Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his wife Liz discuss their cabinet transition, arguing that a nuclear-armed Iran threatens global energy security and must be "defanged" despite short-term disruptions. They criticize the Biden administration for depleting strategic petroleum reserves, contrasting it with their plan to trade barrels to refill stocks by next year. Wright rejects solar and wind as primary grid solutions due to intermittency, advocating instead for a nuclear renaissance via small modular reactors and fusion within a decade. The conversation also covers AI's economic impact, regulatory hurdles in grid infrastructure, and personal views on school choice, gentle parenting, and the influence of teachers' unions. Ultimately, the episode frames energy independence as central to national security while challenging current renewable mandates. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Solar, Wind, and Battery Subsidies00:15:22
I don't care where energy comes from as long as it's affordable, reliable, secure, and it betters the lives of the consumers of energy.
Don't you think it's a national security concern that China is producing such a large amount of solar and has dedicated such a large amount of their energy production to solar production specifically?
If you wiped all the solar panels off the planet tomorrow, no one would notice.
If all of the solar was zeroed out tomorrow, the world would lose 1.2% of energy, but it's energy that's not dispatchable, it's not reliable.
No one would notice.
It wouldn't even be a hiccup.
Do you think nuclear was unfairly maligned?
Oh, absolutely.
It's so much easier to sell fear than to sell reassurance.
It's the climate change movement and the overhyping of climate change that has brought your generation and younger in to be pro-nuclear.
But I truly believe we will launch the nuclear renaissance during this administration.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller Podcast.
We're so excited to be at the Department of Energy today, joined by Chris and Liz Wright.
Thanks for doing this.
Great to be with you, Katie.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
So what's life been like moving from the private sector over to being a cabinet secretary?
Oh, no change at all.
Schedule's the same.
Yeah, yeah.
Pressure's the same.
Pretty dramatically different.
You know, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life, so I've, you know, started businesses from the ground up and assembled a team.
And so here to walk into a large organization with a huge amount of people and a culture in place and have a boss for the first time since I'm 19, pretty transformative, but actually an incredible, incredible honor to work for the people of the United States and to work for a president who's bold, who's not, I always thought government would be slow and bureaucratic and less risk-taking.
Not at all.
He's like, if we have problems, let's fix them.
So you were one of what I'll call the outsiders from Trump world who came in who's new to the club.
What is the biggest surprise you have both seen in dealing with people from Trump world who you've seen over the years, dealing with President Trump specifically, that surprised you?
Yeah, so absolutely.
I am an outsider and brand new in the world.
But what's been great is the cabinet pretty quickly came together as a family.
You know, pretty quickly, my culture is tease people, poke people, I'm casual.
But I thought it would take a while to break in.
People immediately accepted me as the new guy.
The fun, the sense of humor across the cabinet, and I would say across the spouses and the families.
Yeah, the cultural transformation of being part of the cabinet, easier than I expected.
What's the cabinet spouses like?
Everyone was super welcoming.
I was a complete fish out of water.
We were very non-political for all of our life.
As Chris said, entrepreneur all the time.
And I was busy with my philanthropy and with raising the kids and taking care of dogs.
And we're from Colorado.
We're casual.
Too close.
Jumping into D.C. It's like, I need a new wardrobe.
I need to figure out how to do my hair and put on makeup, like all the stuff I've never done.
So, but everyone was so welcoming and so wonderful.
So it's been good.
Everyone's so busy, though.
It's crazy.
I don't think, well, people had been in the office before, knew how busy it would be.
But I think everyone else, we thought, oh, we'd have time to get together.
Let's get the couples all together.
Everyone's schedule is so insane that we never really have time to all get together at once.
The war in Iran is obviously impacting global energy markets.
How concerned are you about the damages to the LNG terminal and other energy facilities over in the Middle East?
Yeah, certainly.
Look, the energy is not one sector of the economy.
It is the sector of the economy that makes everything else possible.
If you get energy wrong, you destroy your society.
Look at what the United Kingdom has done.
Look at what Germany's done.
Germany at least is recanting and I think wanting to go back and fix it.
But you don't want to get energy wrong.
Another reason I think President Trump won.
The Biden administration literally wanted to drive our energy system into the ditch.
Just outrageous.
Fortunately, We pivoted before too much deep damage, but we've wasted trillions of dollars.
But we need to repair the energy infrastructure in the Gulf.
If the damage grows, it just means energy prices are going to be higher for longer after it.
But ultimately, the reason for the war is for 47 years, Iran has been a threat to American soldiers, to American interests, to all of the neighborhood in the Middle East, and ultimately they've been a threat to energy delivery.
And so in the long run, This will have enormously positive benefits.
You cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran that can control the flow of energy.
We'll have a different Iran, a defanged Iran, and a better energy future, but there's a rough patch we'll go through in the meantime.
Thanks to Joe Biden, we had already released a ton out of our strategic petroleum reserve for the election and to lower gas prices ahead of an election.
