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Tuesday marks one year since the Liberals won Canada’s federal election, securing Mark Carney as prime minister despite a Conservative victory looking like a foregone conclusion just months earlier.

A year later, Carney’s popularity and power have only grown. His approval rating sits at about 60 percent, and after winning three by-elections earlier this month, the Liberals now govern with a majority in Parliament.

The combination of Carney’s tack to the center and a backlash against American economic threats has transformed Canadian politics. Minor parties have been sidelined, new parts of the electorate have been absorbed into the Liberal coalition, and Canadians appear to be giving Carney the benefit of the doubt despite challenging economic circumstances.

The biggest question for Liberals now is how long Canadians’ economic patience will last — and how long Trump’s influence will, too. Philippe Fournier of 338Canada and Éric Grenier of The Writ joined me to discuss it all.

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Virginia voters approved a gerrymander of their congressional map by a slim margin on Tuesday. As we discussed on Monday, the new map could elect 10 Democrats and just one Republican this fall, replacing the current delegation of six Democrats and five Republicans.

It’s a dramatic turn in the mid-decade redistricting saga that began with Texas’s Republican gerrymander last summer. As things stand, Democrats could end up as the net beneficiaries of an effort initiated by President Trump.

We dig into those results at the top of today’s podcast, then turn to the listener mailbag. We’ve been getting lots of great questions in the paid subscriber chat on Substack at gdpolitics.com. (A reminder to paid subscribers to take advantage of that!). I’ll start a new thread there so you can drop in questions whenever you like.

Today’s questions cover the California governor’s race, whether candidate attractiveness affects election outcomes, that poll suggesting the Democratic Party is less popular than ICE and the GOP, whether MAGA identification has declined, and what to watch in the midterms — especially the Senate. We even get into the Nebraska race, which one listener argues deserves more attention.

Joining me are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Lenny Bronner, senior data scientist at The Washington Post.

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Virginians are heading to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to redraw the state’s congressional map, part of Democrats’ response to Republicans’ push for mid-decade redistricting.

If the measure passes, Virginia could go from a delegation of six Democrats and five Republicans to one with 10 Democrats and just one Republican. But that outcome is not yet certain: polling shows a closely divided public.

In Florida, legislators are preparing for a special session next week to decide whether, and how, to redraw that state’s map. Recent Democratic overperformances, combined with a state constitution that bars partisan gerrymandering, make the politics there more complicated.

Once Virginia and Florida settle on their paths forward, we should finally — in the middle of primary season — have a clearer sense of what the 2026 congressional map will look like.

That’s our focus on today’s podcast. We also dig into broader questions around election administration, including Republicans’ push to pass the SAVE America Act, Trump’s executive orders, and decisions still pending at the Supreme Court.

And we round things out with the latest midterm fundraising numbers and last week’s New Jersey special election. Joining me for all of it is Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor of Votebeat.

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Heads up: We’ve got a live show at the Comedy Cellar in New York City with Nate Silver and Clare Malone coming up on May 13. We’ll talk about the midterms and the Trump administration, play some games, and take questions from the audience. Grab a ticket, grab a beer, and come join us!

Last November, friend of the pod David Byler joined me to argue that, while artificial intelligence was still on the periphery of politics, it wouldn’t stay there for long. The parties, he said, should prepare for disruption.

Less than six months later, it feels almost silly to have ever imagined otherwise. Over the past few months, the Department of Defense has publicly clashed with Anthropic over how its models could be used in war. Anthropic, for its part, developed a model so powerful that it is now back in talks with the Trump administration about how to protect the nation from its own capabilities.

At the same time, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders proposed a national moratorium on data center construction in response to local concerns about energy costs and broader AI skepticism. Just this week, Maine passed the first-ever statewide version of that idea, banning the buildout of large data centers through the end of 2027. Meanwhile, the White House has proposed federal legislation that would preempt such state laws, and 2028 hopefuls are beginning to stake out positions of their own.

