The News Items Podcast
John Ellis talks with interesting people doing important work. Some you've heard of. Some you haven't. All of them are worth listening to, at some length.
The News Items Podcast
Episode 16: Russ Howard
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John Ellis talks with retired Brigadier General Russ Howard about the wars in Iran and Ukraine, why modern warfare is changing faster than most militaries can adapt, and a much bigger problem that could be coming down the road. Howard argues that food, fertilizer, water, and supply chains are becoming national security issues in their own right. They discuss the real-world effects of conflict on agriculture, growing concerns over global water shortages, and a project at Arizona State University that asks what the world might look like in 2040 if current trends continue. A conversation about the risks that sit just beneath the headlines.
Hosted by John Ellis
Hello and welcome back to the News Items Podcast. I'm John Ellis. I am the founder and editor of two Substack newsletters. One is called News Items, the other is called Political News Items. You can find them both at news-items.com. My guest today is retired Brigadier General Russ Howard. Russ is a farmer in Minnesota and the president of Howard's Consulting Services. He's also a distinguished senior fellow at the Joint Special Operations University. Previously, Russ was the director of the Yepsen Center for Counterterrorism Studies at the Fletcher School in Medford, Massachusetts. He retired from the Army as head of the Department of Social Sciences and the founding director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. His previous positions include Deputy Department Head of the Department of Social Sciences, Army Chief of Staff Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and commander of the First Special Forces Airborne Group at Fort Lewis, Washington. General Howard is the co-author and editor of seven counterterrorism books. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial management from San Jose State University, a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies from the University of Maryland, a Master of Arts degree in International Management from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and a Master's of Public Administration degree from Harvard University. He was a Senior Service College Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a senior fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. A warrior and an overeducated one at that. Russ, thank you for joining us today.
SPEAKER_01Truth about overeducated. Warrior, I'm not so sure, Josh.
SPEAKER_00So before we get to talking about what you're now doing, I want to just get your assessment of where you think things stand in the two wars going on in the world, one obviously Iran, the other Ukraine. And I'll present you with two scenarios. First, the Iran war is reaching some kind of conflict. Either the Iranian side cries uncle under the weight of U.S. military pressure and domestic disaster, meaning the food supply, water supply, worthless currency, unpaid wages, etc., etc. Or Iran hangs on and the U.S. side decides to go with the two-step deal, reopen the strait, release money to the Iranians, and negotiate the rest down the road.
SPEAKER_01Where do you think we are in the Iran war right now? I think both your examples are good but problematic. My take on the Iran war is the problem is there's no one in charge. I mean, the president resigned yesterday. And the problem is RGC, if they surrender, and I'm not sure what the mechanism is that they would surrender, but if the thagosy surrenders, their own people are going to kill them. So there's no incentive for the RGC to to capitulate. And I think they're just going to hold on as long as they as long as they can, or as long as they still have oil storage on Carg Island. I think everybody was cheering when they initially killed about 40 of the senior leaders in Iran. But the problem is it killed all the people that could negotiate. And I think we're stuck in a little bit of a quagmire here. I hesitate to say this, but I honestly think that renewed military action may be maybe the only alternative to the stalemate that they have now, unless the president and the administration can find a way to start clearing the strait. That's my take on the Iran war.
SPEAKER_00And in the Ukraine war, I think we've we've sort of lived. I remember talking to you at the outset, and and I remember I was surprised to hear you say that you thought Ukraine could win the war. You were one of the few people that I knew who said that. And the narrative has been, you know, inevitable Russian victory, and that seems to have changed, you know, in the last three, four months to a stalemate and maybe even major political upheaval in Russia. What's what's your take on where things are in in the Ukraine?
