443: Rick Perry—The Fight of a Lifetime

Hello, friends.

Mike Rowe here with another episode of The Way I Heard It, starring Chuck Klausmeier.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

It's good to be here.

Our guest today is actually a man who needs no introduction.

I mean, and yet,

and yet, I must tell you that he was once the governor of California.

I don't believe he was the governor of California, Mike.

Oh, I'm sorry.

What is the was it Texas?

Yes, it was Texas.

I gosh, he would probably, if he heard you saying that, he would he would probably want to belt you.

Well, you know what?

He's going to hear me because I'm not going to edit it.

I'm sitting here in California looking out at California, and I said California.

Look, it's not the first mistake you'll hear me make in the next 90 minutes.

Actually, I think I did pretty good on this one.

He's easy to talk to and easy to listen to.

Super easy.

And just seems like a genuinely nice guy.

Yeah.

Real nice guy.

We met Rick Perry in person about four months ago at this conference you'll hear us make reference to in California, not Texas, hosted by our friend Alex Epstein.

And it was at this conference that I first heard the governor refer to the modern-day Manhattan Project.

Yeah.

And he spoke to a room full of big shots with a level of urgency that certainly got my attention.

Like many today, Rick Perry believes we're in the fight of a lifetime.

We have to win the AI race.

Electricity really is AI as processed through these data centers that need to get built.

And he believes that Texas or California, who knows really?

I think it's Texas.

I think he really wants to do it in Texas.

Rick Perry is damn sure that Fermi America is a Texas company co-founded by him.

They're going to be building the largest energy and data complex of its kind, powered by nuclear, natural gas, and solar.

This is a big, big deal.

And if they pull it off, not only are we going to beat the Chinese, who we're trailing at the moment, but Texas is going to lead the charge.

But wait, there's more, Chuck.

He's just simply not content to have this fight of a lifetime.

He needs two fights.

He needs two fights.

He needs another fight.

And that fight, Mike, is fighting for veterans with PTSD

with a,

not necessarily a new drug, but a hallucinogen drug, a psycho-drug or whatever.

What would you call it?

Ancient plant.

Yes.

That gives us a substance called ibogaine.

It's now in the headlines all over the place because, as you'll hear me say, the evidence around this kind of thing does demand a verdict.

And the stakes are very, very high.

You know, 6,500 men and women punched their own tickets last year, soldiers who came home and just simply couldn't cope.

The problem is real.

This solution now seems like more than a potential solution.

He's worked really hard at this for over a decade and just got Texas to commit, I think, $50 million.

$50 million, yes.

Yeah.

To study this.

Yeah.

So this guy pushes a lot of boulders up a lot of different hills, and he always has, but he's fighting really hard for our vets and he's fighting really hard for our energy independence specifically with regard to AI these are massive battles and he's up to his neck in both of them so I invited him on because we got along pretty well and he's also been very supportive of my own efforts around reinvigorating the trade so we're in violent agreement on a great many things and because our friend Sean McCourt, who I know many of you know, Sean and I have worked together for years, both on deadliest Catch and on the stories for the way I heard it.

Sean has produced a terrific documentary called The Fight of a Lifetime.

I began The Fight of a Lifetime.

You'll hear us struggle to find the title later in the show, which is kind of funny.

But we found it.

But we found it, and that premieres on Fox Nation soon, Chuck.

July 17th, that'll be on.

I have no idea if that's before or after this appears.

Who knows?

Who knows?

We're making it up as we go, but I watched the documentary this morning.

It's important and it's really well done.

And of course, I'm up to my neck with these other issues too.

So strap in.

It's a great conversation with a guy who loves this country a lot and truly believes that Texas can lead us to the promised land.

Right after this.

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you know Sean McCourt, of course.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

He's a good buddy of ours.

He helped with this podcast years ago, helping to write the stories for, we used to do like Paul Harvey type stories.

That was the whole deal.

It was a real short podcast.

Love this guy.

He works for us now, you know, on a contract basis, you know, editing a new project we have.

But anyway, he shared with us, you know, the, what is it, the documentary that he's doing with you.

Fox Nation.

Yeah, that Fox Nation doc.

Pretty strong.

Very strong.

I'm like, I'm very excited about this.

So there was an interesting movie made about this subject called Of Waves and War.

It's out now.

And it was well done.

I mean, it was a Hollywood director that put it together

12.

Of Waves of War?

Of Waves and War.

Waves and War.

Yeah, of Waves and War.

That's a quote quote from the Odyssey, Homer's Odyssey, when his guys came home from the war.

And anyway, that's where this is taken from.

But it is a it's it's a very well done.

It's a little too woo-woo for me.

I mean, there's a little bit too much psychedelic, you know,

imagery.

Not that that's necessarily bad, but for my purposes in selling the general public about what we're doing here, healing, there's nothing nothing magical about it uh unless you believe you know

medicine and and and god are magical then you know it's just a definition a different in definitions i would suggest but my point is what sean did with his one hour was

some number x better than this uh this movie.

Number one, the movie's too long.

It's like an hour and 47 minutes.

And unlike, you know, Mike Rose's podcast, which it's going to take an hour and 40 minutes to really

educate the public.

I hope you're comfortable, Governor.

Yeah, yeah.

So hope you're wearing your stadium, pal.

Hey, I put on a t-shirt, man.

I'm kind of like, if anybody's looking for Mr.

Professional here, good luck.

Well, you know, you're in the right room when you just pop in in time to hear the governor talking about Homer, God, magic, modern media,

and psychedelics, man.

What a world.

Okay, here we go.

Grab a deep seat, cowboy.

We're fixing to take off.

Charlie, we rolling?

We're good to go.

I just need to do something.

That was the introduction, Mike.

Yeah, look, you know what?

Assume I've said something both flattering and cogent in the preamble, and we'll just

go from there.

Here we go.

Start where we are.

I'll just start by saying, I don't know about you, but my life has been very weird since I saw you last last in Newport at that energy festival.

You're not the first person to ever say that.

Well,

it was really a pleasure to finally meet you there.

And like everybody else in that room, I hung on to every word that you said that day.

A lot of stuff I want to bounce off of you, but in particular, likening this

race for data centers and our current energy situation to a modern-day Manhattan project.

I mean, forgive me for jumping right in, but that's been on my mind for the last few months.

And I wonder if you've improved on the metaphor or you're sticking with it.

I'm not sure you can improve on that metaphor because if, you know, a lot of your

podcast listeners and viewers may not be familiar because this was 80 years ago that America found itself at this very precarious place of

the Germans had invaded,

the UK was out there by themselves, the Germans seemed to be almost unstoppable in 1942.

There was talk that they were on the precipice of being able to find this

weapon, this atomic weapon.

And so Franklin Roosevelt and some other very bright and knowledgeable individuals, some scientists, you know, military leaders, they made the decision that we had to get in this race and we had to win it because literally mankind, or freedom-loving mankind at least, was in the balance here.

So they put together this project to go build this device, if you will, to go find the materials, go find the elements to make this work.

And listen, I'm an animal science major from the beloved Texas AM, so me talking about nuclear materials and what have you is a bit humorous.

But where my life has taken me from being, you know, the governor of Texas to the Secretary of Energy and what have you.

And I actually visited that site.

It's in the Columbia River Basin in eastern Washington State, where

that piece of just raw dirt, Mike, I mean,

they got given the task.

They said, we got to go win this race.

And

all hands on deck, let's go do this.

And in that area, in the Columbia River Basin, from just a flat piece of dirt out there, it's almost desert-y looking in that part of Washington, if you've been there.

Sure.

In 11 months,

They went from a flat piece of dirt to producing plutonium.

Now,

were some mistakes made?

Were some corners cut?

I'm not gonna,

I don't know that.

What I know is that literally freedom in the world was saved because there were people who believed they could do this.

They had a leader that said, let's go do this.

And plutonium, which is a very important part of that building, that weapon that was used to stop the end of the war at Hiroshima and Fukushima, or excuse me, at Nagasaki.

The dogs like that.

Which dog is that?

What do you call him?

Well, that's one of five.

So we're rescue dog people.

That is, I think by the sound of that, that was Cody.

He's a Belgium Malinois.

Great dogs they are, man.

They will interrupt here.

We got a blind wiener dog.

We've got a wire-haired pony graffon that's deaf.

We've got the Belgium Malinois.

We've got a rescue dog from the streets of las vegas that's not half anything and then we had a new one show up oh i don't know a half a mile down the road um who's a blue healer um so anyway we all answer to the name of lucky yeah they're they're good dogs well hang on a second here how do you have a rescue dog from las vegas in texas

okay so don't leave where we are here because you know we're just about to get the

saving humanity here.