I think we did so earlier also in the Trump administration, and now we are planning to do so again, is what I've read.
What do you expect gas prices to be this summer, and how do we intend to refill?
what is, I think, a 58% decrease in our petroleum reserves.
Yeah, so the Biden administration sold over 200 million barrels of oil out of the petroleum reserve, and they sold them to try to lower gasoline prices to do well in the midterm elections.
There was no interruption of flow of energy then.
The Trump administration, we are not selling those barrels.
We are trading those barrels.
We're bringing barrels to market now when the marketplace needs them in exchange for 1.2 barrels of oil delivered next year.
So at the end of this conflict, when you get to the end of next year, which the conflict will be over long before then.
But at the end of next year, we'll have more oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve than we did when President Trump took office.
Meaningfully more oil than when he took office.
Tackling that as a business person would, not as a government that just wants to get reelected.
I mean, it's crazy that they would ever do it that way.
We're going to get into my favorite subject now.
All right.
What do you think it is?
What's my favorite subject?
Solar.
Solar energy.
Solar energy.
I thought nuclear on solar was going to be one of our favorite.
Solar is my favorite.
Affordability is always an issue and especially a big issue for the American people.
What is your plan to scale up power fast without sending people's energy bills through the roof?
Yes, and look, we've invested over the last 10 or 20 years a massive amount of money, 33 years now of subsidizing wind power and mid-20 years subsidizing solar energy.
I worked on solar energy in graduate school, designed remote applications for it, it has a role to play, but if you have an intermittent energy source that's only there some of the time and you don't know when it's going to be there and when it's not going to be there, if it gets any meaningful penetration, it ends up driving up the whole system cost.
So in the roughly half of states that have renewable portfolio standards that have forced the adoption of wind and solar faster, they've added state subsidies on top of federal government subsidies, they have 50% higher electricity prices than the states that haven't gone down their way.
So your issues is just subsidies, not exactly the energy source?
Yeah, as I often say, I don't care where energy comes from as long as it's affordable, reliable, secure, and it betters the lives of the consumers of energy.
Wouldn't batteries solve that problem?
No, because today the United States has about two minutes of total storage of all the batteries in cars and on our grid.
We have two minutes of energy storage.
And when you have peak demand times like FERN, it's like a week-long event.
Wouldn't that be the reason to onshore battery production and move it away from China, who's dumping their cheap batteries and cheap solar into Cuba and other countries now?
We absolutely want to drive battery-forward technology, drive that technology forward in this country, and we absolutely want to produce more batteries.
Batteries have a role to play.
Solar has a role to play.
But they're not likely to be meaningful sources of global energy.
Solar, the last full year we have data, was 1.2% of global energy and 1.2% of American energy.
In the next year or two, it'll get to 2% of American energy.
If you have a solar panel and you say capacity, you build a solar farm that's 100 megawatts, it delivers, on average, 25 megawatts.
And a lot of times it delivers zero.
And sometimes it delivers 100.
It's that intermittency and that low energy density.
New England, that cold front we had, Fern, that came down, it's the biggest stress on the American electricity grid ever.
Largest withdrawal from natural gas storage ever, which is our biggest source of home heating and also electricity.
At peak demand time in New England, which is what matters on an electricity grid.
It's sunny out, you get more energy from solar right now, doesn't do us anything.
It just means some other existing asset has to turn down to accommodate the sun came out from behind a cloud.
What matters is can you deliver energy at peak demand time?
At peak demand time in New England this January, wind, solar, and batteries combined were 2% of electricity going into the grid.
Burning trash and wood was 3%.
But yet we subsidize fossil fuels, but we're cutting all subsidies to renewables.
How do we subsidize fossil fuels?
There definitely is subsidies for coal and for natural gas that Congress currently subsidizes.
We passed a very small amount of money to help refurbish and upgrade coal plants.
But I hear from environmentalists all the time, these massive subsidies of fossil fuels.
I'm wondering where they are and what they are.
Because the short answer is we don't.
There's accelerated depreciation.
But of course, we have that for any manufacturing facility.
That's a tax treatment.
And it's not an advancement of money or a waiver of taxes.
It's just an acceleration of depreciating the value of an asset.
I want to have as few subsidies as possible on energy.
The one big beautiful bill got rid of a lot of them.
Of course, solar is still massively subsidized today.
If you start building something by July 4th this year, you'll get 10 more years of subsidies.
So if we complete the wind down, we'll have subsidized wind power for only 40 plus years.
I'm not sitting here advocating wind.
I don't think turbines do anything except kill birds, to be clear.
Yeah.
Well, we care about the whole system.
We just want to have affordable, reliable, cheap energy.
I agree that there'll be a role, like there'll likely be a role for solar in the long run.
I firmly believe there will be, certainly more than wind.
But it's more an additive source of power in special situations.
It's only an electricity grid.
It doesn't provide process heat that's used for manufacturing.
Do you think it's a national security concern that China is producing such a large amount of solar and has dedicated such a large amount of their energy production to solar production specifically, and that they are surpassing the entire world in production of solar panels and all the components that go in?