SPEAKER_01I think Ukraine wins by not losing.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01They you know they were supposed to fold in three days, and look how long it's been. And the interesting thing about this this war, and I'll talk about both wars in a second regarding agriculture, but the Ukraine war, the Russia Ukraine war has changed warfare. The drone warfare now is preeminent. You can get a smaller country that can manufacture uh combat-related items very cheaply to take on a major power. I mean, it we should be asking ourselves all kinds of questions. You know, the the Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier, cost $36 billion to build. But you can take a missile that's about $1.5 million and make maybe 10 or 12 of them and take out an aircraft carrier. So I think all of us need to be rethinking what types of military hardware and at what expense we need to be fielding. So I I'm I watched the Ukraine war fairly carefully because I I do think I I'll stick by my earlier saying that by not losing, they win. And I think my personal opinion is that within about six months, things are going to start falling apart in this in Russia to the point where Putin can't continue. The technology that Ukrainians are using to target Russian industrial complexes, and particularly their fuel lines and their means of supply, is really kind of brilliant. And I th I think we should uh all take notice of that.
SPEAKER_00So my idea is that we turn this into a kind of a private equity deal where the U.S. buys Ukraine so we we can advance our military capabilities in one fell swoop. Are you are you in with the Ellis program? Yeah, I am.
SPEAKER_01And I think other countries are too. They're they're starting to sell their technology. Even the Israelis are interested, and Israelis have they're at the top of the line for military hardware hardware technology. So I the the challenge for both these wars, if you're in agriculture, is that Ukraine produces a lot of fertilizer, a lot of wheat, too. And so does Russia. And so the cost of fertilizer in the United States in Minnesota farm country at the beginning of the Ukraine-Russia War was uh went off the chart. Yields reduced by about 30% because people couldn't afford the fertilizer. That somehow has rectified itself because of U.S. market. But now with a straight close, you get you need liquid liquid liquid nitrogen to make fertilizer. And so the farmers, again in Minnesota, are having a difficult time affording fertilizer, and this is the time we plant right now. So both these wars have long-term effects that you don't think about in a military context, but you should be thinking about as far as manufacturing food, supply line distributions. So there's a lot more of these two wars than just military conflict.
SPEAKER_00We'll get to the work that you're doing now. You've set up uh an institute on on this very subject in partnership with Arizona State University. Tell us how that how that came together.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Well, if you want the whole story, I'll try and make a short story long here. So a friend of mine, actually you may know him, Lieutenant General retired Charlie Cleveland, was supposed to give a speech in Washington, D.C. to Arizona State and Mississippi State Universities about agriculture and warfare or something, and the hurricane hit his house, so he couldn't do it, so I did it. And so I met a lot of interesting people. They liked my speech, and so I started thinking, I read the President Biden's or the Biden administration national security strategy, thinking that there might be something regarding food security in there, and there was. And food security in the Biden administration held equal rank with terrorism, Russia, China, you know, Iran, all the rogues, all that. That was a national security problem. And I started thinking, and John, you remember when we started the combating terrorism center at West Point, there wasn't anybody really in the world that had a center to combat terrorism, right? So I started thinking, well, who is looking at food security, water security, who's looking at agriculture? And so I did a little lit review or review, and the answer was nobody. So I thought I met a very interesting colleague at Arizona State who has the same last name as you, but no relation, Alicia Ellis. She was an Air Force officer, PhD, and just a real go-getter. And so we had a chat over a martini, which shouldn't surprise you. And we said, you know, who's looking at this? And she said, Well, I've been thinking about trying to do something at Arizona State for some time. She is a farmer in her own right, which raises cattle. And so we decided to put a little proposal together and took it to the president of ASU, Michael Crow, who's a very innovative, gets credit for being, I guess, the most innovative college president in the United States. But anyway, he said, well, let's do it. And he did it without any donors. Or and so he started it as a program. And I think Arizona is going to Arizona has an interest in the Arizona government's education directorate or whatever has to approve all centers and institutes. So I think ours is going to be approved this week. Yeah. So we started off, got an early contract with the Institute for Irregular Warfare, and uh a couple donors who you know have ponied up some money. And we're off to the races. And we have a course that we both teach. We just published an article that thank you for news items for featuring, and uh we're we're off the races. And there's a lot of interest in what we're doing, both in government and even the FBI is interested. So it's not as not as quite as exciting as the Combating Terrorism Center. You know, West Point is its own draw, and and terrorism is probably uh more important to most people than agriculture and water are, but we're making some progress there.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell You now teach a course at ASU on agriculture and national security. What how do you how did you I guess what's the syllabus? How do you walk the students up to uh a general better understanding of the subject matter?