AI has officially entered the political mainstream.

To mark its arrival, I invited David Byler back on the podcast. He is the vice president of trends and futures at National Research Group, and together we talk through how AI became a live political issue. We also ask whether the latest examples of AI polling, described in the New York Times op-ed “This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling for Good,” count as good data, bad data, or not data.

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Five days later, the United States went to war with Iran, upending the global economy. Since then, oil is up about 50 percent, average gas prices have risen by more than a dollar, and inflation has followed suit. On Friday, March inflation came in at 3.3 percent over the past year and about 1 percent since February, the fastest pace of Trump’s second term.

So today we’re taking stock of the American economy a month and a half into the conflict. In addition to inflation data, we’ve got new data on jobs (not bad), economic growth (not good), and consumer sentiment (not happy). Plus, taxes are due by Wednesday, so we are taking the opportunity to assess the country’s fiscal picture. (Happy Tax Day to all who celebrate!) And we also get into that alarming headline from the Times last week that read, “This Is Starting to Look Like a Slow-Motion Bank Run.”

Joining me is Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University.

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Where do we begin? Tuesday gave us plenty of election results worth digging into. In Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Democrats turned in their biggest overperformance in a special House election since 2024, in the race to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. Republicans still won, but by a margin 25 points more Democratic than the district’s baseline.

And then there was Wisconsin, where the liberal candidate for the state Supreme Court won by — checks notes — 20 points. Twenty points, in a statewide race, in the consummate swing state. There are caveats, which we’ll get into, but taken together, it’s an unnerving picture for Republicans.

Speaking of unnerving pictures, this is our first episode since President Trump threatened to kill “a whole civilization” early Tuesday and then, by day’s end, agreed to a ceasefire with Iran. We recorded this Wednesday afternoon, when a lot was still in flux, so some of the details may have changed by the time you hear this.

At the moment, even the contours of the ceasefire are murky. Is the Strait of Hormuz actually open? Is an end to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon part of the deal? Have strikes in the Gulf really stopped? And that’s before you get to the longer-term problem: the American and Iranian visions for any lasting agreement still seem fundamentally incompatible.

Politically, incompatible narratives are emerging too. The White House is claiming victory over a severely diminished Iranian military. But the regime is still in place, Iran still has its enriched uranium, and it now appears to have a say — and even a financial stake — in who passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Also on the docket today: the election this Sunday in Hungary and a “Good Data, Bad Data or Not Data” question on polling showing Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger floundering in approval polls after winning by 15 points last fall.

With me to talk about all of it are Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, and Lenny Bronner, senior data scientist at The Washington Post.

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President Trump’s approval rating now sits just below 40 percent, according to the Silver Bulletin average. That makes for a good headline, but it’s still well above the zone presidents reach when things truly fall apart. Both Bushes saw their approval sink into the mid-to-high twenties during their time in office, as did Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon.

And while approval in the high thirties to low forties is politically dangerous, it does not necessarily herald the kind of sea change that produced the Watergate reforms or the Reagan Revolution.

For most of Trump’s decade in the political spotlight, the conventional wisdom has been that he is sui generis. No matter the controversy, the thinking goes, he will retain a base of support strong enough to keep his approval from falling to the levels reached by America’s least popular presidents.

In light of the political backlash to the ongoing conflict in Iran, Nate Silver and I took to Substack Live to ask whether that wisdom will hold in Trump’s second term. We also talked about the midterms, the Democrats, and plenty more. Nate even shared when he plans to launch his midterm forecast, plus what Elon Musk called him in their latest beef 😬.

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I spoke with Kenneth Mori McElwain, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Tokyo, on the final day of my two-week trip to Japan. It was a welcome chance to step off the American news-cycle hamster wheel and use the time to get a sense Japanese politics.

