Chris & Liz Wright on Iran, Solar, Nuclear, & Card Counting | KMP Ep.34

19:00Katie Miller: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 their capacities 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.

19:41So 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.

19:59Katie Miller: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 percent 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.

20:43So 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.

20:53Katie Miller: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.

21:34It 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.

22:06Katie Miller: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, you know, oil, natural gas, and coal, you know, 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.

22:43Propane.

22:44Katie Miller: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 your favorite hydrocarbon is for sure. That's not true in your household? I can't say it is, no. Oh my gosh. You guys gotta get your act together. Liz, you're super passionate about school choice. Yeah. What sparked your interest in that? I think the biggest thing was I we grew up at public schools you know our parents both moved 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 twice a month and it was a significant portion and she said she wanted to put it 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.

23:58Definitely public schools are the best. 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 was 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.

24:34These 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.

24:42Katie Miller: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, you know, peppering me with a few things, a few pieces of information. But mostly I just, you know, started reading, started looking into things and realized, yeah, the world could be a lot better in government. You know, what did Reagan say? The worst things, two words you can hear, the sentence you can hear, 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, actually needs to be blown up and start over so that it can be pushed.

25:21Amen. Stanford hippie chick. See in the room clearly. And of course she has for a long time. Converting one liberal at a time.

25:30Katie Miller: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 birthright? That's a good question. Yeah it's the biggest decision you make in life right just by far it 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.

26:10I 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, look, 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. And I think today our son brought us, you know, coming back from a Thanksgiving vacation away.

26:51He 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 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.

27:29Katie Miller: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.

28:10And then, hey, we're just going to go up to Las Vegas and Reno and make money. maybe I'll stay at card counter forever. And I wanted the glamour of like the casino people coming and showing up to escort me out. Now I'd be a young, 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. And it turns out, I mean, 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.

28:49And 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$5 bets and go up to like a$50 bet. So I think the most you ever made was maybe$200. But it was a theory. Liz didn't marry me for the card counting fortune. But I had visions of a cartoon. And I was homework and two jobs, so it was all good. I had him covered for one brief moment.

29:20Katie Miller: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?

29:35Katie Miller:I said accidentally, I gave you a slide-out. Yeah, you know, I haven't seen any Cabinet member, which is shocking to me, you know, meltdown. 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. 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. And if there was a cabinet group chat, and maybe there is, who would send the most memes?

30:15Brooke Rollins. Oh. Brooke is also funny, but she also, she's like the den mother of the cabinet. Like, she knew everyone before. She loves everyone. She wants to bring everyone together. Marco might be the subject of most of the memes that are sent around. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

30:40Katie Miller: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. People always ask me, what are you most disappointed about? Food. You're in business. You go to a meeting or a gathering, there's always snacks. There's some food around. They cater in cookies. Bobby took them all away. Yeah, I don't know if it was Bobby. I'd 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.

31:15I 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 did 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.

31:42Katie Miller: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. His wife is the same way. 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.

32:25The cabinet is low maintenance. They are so great. And there's some great humor in it. So look, we love our families, but socially that's trickier than hosting all the cabins. And an extended weekend combined is like 30-something people. So that'd be a little bit.

32:41Katie Miller: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 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.

33:22Oh, I would say the fast-forward button. Awkward conversations. It's those vulnerabilities, those awkward, those inappropriate things that I think bring the spice to life. But boring is tougher to take from me.

33:34Katie Miller: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. Well, no, it was to the Kumbaya. 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.

34:26Note, people live 80 feet high living in trees in like a 15, 20-person familial band. Liz becomes more impressive the more you talk. Yes. His mom came out of the trip too. Liz was gay with the plan. We took our kids and crazy my mom. Yeah. Yeah.

34:43Katie Miller:If the U.S. energy grid had a personality, how would you describe it? Personality. Tasmanian devil. I don't know. Totally chaotic. Quirky. Quirky. It does awesome things. 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.