They have, if you look at the pictures and videos of their mountainous regions, that because they're going to be more price resistant, especially with what's going on in Iran, that it should be a national security issue for us to not be producing the same for us in situations when there is tightening of other types of energy.
If you wiped all the solar panels off the planet tomorrow, like no one would notice.
We're losing 10% of sort of global oil production today.
It is a massive crisis.
If all of the solar was zeroed out tomorrow, the world would lose 1.2% of energy, but it's energy that's not dispatchable.
It's not reliable.
No one would notice.
It wouldn't even be a hiccup.
So where are you then on orbital data centers and powering them via solar in outer space?
Great idea.
There are good applications for solar.
There are fuel reduction technologies.
You're on a remote island and diesel is expensive and you can burn less diesel by getting some power from solar.
Great.
You power data centers in space, fantastic.
It's going to play a role.
Remote villages in Africa, you can charge a cell phone.
You can't cook or do or have economic, increased economic productivity from solar because it's not high intensity energy and it's not there 24-7.
It has a role, but it's not that big of a deal.
It has been a great industry for China.
They sell the solar into the whole rest of the world.
It's not 2% of Chinese energy, so it's not meaningful for them today.
I hope its role grows in the future.
Look, I'm in general pro-solar.
I worked in it.
I hope it grows in the future.
Well, mark that down for everyone who has ever said Chris Wright is not pro-solar.
That's the moment you said you're pro-solar energy.
Yeah, yeah, in a market capacity.
No, and I've always said that.
But yeah, we don't want to subsidize stuff that makes electricity more expensive.
Thank you for indulging me.
We're now going to move on to nuclear energy.
You said, even in this interview, that we're going to launch a nuclear renaissance, specifically in this administration.
You've even said that nuclear is going to become sexy again.
How fast do you think we can scale up?
nuclear as a main component of our grid infrastructure and powering say AI data centers and other things for homes so that we are able to lower energy prices for Americans.
We should have the first sort of next generation nuclear electrons hopefully on the grid during this administration.
That'll be from a small modular reactor to get it done that fast.
That's that's aggressive.
We'll have three next generation reactors critical meaning running their nuclear systems by July 4 of this summer but for electrons on the grid we're talking you know, the end of this decade into next decade.
But nuclear was 6.5% of global energy in the year 2000.
Today it's less than 5%.
Still double wind and solar combined in total energy.
Because again, it's not just electricity.
It produces that high temperature heat.
Mostly that's wasted to the atmosphere today.
But that can be used to manufacture and produce things.
So if you can't produce process heat, you're never going to be a major player in global energy.
Our biggest use of energy is to manufacture materials.
In fact, it's very very high temperature process heat intensive to make solar panels, which is why polysilicon is produced mostly in China, because they have massive coal reserves and they produce a massive amount of high temperature process heat to produce polysilicon.
When do you think we'll have fusion?
I think we will have more energy in than out in the next three to five years.
I think we'll have hopefully a commercial pathway identified in the next five years.
But fusion energy on the grid, yeah, it's 10 years if everything goes awesomely well, 10 to 20 years, but it's coming.
I went to work on it 40 years ago, and we thought it was 10 or 20 years away then, so could be wrong.
Fusion Timeline and Regulatory Reform00:06:43
So questionable.
It's a tough problem.
But I think it's coming.
But fission energy, you know, the original nuclear energy, there is new generation reactors coming out.
We're going to make more of those in factories, which means the cost of them is going to come down.
The innovations with them, the safety is going to be even greater than it is with existing reactors.
So nuclear's got, I think, a very bright future.
Do you think nuclear was unfairly maligned?
Oh, absolutely.
It's so much easier to sell fear than to sell reassurance.
You know, that's the asymmetry in politics and activism, you know.
Liz and I were environmentalists.
We were outdoor adventurers.
I was actually a board member of an environmental group when I took this job, a free market environmental group.
But the environmental industry really has become sort of a fear selling industry.
And boy, you can raise billions of dollars to scare people about things like nuclear power or climate change, where there's like a kernel of something there, but they're just wildly exaggerated.
And unfortunately, it's been effective.
When do you think the tide turned towards saying we needed to build more nuclear more quickly?
And kind of mirror what some of you know European countries have done.
Well sadly it's, it's the climate change movement and the over-hyping of climate change that has brought the your generation and younger into be pro-nuclear.
Um, so that that that's a I would say that's a positive uh side effect of of a of a very aggressive climate movement that I and I think we've hit peak crazy there.
I think that'll drift down.
There'll be another issue that'll dominate, the fear-mongering, you know, 20 years from now, always There, always is.
There always is.
That just cycles with history.
But I think the public support is stronger than it's been in my lifetime right now for it.
But also we needed the private capital.
We needed the common sense governance of the Trump administration to put the building blocks in place to actually start to build nuclear and to get that ball moving.
What's something about being energy secretary that would surprise people and that shocked you when you came into this role?