The stereotype of Japanese politics is that it is staid and steady, conservative in both the capital-“C” and lowercase-“c” meanings of the word. The conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party, has governed Japan for 66 of the 70 years it has existed. But even with this apparent political consensus, a bias for the status quo has made it difficult, at times, to tackle big questions.

The LDP remains in power today, but Japanese politics has not felt especially staid or steady lately. Last month, Sanae Takaichi, the country’s first female prime minister, secured the largest majority in Japan’s postwar history — a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house. That came less than two years after scandal cost the LDP 28 percent of its seats and forced it into minority government.

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Now Takaichi is confronting a daunting set of problems. Japan has finally emerged from decades of deflation, but wages have not kept pace with rising prices, contributing to a cost-of-living crisis. While I was visiting, gas prices hit a record high.

At the same time, Japan’s pacifist constitution is once again a live political issue. Drafted during the U.S. occupation after World War II, it renounced Japan’s right to wage war. In its 80-year history, it has never been amended, making it the world’s longest-lived unamended national constitution. Takaichi says she wants to change that.

Japan also famously faces a rapidly aging population. Takaichi has promised to deliver economic growth, while maintaining tough limits on immigration and avoiding a further expansion of the national debt.

And that is before getting to some of the country’s other high-profile cultural debates, including whether women should be allowed to become reigning empresses and whether married couples should be allowed to keep separate surnames. At the moment, the answer to both is no and Takaichi wants to keep it that way.

The big question facing Takaichi at the moment is whether she can translate her sky-high popularity into tangible results for the Japanese people.

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I’d planned on getting up to speed on the news I missed and talking to Nathaniel Rakich and Mary Radcliffe about it. However, when I woke up from an in-flight nap on Saturday, Nathaniel and Mary had messaged me telling me that they had planned the whole podcast already and that it would be best if I didn’t go on twitter or read up on the news ahead of time. Just show up and turn the show over to them.

So (and this is how much I trust them) that is what we did on today’s podcast. I relinquished hosting duties to Mary and Nathaniel and they quizzed me on the twists and turns of the past two weeks.

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Democrats are in the midst of an intraparty debate over how to win their way out of the wilderness. There are arguments about ideology, strategy, identity, and more. And while these debates always feel urgent for the party out of power, they are, at the very least, not new.

Parties and politicians have been trying to figure out how to shore up their vulnerabilities, enhance their strengths, and fight another day for just about as long as representative politics have existed.

Today we are going to focus on one such instance. We’re looking back at late-20th-century Nevada and the beginnings of a political machine built by former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

It’s the subject of a new book by CEO of the Nevada Independent Jon Ralston, titled, “The Game Changer: How Harry Reid Remade the Rules and Showed Democrats How to Fight.”

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If you aren’t familiar with these takes, then you probably aren’t online enough to experience the sad loneliness of the American male liberal, so please carry on as you were. I joke, I joke.

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In any case, these ideas have caught on enough that friend of the pod — a machine learning engineer by day and head of political data at in his spare time — wanted to do more research into what differences actually exist across the political spectrum and between men and women.

In this episode, he breaks down what he found and also gets into his latest research on affordability and whether Americans are lying to pollsters about how much they read.

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Depending on who you ask, we’re either living through a moment that feels totally unprecedented or alarmingly familiar.

Today’s guest argues it’s alarmingly familiar: great powers jostling for influence, nationalism on the rise, trade and technology turning into weapons, and festering conflicts with the potential to spiral.

In his new book, “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History,” Yale historian Odd Arne Westad compares today’s geopolitical landscape to the decades leading up to World War I.

A hundred-plus years ago, the world looked modern, interconnected, and — at least to many people — too prosperous and rational for a major war. Then, in a matter of weeks, a localized conflict became a continent-wide crisis that ended in 40 million casualties.

The percentage of people alive today who have experienced great power conflict is vanishingly small, and after 80 years of great power peace, it can be easy to think of the prospect as far-fetched. Westad argues that this, too, may be a similarity to the early 20th century.