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, we it's kind of ag and water 101, both teaching the importance of agriculture and the water and the shortages of both arable land and water and what you can do about it. And then sort of the history of water and agriculture, food, as implements of war, uh both as uh offense and defense. And then this uh semester, we're also going to add a module on agriculture or terrorism. So there's uh Alyssa uh Ellis is a one of the countries export on supply chains, and she adds she has a very interesting module on supply chain dynamics in agriculture and how a simple break in the supply chain can just the excuse the vernacular here, but screw everything up. And so the notion is that you know, one day, next day delivery and global globalization is sort of in question now. And and there's probably more of thought that maybe countries, nations like the United States should have some resilience with regards to agriculture and and water. And there's also a module on great power competition in agriculture and notes that China is buying up a lot of or trying to buy up a lot of U.S. agriculture land. Interestingly, the land they're buying often happens to be right next to a military or intelligence installation. Apropos of our earlier conversation, we look at the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war on uh agriculture. So it's uh it's kind of fun. It's we have there are the students are from all over the world. This is an internet-based course. We I think we had four continents uh last time we did it. This time I think we'll have the same amount. And it's uh a lot of fun. And uh the major challenge is if you're a teacher these days, you didn't ask me this question, but I'll answer it anyway. All right. Is that so back in the days when I used to teach, back when I was alive and taught at West Point and and uh the Fletcher School and the Monterey Institute, uh, we didn't have to worry about AI. But I can tell you that reading essays now is much easier than in the past. You know, the big question is what do you do about AI? And I've come to the conclusion that you just run with it. You know, I mean you're not gonna be able to change it, you're not gonna stop it, you're not gonna be able to police it. So you take advantage of it. So we're we're sort of wrestling for that at ASU now and uh other places. But turnpapers have gotten much better, John.
SPEAKER_00Well, I bet they have so tell us about water worldwide. I remember in the book The Big Short that Michael Lewis wrote about the great financial crisis. One of the, you know, principal characters was a man named Michael Burry, who was widely scorned for betting that the housing market would collapse. And of course it did collapse, and Michael Burry made a great deal of money for his investors and for himself. And he was asked what he was gonna do after that, having made the greatest call, arguably, in in the history of financial markets, and he said he was gonna focus on water. And I I thought that was sort of instructive that he saw the next big crisis building in water. He's right. Can you explain why you should think that or why he thought that way so long ago?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Because the world's running out of water. In this 2040 project that I I'm sure I think we'll talk about a little bit later. There are going to be 63 countries in the world that won't have enough potable water, potable water for their population. The aquifers are being drained. The Agalala aquifer that supports most of the Midwest is being depleted at a a rapid rate. In fact, this two days ago in Newsweek. Actually, you covered this the water shortages pretty well in news items, but just two days ago in Newsweek, they had an amazing article, easy to read on Agalala aquifer. So, you know, without water, you you can't grow anything.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01So kind of essential. People say, well, food shortages or uh agriculture, the arable land and all that, but it really at the end of the day, the water is a problem. So back when we were both graduate students, which was a long time ago, but you know, if you recall, the world was going to run out of water. I mean, one run out of oil about 2013. Well, it didn't happen. And now we got more oil than you just find new finds all the time. And with oil, it's kind of interesting because there are a lot of substitutes for oil, right? You got hydro, you've got wind, you've got solar, you've got all kinds of alternatives for for oil. But Don, what is the alternative for water? What's the substitute for water? Yeah. Having a hard time coming up with an answer for that?
SPEAKER_00Well, they got the technology uh out there that's being touted is that you can uh, you know, that there are machines, I guess you would call them, that take uh water out of the air. Well, that's producing water. Which which strikes me as unlikely, but there you are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you can you can make water, but there's really no substitute for water. I did a TED talk here about four years ago, and in the audience I said, you know, I go through this routine about substitutes. There's about 11 substitutes for oil. I go through that, and then I say, so who can tell me what the substitute for water is? And a guy in the third row says, beer. And uh I think maybe he had been consuming some before he came there. But so water is important, and we're running out, draining aquifers all over the world, using too much water. Now there are remedies. Uh we go into them in the course we teach. We go, what are the remedies for saving water, using water more efficiently, doing all that. But still the prognosis for water consumption in the world is not good. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00So you could have a chart and it just at some point in 2040, let's say, just the chart just says it no longer works, right? Right. Then where is the water crisis most acute? I mean, is it is it I mean, obviously we have here in the U.S. you look at the pictures of the Hoover Dam and you look at the you know the pictures all around Africa.