No, this is the world we live in, Governor.

We can go from the very essence of a consequence to where you got your rescue dog.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, who's not in need of a little rescue here?

I think that's the real essence of the story here.

When we finish this up in an hour and a half, let's look back and see if

being rescued is not a part of that.

But to answer your question, Chuck,

my daughter and her husband, who's a former naval officer, a Navy SEAL, he was 07 through 16, active duty, and then,

you know, and has all of the

has all the things going on in their lives that those boys had from 07 when he graduated from the Naval Academy and went into the fleet.

And then he ended up in Las Vegas working with a

really incredibly interesting fellow who's an Israeli national in the real estate business out there.

So now, subsequently, they have moved to Austin.

He started

one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in North America called,

well, I think the name of it now is Core Scientific,

which is about to be acquired by another big company.

None of that has anything to do with the dog that was saved on the streets of Las Vegas.

I bet it does.

I bet it does.

Our daughter.

Yeah.

My daughter is, yeah, it's energy, but it's kind of one of those strange ones.

My daughter is a dog magnet.

Most of these dogs that are here at our place now came to us through our daughter.

The Malinois dead.

The

Las Vegas dog

was about an hour away from being euthanized, and she saved it from a shelter.

It was picked up on the streets of Vegas.

Vegas.

So anyway.

Governor, have you heard of these?

Like,

I think of them like underground railroads.

And Chuck has a good friend, Amy, who kind of runs one of these.

That's how I got my dog, Freddie.

He was about an hour away from the needle.

And somebody picked him up from a shelter.

in California and like drove him, I think from Bakersfield up to the Republic of Marin, where I found him, right?

And they're constantly shuttling these dogs back and forth, sometimes across state lines.

And there's this whole industry nobody knows about with regard to mutts and rescues.

Interesting.

I'm just listening to a book on tape called Tina, T-I-N-A, and it's about a dog rescue guy who lives in Thailand.

Now, you know, we're getting...

way outside of the bounds of where I thought we were going to go on this podcast, but that's okay.

That's what makes Mike Rowe interesting.

Well, look, if you're going to invoke a part of the world where the dogs are, well, forgive me, but from what I've read from time to time on the menu and juxtapose that with Sin City, where a dog can be adopted vis-a-vis the daughter magnet that you currently have, I guess we could pivot from magnetism into electricity, which are inherently linked and eventually get you back to that flat piece of ground.

Right.

So look, just to frame all of this in a way that I wanted to ask you about, isn't it amazing?

Like take the Manhattan Project or take the current initiative that's really going to redefine our whole energy posture.

Sometimes

we are reactors.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on the pun, but greatness sometimes happens because circumstances have been thrust upon us.

And other times you've got these forward-thinking people who are able in a really proactive way to get ahead of the problem.

And I just wonder, you know, you spent your year in your life in politics, really, and in the military and all of that.

What are we dealing with here?

Are we reacting to something existential or are we trying to get in front of a danger that can really only be called clear and present?

Yeah, and I will answer that by saying probably both.

We are being reactive because we woke up.

And I'm a Donald Trump fan.

I think what Donald Trump is doing, the chaos that he's bringing, look, I'll let other people argue about whether they like that or not, what I'm interested in.

I've always been a results person.

Process wears me out.

And of all the oddball things to have gotten into that where you didn't particularly like process,

government is full of process.

I mean, the swamp is about as processy a place as you can find.

Even Austin, Texas, has got way much more process than I like.

I like results.

Go do X.

Get this done.

Trump's the same kind of individual.

I mean, that is why he has been successful in his life.

He is a results-oriented individual.

And he basically, as he's come back in in the second term, you know, he's leaned back, he's analyzed the landscape out there, and he said, you know what?

China is about to kick our butt in the AI business.

And AI is an energy hog.

If you're going to be participating in artificial intelligence and winning that race, you're going to have to have an extraordinary supply of energy.

Where do you get that energy?

Well, you know, we've been told here for way too long that if we'll just build enough windmills and enough solar panels and renewables out there, that we'll live happily ever after.

And the fact is that's just wrong because they're not reliable, because they're frankly require a lot of government subsidies to be competitive, and they're not dense enough.

And when I talk about dense, I'm talking about for the amount of power that they deliver, the cost going into it.

So there's only two ways that you can get the type of baseload power, and that is with fossil fuels, which we're blessed in this country to have an extraordinary amount of natural gas, and I might add relatively clean burning natural gas, and nuclear power.

Those are the only two.

It's kind of like when people used to criticize me when I was a governor, and we were a growing state,

and I told people, I said, there's only three ways that you can build more infrastructure to handle the amount of

roads that we're going to have to have to move things around and people around in this state.

You either believe in tax roads,

or you believe in toll roads,

or you believe in the asphalt ferry.

Pick ones.

People were a little bit irritated because I said, look, I mean, toll roads are the answer to building out.

The same is true with this energy concept.

There's actually only two types of power that you can count on to win this AI race.

It's either fossil fuels, which is in our case natural gas, and these natural gas combined cycle turbines that we are really good at building and by the grace of God, sitting on copious amounts of this carbon fuel, or nuclear.

And nuclear has been demonized.

Well, we listened to Alex Epstein at the event out in California where you and I met.

I think he's one of the brightest.

Interestingly, just as an aside,

he got criticized by Tom Tillis yesterday when Tom Tillis was leaving or saying that he was going to leave the Senate for whatever reason.

I'll leave that to somebody else.

But he was criticizing Alex Epstein because he was a philosopher.

And that is true.

Alex Epstein is a philosopher.

He is one of the smartest, brightest young men I've ever been around in my life.

I met him in 2017, 2018 in South Africa at an energy conference.

And he just, I mean, I was taken by how bright he is.

He's a believer in his philosophy that fossil fuels are

the answer to mankind's woes.

When you think about what has happened and the quality of life that mankind has achieved over the course of the invention of the fossil fuel engine, then the flourishing of mankind is absolutely needs to be saluting fossil fuels.

And fossil fuels have allowed us to tame the environment.

They've allowed us to have air conditioning and irrigation and, you know, copious amounts of water around the world.

And Alex understands intellectually, I think morally, and ethically, that

if you're not for using fossil fuels to

help mankind flourish, you might have a bit of a dark heart issue.

Because you think about it, Mike.

You might be wicked.

Yeah, you might just have a dark heart.

You're basically saying to people in Africa, well, Suck it up.

You just happen to be born on a continent where

you don't have

the ability to

have electricity.

No industrial revolution for you.

It ain't going to happen for you.

Now, listen, we're not cutting our electricity off over here, and we're going to fly around in our jets and go to the climate conferences we need to.

But for you people over there, You're just not going to flourish.

Your children are not going to probably even be born because you're not going to have an incubator.

You're not going to have electricity to have a hospital that's up to any standards.

And God forbid you have a light bulb to keep away people in the dark of night.

Alex told me 3 billion people are currently relying on wood and dung as their primary source of energy.

Suck that in every day into your lungs.

And that India and China combined are on track to build a coal-fired plant every week for the next 30 years.

You know, I think the thing, I'm usually a little

skeptical of binary choices, but Alex has been on this podcast a couple of times, and every time he leaves, I find myself thinking: behind curtain number one

is a world

where man is dedicated to protecting the environment and saving the climate for the betterment of the species.

And behind door number two is a world where man is engaged in mortal stakes

whereby he is protecting the species from the environment and from the climate.

And

I realize that's probably an oversimplification, but boy, if you set the table one way or the other, the entire conversation is going to be informed by that.

And that's why that meeting where we met was so, so interesting.

I knew that in general, everybody there was sitting around the same table, and it was set in a way that I think most people understood.

Look, these are mortal stakes.

And back to the Manhattan Project, the thing that has stuck with me about that is that we can compare the race to get data, AI, and all of that built with enriching uranium.

It's the stakes of what happens if we fail that keeps me up.

Dumb.

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It's company cam.

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And that's a really good comparison, Mike, because in 1942, the world was facing Nazism, fascism, and today the world is facing communism from the Chinese Communist Party.

I mean, that's the comparison, and I think it's a correct comparison.

I've dealt with the Chinese enough to know that they do not play with the game rules that we have learned in Western civilization.

They just don't.

And I'm not sure that ever changes.

I think they understand power and they understand overwhelming power and artificial intelligence and its ability to be

used in a large number of areas is our big challenge, I think, in the Western world.

Are we going to get there first?

Are we going to win this?

We used to say over at the Department of Energy when we were over there and working towards quantum computing,

that which the Department of Energy, as some people may or may not know, has got 17 national labs and these national labs labs are absolutely the crown jewels of this country.