Today we talk about those similarities and differences and what lessons we can learn.

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On today’s episode, we open up the mailbag for an overdue round of listener questions — and you had some great ones! You asked whether Democrats might be locked out of the California governor’s race, who might win the heated primary in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, and whether Iowa is actually in play for Democrats.

You also had some more philosophical questions, like whether the Republican and Democratic parties will still exist in 2040 and what strategically is the best path forward for the GOP. Continuing a past theme, you also asked why Zohran Mamdani’s favorability rating is so high and what we expect turnout to look like in 2026.

As a reminder, paid subscribers can share questions in the paid subscriber chat, which we’ll prioritize, and you can also reach me with questions on social media or by email at galen@gdpolitics.com.

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At the start, it seemed the goal was regime change. President Trump called on Iran’s forces to lay down their arms and for civilians to revolt, saying the operation could last four to five weeks.

Since then, Trump has also called for Iran’s unconditional surrender, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the goal of the conflict as destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, missile production factories, and navy.

On Monday, Trump said the war was ahead of schedule and “very complete, pretty much.” The same day, the Department of War said, “we have only just begun to fight.” On Tuesday, Democratic senators emerged from a briefing telling the press they were concerned about the likelihood of the U.S. putting boots in the ground in Iran.

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Meanwhile, the economic repercussions of the conflict and the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have rippled across the globe, amping up the stakes of the war.

To borrow an analogy from a friend of the podcast, there is an awful lot of noise surrounding the operation. Today we are going to try to find the signal. Where do things stand? What are the upside and downside risks? And what are the possible outcomes?

Joining me to do that is Mara Karlin, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She served in national security roles for six U.S. secretaries of defense and most recently served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities under President Biden.

President Trump now says the goal is Iran’s unconditional surrender. Meanwhile, Iran’s clerics have appointed Ali Khamenei’s hardline son as the new Supreme Leader, suggesting surrender is unlikely for now.

Fifteen countries have become involved in the conflict in some way, the number of U.S. service members killed has risen to seven, and the number of deaths in Iran is estimated to be more than 1,200.

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Markets have fallen around the world as the likelihood of this being a short, contained operation is fading. Perhaps most notably oil prices have gone vertical. They reached $120 a barrel overnight and were at about $100 a barrel at the time we recorded the podcast.

That compares with $55 a barrel in December and $65 a barrel just before the war. The average price of gas nationally has shot up 50 cents per gallon in just a week and now sits at about $3.50 per gallon.

Last week Congress declined to rein in Trump’s authority in the conflict, but that doesn’t mean the domestic politics of the matter are settled. Not by a long shot. With me to discuss the unfolding politics here at home is , author of the “” newsletter.

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The war in Iran has set off a civil war within the Republican Party over whether the military adventurism of Trump’s second term is America first or America last. As one indication, Megyn Kelly kicked off her podcast on Monday (one of the most popular right-wing shows in the country) with withering criticism of Trump’s decision. Her first guest, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested it could lead her to stop voting.

On Tuesday, Texas’s incumbent senator, John Cornyn, managed to fight his primary merely to a draw with scandal-plagued Ken Paxton after spending a record $70 million. Further down the ballot, once rising star Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost his primary outright. The tensions within the GOP, at least at the elite level, are already at a rolling boil. So what happens when Trump — a force helping to hold both parties’ coalitions together — leaves the scene?

That is the question I attempted to answer, alongside friends of the podcast Nate Silver and Clare Malone, at a live show Wednesday night at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Joined by a rowdy, sold-out crowd, we hosted our first-ever 2028 Republican primary draft. We even got a West Village audience to applaud for Tucker Carlson. (If you missed our Democratic primary draft from January, I encourage you to check it out!)

