I just you know y'all need to figure out a way to make this work some other avenue. But I said Ken, if this shows up on my desk I'm not going to sign it.

Matter of fact I'll veto it. Well it showed up on my desk because Ken Hans is a very capable lobbyist and George Mitchell is very respected.

Doug Lewin

George Mitchell, Yeah, George Mitchell, Mr. Mitchell is everything.

Governor Perry

And it ended up on my desk and I vetoed it. And Mr. Mitchell called me and let me know no uncertain terms. He called me a lot of names and Good boy was not one of them in the mix. Anyway, it was awesome. It was an epic butt chewing that I can. I wore as a badge of honor. And you know, it was the other one.

Doug Lewin

You said there were two. Can you, can you tell me who.

Governor Perry

The other Ross Perot senior who ideally love one of the greatest patriots this country's ever had. And Ross had an issue I, I won't go into. And Ross was correct on, on, on his, his issue. It was dealing with child protective services and they were not moving anywhere near as fast as they should have. And he called me one day and I had the phone out this far away from my ear that he was laying it on me and laying it on me extraordinarily well. And Ross, Mr. Perot Senior, I mean he's done more for veterans in this country than any single individual I know.

I'm telling you. And there are hundreds of men and women who he did amazing things for that we'll never know about. Rossborough, one of the great patriots of all time. But he was letting me know that I had failed miserably. And when he got through, he didn't say thank you Governor. He just went. Slammed that phone down. And I was kind of like that was an epic butt chewing.

Doug Lewin

You got to be a billionaire to yell at a governor, I guess. Right. I guess that's, that's the line between Perot and Mr. Mitchell.

Governor Perry

I probably earned them both and I respected both of them after it was over with as they did me.

Doug Lewin

I know I said we're going to end. I do just want to ask you. We'll put a link in the show notes. I mean you're to a couple of things you're doing. I'm kind of fascinated by sort of like post presidencies and in your case, obviously a post governorship. You're doing a lot of really interesting things right now. But one of them you mentioned veterans, which is stimulated the thought that I heard you speak a couple weeks ago when you were talking about a veteran, Mr. Luttrell. Right. Who you became close with and Yes, I know it's a long story.

Can you give the short version of it and then we'll put a link in the show notes because I think it's really fascinating the work you're doing on behalf of him and other veterans to get medical care they desperately need.

Governor Perry

Yeah. He showed up just totally by the grace of God on a vacation trip out to Coronado island in 2006. We went through the Naval Special Warfare center out there at the invitation of now Congressman Jake Elzey. Interestingly, he was an F18 pilot, signed to Seal Team 5 and invited. I didn't know any of these people. Marcus was assisting with the tour. This was in August of 06 and it was the week after he had been at the White House receiving the Navy Cross from President Bush. And I told him, I said, hey, if you're ever through Austin, come by and see me sometime.

Which I told literally dozens of people. Fat chance that you're going to come and get in the governor's mansion, right? So I can, I can invite you until you come by and see me sometime. And you're, you know, nice thing to say and go on about my business. I called his mother when he, when we got back. I didn't forget about him, but I went on about my day job. The following May, the phone rang in the governor's mansion and it was the security detail. And they said, sir, there's a young man down here who said you had told him when he was through Austin to come by and see you.

And I went, that's interesting. I said, what's his name? And they told me. And I said, yeah, I did tell him that. I said, send him in. That was in the evening of May of 07. And he lived with us in the governor's residence, Governor's mansion, until August of 09. So nearly two and a half years he lived with us. Not all the time, but he knew we were a safe space. He had very severe post traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury. He was addicted to opioids. And I spent a lot of time trying to find the answers to why our government was so poor in dealing with these kids mental health and that started 17 years ago, this long journey that I'm still on.

I've become a advocate for plant based medicine that we're seeing highly successful treatments down in Mexico with these veterans that are going down and being treated. The session of the legislature, there's going to be a effort to pass clinical trials for ibogaine I B O G A I N E. Very few people know about it, but it's a incredible, incredibly successful compound that comes from a shrub in Gabon. In Africa, clinical trial just finished a year ago by Dr. Nolan Williams out at Stanford. 30 veterans sent down to Mexico, they were treated with this compound. 88% of them had zero symptoms of post traumatic stress after one treatment.