The work that's done out there, that project out in Washington at the Pacific Northwest Lab, which is one of those 17 labs today,

are

those jewels.

The most extraordinary work, I think, in the world is being done at these various Nasundri labs.

There's Sandia, there's...

I'm sorry, but it just really strikes me that the three words I heard when I jumped into this room were Homer,

God, and magic.

And there is a magical element to everything you're talking about.

The mystery

in which

plutonium is immersed.

I mean, people just, most people don't have a freaking clue.

And how could they?

The science is so big and so wondrous that that it feels like magic.

And AI feels like magic.

So do you think that part of getting this thing over the finish line will involve demystifying the magical components of this?

Or are we better off just looking in wonder and letting the experts get in there and sprinkle their fairy dust on it so we can all live happily ever after?

Well, I'll answer it like I did your previous question.

It's probably probably a little bit of both.

You know, for those that want to understand quantum computing is and why that's important, for those that want to understand what artificial intelligence will allow us to do, the book is there to be read, the movie's there to be watched.

For the vast majority of us who just want to enjoy life in quietness and calmness and in peace, you know, y'all figure this out and

let us enjoy it.

And I'm good with that.

Our history of our country has been full of people,

you know, the Einsteins, the Fermis, the, you know, the scientists that understood it, but made our lives so much better.

And that's where I kind of think we find ourselves today.

That's the reason that Donald Trump saying, and signing these executive orders that have said, go make this happen.

Here are these executive orders on nuclear power.

Here are these executive orders on energy development.

Go make this happen.

He understands it.

I think Donald Trump is a visionary.

I'm not sure, you know, and I share that visionary

title with him.

Listen, I'm not trying to get confused that I'm the smartest guy in the room, never have been, but I really like to hire the smartest people in the room, and then they'll make me look good.

And I think Donald Trump is not unlike that.

He goes and brings people in.

He says, You go do X and Y and Z.

And I'm going to tell you, I'm enjoying greatly watching what I'm seeing right now.

Sometimes it's fun to watch MSNBC's heads blow off every day, but that's, you know, I'll try not to be too political here.

But the point is, he has given this directive and he said, go win this race.

And when I saw you four months ago,

we, this small group of people, my son being one of them, and a couple of other really bright,

extraordinarily talented people,

put together this concept that we were going to build the largest

AI-driven data center in the world.

And

that was what you saw announced the last week in June to be, our goal was to do this on the 4th of July, Independence Day.

That's not lost on anyone, that if America

were able to build to power

the largest data center in the world,

then we would send a message to the Chinese, nice try, but you know what?

America is leading in this race and we're going to win it.

And that's exactly what the plan is.

So Fermi America is, matter of fact,

today, which is,

I don't know whether I can say the dates or not, but the end of...

We're recording this on July 1st.

First day of July.

We announced today that we've got

some substantially large

Siemens equipment headed our way to go to that site.

And let me just give you a little look under the hood here so people will understand

just what an extraordinary project this is.

So,

Pantex is a Department of Energy piece of property just outside of Amarilla, Texas.

It's on,

I don't know how many acres, I want to say it's 6,000 to thousand acres just east of the Amarilla airport.

It all belonged to Texas Tech University at one time.

I won't take you through all of the back and forth, but the Department of Energy ended up with this property in the late 40s as a place to dispose of the nuclear materials that we had.

And it's been there, used for multiple purposes, the least of which is not to disassemble nuclear weapons from around the world.

Substantial amount of the weaponry that when the Iron Curtain fell, when Reagan helped bring to a close the

great

Soviet Union, and a lot of the weapons that they had were relocated to the United States and disassembled.

There's probably more nuclear material right outside of Amarilla, Texas, than there is any place in the world.

Now that's, I don't think I, well, I didn't tell you anything that's classified, but we have nuclear materials in a lot of different places.

But that facility right there has been the home to high explosives, to nuclear materials for literally over a half a century.

The reason that's important is the people of Amarilla and Carson County and Randall counties, which are two counties up there, they're kind of like,

you're going to build

some nuclear power plants over there to drive

data centers?

When are you getting started?

They are very supportive of that.

And then

into your core issue

and mine, I might add, there are two limiting factors for building AI-driven data centers.

One of those is the energy.

Are you going to have enough energy to keep those data centers running?

I mean, they are literally data hogs like you can't imagine.

I mean, gigawatts of power.

As a matter of fact, this facility, when it is completely built out,

11 gigawatts of power.

That's enough to keep Manhattan lighted up for a year.

This is a stunning amount of energy.

So having enough power, and again, we go back to the point is you've got to have, I I mean, listen, wind and solar are fine.

I'm not an anti-wind, anti-solar guy, but they're not going to be able to drive the baseload that you're going to need to be competitive in this race.

So, I mean, that's a given.

That's not my theory or anything.

That's just a given.

No one disagrees.

Nobody disagrees very well.

So building

that power

is consequential.

And the second issue is the trades and having the men and women women with the skills to go build these facilities.

The plumbers, the electricians, the HVACs, my favorite, the welders, all of those

tradesmen and women.

That's the future of this race.

And we're behind in both of those, Mike.

I mean, one of the reasons I was so excited to get to do the Mike Rowe program, because everybody knows where you are when it comes to the trades.

and you're right.

You've been the Johnny apple seed.

You've been the messiah of the trades and rightfully so.

I think people are just now starting to, you know, sit back in their chairs and go, you know, Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe's right.

We've got to go get focused on teaching these young people these skills that are very sellable to make a big difference in their lives, but more importantly, make a big difference in this country.

The welding school over at Bernie, Texas, that my friend Dorman Vick, that I mean, he's

what a great and extraordinary story.

Young kids who come in at 14, 15 years of age, and at 18 and 19, they're graduating from Bernie Champion High School with a certification as a welder and starting to work making $80,000 to $120,000 a year with zero debt.

They're happy as they can be.

They're doing what they want to do in their life.

They're not trying to figure it out.

They're not going to college and being taught how to be woke.

They're literally going and doing their life's work.

But more importantly, from my perspective,

they are filling the jobs that this country must have if we are going to win this AI-driven data center race,

do you see a kind of Rosie the Riveter rhyme here?

Do you see an Uncle Sam wants you kind of recruiting message for this?

I do, but I also see at its core something that over the last 17 years, I feel like has been somewhat dismissed because it's so damn simple.

But it really comes down to the kid you just described, making $150,000 a year with no college debt, maybe welcoming his first kid into the world.

Maybe he's 27, 28 years old.

That guy, he needs to be on a billboard.

He needs to be on PSAs.

He needs to be pointed to as the proximate cause of success and the American dream.

And as a citizen who, back to my earlier question, who answered a call, right?

I mean,

there's a bit of the first responder component to what you're talking about.

And what I really want to say to you is,

since we met, and I've said this to Chuck and Mary, my business partner, and really everybody in my world, it's like a memo went out to every CEO and half the governors.

I met with Governor Abbott in detail about a potential campaign around the very thing you're discussing in Texas.

We're having similar conversations in Pennsylvania.

We already did it in South Dakota, but it's just a heck of a thing when the ship actually turns around.

Now, I'm not saying we're nowhere near ready for a victory lap, but at least in terms of acknowledging the problem, I was so heartened to hear your comments and Alex's and Toby Rice.

and guys who have a front row seat to this.

And I'm just waiting for somebody to pick up the hammer and really hit the alarm like with real urgency because because five out two in five out two in that's that's not sustainable math

it scares the hell out of me well you're spot on and Governor Abbott to his great credit took your challenge I think you're seeing him speak about this

I'm going to continue to to talk about it you know and I'm not you know blowing smoke up your dress here but I don't think anybody has

sounded the alarm any louder, any better than Mike Rowe has.

You moved the needle, but there needs to be more Mike Rose out there.

There needs to be more governors out there.

There needs to be, you know, Chris Wright, the current Secretary of Energy, Chris gets this.

And when we showed Chris this Fermi America plan, and I don't think I've even mentioned this, our site

is

almost 5,800 acres and it is contiguous to, it shares a border with the Pantex facility in Amarillo.

This is land that Texas Tech has had.

They've been grazing cattle on it for many years.

The government has used it from time to time, but this will build

a monumental,

as a matter of fact, this will be a monument

to

the American trades.

This will be a a monument to the America ingenuity.

This will be a monument to the Trump administration for seeing and having the vision that America can win this race.

And this is the right place.

This is the perfect site.

Just as I told you, you've got the workforce.

You've got a city that sees this and goes, let's get started today.

What are we waiting for?