We also discussed the political consequences of the big news stories of the day: the results in Texas on both sides of the aisle, the expanding war in the Middle East, and a torrent of attention-grabbing AI news. Plus, we opened the mics and answered audience questions.

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We were originally planning on dedicating today’s whole episode to the kickoff of the 2026 primary calendar with Tuesday’s elections in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas. However, if I’ve learned anything hosting the GD POLITICS podcast, it’s to be flexible — we might end up at war.

The U.S. and Israel struck Iran beginning on Saturday, killing Iran’s supreme leader. Iran responded, attacking Israel, U.S. military assets, and civilian targets in the Gulf States. Hezbollah in Lebanon has also joined the fighting.

As of the time of our recording, the back-and-forth bombing is continuing and there are more questions than answers about what will happen next. Will there be a revolution in Iran? Will it be successful? What would the current regime staying in power look like? How wide could the conflict spread and how long could it last?

I’m sure those are questions we’ll contend with in the future. Today we are going to kick things off with how the American public views the conflict and how politicians are reacting.

Then we will move on to Tuesday’s primaries. The blockbuster races are the Republican and Democratic Senate primaries in Texas. I’ve covered a lot of these races in my day and I can’t remember the last time I saw polling as contradictory as what we’re seeing in the race between Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico in Texas. We’ll also touch on some of the House primaries worth keeping an eye on Tuesday night.

Joining me is director of data at FiftyPlusOne, Mary Radcliffe, and deputy editor of Inside Elections, Jacob Rubashkin.

Today’s episode turned out to be serendipitous. Last Friday, I’d been planning to speak with Harvard economist Jason Furman, Obama’s top economic advisor, about the recent flood of economic data: the jobs report and revisions for the past year, inflation data, GDP growth, trade balances, consumer sentiment, and more.

There was one piece of data I did not expect we’d be getting in advance of our conversation: the Supreme Court’s decision on President Trump’s emergency tariffs. Friday morning, the Court struck them down in a 6-3 decision, concluding that the power to enact such broad tariffs lies with Congress.

So, on today’s episode, we begin with the latest tariff news and then widen the lens to the broader economy, including Furman’s suggestion that we may have achieved the first indisputable “soft landing” in postwar American history: bringing inflation under control without triggering a recession.

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My favorite interviews with politicians happen when they’ve run their last race and can reflect candidly on their time in office and the complexities of politics and the world. Today you’re going to hear such an interview with former governor of Texas and former secretary of energy Rick Perry.

We begin by talking about the heated Senate primary in Texas. The former governor has thrown his support behind incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and doesn’t shy away from criticisms of Attorney General Ken Paxton or the Democratic side.

We then turn to a more personal topic: Perry’s experience with the psychoactive drug ibogaine and his advocacy for its use in treating things like addiction, PTSD, brain trauma, and cognitive decline. It may seem like a counterintuitive position for a social conservative, and we get into that.

We end by talking about the moment during the 2012 GOP primary debate when Perry forgot the name of one of the agencies he intended to shutter as president — the Department of Energy. It became something of a viral moment at the time, but in this interview we talk about what was going on in his personal life, which he describes as the most difficult six months of his life.

Below are some excerpts, edited for clarity, from our conversation, which took place on Wednesday, February 18.

Perry’s Opposition To Ken Paxton In Texas’s Senate Race

Gov. Rick Perry: I tell people the Bible’s kind of like a checklist that a pilot would use. I was a pilot in the United States Air Force. So they pounded into us: use the checklist, use the checklist. That will save your life, that will save the people’s lives who are in your airplane. The point is, the Bible is that checklist.

So if the Republican Party is gonna be the party of Judeo-Christian values, then having someone who basically has flaunted those rules and regulations, whether it’s standing up in front of God and saying, I will be faithful to you until death do us part, which he obviously failed at, whether it’s eight senior members of his staff, I’m talking about Paxton here, who stood up and said, this guy has broken the laws of the state of Texas and the federal government and we can’t work for you anymore. I mean, that is a damning indictment. Eight of the people, eight of the people who you hired at your senior level.