Doug Lewin

And there's like, no, there is no treatment that's like anywhere close to 8%.

Governor Perry

Nothing's even close. So it's a Schedule 1 drug. It got swept up with all of the different psychoactive compounds back in the 70s by Nixon.

Doug Lewin

Well, schedule one, it's like heroin and cocaine, right?

Governor Perry

Yeah. And basically Schedule 1 says there is no medical purpose and that it's addictive. Ibogaine is neither of those very clearly has a good medical use. Properly dosed, diagnosed, followed up with, and it is not addictive at all. So, you know, I think we're going to see President Trump is a very good supporter of these plant based medicines. You got Bobby Kennedy that's going into hhs, hopefully Jay Bhattachara, who's going to be at nih. There's really some good signals. Congressman Morgan Luttrell, Marcus's twin brother, Dan Crenshaw, Wesley Hunt, Jake Elzey, Walt. I mean, there's a host of people in Washington D.C.

today that are familiar with this, that are supportive of this plant based medicine. It's where I'm going to spend the rest of my, you know, I hope God gives me a lot of years to be engaged and helpful, but this is where I'm going to spend the rest of my life. We owe it to these veterans. And I might add, it's not just a veteran centric issue here. This compound ibogaine has been found to be highly effective on breaking addiction of alcohol, cocaine, heroin, opioids, fentanyl with just one treatment. I mean, that is stunningly out of the realm of what you would have thought even possible five years ago.

But we're finding it's true. And we as a country need to really allow for these clinical trials to be done, do them properly, have the right kind of oversight. But I think we can save literally millions of lives. Every one of us, every one of us has a family member somewhere which has a mental health problem, particularly addictive type behaviors that we're seeing. And if these compounds do what we think they can do, and there's some really good clinical trial evidence that they can, then why not? How bad you gotta hate people that we don't go forward with this to bring them some relief and to give them their lives back and to literally save their lives.

Doug Lewin

Yeah, I don't think people realize how bad the epidemic of veteran suicides is. I mean, the numbers, you know, and.

Governor Perry

It went up last year.

Doug Lewin

I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's devastating. And I don't remember what the stat is, but the stat, it's over 20 a day. 20. And each one of those, like, it's not a number. Right? Those are people, they're people that served our country. And I just, you know, I feel like it's very easy, kind of. Yeah, it's easy for folks to kind of salute and signal that you have actually taken action with. With that individual, with Marcus Littrell. But then trying to help a wider group of people, it's just so admirable and really appreciate it.

Governor Perry

I'll finish with this. One of my. One of my longtime political advisors, when it became public that I was publicly out talking about that. These psychoactive plant medicines and, you know, I grew up in the 60s and drugs were bad, and LSD and marijuana, you know, all of those things. And I've been very, you know, steadfast in my opposition to recreational use of drugs. I'm just not for it. I think it's a really bad avenue to go in. But when it became public that I was standing up and talking about these in a very positive way and that I was.

He called me and he said, what are you doing? I mean, you're fixing to throw 40 years of reputation out the window with this hippy dippy s**t and. Excuse me just a second. I told him, I said, look, I understand your concern, but I have studied this. I think I know the details. I've talked to enough veterans that have been treated. But here's what's more important to me. My reputation is not more important than their lives. And that's kind of where I am today. If we can save these people's lives, then we have done the Lord's work.

Doug Lewin

If you save one life, you save a world, a universe. Governor, this has been an honor and a privilege. I'm a real, like, student of Texas history. And to be able to talk for an hour with the longest serving governor in the state of Texas is, again, a real honor and privilege. I really appreciate you being on the podcast. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience in closing? Hey, thanks, guys. Appreciate you.

Governor Perry

All right, God bless you. Take care, Salon.

Doug Lewin

You too.

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George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet

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