Well, one is that the construction of all the nuclear weapons, you know, was done through the Department of Energy, the nuclear engines that power our aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
So there's a big military aspect to it.
And another thing people don't appreciate is the 17 national labs in the United States.
The greatest Nobel Prize factories on planet Earth are also part of the Department of Energy.
And, you know, science and the understanding of matter and the universe, you know, has been an intriguing thing to me since I was in junior high.
So to have all of the national labs and nuclear technologies and actually nuclear weapons were also super intriguing to me as a young kid.
So those things, in addition to my career in the space of energy, are just awesome additions.
It's like a kid in a candy store.
Did you expect AI to be such a predominant storyline of your time as energy secretary?
Did you see that coming?
Because there's not a day that goes by that there is not something in a major legacy news publication about the energy needs for our country, specifically to power AI data centers.
whether that's increasing costs for ratepayers or any of those?
Only right before, only in the few months coming up.
When I went to college, so a long time ago, you know, AI was going to be a big thing then.
I've been hearing about AI and computers are going to be better than humans my whole life.
Very skeptical of it.
I still don't believe AI will have consciousness.
They're not going to be human-like in life at all.
You're not a believer that they'll reach AGI?
I'm a believer that no, I don't think they will mimic in any way humans, but I think they're capacities will be are tremendous, and the human brain is an amazing computational machine.
We're best of all of recognizing faces.
We're wired to do certain tasks.
We're not nearly as good as chess and playing other games as computers were.
That was true a decade ago, but I think the rapid expansion of what we can do with AI has been amazing, and so this thing I've been hearing about all my life it is actually finally happening.
I do think it will be completely transformative to the economy, to the progress of science.
So I don't want to underplay AI in any sense.
I just think it's different than humans, but the capacities that it will bring to expand what humans can do will be amazing.
And they will be very disruptive in ways we don't appreciate right now.
Do you think it's a bigger challenge to upgrade our grid infrastructure or to find additional power sources to actually power the grid once we have the infrastructure?
The infrastructure is probably the biggest challenge, the biggest challenge.
But if you look at the last 20 years, we tripled United States oil production.
We more than doubled United States natural gas production.
Those two energy sources are well over 70% of U.S. energy.
But yet we barely grew our electricity production.
That's a regulatory problem.
There's just too many regulatory layers.
The complex nature of the electricity grid and the bad market structure we have to incentivize things to happen on the electricity grid.
have been major problems.
So again, thank God President Trump won the election and we have a chance to try to fix this very complicated, very important system that just hasn't grown for decades.
When people hear regulatory problems and regulatory burdens, it feels like this like mythical beast that someone doesn't know how to overcome or what they're even punching at.
As you look at what you've done, right, how have you been able to strip down what I'll call these like regulatory barriers in order to actually increase our energy output?
Yeah, I mean, with nuclear, you've just got to look at it.
I say we need to focus on safety, safety, and safety, where the focus had been on bureaucracy, safety, and bureaucracy.
We had successfully prevented any meaningful safety in the incidents in the nuclear industry since the creation of the NRC, but it had just become so bureaucratic.
It just didn't allow any innovation, any progress.
It essentially didn't approve or allow anything to happen.
And you can't drive progress and improvement without action.
And so I think through the work at the national labs and through the huge private capital that's come into the nuclear space, that combined with some regulatory reform, combined with some incentives to resource enrichment and fuel fabrication in our country, there's a lot to put back together there.
But I truly believe we will launch the nuclear renaissance during this administration.
Breaking Impasse for Progress00:06:25
What's your favorite source of energy?
Is it coal, petroleum, solar, nuclear?
Got to pick one.
What's your favorite?
Well, the world runs on hydrocarbons when I was born, and it will when I die, and it will when our kids die.
So look, if you're human betterment, oil, natural gas, and coal, they run the world.
for the next generation of what could be meaningful and contributory to the future, nuclear for sure.
It can be a large player in global energy.
And when I talked about hydrocarbons, I should narrow it down to my single favorite hydrocarbon, which is propane.
Propane.
I love that Liz knew your favorite answer was propane.
We both have golf shirts with propane molecules on them.
The molecule itself on our golf shirts.
True love when your wife can answer what's your favorite hydrocarbon.
That's not true in your household?
I can't say that's not.
Oh my gosh.
You guys got to get your act together.
Liz, you're super passionate about school choice.
What sparked your interest in that?
I think the biggest thing was we grew up at public schools.
Our parents both moved to Colorado, bought a house in the best school district they could, and went to a good school.
When we got out to California, I was working right after college doing clinical research in San Francisco, and I was working with pregnant teen moms or pregnant teenagers and trying to, you know.
And one of the gals that worked for me had been a mom at 14 or 15.
She was having me set aside $50 every paycheck, which was a significant, they paid twice a month, and it was a significant portion.
And she said she wanted to save it so she could send her daughter to Catholic school so she wouldn't turn out like she did.
And I was like, whoa, that was a light bulb moment.
Here I was.