This is a state that that is sending the message out, you want to come and risk your capital and have a chance to keep more of it?

You move to the state of Texas.

Think about what they've done over in Dallas in the last,

during this last year in the legislative session.

They created the Texas Stock Exchange, which has sent the message to New York City.

And now particularly with this Marxist communist person that may be the mayor of New York City, who's basically said, you know, we don't even need police here.

We're going to have our own grocery stores.

And you think the communists did socialism right?

Watch us.

You know what I realized the other day?

His name, what is it, Mondami?

Mom Dani.

It's basically an anagram for I, Madman.

Huh, hadn't thought about that.

But seriously, you think about if you're a Wall Streeter, And you have just been told your city potentially in a year is is going to be a war zone.

You want to raise your family there.

You want to walk down Wall Street to go to work, and there are people lurking around who know there's not any police, know there's not any law enforcement, know there's not any protection, and socialism has taken over New York, and there is a place you can go.

called Dallas, Texas, with the Texas Stock Exchange, where you're going to be safe.

and the mayor of Dallas is a law-abiding, freedom-loving individual.

What are you going to do?

You know what you're going to do.

You're going to start saying, you know what?

We've been here for 100 plus years, but

we're thinking the new frontier

down there in Texas, that's looking pretty good.

If you watch much television, you might have seen me pop up up recently in a commercial for Pure Talk.

In this particular commercial, I casually mentioned that I switched wireless companies because I was sick of overpaying my previous provider for a level of coverage I found to be lacking.

Unfortunately, in this particular commercial, I also called out my previous service provider by name.

And that made somebody up the food chain very, very, very angry.

How angry?

So angry that the commercial in question has been pulled off the air, never to be seen again.

It's true.

This is what happens, I suppose, when you upset a client worth $185 billion.

Look, I wasn't trying to make trouble or embarrass anybody.

I was just telling the truth.

And the truth is this.

My previous wireless provider was a disappointment.

They were expensive.

Their service wasn't great, and neither was their coverage.

PureTalk, on the other hand, has the most dependable 5G service in the country.

They're on the same 5G towers as the big guys, but they don't charge you for any of the extra crap.

As a result, they can offer unlimited talk and text with plenty of data for just 25 bucks a month.

And they support our vets in a meaningful way, as well as my own foundation, which I do appreciate.

Bottom line, if you're tired of doing business with a big, bloated, multi-billion dollar wireless company who doesn't even know who you are, do what I did.

Switch to a company that actually stands for something.

Go to puretalk.com slash row and save an additional 50% off your first month at puretalk.com slash row.

Texas looking good, and I'm just imagining, you know, waking up this morning in Florida as a high-end real estate agent and going all right.

Yeah, all right, I'll see you soon, you know?

Yeah, you know, I want to tell you an interesting story about how

government can make a difference and they basically can make a difference by getting out of the way.

In the early 2000s, Boeing was deciding that they were going to get out of the Pacific Northwest and they were going to go to another location.

You know, I think, let's see, was it United and Continental that

had either merged or were thinking about merging

at that same period of time?

And

the two cities that it came down to was Chicago

and

Houston.

Those were the two places.

And that may have been the United Continental.

But beside the point,

they chose, we recruited them.

This is the early 2000s.

This is before we really got good at recruiting businesses in the mid to late 2000s.

We got really good at it in Texas.

We got HP,

we got Toyota.

They came by the literally tens of thousands to the state of Texas over the end of the 2000s.

And Governor Abbott has kept it going.

Matter of fact, he's expanded it substantially.

Was it a recruiting message that worked, or did you just simply incentivize them?

And really you just run the run the numbers and then you're left to square it or ignore it we did both we had a I had like a $35,000 radio ad campaign in Texas in 2006 or seven I mean you think $35,000 I mean that's pretty tiny but we advertised it I was going out to California we were going to recruit these businesses we literally bought some ads to put on some taxis.

You remember when they put used to put ads on the back of taxis and drive around?

It's like, you know, come to Texas.

You know, we're wide open for business.

And we had a little TV spot that showed me flipping

a sign on a door to open for business.

And

anyway, Jerry Brown, who was the governor of

California event, he got asked about it.

Somebody stuck a microphone on his face and said, you know, Governor Brown, what do you think about this ad campaign that texas is doing here to recruit businesses back out of california to texas and jerry kind of you know gave him the back side of his hand signal and said ah that that ad campaign doesn't even make a fart

could not have been a greater

that's all you needed

That took a $35,000 little ad campaign, and it was on every TV.

It was made national news.

I mean, it was a multi-hundreds of thousands of dollars little ad campaign that was kind of like Jerry Brown says Texas ad campaigns not even a fart.

It was awesome.

That's it.

Well, you know, today they call that earned media.

Earned media.

Right.

And it's, and I know I really want to dig into the Ibogaine thing soon, but this all comes down to what's persuasive.

You know, I'm kind of obsessed with that.

And I want you to make your point about, what was it, the airlines?

Yep, the airlines.

The airlines were moving.

And here was the point with this that I saw in later years.

They chose Chicago.

And the wives of the decision makers, I heard a couple of years later, they were very influential in where the headquarters went.

And Chicago was chosen over, as a matter of fact, I think it was Dallas rather than Houston.

It was either Dallas or Chicago, and they chose Chicago.

And I picked up through very good sources that the spouses of the decision makers helped make that decision because they thought the cultural arts were more expansive in

Chicago than Dallas.

And maybe in early 2000s that might have been the case.

But here's what happened in a decade in the state of Texas.

And the reason this happened in the state of Texas over that decade is because we didn't over-tax, we didn't over-regulate, we didn't over-litigate, and we had a skilled workforce, which basically means you've got accountable public schools.

Those four things

are

the real message for anybody who wants their state to get ahead.

Don't overtax, don't over-regulate, don't over-litigate, have a skilled workforce.

Because

in that decade,

Fort Worth built a new museum of modern art.

The Formula One race came to Austin, Texas.

Dallas built another performing arts facility,

the Meyerson,

on top of a performing arts facility they already had.

Ross Perot's family built a museum of natural history.

There was South by Southwest, one of the biggest music and film festivals in the world now, came to Austin, Texas.

You know, Austin got the Formula One.

I mean, all of these things happened in a decade because I'm going to be just a little political here.

When I became the governor,

the next year, the next legislative session was the first time in the history of the state of Texas that we have all Republican leadership.

And that's when we put these policies into place that didn't overtax, over-regulate, over-litigate.

And we really changed the

thought process, if you will.

We changed the character of the state of Texas where people were like, that's where I want to be.

I want to come into this this state, be a part of this, enjoy the freedoms that are there.

And if you get to keep more of your money,

you'll decide where to put the state of Texas, and I'll suggest very few other states, if any, would have built a performing arts facility, would have built an F1 track, would have done all of these things.

That was the private sector being able to have more of its money to decide itself.

And that is a great,

I think, lesson to everyone who's in public service.

If you want your community to grow, let the private sector keep more of their money.

Government is never going to be able to build these great museums and edifices, I will suggest to you.

Now, they may help, they may participate, they can get out of the way.

Right.

But

in

2011,

On Reagan's birthday, I was on the USS Reagan doing one of my bucket lists in life, and that was to do a catapult launch and a trap in an F-18.

My friend Jake Elzey, who is now a United States Congressman, was the air boss on the Reagan, and he got that done for me.

And

as one of the cods landed and the door let down, and I was watching the people walk off, one of the individuals was the head of that company that had chosen to go to Chicago, And I recognized him.

And I went over and just shook his hand.

I hadn't seen him since a meeting probably a decade earlier.

And I said,

after some pleasantries, I said, where are you living now?

And he gets this big smile and literally belly laughs.

He went, well, governor, he said, I'm in Plano, Texas.

So in the decade since he and his wife had moved to Chicago,

the cultural arts had gotten good enough for him to move to the state of Texas, and he got to keep a lot more of his money because we don't have a personal income tax.

Here's how we get to Ibergain.

Everything we've talked about so far really does redound

to persuasion.

And it does occur to me that everything you've done in your long career is part and parcel of that.

The Manhattan Project preceded you, obviously, but there was an awful lot of persuading that had to happen.

Chicago versus Dallas.

These are cities making a case for themselves, right?

Rescue dogs, right?

Somebody needs to make a persuasive case for adopting a dog versus buying a purebred.

And that battle will go on and on and on.

The environment, nuclear, certainly we have to make a more persuasive case to dispel the irrational fears that so many people carry around with regard to that, you're Sisyphus, dude.

Every time I turn around, you're pushing another rock up another hill.