SPEAKER_01I mean the d the the the desert there is is d desertification in Africa, the this desert there, I mean, i it it it i it it's incre goes south about thirteen kilometers a year. And so people think that Nigeria, for example, that the terrorism and all the problems there are religious related. Talk to Nigerians, that's not true. I mean, it's partially true. But the real problem is that Muslims are mostly nomads, right? They raise I mean, they raise goats and they and they need forage. And so they follow where the water is. And so the Christians in Nigeria are mostly agricultural people. And so they call it the belt across Nigeria. It's where the desertification is pushed down to the point where Muslims herders are juxtaposed against uh Christians who are agriculturalists, and that's the point of friction. It's land use, it's a land and water use problem, not primarily more so than it is a religious problem. And those events are going to happen all over the world. And if you have a minute, I will read you of ten places where it's gonna happen. Do you have time?
SPEAKER_00Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So the Indus Basin, Mekong Delta, Nile River Basin, the Amazon Basin, the Aguilala Aquifer, California Central Valley, the North China Plain, Great European Plain, the Chad Basin, and the Fertile Crescent. And it's all gonna happen about the same time in 2040.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I want to get to uh what's uh called a TTX. And uh, out of your partnership with ASU and the setting up of this enterprise comes what is known as a tabletop exercise, and it's entitled 2040 Agriculture, Water, and Systems Apocalypse, which by the way is right up the news items uh subject matter alley. The general idea is that participants in the tabletop exercise start at the end, the apocalypse, and work backwards to the present to identify the quote, critical intervention windows where the outcome could still be rewritten. Tell us about the TTX.
SPEAKER_01Well, the background is a fellow by the name of Jay Forrester, a PhD at MIT in 1972, put a lot of data into a computer. The computer was probably the size of your house, but he put the data in the computer and determined in 2040 the world as we know it will not be the same because of the overuse of resources. And he the I don't know if you remember, John, I think I remember this, but it was called the the Club of Rome in the day. Right. And it it was, I guess, like a big think tank, and they they commissioned studies and so the Club of Rome commissioned this, and Dr. Forrester came up with the prognosis that by 2040 we're gonna run out of food and run out of water, social systems are gonna be overwhelmed, and there for a lot of reasons the world as we know it was gonna end. And he was sort of laughed at. He'd go around and he'd and people said, yeah, conspiracy theorists and all that. Well, interestingly enough, in 2020, MIT ran a the same study, looked at the same data when uh collaboration with the University of Melbourne in Australia. And guess what? Old Dr. Forrester was pretty spot on. So what he had predicted had pretty much come true by 2020, moving on to 2040. So I grabbed a hold of this and still thought it was conspiracy theory stuff, and I did a little lit review and a little research, and some interesting organizations like the Bank of America and Chase and others had been looking at this too. So I thought what we might want to do is have a war game that showed the world at 2040 like it was going to be, particularly with regards to water, food, agriculture, and supply chains, and sort of paint the picture of the world in 2040 and then work backwards, backstaging they call it, to see if smart people could come up with remedies or mitigating actions that could forestall a 2040 event. And so I didn't I I didn't actually believe that I was really onto something until I got into it and I found out that I am really onto something. So we're going to alpha test this in July at a a major plastics function meeting with plastics executives. And we're going to use the Ogallala and the Central California two examples to test students' abilities to come up with remedies and sort of mitigating actions to forestall what would happen in 2040. They're going to beta test this uh in my class at Arizona State, and we're going to probably run the first iteration of the TTX perhaps at West Point in in the fall. The the long term, uh the training TTX, the tabletop exercise, is sort of the forerunner of the idea for a major uh war game on this, complete with uh white cells and competing teams. And so we're taking little baby steps, but the baby steps are actually quite important. And we can tailor this 2040 tabletop exercise to almost now any industry that has uh a water or I mean it actually any industry that is going to be involved in commerce in 2040. So it's it's kind of fun. I've had a lot of fun doing it. I've just shipped off the first draft to people are gonna use it in July, and I'm getting pretty positive results. So uh that's the the original study determined that there had to be limits to growth. The 1972 study, their bottom line was there had to be limits to growth. You're gonna face this in 2040. I'm most interested in water. As you know, I was a horse rancher in California for a while, and water was very important. And I was getting my well was 300 feet deep, I was getting water at 120 feet, but the water was going down 10 feet a year because all the wineries around me. Now, to drill a new well in California now at $76 a foot. That's pretty expensive. So I saw, you know, I'm not a math major, but I could do the math there, and I figured out more years I had. Well, now I'm a now I'm a hobby farmer in Minnesota, and we don't have any trouble with water here. But uh 10,000 lakes, one right outside, not not too far from my house. We're we're okay. But the my ha I've had this interest in water ever since I uh I had depended on it in uh California.