…

Perry: I think this is about Texas and what is the Republican primary voter going to decide about the direction that they want the Republican party to be and a reflection of what they want the Republican party to be.

Galen Druke: And if Paxton does win in that case, what message does that send? Like, if this is about the future of the Texas Republican Party and Paxton wins, what does that tell you?

Perry: Well, from my perspective, I don’t think it’s a good message. I think the idea that character doesn’t count, I mean, if you want that to be your bumper sticker, good luck.

Whether A Paxton Win Could Imperil Republicans’ Hold On Texas

Perry: This has been going on for 25 years, since my first run for a full term for governor in 2002. The media was all frothing at the mouth of, you know, ‘We’re going to get the state back into Democrat hands, because they had this little dalliance with this Bush guy. Now he’s gone. And, you know, Perry’s kind of an accidental governor anyway. He just kind of slipped in there as lieutenant governor and then Bush went on to be the president. And so we got Tony Sanchez who’s running, who’s a multi-billionaire or multi-millionaire business guy, oil and gas guy, and he’s going to self-fund, put 80 to a hundred million dollars in it. And we’ll get the state back. We’ve historically been a Democrat state and we’re going to get back to it.’

Every election cycle. We hear that every election cycle. That’s true for this one. I’d be very surprised, stunned, even a better word, if the Democrats were able to win a statewide elected position, unless we pick a massively flawed candidate, which potentially could happen here. But my instinct is that it’s not going to happen. John Cornyn will be our nominee and whether they pick a flawed individual as Jasmine Crockett or a flawed individual like Talarico, the Republicans will win.

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On James Talarico’s Christian Faith

Druke: You talked about your Bible study and the importance of the Judeo-Christian faith guiding you in politics as well. Talarico has leaned pretty heavily into his Christian faith in his political appeals. He’s a pastor in training. Do you think there’s anything admirable about Talarico’s approach in that regard?

Perry: I would say that he needs to walk into that room where that mirror is and really ask whether or not he can profess a faith in Christianity and support abortions.

Druke: And is that really the main sort of sticking point for you?

Perry: You asked me, you asked me what my position would be. My advice to him would be, you know, is your mortal soul worth more than your political position, your political win, your will to be the United States Senator on the Democrat side. And if you do not pray at the altar of pro-choice, pro-abortion, you’re not gonna get the nod and the Democrat ticket.

So I can’t find it in my, I left the Democrat party in the eighties because I saw a party that was so beholden to the pro-abortion position. And as an individual who will stand up in front of a group of people and profess your Christianity and to be pro-abortion does not, to me, those two don’t mix. So, you gotta pick one or the other.

What Led Perry To Be Treated With The Psychoactive Drug Ibogaine

Perry: This compound, properly diagnosed, properly dosed, properly guided through and properly followed up with was showing some really interesting potential for what we refer to as CTE, multiple concussions, I think cerebral traumatic encephalopathy.

We see that in professional athletes: football players, hockey players, soccer players who have multiple concussions, and what we’ve learned is that those concussions are cumulative in their effect. So, if you’ve been concussed multiple times, those kind of build on themselves.

And that was what led me to go to Mexico to be treated. I didn’t have any trauma in my life. I mean, you know, people who had PTSD, however that PTSD may come, I never had any of that in my life, but I was concussed multiple times as a young person, twice in athletic events, once on loading horses. And I’m talking about knocked out for over one minute three different times. Those are severe concussions.

I had mild insomnia and anxiety from the time I was about 22 years old, when I first saw it in my life, from when I went to pilot training. First time I really had to start performing at a high level. Managed it.