And I think maybe the Ibogain story, it's certainly right there with all of the other ones.

And, you know, Sean McCourt is a good friend of ours.

I've known him for years, and he just produced this film, and you're in it.

And I just watched it on my walk this morning.

And congratulations.

I know this has been a big fight and we can frame it any way you want, but

for me, this rock that you're pushing up this particular hill goes all the way back to this weird dichotomy between drugs and medicine and plant-based and recreational and just the incredible confusion that seems to hover like the cloud of dirt hovered around pigpen.

How are you going to cut through it?

Yeah, it's interesting that you made the connection between nuclear and Ibogame because they're alike.

And they're alike because there's been this great

mystery and there's been this great fraud about the truth about both of them.

You think about nuclear power and what, three events, maybe four?

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and obviously the two bombs on the nuclear weapon, this terribly

destructive weapon that killed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in Japan.

So we've been taught that all of our lives.

You remember, I think it was the 64 election.

You may not have been alive in 64 row, but I was.

Okay, I started to say, you're just a baby.

The 64 election, there was this ad, I think, that one of the, either Goldwater or Johnson used, and it was

the daisy ad, pulling the things off the daisy.

And it was was used to scare people.

Nuclear is bad.

Your children will all be born naked if we have nuclear power.

I mean, you know, it's just kind of like, come up with every crazy statement you can, and people go, oh, my God, that'd be bad.

So

the same thing happened in the late 60s, in the 70s, and carried on through the 80s when it came to these compounds.

And listen, don't ever get me confused as being some pro-drug guy.

I'm not.

I mean, I'm still a knuckle-dragging, right-wing Republican when it comes to these issues of recreational drugs.

I'm never going to be for that.

I mean, I think we're learning now about cannabis.

You know, some studies are coming out right now.

It's like, you know what?

Just opening up these stores on every corner might not be such a great idea.

So, you know, set that aside.

Recreational use of drugs, bad.

But are there some compounds out there that got swept up in the anti-drug mentality of the late 60s and 70s?

What Nixon did

using these compounds as a political tool in hindsight

really hurt our country and hurt the world in turn.

And what I mean by that is

Nixon saw, there were two groups that Nixon really disliked.

He hated blacks and he hated hippies.

And he really hated black hippies.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, they used the DEA and the anti-drug mentality to go after these groups.

So anything that had the word psycho or psychedelic or psychoactive or, I mean, they swept them up, put them under Schedule I and go get those people.

And in hindsight,

and so we add on to that in the 70s, and even the 80s, and the Reagan administration, and Mrs.

Reagan, who I dearly love Nancy Reagan, but her just say no to drugs.

Yes,

don't be using these things recreationally, but

it cast a pall over every

potentially

could save a lot of lives got set on the shelf, locked in a closet, put in the basement,

hands off,

and we're just now,

you know, literally 50 years later, figuring out we may have overreacted just a spell.

So

let me delve into and share with you where this transition for me occurred.

Could we start first with the problem just to make sure people understand?

And I know listeners here will get it, but I mean, is it 17 a day?

Is it 20?

Is it 22?

We don't know.

We don't know, right?

But we do know if you're going to ring an alarm bell, whether it's around the skilled trade shortage or the importance of

a better energy plan, surely there's an alarm for this.

Because last year it was

6,500, I believe, that were attributed to straight-up suicide.

I don't know that that includes deaths of despair and misadventure and all sort of things, right?

So that are adjacent to this number.

My point is, it's a scandal.

These men and women, they need a right

to try.

Mike, in Sean's documentary, they had an incredible stat that just dropped my jaw, which was in the time from 9-11 to 2022, you know, the two wars that we fought, 7,000 men and women died in battle.

And during that very same time, 140,000 killed themselves.

I mean,

that goes on a billboard just as surely as the trade school kid we're talking about.

It's just, it's extraordinary.

I want to hear how you came to it, Governor, but I just want to make sure people understand the totality and the enormity of the problem because you've found success with this thing and it's still freaking people out.

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soon may the noblemen come to bring a bottle for everyone one day when the waiting is done we'll take a drink and go

so

we've never been at war for this long

and this intensive war

i think i may be correct in saying this in the history of mankind you think about

the the spartans and

however many um millennial ago that that we've been fighting wars.

And we fought for a little bit of time, then we walked and we did some things.

But the intensity of being at warfare, you know, look at the Civil War.

When we fought, then we may have walked for three or four weeks, and then we fought for 24 hours, and then

World War I, a little more intense, World War II, a little more intense, but we were not at combat, even in World War II.

I think if you were in the 1st Division, 16th Infantry, you went in on North Africa, you fought there for that, you know, May and summer of

43, then you went to Sicily, and then you got shipped over to England, and then on the 6th of June of 44, you invaded, and then you went all the way through, you know, Europe, and the war was over with basically around the end of April of 45.

That's only two years

only.

I mean,

if you were one of those frontline warfighters, that was a long period of time.

But think about Vietnam a little bit more.

Maybe a couple of tours in Vietnam where you didn't know where the bad guy was.

I mean, a little more intensity on that brain, a little bit more of those chemicals pumping out into your brain.

We saw

what we call it back in World War II, shell shock.

Shell shock.

World War II, actually, yeah.

Battle fatigue.

Right.

Same thing in Vietnam, and we just kind of set it aside.

You know, we're war fighters, we don't talk about that, we we'll deal with it ourselves.

And

generally, they would find a way to mask it with alcohol, which was a whole nother problem.

Then we get into this war on terror,

and for almost 20 years,

these

young men and women,

in some cases, deployed eight nine ten times

not knowing i mean literally walking down the street in baghdad whether the person coming towards you is a good guy a bad guy

that

intensity of warfighting we have never seen potentially in the history of mankind

so

We're basically test pilots right now, Mike, is what we are.

We've got this massive amount of young men and women.

Yeah, I will suggest to you some of the finest that we've got

who have sacrificed

time after time.

They've held their hand up and said, here am I, send me.

And then they come home, and our government has been an abject failure at dealing with how these young men and women process into

into

the civilian world.

There's no reverse boot camp.

No.

And

anyway, as that is your basis, that our government has failed.

Our government owes these young people at least some answers about why

are my friends killing themselves?

Why is this happening?

And now over the last, I'm going to say last decade, we're starting to understand it a lot better.

We're starting to see a lot of different things.

And so, I want to take you back.

This started for me.

My dad was a B-17 tailgunner in 1944 and 45.

His crew member was killed

October the 7th of 1944 on a mission.

My dad got to see

a tail gunner.

He got to see real combat.

Best I can tell, my dad never exhibited any symptoms.

But

what I know now is that you cannot go to combat.

You cannot be in intense combat, whether you're a telegunner on a B-17 in 1944, or whether you're a young man on point in Vietnam in 1967, or whether you're a Navy SEAL dropping into some place

in some God-forbidden place around the world today.

You cannot go into combat

and come back home and be the same person you were.

I believe that with all my heart.

There's something that happens.

Some of them handle it better than others.

Some of them handle it differently.

But my point is, we have sent this entire generation of kids into war for nearly 20 years in some cases, and our government handed them a sack of opioids and said, here you go, take these until we figure out how to help you.

They masked it with alcohol, and then we sit around and go, damn,

did you hear that Mike or Bobby or Jane, they killed themselves last week?

Huh.

Wonder why.

Well, we know why.

And so what are we going to do about it?

So this started for me back in 2006 when I met a young man just by the grace of God out on

Naval Special Warfare Center in San Diego.

gave us a tour of the place while I was the governor, the lieutenant commander, naval aviator, just to kind of show you how small the world is and how this is really meant to be.

That naval aviator that actually led the tour, who went in the barracks and pulled out this enlisted kid to give a Saturday morning tour to a VIP, which, you know, most of them shot the finger to that, I'm sure.

But this one came because he was from Texas and this was Texas governor.

The boy who led that was Jake Elzey, the now United States Congressman from over in

central Texas.

The enlisted SEAL who

assisted at that tour

was a boy by the name of Marcus Luttrell.

Lone Survivor.

In 2006, this is when this occurred, about a year

after Operation Red Wings.

We took him to dinner that night after they had given us the tour.

I knew this was an extraordinary story as we were picking his brain about,

because Jake shared a little bit with us about what happened.

This was before the book, this is for the movie.

Nobody had ever heard of Marcus Luttrell before.

I told him, I said, give me your mother's phone number.

I'll call her when I get back to Austin.

Tell her I ran into you, doing fine.

And I said, hey, if you ever buy,

you're ever in Austin, come by and see me.

Bat chance, right?

I mean, it's a nice thing to say.

You know, I told it to hundreds of people.