SPEAKER_00So what are you know critical intervention points? What are the what are the what are the windows you see in the next 15 years where a course correction, if you will, could take place?
SPEAKER_01Well there are are several, and it really depends on on the area you're talking about. In the Indus, it's the the treaty that was uh actually worked for for many years until about a year and a half ago. And and now India and Pakistan are fighting over the Indus water. In China, it's uh overuse and and the the and lack of conservation for the Great China Plain. And of course, China uh they control a lot of the water that far goes south, so there's treaty obligations there too. A lot of it has to do with international relations and treaties, and some work, some have worked, and some are sort of falling apart. The major problem I see is this the depletion of the aquifers all over the world. You can just just pump water. You don't have to worry about rainfall, you just keep pumping water, and pretty soon there's not going to be any water to pump. And then not just in the Aguilala, but in several different parts of the world. Uh, another thing is the overuse of water for growing crops. This is one of the good news items is that uh a lot of work now, particularly in rice and other cereals, about use uh reducing the amount of water you need to grow grain. Yeah, I don't think did you know that pineapple is a grass?
SPEAKER_00I did not know that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, pineapple is a grass, and in South America, uh forget which country, they figure out a way to grow pineapples using a third of water that they normally would use. So there are actually some good news there. There are replacements as you talked about, uh, so desalinization is a is an option. But we have to be a little careful here. Have you ever have you ever had a saltwater fish tank?
SPEAKER_00No, I have never had a salt saltwater fish tank.
SPEAKER_01So I had to lived in American Samoa for a while, and I took care of uh some folks, they were gone for the summer. I took care of their fish tank, saltwater fish tank. I'm telling you, this thing was huge, the biggest swimming pool. And there's all kinds of fish in there, and it was great fun. And about two, three days before they were to come home, all the fish were bumping into the site of the aquarium. And I thought, holy cow, what's going on here? These fish are all gonna die. So I asked someone what's going on. He said, Well, you got too much salt in the tank. Put some fresh water in there, and the fish were fine. So if you take it to the extreme, if you take too much salt out of the water, what do you do with it? I mean, you can't I guess you can what do you do with it? There's too much to use, and if you put it back in the water, you have the opportunity of fouling seawater. I mean, that's a real stretch, but still, desalinization is expensive. And then what do you do with the salt? So there are remedies, there are mitigating things you can do, and we teach those. It's kind of fun. Aqua gardening, you just use uh the same water over and over again. You can use, I mean, they can purify sewage, believe it or not, use it for agriculture. So there are many the problem is that getting water out of the ground is just too easy. And then that's what people that's what people are doing. It's not cost efficient. The other thing is, I do this in my TED Talk. So we I don't know if you've ever seen John or been interested in, but we have natural gas and oil pipelines all over this, all over the United States. I mean, they run from west to east and south to north, and we don't have any water pipelines that do that. But we have areas in the United States like the Pacific Northwest that have an abundance of water almost always. And we have areas in the in the southeast that lately have had some problems, but generally, usually they have an abundance of water. Well, what's stopping shipping that water to the west or from the north uh northwest down to the south? Now it's it's it's cost prohibitive. It's too expensive. But my guess is uh if my predictions that the 24 predictions are true, then perhaps there will be robust water pipelines in the United States to take advantage of areas that have an abundance of water to areas that don't.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you would think that given the pipeline infrastructure that exists for natural gas and and other things, that you could right next to it, you could build pipelines for water.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you wouldn't, you know, the the approval process, I'm sure, would be hundreds of years, but in theory you could do it very quickly.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Well it's it'll all be supply and demand. I mean you know, I am not a con you know me, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but and I probably have invested too much time in this 2040 project. I'm I'm s I'm having so much fun with it that I it it's become part of my life. But uh and it's uh created quite a bit of interest, actually, and I'm glad for that. So we'll see.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Do you I mean in in doing this you'd be a lot of I would think that not very many people you know would know about it or would, you know, say that they're interested in it, and then suddenly it would seem to me that a whole lot of people would know about it, and a whole lot of people would put be calling you up and saying this is a real problem. You know, what do we do? Has that begun to happen?