I had been incredibly liberal in college.
Definitely public schools are the best.
The government can solve all problems, blah, blah, blah.
I say I was an uneducated liberal because I just didn't do the research.
I didn't think about it.
I just believed whatever I heard.
And it was in the day of Reagan was evil, America was terrible, whatever.
But that one moment, seeing this young gal who was struggling, she knew what she did set her up for not an easy life.
And I thought, wow, I had options for school because my parents moved to a good school district.
But these kids are stuck in the inner cities, and they're not.
And I think the most un-American part of America is our public school system in the inner cities.
These kids have a bad rap, they're born in the wrong zip code, and no school will help them get out of that with the current system as it is.
Is that the moment you were red-pilled, or did it slowly happen over time?
That was the trigger.
I mean, Chris and I met when we were 18, so I already knew him.
He was peppering me with a few things, a few pieces of information, but mostly I just started reading, started looking into things, and realized, yeah, the world could be a lot better in government.
What did Reagan say?
Things that you could.
Two words you can hear or the sentence you can hear is, i'm the government, i'm here to help.
You know it doesn't work that way.
Incentives matter, and you know free markets matter and our education system needs to be pushed to.
The need actually needs to be blown up and start over so that it can be pushed.
Amen Stanford, hippie chick seeing the world clearly.
Of course she has converting one liberal at a time.
Um, one of the big things also in our country right now is our declining birth rate and also declining marriage rate, But yet you two found each other at 18 years old.
What would your message be to other young women and young men about putting the effort into finding a spouse and that support system earlier on?
And to your point, having kids in a healthy, loving relationship and not out of wedlock to increase our birth rate?
That's a good question.
Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest decision you make in life, right?
Just by far.
It drives what your life is going to be like.
I always say I've had this crazy lucky life, but by far the luckiest thing in my life was meeting her at age 18.
I was an irresponsible, fun-loving, and fun 18-year-old kid, but I wasn't looking for a wife then, although it was certainly my vision.
But I came home that night, and I saw my sister, and I said, I met a girl today.
I could marry her.
Now, my daughter would chime in and say, Dad, what?
Took you 10 years.
And so I always say, if I could do anything in life and I don't have, like I've had a great, wonderful life, but if I could do one thing over I would have gotten married earlier to the same gal and had more kids.
So, and I think today our son brought us, you know, coming back from a Thanksgiving vacation away.
He said, you know, people now wait until they have a career and then they try and find something you get out of college.
So many people go to college.
They think the next step is a big career and then get your career established and then find someone.
And he said it's better.
And he was young and he said it's better.
Why don't you grow together with someone?
Find someone that really completes you, that makes you a better person.
And why don't you grow through those challenges and not wait until you have to make all the compromises when you get together?
So I think a message to tell, yeah, to encourage thing is you don't need to have everything figured out.
Just find the person that is really wonderful for you and figure it out together.
I hear you're a card counter.
So what was your first career?
Well, my first career was a weed picker when I was nine, you know, and then babysitting and lawn mowing and all that.
But I always wanted to make money.
So yes, when early on in my career, I worked for this tiny little company and we were trying to buy out the crazy guy whose business it was.
And I didn't have any money, but you had to figure that out.
And we had sort of an impasse in what was going.
So I was quote unquote unemployed for a month.
And I'm like yeah, counting cards isn't hard.
I'll learn how to do it.
It turns out it isn't actually hard at all.
And then, hey, we're just going to go up to Las Vegas and Reno and make money.
Maybe I'll stay at Card Cutter forever.
And I wanted the glamour of the casino people coming and showing up to escort me out.
Now I'd be a big shot.
Now it turned out it didn't work that way.
But it was super interesting to do that, to go up and do it.
Las Vegas Card Counting Adventure00:15:31
And it turns out, I mean, it's shocking.
Is, casinos can cheat and if you're counting, they know you're counting and they cheat.
You know, like our guess was, one in five dealers knows how to cheat.
So if you come in, you count cards, they change the dealer to your table, to the person who can cheat, and if I get up and walk to another table, they change the dealer over.
They make it very obvious what they're doing.
Basically, you're not going to be able to take money from us by counting cards, and we didn't have a lot of money.
And so he would bet in like five dollar bets and go up to like a 50 bet.
So I think the most you ever made was maybe 200 bucks, But it was a theory.
Liz didn't marry me for the card-catting fortune.
But I had visions of a card-catting fortune.
And I was home working two jobs, so it was all good.
I had him covered for one brief moment.
Now I'll move on to a fun section.
It's called Cabinet Confidential.
Your answers can only be that of another Cabinet Secretary, and you both should answer.
Oh, no.
Who is most likely to accidentally blow a fuse?
I said accidentally I'd give you a slide out.
Yeah, you know, I haven't seen any cabinet member, which is shocking to me, you know, melt down.
What I see is eruptions of humor.
I will tell you, not everyone appreciates how crazy funny Marco Rubio is.
That guy is hilarious and constantly hilarious.