Hey, Hey, if you're ever through Austin, come by and see me.

And

we went about our way.

I called his mom and told her, I said, I saw your son.

He's doing fine.

And, you know, I went back to being the governor, doing what I did.

The following May of 07,

the security detail calls into the governor's mansion and says, sir, there's a young man down here who said, you told him if he was ever through Austin to come by and see you.

And I literally laughed.

And I said, I said that to hundreds of people.

I said, what's a person's name?

And he told me and I went, yeah, I did tell that kid that.

I said, well, send him in.

We'll give him dinner.

And

that was in May of 07.

And he lived with us

for the next two and a half years.

With your family?

Yes.

In the governor's residence.

He was really sick.

He was separated in a very oddball way that we subsequently got involved with and got him, you know, re-evaluated where he was eligible for TRICARE.

I mean, they literally just sent him out the door.

It was the weirdest thing in the world.

I know a little bit about how the military functions, being the commander-in-chief of the Texas military forces, but this was just an oddball deal.

And this kid had the only health care he could get was through the VA.

And I was just kind of like,

after he came and stayed with us, my wife's a nurse, and she identified this pretty quickly.

Addicted to opioids, had alcohol issues.

He had physical issues, obviously traumatic brain injury, slept with the light on all the time, was afraid to wake up in the dark.

I mean, it was a tragic set of events.

Did he tell you the story of what happened

that made him famous, the whole lone survivor thing?

So you knew all that.

I knew that at dinner the night we first met.

As a matter of fact, I told him, I said, Marcus, you have a really interesting story here.

I said, you need to find somebody to help you put this into a book form to honor your friends.

And we knew his backstory.

And

again, he was living with us in May of, I think, 08 when his book became number one on the New New York Times bestseller.

Wow.

So

yeah, you may or may not remember this.

The governor's mansion was being redone.

There was an arsonist that tried to burn it down.

We lived off campus, as we refer to it, in a private residence for nearly five years.

And for two of those years, he lived with us.

We had a third...

floor on this house that we had moved into and we just gave it to him and he could come and go and the detail knew him and and during that period of time Marcus goes from being you know some unknown big tall drink of water kid to a very well-known New York Times bestseller to I guess the movie didn't occur until he actually had moved out with us but now the way I heard it you guys were fishing when he got the word I've actually got pictures we're bass fishing back over here about 50 miles from where we live today

and

I've got a picture of him holding up his number one finger as he got the call from his publisher.

That, hey, man, you just made number one in the New York Times bestseller list.

But he's also got like a seven-pound bask on it.

This is pretty sweet, too.

This is a pretty big day.

That's great.

Yeah.

So then, obviously, he's sick.

He's struggling.

He's having this extraordinary thing happen to him, but I'm guessing he's not really getting better as a result of that.

Where does the Ibogaine happen?

Yeah, well, that's actually way down in his story.

We chased a lot of rabbits.

I took him to multiple places.

The Carrick Brain Center up in Dallas,

we threw a lot of jello at the wall, I guess is a way to say it.

And some of it would help a little bit and what have you, but

he went to a place in Florida called

Athletes Performance.

I think it's now it's called Axios.

And he still goes there every year.

It's in the Panhandle up around Pensacola.

And they do a lot of work for high-end athletes,

you know, special operators, NFL players, law enforcement.

And it's where we got his addiction

to the opioids addressed.

I don't know, you know, there's a difference between being cured and healed.

But we got him off of the opioids by going there.

They hit him in a good way.

The greatest thing that ever happened to Marcus is he got married, and he married a fabulous woman.

Melanie Juneau was,

I mean, she literally was an angel that saved his life.

Yeah, it was great that he got to live with my wife and myself.

I tell people, I said,

unfortunately, there are tens of thousands of young men just like Marcus Lattrell, that he didn't know a governor.

Marcus just happened to meet me at a time that was very fortuitous for him.

And in turn, us.

But the point is, I mean, I see God's hands all over this is where we met, why we met, what we're doing now, how this is all working out.

This is, I'm just a good useful tool, just as Marcus is just a good useful tool in this, to make a difference in a lot of people's lives.

So anyway, let's fast forward.

And

during the time he was living with us, we met his brother his identical twin brother navy seal morgan lattrell

and

when i left the governorship

morgan was leaving the seal teams and he had some traumatic accidents he he crashed off the coast the east coast of norfolk in a nighttime training mission broke his back This was in 09, I believe.

About the same time Marcus was down at this facility being treated for his opioid addiction, Morgan ends up down there because he has broken his back.

And they send him to the same place.

And

we,

you know, he became

very much a part of our family as well, as did Marcus.

So these two boys stay in our lives.

And after I leave, the governorship.

I've run for president in 2015.

That didn't last very long.

And

helped Trump.

He asked me to come be the Secretary of Energy.

And I want to take some people to D.C.

with me that I know and I trust.

I sued Washington a lot while I was governor, but I didn't know a lot about Washington.

And so I wanted some folks up there.

And both of these young men are peculiarly bright.

You know, I don't know whether you put them in the genius category, but they are very, very bright.

Morgan was working on his PhD in brain science because he was very interested in PTSD and traumatic brain injury and what have you.

I knew that.

So when I got to D.C.,

there was a nascent program at the Department of Energy using the department's supercomputers.

All the supercomputers in the United States basically belong to DOE.

University of California San Francisco was in a early on program to scan the brains of people with traumatic brain injuries using those supercomputers and their power to be able to map the brain.

I asked Morgan if he would set aside his PhD work, come to D.C.

with me, help work on that program, keep an eye on it, and quite frankly, just have my back as we were in Washington, D.C.

And he agreed to do that.

And that, Mike Rowe, is the first time I ever heard the word Ibogaine.

It was through Morgan in probably a casual conversation as we were talking about brain science and what they were doing.

Dr.

Jeffrey Manley, PhD, MD out at the University of California, San Francisco, ran this program, still does, great guy, a wonderful scientist and doctor and researcher.

And Morgan worked with him.

And in a casual conversation, I heard Morgan say that they were sending some of their friends down to Mexico to be treated with this plant medicine called Ibogaine.

And I said, Morgan, you need to be really careful with that.

I said, I don't know.

what that is, but that doesn't sound like a good idea.

Doesn't sound like Tylenol.

That was my first

sorry.

Not

in the background.

They got a good rhythm going on.

The FedEx truck has just pulled up out here, and this is the way that we say hi to the FedEx driver.

And he loves them, but they announced that he's coming up.

So we live like

I live 75 miles from Austin, 85 miles from Houston, three miles outside of a town that's population 87.

So

to say we're rural is a pretty descriptive term.

That's where you're sitting right now?

That's correct.

Nobody sneaks up on us out here.

Who's over your left shoulder?

Right there in the frame.

That?

Yeah.

That is the most beautiful woman in the world.

That's the first girl I ever had a date with.

Wow.

I dated her for 16 years before I talked her into marrying me.

Wow.

You're really trying it on, huh?

You're still trying it out, yeah.

59 years since we had our first date together.

Wow.

That's pretty good stuff.

Now, we hadn't been married that long.

We dated for 16 years.

She was not a,

she was not an easy sell, let me put it that way.

I don't want to fry.

So, Ro, I will tell you, you'll love this.

So, when I was a pilot in the Air Force, I was pretty cool, right?

You know, I was wearing a flight suit, flying all over the world.

C-130s, right?

You know, I was attractive to her.

When I got out of that and came back home and moved back to the farm and, you know, old worn-out blue jeans and greasy hair, I lost a lot of my cool.

So she was like a really hard sell.

But I persevered.

Kind of like selling the people of the state of Texas that Ibogaine is something that they ought to pay attention to.

Or that nuclear is not a thing to be afraid of.

So, and that really gets to the core of this.

I'm a curious person.

Yes, I'm conservative.

I don't make any,

you know, I don't

make any excuses for that.

I don't apologize for that.

I'm a conservative.

I think conservatism is a good thing, but I'm curious.

And

if you come to me with facts and data, I will,

criminal justice reform is a great example of it.

Sure.

I was a, do not come and talk to me about this criminal justice reform.

You break the laws of the state of Texas.

We are throwing you in jail and we are throwing the key away.

That was my mentality in the early 2000s.

And I had a district judge, a Democrat district judge by the name of John Crusoe, who came and said, Governor,

here's what we're doing up here in Fort Worth with these drug courts and with the shock probation and people who are, you know, they broke the law and they need to be punished, but we're not sending them to prison where they become professional criminals.

And I found that to be curious.

And I was like, that's interesting.

And the more

I got talked to about it and the more open I was to this is a productive way to deal with these individuals.