I picked an odd profession to go into later in life, politics, to have a little insomnia and anxiety, which it would crop up from time to time. I mask it rather well. You never saw it, I don’t think. But the point is, I knew it was there. And if I was gonna be an advocate for this medicine to help these veterans who had post-traumatic stress, who had traumatic brain injury, who had addiction issues, I wanted to see, would it help me? And that’s what I did.

The Experience of Taking Ibogaine

Perry: Let me just give you my experience. And let me forward this by saying everyone’s experience is different, the best I can tell. If anybody comes in and says, let me tell you exactly how this is going to go down for you, you might want to just say, this person might not know what they’re talking about.

Almost everyone has a different experience. You may have some life experiences. You’re gonna have, in most cases, a substantial amount of throwing up. I don’t have any idea why that is the physiological event that occurs, but practically everyone. And it’s a long experience. It may last between eight and 14 hours. And again, different lengths of time for different people.

You take the compound orally, and it’s calculated on your body weight how much of the ibogaine alkaloid you take orally. It takes anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half for it to have an effect. When you start feeling that this medicine is starting to have an effect on you, you lay back on a pallet or a bed, depending on which facility you’re at, and put an eye shade mask on.

And that stopping of the visuals coming in from outside, most people will have a visual, from the standpoint of, some people have a going back through their life. I’ve had people tell me it was not unlike a Rolodex that was kind of spinning around with different parts of your life and it’s a review of your life. Some people may find that to be a bit frightening.

I did not have a review of my life. I had a journey through space and I was basically traveling through space. I was very curious about this. My curiosity was what had driven me through deciding that I was gonna take this medicine. Will it affect my insomnia, my anxiety that I had? What else? And what I found was that there was a spiritual aspect to it, not an overtly spiritual aspect, but certainly an experience that I would suggest was very inwardly spiritual in its effect on me and that, you know, God’s real, he loves me.

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Bridging The Gap Between Social Conservatism And Psychoactive Drugs

Druke: I was sitting here listening to you describe your experience and I’m curious how you bridge the divide or gap between this kind of advocacy and the more socially conservative parts of the Republican party.

There are people who believe that this stuff is evil, satanic, what have you. And even if it’s not evil, just think back to the GOP’s legacy, you know, imagine Nancy Reagan listening to the story you’re telling, or the war on drugs. How do you put this in the context of your political experience?

Perry: Well, that’s exactly what we ran up against with the Texas legislature. You have a very conservative body. I would argue that the Texas legislature is as conservative today as it’s ever been in its history. The way we made the progress that we made with the Texas legislature and the way that they went from being hard ‘no,’ to supporting this was we brought veterans in who had gone through this process, who had been treated.

And these are young men and women who literally had put their lives on the line for our country, literally. And our government had failed them from the standpoint of how we address the PTSD, the traumatic brain injury, the addictions issues that came from, as a matter of fact, our government was part of the problem, in that, in the mid-2000s, they were literally giving our warfighters sacks of opioids because they didn’t know how to deal with the PTSD and the traumatic brain injury. So they just gave them a sack of opioids and said, here, take these. Maybe it’ll make you feel better. And then we addicted this entire generation of warfighters, to a lot of degrees, with these compounds.

Those members of the legislature looked into the eyes of those veterans, those people who in too many cases were one step away from just kind of ending it all because they didn’t, they saw no relief, no help until this medicine came along and they were introduced to ibogaine.

…

That changed minds. And in changing minds, they changed the course of where I think psychiatric medicine is going. Five years ago, if you’d said, we’re gonna be having these conversations about, you know, former governor of Texas and psychedelics and psychoactive drugs, II would have gone ‘get out of here.’ But we looked at the science, we looked at the outcomes. We trusted people who we literally had trusted our lives with, so to speak, and made the right decisions.

I want to think that Nancy Reagan and people like Mrs. Reagan would be open to this kind of conversation today, because I think when, you know, if you went up and you sat down with the current administration, and which we have done to some degree, they are open to this because you can’t argue with the results.