Of all the cabinet secretaries we've interviewed on the podcast, every single one has given the answer of Marco Rubio is the funniest.
Okay.
And he's now like, what, five for five?
And there's other funny people, but he's very funny.
So I know this answer then.
If there was a cabinet group chat, and maybe there is, who would send the most memes?
Brooke Rollins.
Oh.
Brooke is also funny, but she's like the den mother of the cabinet.
Like she knew everyone before.
She loves everyone.
She wants to bring everyone together.
Soco might be the subject of most of the memes that are sent around.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Who has the best snacks in their office?
Or have you not been to anyone else's office?
No, no, of course I've been to other offices.
But that is a shortcoming of government.
When people always ask, what are you most disappointed about?
Food.
You know, you're in business.
You go to a meeting or a gathering.
There's always snacks.
There's some food around.
They cater in, you know, cookies and all the way.
Bobby took the call away.
I don't know if it was Bobby.
I love to blame it on Bobby, but he's too sweet of a guy for that.
Have you adopted his diet that other people are now on of the meat and fermented vegetables?
I have not.
I have not.
My wife has been keto for a long time.
I've always been a little bit that way.
But yes, Bobby has got a lot of converts onto his diet.
Some are real happy about it.
Some are like, why didn't I agree to this?
And now I can't back out because Bobby told me it was good and probably it is, but I can't change.
So there's some angst over Bobby's diet.
But man, he's one fit dude.
So it's hard to dispute what he's doing.
Who has the weirdest hobby?
Oh, man, not enough.
Time for hobbies.
Howard's got the best pose.
And man, he rocks that pose everywhere and in all settings.
Howard, that guy is a bottle of joy.
You know, stressful or whatever.
Howard is can do, always grinning, rocking the pose whenever he needs it.
Yeah.
Okay, we're moving on to would you rather?
Okay.
You both do need to answer this separately.
Okay.
Would you rather host a dinner party with the entire cabinet or host both of your extended families for a holiday weekend?
Number one.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's what I said.
The cabinet is low maintenance.
So, they sound great.
And there's some great humor in it.
So, look, we love our families, but that's, that's, that's, but socially, that's trickier than hosting all the cabinets.
And an extended weekend for, but with combined is like 30 something people.
So, that'd be a little bit.
Would you rather always have the best parking spot or the fastest checkout line?
Fastest checkout line for me.
He doesn't shop.
I don't shop or drive these days, so I'm neutral.
Would you rather take a cross-country road trip with no itinerary or a perfectly planned trip with zero spontaneity?
Number one, for sure.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I can see why you're married.
We have bought airline tickets and put backpacks on our back and showed up and figured it out when we get there.
Would you rather have a rewind button for awkward conversations or a fast-forward button for boring ones?
I would have to say the former for me.
Oh, I would say the fast forward button.
Awkward conference.
It's those vulnerabilities, those awkward, those inappropriate things that I think bring the spice to life.
But boring's tougher to take from me.
Would you rather spend a week without electricity together or a week without talking to each other?
Oh, without electricity.
Oh, we've spent a week without electricity climbing mountains, adventuring.
What's your favorite backpack trip?
Papua.
Well, it wasn't backpack trip.
Back when I was in the country.
Well, no, it was to the Kumbai.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we went to the western half of the island of New Guinea, the most primitive place on planet Earth.
No agriculture, tiny societies.
They call the tree people.
How'd you get there?
Little familial bands.
We flew to the highlands on a low-grade commercial flight, and we chartered a plane, landed at an abandoned grass airstrip in the middle of the jungle, and then walked for six hours through standing water into a really rough place to live.
Note, people live 80 feet high living in trees in like a 15, 20 person familial neighborhood.
Liz becomes more impressive the more you talk.
Yes.
More crazy.
His mom came up with the plan.
Liz was getting with the plan.
We took our kids and crazy my mom.
Yep.
Yep.
If the U.S. energy grid had a personality, how would you describe it?
Tasmanian devil, like, I don't know, totally chaotic.
Quirky, quirky.
It does awesome things.
You know, it's got its problems, it's got its complexities, but it's the world's most important network.
Without the United States electricity grid, none of this is possible.
So lovable and quirky.
What's the biggest difference from living in Colorado to now living in D.C.?
Do you live here full-time?
Yeah, I'm here pretty much full-time.
The biggest difference is that we don't have our dogs here, and our grandbabies are in Colorado.
But it's kind of, we joke that this was our pre-kid lifestyle.
We lived in San Francisco, we lived in Boston, you know, urban hipsters, and then we had all of our kids and did all that, and then jumping back into here, it's like, oh, we get to be cool urban hipsters again.
And for people who don't know, you guys have two kids, two grandbabies, and how would you say your parenting style is or was?
We were very much free-range parents, I would say.
We grew up that way.
I'm one of six, he's one of four, we grew up with all the freedoms in the world.
So are you?
So we were very hands-off.
Do you agree with gentle parenting or are you more in a different type of parenting style?
I would say I don't even know the term.