And Texas became the first state, I want to say in 07, we implemented this statewide

criminal justice reform that

the product that came out of that, the result was by 2011,

we had saved $3 billion

in building new prisons

and untold lives that were saved because they never went to jail, never went to prison, which is where you become a professional criminal.

That mentality served me very well when it came to either being open to this concept of why would a psychoactive compound, why would you be open to betting your reputation on this

to

potentially save a few people's lives?

That

same

mentality and same characteristics was how I sat down with Donald Trump at Bedminster in, I think, 2018 and talked to him about criminal justice reform.

And I had Brooke Rollins, who is now his Secretary of Agriculture.

And I think the governor of Kentucky at that particular point in time was in this meeting.

and Trump was Trump sounded like me.

He was like,

get behind me, Satan.

He said, I'm tough on crime.

And then we made the pitch to him,

and he was curious.

That was the meeting that started him

to be open to a criminal justice reform that I will suggest to you was one of the very important reasons he got elected in 2024

because there were, particularly in the African-American community,

there were people that said, you know what, he understands us.

He understands what's happened to us.

He understands that the criminal justice system hadn't been fair to us.

And

that

being open

and curious has been one of the

great gifts that I've been given as a person

and being able to share with other,

you know, pretty conservative Republicans that you can do these things and it's not going to ruin your political career.

It's not enough just to be curious.

You've got to be, you know, you've got to be willing to be wrong, right?

I mean, curiosity requires a measure of humility.

You know, that's in short supply.

I think it seems like in the political class, certainly in the journalistic class, we're very long on certainty these days.

And literally every topic that we've talked about so far has required a kind of peripatia to get Homeric on it, right?

It's just the willingness to say, you know what, I was sure about, I was sure about this.

And now I'm not only open,

I've changed my mind.

That's a hell of a thing.

That beautiful woman over my left shoulder reminds me on a regular basis that one of the hardest things to do in life is to admit you're wrong.

Well, you know what?

I've had lots of practice, like anything else.

It gets easier

the more wrong you are.

But flash forward a bit.

I don't want to keep you all day.

You got a house full of dogs and you're trying to change the world.

What's happened in Texas with Ibogaine?

Where are we in this long slog

to acceptance?

So

this last session of the legislature, Brian Hubbard, who, if you want to talk to the smartest guy on the planet from my perspective,

Brian is my partner in this.

He ran the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Commission until it was shut down by their current governor and attorney general, who someday they'll have to explain why that happened, but that's on them.

But the point is, Brian Hubbard, myself, Amber and Marcus Capone,

the Vets organization, and a host of really good, capable people that I just don't have time to name all their names, were

out

helping on this.

We put together a plan, we implemented it to allow for the state of Texas

to

commit $50 million.

That's real money.

$50 million taxpayer dollars to partner with a drug development company, an equal amount.

The state of Texas gets to maintain any patents that come out of this and do clinical trials.

The focus is on veterans, but Mike, this is a lot bigger than veterans because what we know about Ibogaine now is it is extraordinarily effective against addictions.

I'm talking alcohol, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, opioids.

I mean one treatment, one oral treatment with Ibogaine in 80 plus percent of the cases and the addiction is gone.

I mean that sounds too good to be true, but I've seen the data.

Stanford's done a clinical trial on this.

I've seen over a thousand veterans that we sent down to Mexico to a facility called Ambio

that has had extraordinary success, particularly dealing with our warfighters.

That's where Markets and Morgan, where Dakota Meyer, Medal of Honor recipient, all of them have been to AMBIO and to be treated and had stunningly good success.

So this legislation, which by the grace of God and

the people of the state of Texas standing up and saying, we want to do this, Governor Abbott was fully behind this.

The lieutenant governor came on board.

The speaker came on board.

It passed the Texas legislature, which has 150 members in the state house, with only two dissenting votes.

It passed, I think, on a voice vote in the Senate.

The governor publicly signed it.

I mean, the governor put his reputation on the line on this as well.

So a lot of courageous Texans.

So just kind of as a little background.

When it first became public that I was

talking about using some psychoactive drug to treat veterans in Mexico.

One of my political consultants came up to me and he said, what in the hell are you doing?

He said, man, he said, you're fixing to throw away 40 years of conservative history.

He said, what are you doing?

And I said, well, I said,

I don't.

I don't think so.

I said, I have studied this.

I've talked to literally hundreds of people that have been treated.

I've been down there and looked at this facility.

I said, I've done my homework on this.

I probably studied this more than anything I ever faced while I was the governor looking at issues.

I said, because I knew how sensitive this was going to be.

And I needed to really know what I was talking about.

But I said, here's the other side of this.

And this is what I appreciate about these other members that have done the same thing, that have to stand up in front of their citizens for election.

I said, my reputation is not worth more than those veterans' lives.

And that's what's really important, is that there are a lot of courageous men and women who understand that this is a compound that has the potential to really change people's lives, save people's lives.

And if you cannot be for that

kind of goes back to that statement that we talked about earlier about those environmental radicals.

You got a dark heart if you

want to say, yeah, you know, there may be some compound out there that could save your life, but you know, my

being against those psychedelics are stronger than that.

So you're just going to die.

I think, too, Rick, may I call you Rick at this point?

It's been nine years.

Yes, sir.

I think.

Or hey, you, I will, I will answer.

I mean, like, you've just jumped straight to Roe.

So I figure I'm good with Rick, dude, t-shirt, boy, whatever.

I'm hearing a t-shirt.

You can call me.

That's just from the waist up.

I don't even want to know what you're rocking.

It's none of my business.

But it's this idea of you're either reacting to a circumstance or you're trying to get ahead of an eventuality.

And, you know, it's a harder slog to sell when you're trying to get ahead of an eventuality because you're dealing with the theoretical thing that that might happen and you want to do this thing to prevent that.

But again,

the evidence demands a verdict.

These guys are punching their own tickets at record and heartbreaking numbers.

And I feel like, you know, I don't know who those two knuckleheads were who voted nay on this thing, but I know our country is full of people who kind of

they'll show up,

the house is fully involved, the flames are everywhere, and they stroke their chin, and they talk about what might be done to deal with this fire that's happening in front of them.

The whole approach is just so much more suited to fire prevention as opposed to, brother, your house is on fire.

Well, our house is on fire with regard to trade schools.

Our house is on fire with regard to energy.

I'll suggest again that there is a fire with our four-legged friends and the incredible ridiculousness that has separated purebreds from rescues.

And this is certainly a fire.

I just, for the life of me, think we're entering the most extraordinary time of advocacy and persuasion that I've ever seen in my life.

And whether you wanted to or not, you certainly have a seat at the grown-up table, man.

Yeah.

So it's really interesting.

We've had a meeting with, I think, 15 other states, and I would suggest it's going to grow.

It's going to be more than that, as some pretty conservative members of the legislature from all across the country have contacted me and said, hey, they're curious.

And we talk about this.

Their heart's in the right place.

They've got veterans.

They've got loved ones who have addiction problems or have, you know, PTSD or traumatic brain injury.

We think that there's probably, and this is me speaking, I'm not hanging this on anything other than some data that needs to be looked at.

If neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, MS,

Alzheimer's, I will suggest to you all of those may be affected in a positive way with this plant that comes from Gabon in Western Africa and has been used for centuries over there from the aboga shrub.

And let's do these clinical trials across the country.

I mean, Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy, he and his agency,

they're going to be supportive of this.

I'm just, I'm comfortable that Bobby's one of those curious individuals who is going to say, let's take a look at this.

Dr.

Oz, I think Dr.

Bhattachara,

you'd look over at

You know, what I'd like to see is there be a rescheduling of Ibogaine.

And listen, I'm not going to get in anybody else's field here.

I don't want to get distracted of my mission.

My mission is about ibogaine.

You know, there's some really interesting things out there with psilocybin, there's really interesting things out there with MDMA.

There's other compounds that I hope this administration will say, you know what, let's go do these clinical trials so that we know and we'll find out whether or not they are

what you say they are.

I'm focused on ibogaine because I am convinced that this compound, particularly with our veterans and particularly with addictions, and Mike, think about how many people you know, well, I'll speak for myself.

How many people I know whose families are tragically

impacted by someone who has a substance addiction,

whatever it may be.

And I'm convinced that this compound has the ability to reset the brain.

You look at the Stanford study and the work that they did, there's measurable increases in the white matter in the brain of every one of the veterans that the Stanford study,

you go to Stanford and Ibogaine and it'll pop up and take a look at it.

The white matter increased, that's the myelin sheath around the exterior of the brain.