How the ‘Oops’ Moment Relates To Perry’s Experience With Ibogaine

Druke: I want to talk a little bit about your experience with politics before we wrap up today. I’m curious how you even feel about somebody asking you questions about the quote unquote “oops moment,” but you mentioned, you know, experiencing anxiety, insomnia, things like that. I know what it’s like to try to function in a public facing role when you haven’t slept or when you’re feeling anxious.

That moment in the 2012 debate when you were saying the three departments that you were going to eliminate and you forgot the Department of Energy. When you reflect back on that moment, what do you think about?

Perry: I mean, you bring up a really interesting scenario, and I wanna back it up even a little bit farther for you and tell you why I think that occurred. In the first week of July, I had major back surgery. I had a fusion between my, I think, L1 and S5. Is that right? Anyway, down in the lower part of my back and there were some complications with that surgery. Had a neurological hyperfusion and they treated it with opioids.

Six weeks later, I announced for the presidency, I think August the 13th, erroneously thinking I could have major back surgery, heal up and perform at the level you need to perform to run for the presidency of the United States. You know, I’m what, 60, I’m 61 years old. I’m thinking I’m, you know, 10 foot tall, bulletproof, and I can do this.

That debate rolled around. I was taking compounds to try to continue to cover up the pain from that surgery on that hyperfusion. I was taking compounds to go to sleep at night, Ambien, I was taking Provigil in the morning to be alert and be focused.

So, in hindsight, I think about how debilitated I was as an individual and it made a lot of sense to me. Now, as I look back on that, I’m surprised I had functioned as well as I did that I could even remember two of the three that I was going to get rid of and instead of, you know, and it’s humorous now, but it was, it was a brutal period of time and I was trying to perform at a very high level. I was not successful, obviously.

But it made the point to me that I understand the challenges that, that when people are given these, particularly opioids. I think opioids are an incredibly, you know, I’m sure they’ve got their place properly, but what we know about them is that, I’ll give you an example here quickly:

Opioids in particular, some people are very prone to be addicted to them and addicted to them very quickly. It’s one of the reasons that the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma are such an evil bunch of people in my opinion. They pushed this stuff onto our population out there.

But here’s what we have found. If you try to get off opioids through just an abstinence program, it’s like, okay, I’m gonna quit taking these things and get over it now. It takes 18 months for your brain to get back to a normal looking state in a functional MRI. Eighteen months.

With the treatment of ibogaine, that brain scan gets back to a normal looking brain between 48 and 72 hours. That’s what the Stanford, some of the Stanford studies showed us and some of the post-docs and the doctors working on that. I mean, that is a fascinating question. Again, gets right back to here’s why we need to be doing these clinical trials on this plant medicine ibogaine to find out is that really the, is that really the fact? And if it is, we need to be making that readily available to substantially a large number of people in this country.

Druke: It is interesting putting that moment in the context of how you were being treated medically… I am curious, from your perspective, that “oops” moment, was that defining in the 2012 presidential primary for you? I mean, might things have been different had that not happened? Like when you wrestle with what that means in your life and in even American history, what significance does that moment have to you?

Perry: Yeah, so here’s what I would say: I think I was a candidate who was probably not going to be successful because of my physical and my mental state due to the surgery that was done. And it was the most difficult six months of my life.

You know, it is what it is. Would I change anything? And, you know, probably not. It all turned out all right from my perspective.

I’m a lot more interested in where God has got me placed at the moment and what I’m doing than looking back on, you know, would I have been in a different place had it not rained 28 inches in 24 hours in 1978 and I not go to work for Southwest Airlines and stayed at the farm? I mean, I can go back through my life and there are these, you know, God puts up hurdles. He removes them.

I’m, you know, not for me to say that a particular point in time had a huge effect on me. There have been a lot of them that had an effect on me. But I’m pretty, not pretty, I’m very satisfied that I try to do God’s will and it’ll all turn out all right.