What is gentle parenting?
We're pretty mean and harsh.
You can see how mean Liz is.
Brutal.
Gentle parenting is the new trend, I would say, among young mothers where instead of saying, I'm going to put you in time out, I'm going to give you another chance, it's getting down to their level and quietly having conversations about feeling and structure and their emotions.
I don't do that in my house, to be very clear.
I say, like, eat your dinner, or that's it, we're done here, and you can go to your room for the night.
Yep.
But gentle parenting is the big thing, so I was just curious as to how.
Yeah, no, we weren't that gentle.
I mean, we were.
And have a broccoli for dessert?
Yeah, yeah.
I have a very funny story with my son.
Please do share.
Chris was traveling all the time early on.
He was over in China, I think, at the time.
And I had two little babies living outside of San Francisco, no family.
And Arthur had just had a very big.
bad day.
Our daughter's older and our son is 21 months younger and I think he was about two and Sitting in his hard chair, he had had, you know, he would, he's a very emotional child.
Hurry was a very emotional child.
Total meltdown while eating dinner.
And it's like, honey, you need, you have to go down to your room until you feel better.
You know, you can come up.
I picked him up, took him downstairs.
You stay downstairs until you feel better.
And then come back up.
Skylar and I finished eating.
Suddenly I hear Arthur wailing again.
Like he had subsided.
I went down there.
It's like, what if I never feel better?
I was like, well, if you never, okay, as long as you stop crying, you can come back and finish your dinner.
So then he.
comes you know stops crying comes back finishes his dinner as he's eating his dinner we're done we had had dessert and he's like okay i'm ready for dessert no you're not having dessert you it is 45 minutes after we start eating you lost your chance for dessert total meltdown and um and he kept eating stabbing his stuff and he's like well what if i just have pudding for dessert like no that's still dessert what if i just have fruit no that's still dessert no dessert Mom, I am having fruit.
I am having dessert.
He takes his fork and spears his broccoli.
I'm having broccoli for dessert.
And then he eats his broccoli.
I'm like, oh my God, this boy's going to be a lawyer or something.
But I had my hands full.
He was like two years old.
It sounds like my household last night.
But it definitely, you know, we were much more friendly with our kids than the relationship I had with my parents.
And I don't know, Chris, you were really close with your mom, but with your dad, not a real close relationship.
But so it was fun.
For us, the big thing was freedom and independence.
You got to get kids today in general are just so coddled, so controlled, so scheduled.
We became who we are by having freedom, by going out on our own, getting in trouble, figuring stuff out.
So we gave our kids, you know, in the little town of Mill Valley where we live, just way more freedom than the average people.
People probably wanted to report us to Child's Protective Services, but still much less freedom than we had, but way more.
You know, you want your kids to feel autonomous, to feel and control their circumstances, to author their own lives.
What's your daily routine like in D.C.?
He's frantic every single day.
You know, starts in the morning, a little bit of exercise, a little bit of, you know, a small amount quickly.
You know, usually calls at the house in the morning, come to the office.
It changes all the time.
As I say to Liz, I come home usually before dinner.
I need to curl up on the couch in the fetal position for a little bit to recover.
And then Liz gives me some grief and we laugh about something.
and figure out what we're going to do for dinner if we haven't had dinner already.
What's his best dad joke?
Oh, my goodness.
I don't know.
Do you have any good dad jokes?
Actually, he has tons of jokes.
I think I'm very funny, but both of my kids and my wife don't always think I'm as funny as I am.
But the spouses, our son-in-law thinks he's really funny.
Our daughter-in-law thinks he's funny.
The grandsons think he's funny.
But, yeah, dad jokes.
What's a conspiracy theory that you believe in?
I am not a conspiracy theory person.
I wouldn't even unless I say political and I think conspiracies at the teachers union want to keep the students stupid so they can control them and turn them into Democrats.
That's a good conspiracy theory.
That's a new one we haven't heard yet.
I've been a big, I've enjoyed with great humor the Al Gore prognostications about what's going to happen.
You know, his grovelly voice about his certainty of what's coming next in the world.
And you just know they're completely wrong, but yet everybody gets spun up and loving them.
Paul Ehrlich just died.
who's sort of the godfather of the Al Gore's.
You know, he predicted doom and gloom by many different mechanisms throughout his whole life.
He was wrong on every single thing.
And the New York Times headline was, Paul Ehrlich's predictions were ahead of their time.
They weren't wrong.
All these doom and gloom things are just about to happen again now.
Where do you get your news?
Mostly from talking to people, from reading.
You know, Real Clear Politics is certainly a place I go because I always read stuff from the left and the right.
Obviously, I read a lot of technical scientific literature.
Yeah, Wall Street Journal and Heatmap.
What's the first app you open in the morning?
Aurorang.
I'm a whoop wearer.
What's your most controversial opinion?
My most controversial opinion.
Will I tell my kids that I'm in the top two list of their parents?
Controversial opinion, yeah.
That when she laughs, that dad's funny, that's controversial in our household.