SPEAKER_01I think so. I mean, I think doing podcasts like this help. We have some there's some DOD interest, there's uh some Senate interest in the Senate for funding. You know, it's but it's never you know, 9-11 was was a sort of there is no agriculture or water 9-11. There's nothing that's gonna grab the attention like planes flying into the twin towns.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01So you really have, but I I will tell you, and I encourage you to do this when you don't have anything else to do. Google 2040 world ends or something like that. Or anything that has to do with 2040 and water or supply chains or and you will be amazed about how many articles, some good, some bad, some really, really bad, but you would be surprised how many people or authors and and and folks, some serious folks, are actually writing about it. So for every one of those ten regions or areas that I I I'm listening in the T I'm using in the TTX, there is at least one 2040 article, easy-to-read article, that actually specifies 2040 as a time when there it's going to be that is gonna be a serious problem in that, I mean a may maybe life-ending problem in that part of the world. So there's a lot of information out there, but no one other than, I guess, Alyssa Ellison and and myself at SU have decided to, you know, make it uh national security interest uh program for us.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell And are you uh you know, are you taking this show on the road, so to speak? Or are you doing TED Talks and and uh presentations to DOD or stage?
SPEAKER_01Our first one will the first real test of this will be in July. And then we hope to have another one in in October. But yes, the idea is is to take it on the road, but I want to have I don't want to take it on the road until at least I have an alpha test. But as I I see this happening, it's really anybody in an industry that wants their executives or their aspiring executives to think about what could happen in the future. And the the beauty is that we have a pretty good 2040 scenario that I didn't come up with myself. I mean, there are a lot of people that are talking about it. So, but they have the opportunity now to work backwards to to mitigate the the problem. So eventually, this now is just a two-move game. Eventually it'll be a three-move game, and that you come in and you're you're play your player and it's 2040 and you come up with all these good ideas, and then the white cell determines which ideas are good and which are bad or whatever, and then it becomes 2030, and you failed. You you succeeded in some, but you failed in others. So you have to go back and then recalibrate. And then, oh, by the way, once the war game is uh matures, we'll have injects that screw up your whole day with the with the solution that you had, so it makes it a real challenge. So it'll be group dynamics involved, team playing, team building, there are all kinds of side advantages to 2040. It's just not coming up with the right answer in the game.
SPEAKER_00So if someone listening to this podcast wanted to get in touch with you, how would they do that?
SPEAKER_01Our center, the agriculture and national security, it's listed as a program, is readily available on the Arizona State University website. All you gotta do is is Google Arizona State University, Agriculture and National Security Program, contact information and all that.
SPEAKER_00Terrific. I would urge our listeners to do just that. And Russ, we've taken uh a fair amount of your time. We appreciate it very much. And we will talk again soon, I hope.
SPEAKER_01I I do too. Good to good to see you, John. It's been a while.
SPEAKER_00Good to see you.
SPEAKER_01And Dale, thanks for your help here, sir.