That's the super highway.

That's what moves your thoughts around in your brain.

Every one of those veterans had measurable increases in white matter.

There's a regenerative effect of this medicine.

And so,

I mean, this may be

the most profound advancement in medicine in my lifetime.

And let's look at it.

That is some tall cotton.

That's some tall cotton, man.

I mean, you know, full disclosure, I mentioned on this podcast.

probably a month and a half ago that we had met, or maybe I wrote something on Facebook and I said, you know, that this was a key area of interest and I was really looking forward to talking to you about it.

And I immediately heard from people who were like, well, okay, but wait.

And I mean, people really, I mean, the lines are drawn, Governor, and you've got, there are vocal detractors out there.

And I don't, again, I'd be much more charitable to their skepticism.

in the framework of, well, we don't really know how bad the problem is yet that we're trying to cure.

So let's just tap the brakes.

But come on, this is like experimental drugs being denied people with ALS

because they haven't been properly tested.

I mean, isn't it rational to say, wait, there is nothing to lose here?

I mean, and again, not to plug my friend's movie too hard, but you really meet the vets in this movie who are really

walking around with the weight of the world.

They're this close to punching their own ticket.

Yep.

Yep.

And to say to that guy or to his wife or to his kids, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm skeptical of all of this, so you don't get to try,

well,

that's outrageous.

The 17th of July is when that will air on Fox Nation.

So I hope everyone that's watching, listening, will take a look at it because it is a profound piece of reporting.

Sean,

Sean's done a really good job with this.

Yeah, he's a real friend of the court, as it were.

Chuck, what's it called?

The movie?

Remember?

Oh, I don't.

Do you know, Governor?

I don't.

You know what?

It is.

It's got, he says

in the Washington Post editorial, I said that this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

That was,

and it's something to do with

the rest of

I'm sorry, I've only looked at the

clip of it.

He let me see,

I've seen it all, but I've be darned if, and he told me what he named it, but Fox Nation

and the 17th.

So, and it's something about the rest of my life.

Oh, it'll be easy enough to find for people.

It's not listed on here.

It just says Ibogaine Master.

Well, you know what it is?

He's got it in the movie itself.

It's still the rough cut, but the title's in there.

Yeah, somewhere in there.

I literally saw it this morning.

Yeah, it's a very strange thing, Rick, to be rucking with 50 or 60 pounds on your back, watching a film about Ibogaine, huffing and puffing, sweating profusely, just stalking through the fog here in Northern California.

But that's how I started my day, watching you when you interviewed.

Well, not necessarily watching me, but

watching it.

Who's your associate?

He was on Rogan with you as well.

Brian Hubbard.

Brilliant.

That guy's good.

Oh, he's fast good.

That guy's very good.

Brian Hubbard may be the brightest person I've ever dealt with in my life.

And I've been just, by the grace of God, been exposed to a lot of really interesting, extraordinarily bright people.

Brian Hubbard may be at the top of that list.

He's got such a style about him.

Like when he really gets wound up, he kind kind of gets close to the microphone and he tells you very quickly and he's got a sonorous voice yeah it's it's really oh that kentucky accent i mean i could listen to

introduce him from time to time i said now folks brian is gonna look like and sound like a hillbilly from kentucky in the appalachian mountains and he is

which he is i mean he grew up in in uh eastern uh Kentucky in the Appalachian Mountains in a family dysfunctional and he very public about this, affected by alcohol and coal mining country.

And he has just found his real calling in life, and he's incredibly passionate.

He and his wife are both just two of the loveliest people I've had the privilege to get to meet in my lifetime.

I got the title.

It's I Begain

the Fight of a Lifetime.

The fight of a lifetime.

There you go.

I know something about it.

There it is.

The lifetimes.

Yeah.

Well, you know what?

I mean, I'm glad you found it because that might be the title of this episode.

Rick Perry, it's the fight of your lifetime, or at least it's the fight for this year.

Who knows what's coming up for you?

I'm not ever going to.

Somebody asked me, How do you like being retired?

And I said, wouldn't have a clue.

I'm not ever going to retire.

I'm going to work until the last breath is taken.

So, bottom line, is Texas going to lead

the AI revolution in this country as well as

cure

PTSD?

Yes.

If you don't believe it,

when do you even want to start?

I believe in both of these things.

The team that we put together to build this AI data center, the potential for,

I realize I'm biased.

I get it.

That Texas is a unique place.

We got a unique history.

We're, you know, if you drew the outline of Texas in the dirt in Afghanistan, the kid over there would know what that is.

I mean, Texas is a unique place for a lot of different reasons.

And our spirit of, you know what, we're going to carve out of this absolutely just hard as hell place to live, this great empire.

And we're going to, and you think about the movie Giant, or you think about the Alamo, you think about the history of this place, and it is bigger than life.

So the idea that we're going to build a data center that literally takes America to the cusp of winning the most important battle in our lifetime,

why not?

Why not?

You know, Pennsylvania is feeling pretty consequential too these days for a lot of different reasons.

Our friend Selena Zito, who I love, man, she is awesome.

She and I met, and not to get off

subject here, but

Selena Zito is one of my favorite people in the business.

I mean, I love her.

She came and traveled with me when I ran for president in 2011, and just I completely became enamored with her in a professional way.

I mean, she's just the most lovely person, great family.

Give her a hug for me.

Well, she's my sister in some weird cosmic way.

Her whole approach to journalism.

and writing was my whole approach to dirty jobs.

It was to take the back roads and to let the people be the star of the story and just try and stay out of the way and be an honest broker of the day you experienced.

And she's so good at that.

She's taken such an interest in Microworks and she's connected me with some of these CEOs that I mentioned

who are turning out to be very generous with our foundation.

And I'm wondering, do you know there's a thing happening in Pittsburgh on the 15th of July that she got me invited to.

It looks like McCormick and Fetterman will be there.

It looks like Trump will be there.

Looks like a big sort of round table of people who are talking about data centers and AI.

Yeah.

AI.

Yeah.

We actually are looking at how to get up there and be participating in that.

So I may see you up there.

I'm going to be there.

I just decided this morning.

It's going to be.

do it.

I got to move a.

Then I'm calling Selena when we hang up here and saying, hey, where's my invite?

I just mention it because it's a good place to land the plane and turn

weird.

It's like a hive mentality.

You know, I think about back in the day, I remember Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby were both working on the integrated circuit.

One at Texas Instruments,

your backyard, and one out here in what would become Silicon Valley.

And they never met, Rick, but they were both focused on this problem and came to the same basic solution to the point where they wound up sharing the Nobel Prize,

which had never happened before.

And so if I'm looking for reasons to hope, I'd leave you with this.

This is happening in different pockets all over the place.

This awakening, if you'll pardon that old trope, it's real and it's bubbling to the point where I wound up at one of these,

the Aspen Ideas Festival, which,

you know, in general, I avoid festivals and gatherings and all of that kind of thing.

But I saw a remarkable panel and there's Larry Fink, head of BlackRock,

who, you know, all the ESG stuff, I was pretty vocal.

That was not my jam.

But he stood up there in front of a very liberal crowd and said, don't fool yourselves.

We need 500,000 electricians in the next couple of years or we lose everything.

Yes, sir.

So if that guy got the memo, I think there's reason for optimism.

I'm the most optimistic guy in the world.

This country has faced so many challenges through the years, and you think about,

you know, whether it was back in 1778 or whether it was in 1917 or whether it was in 1943 what we faced and what we've overcome there's a spirit about this country

that

is absolutely untouchable anyplace else in the world

We got our issues.

We're not perfect.

But when it comes to

the can-do spirit, when it comes to having the heart of freedom fighters, when it comes to being able to

sacrifice above everything else for family or country, no place does it like America.

And that's the reason that

I'm as excited about living at this period of time.

as I've ever been.

Well, I'm glad you're still alive, and I'm glad you're still in the fight.

Please thank the most beautiful girl in the world for giving us so much of your time and

give that pack of wolves a collective scratch.

We're fixing to go outside.

Shake it out.

All right, Governor.

I sincerely appreciate Mike Rowe.

You're a great American.

I appreciate you.

God bless you, brother.

You're not so bad yourself.

Don't hang up yet.

Got to make sure all your wisdom is properly uploaded.

As for the rest of you, we'll talk to you next week.

That won't take long.

This episode is over now.

I hope it was worthwhile.

Sorry it went on so long,

but if it made you smile,

then share your satisfaction in the way that people do.

Take some time

to go all along

and leave a

review

I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge.

But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge.

You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

Number four, all you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

All you've got to do is leave a quick

live stop.

Especially if you're here for the oil.

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