That could be.
What's something you pretend to understand but do not?
He understands everything.
I take nuclear physics for me.
Oh, our older of the two grandchildren, he's still less than two.
Kilosh.
Yeah, he speaks a language we call Kilosh.
And I often speak back to him, but I don't actually understand what he's saying, but I know it's something wonderful.
Yeah.
If you had to give a 10-minute presentation with zero prep, what topic are you picking?
I'm talking school choice, but.
I'm talking Denver Nuggets or energy.
Which section of energy are we going?
Like when you're just freelancing, what's your favorite part of energy that you like talk Liz's ear off or your friend's ear off about?
How the world works and how the world energy system changes or doesn't change.
You know, it's giant, it's complex, it moves slowly, but it's critically important.
Everyone thinks energy is the electricity grid.
Like that's just one sliver of energy and definitely not the most important sliver of energy.
Is the deep state real?
The deep state as a coordinated entity?
No.
The deep state as a massive impediment to social progress and efficiency and all that?
Yes.
Have you found people here who don't want to carry out the mission that you've said, I want this done and it doesn't happen?
Oh my God, absolutely.
Anything that get on an internet here is on Politico or any hit site.
immediately.
Even in our administration, that's a shocking thing to me as a business guy in a very competitive field that was innovative and fast moving.
So we had things we didn't want people to know.
We had a little bit of challenges there, but not much.
The degree of leaks, the degree of undermining people, you know, in our own administration to me is just shocking, absolutely shocking.
Socks, Wardrobes, and Loud Dialogue00:04:18
What's your favorite President Trump story?
Oh my gosh, President Trump is an absolute man of action.
Early on, I would bring him ideas of things to do.
And boy, if it made sense, is it going to help the American people?
Is it going to work?
Do it.
I thought it was going to be a long-term sale.
Can I have one for sale?
Well, maybe one of my favorite ones was early on, Doug Burgum, Lee Zeldin, Howard Lutnick and I, we came and we sat with the president in the Oval Office a few weeks after confirmation.
said we got to build the Constitution pipeline to New England.
It will change energy price for six states.
It will change the opportunities in those states.
We explained it to him.
He said, you know, how do we get this forward?
Howard had a very bold idea.
Let's just go build it.
We'll start tomorrow.
Bring the tobacco.
Yeah, bring the tobacco out.
And President Trump said, well, let's think about that.
And he was very, he said, I think I'll reach, well, how about if I reach out to all six of the governors and I invite them down here to the Oval Office and chris, when can you have a presentation ready and we'll run them through why it's a win?
I said, I can be ready tomorrow, sir.
And he said, fantastic.
Well, we'll reach out to the governors and we'll bring them all down.
And then at the end of our dialogue, you know, the press corps came in and we stand behind the Oval Office desk to him and he starts going on the press conference talking and he announces that we're going to build the Constitution by the way.
And so I thought, well, that was a different way.
But then the cutest thing was, you know, he's always confident and bold.
I love it.
Then the press.
File out of the room.
And as soon as they get out of the room, he turns around and he said, was it okay that I said that he was so nice and so sweet?
I said yes sir, mr president, the word had to get out there and now it's out so Howard, kind of won.
Yeah, exactly.
So this is the last question.
We ask on the podcast every episode, if you could host a dinner party with three people dead or alive.
Who's sitting at the table and what are you eating?
Oh, want me to answer first?
Yeah, you guys, too hard for me.
I would say Winston Churchill, George Washington, and what would be the other one?
Probably Abraham Lincoln.
What are you eating?
We're eating flank steak, grilled asparagus, and wild rice because it's really easy to prepare.
Wow.
I'm going to have Socrates, Isaac Newton, and President Trump.
And we're going to have turkey, gravy, stuffings, kind of a Thanksgiving dinner.
With my eclectic gathering of folks and we're going to have a great dialogue and and and uh and some loudness, and I would be remiss if we did not talk very quickly and briefly about the socks you're currently wearing today.
You mentioned before we started that you always wear bicycle socks.
Why?
Well, there was a period where I did some bike racing and some cycling.
There was a friend who had the bike sock company and his factory burnt down in North Carolina, so a few of us invested to rebuild the factory in North Carolina.
All the socks are still made in North Carolina and and they my my ankles get less itchy if I don't have warm socks going all the way up them.
So it's, it doesn't look good, but it feels good.
So I said I had to get a whole new wardrobe.
We all got whole new wardrobes.
I didn't change my socks.
Yes, the only thing I didn't change when I came to DC.
Typically he's going to be on stage.
He has long socks so that people don't you know they're biking socks, but longer cycling socks.
It would be considered a faux pas, I think, to wear these with your suit, but it makes sense.
Yeah, I commit a lot of faux pas.
Thank you so much for doing this.
Thanks, Katie.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of the Katie Miller Podcast.
Please join us again next week, 6 p.m. Eastern, everywhere you get a podcast, YouTube, X, Rumble, Spotify, and Apple.