35:24We 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.

35:36Katie Miller: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 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 does gentle parenting mean? We're pretty mean and harsh. You can see how mean Liz is. Brutal. So gentle parenting is the new trend, I would say, among young mothers where instead of saying, I'm going to put you in timeout, I'm going to give you another chance.

36:21Katie Miller: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. Yeah. But gentle parenting is the big thing. So I was just curious. Yeah, no, we weren't that gentle. I mean, we were. Broccoli for dessert. Yeah, yeah. I have a very funny story with my son. Please do share. When he was two, he was, 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.

36:56And Arthur had just had a very bad day. Our daughter's older and our son is 21 months younger. And I think he was about two. And sitting in his high chair, he had had, you know, he would, he's a very emotional child. or he was a very emotional child, total meltdown while eating dinner. And it's like, honey, you need to, 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.

37:30He'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. I was like, no, you're not having dessert. It is 45 minutes after we started eating. You lost your chance for dessert. Total meltdown. And he kept eating, stabbing his stuff. And he's like, what if I just have pudding for dessert? Like, no, that's still dessert. What if I just have fruit?

38:00No, that's still dessert. No dessert. Mom, I am having fruit. I am having dessert. And 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 this boy is going to be a lawyer or something but I had my hands full he was like two years old so it sounds like my household last night but it definitely we you know we were 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 the big thing was freedom and independence you gotta you gotta the kids today in general are just so coddled, so controlled, so scheduled.

38:39We 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, is to alter their own lives.

39:06Katie Miller:What's your daily routine like in D.C.? It'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.

39:46I 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.

40:04Katie Miller: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' unions 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 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 in love. And then Paul Ehrlich just died, who's sort of the godfather of the Al Gores.

40:48You 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 were wrong all these doom and gloom things are just about to happen again now.

41:06Katie Miller: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 heat map. What's the first app you open in the morning? or a ring. 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?

41:44Controversial opinion. When she laughs that dad's funny, that's controversial in our household. That could be.

41:54Katie Miller:What's something you pretend to understand but do not? Oh, man. He understands everything. I'd say nuclear physics for me. Oh, our older of the two grandchildren, he's still less than two. Oh, Kilos. Yeah, he speaks a language we call Kilos. And I often speak back to him, but I don't actually understand what he's saying. but I know it's 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...

42:37I'm talking Denver Nuggets or energy.

42:41Katie Miller: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?

43:15The deep state as a coordinated entity? No. the deep state as a massive impediment to social progress and efficiency and all that? Yes.

43:25Katie Miller: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 to 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.

44:03Katie Miller:What's your favorite President Trump story? Oh my gosh. President Trump is an absolute man of action. You know, early, early on, You know, 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? You know, do it. You know, I thought it was going to be a long piece to sail. 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 of the Oval Office a few weeks after a confirmation. We've got to build the Constitution pipeline to New England. It will change energy price for six states.

44:43it 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 go build it. We'll start tomorrow. Bring the backhoe. Yeah, bring the backhoe. 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 Listen, 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.

45:19Well, 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 one. And so I thought, well, it was different. 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 OK that I said that? He was so nice and so sweet.

45:52I said, yes, sir, Mr. President. The word had to get out there and now it's out.

45:57Katie Miller: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? Want me to answer first? Yeah, you guys, it's too hard for me. I would say Winston Churchill, George Washington, and what would be the other one?

46:29Probably 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 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 and some loudness.

47:08Katie Miller: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 my ankles get less itchy if I don't have warm socks going all the way up them. So it doesn't look good, but it feels good. So I said I had to get a whole new wardrobe.

47:47We all got whole new wardrobes. I didn't change my socks. It's the only thing I didn't change when I came to D.C. Typically, if 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.

47:58Katie Miller:It would be considered a faux pas, I think, to wear these with your suit, but it makes sense. I commit a lot of faux pas. thank you so much for doing this thanks for having us thanks 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 see you then