Big Digital Energy

0:18 You know, the opening line is for a political candidate that comes on as always. So you want to work at all American burger. You're too young to get the reference. Did you get the reference? I

0:30 did not. Fast times at Ridgemont High. Oh, I remember the movie. Yeah. Remember the movie.

0:36 You say that, though. I was good, like, Spakoli and Phoebe Cates. That's what that's going on. Oh, my God. Yeah. That was a defining moment in my life, too No, but so the disclaimer I have

0:47 to give you is, for the longest time, if you came on Chuck Yates needs a job, which is now Chuck Yates got a job, but that's a whole other story.

1:01 You came on the podcast as a political candidate. You automatically lost your race. Unfortunately, he's had a bad string of losing, but Liz Morell came on, the attorney general for Louisiana, so

1:12 she won, so we got a victory in the W,

1:16 so don't break the streak. I got it. We'll keep it going. So all right. Mom is potentially watching the podcast. Tell mom who you are and why the hell you want to run for governor of Alaska. For

1:29 now? Yeah. Um, my mom or any mom. It's mine. Maybe your mom will your mom listen to? We'll get two views. She actually has a yes. I have to keep telling my mom not to read the comment section

1:42 underneath articles and things like that. She'll text me. He's like, Oh, I had to go. I do this and okay. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, the reason is is when I graduated from college,

1:52 played football, it was easy to go back home to Alaska. You were an outside linebacker. I was a guard. You were a guard, really. I was a linebacker in high school. I was a two time state player

2:03 of the year. I got recruited. It was mainly Ivy League. Went to got a chance to go down to Stanford and Nike Elite Camp. But the head coach that says, well, First Team Allstate in Alaska is 13

2:13 Mall City in LA. Oh, nice. And it was like, Oh yeah. And then buddy to evens, he went 0 and 12 and then got fired. I don't remember that at all. Yeah, exactly. I have that on my bedroom wall

2:23 or a foster. But it was easy to come back. But now kids came late. So I've got a four year old and an 18 month old little girls. Oh wow. And when I look at what Alaska - Okay, can I cut you off

2:34 real quick? This is, I've got three girls.

2:38 And you're at the age where you're about ready to do this You surf from mom, the pedicure. Stick with me on this just second. I had no, I got you. Yeah, yeah, so my three little daughters would

2:51 be grumpy and mad about stuff and all. You take everybody to get a pedicure. Everybody is nice and pleasant and they tell daddy what's going on. And for years when they were really young, what

3:05 they would do is they would sit there and they would say, well daddy, We're gonna have 'em paint your toes pink. you know, to try to embarrass me. And then now later in life, 'cause my baby's 18,

3:19 my oldest is 23, now I get whatever color they're getting. And Sarah's like, oh God, dad, that's so embarrassing. I can't believe you do that. Dad advice. I appreciate that. We

3:32 do daddy dates right now. And there's this coffee shop bakery near the house. And they serve this thing, they call it a breakfast pie. And it's just eggs and sauce. It tastes really good But with

3:44 my now four-year-old, she wants a kid coffee. And so we don't like the hot chocolate and stuff. They're my wife since it gets food dies. But she gets a steamer at kids' temp with whipped cream.

3:55 And they do like a phenomenal house-made whipped cream. Oh, nice. With just a couple of sprinkles. And that's her, and that's the daddy time she gets. And it's, she'll like every couple of

4:05 weeks in it, 'cause I travel a lot. She'll be like, Daddy, can we have a daddy date? God, that's awesome. And that's, so yeah, I'll be, I'll be big on the picture. And I hate to do this to

4:15 you, but I feel like it's my job. If you're ever sitting around with a bunch of old guys and they have daughters, they'll just start throwing out numbers. And it's the weirdest thing. You have no

4:27 idea what they're talking about. 19, 21, and then some guy will say 29 and everybody go, Ah, that's the age your daughter comes back. 'Cause I hate to tell you this, Oh, I feel so bad telling

4:39 you this. But they do leave you at some point, and they think you're the stupidest person in the world, and they won't talk to you. I spent a year talking to daughter Sarah through office memes,

4:53 the TV show, 'cause she liked it, I would find a meme. I mean, I would spend hours looking for the right one and all that, but they come back, and they will come back. So, hate to do that. No,

5:05 let's bracing myself.

5:08 Please do. All right, so, sorry, I totally got a soft track. It's my ADD. All right, so where did you wind up going to college? So I went to Northwestern University in Chicago. All right,

5:21 yeah. Evanston in the Big Ten. Yeah. So I had the opportunity, you know, most of my chances at high school was to go play football at Ivy League schools, but I wanted to see if I had the

5:33 opportunity to, you know, play in the Big Ten. Yeah And from my hometowns, 1200 people, my high school, I had to drive 30 minutes to go to my graduating class, was like 92. And what's the

5:43 hometown? Anchor Point, and I graduated from homework high school. Oh, I've been to Homer. Oh, yeah? I have been to Homer. I went over July 4th that week. And anyway, show up there first

5:58 night in Homer, Alaska. The friend I'm with, her brother is playing in a band and they're at a bar So we go, and I might have. been over served. It was not my fault. But was it the salty dog,

6:13 the lighthouse on the spit? Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, and we walked out of there at two o'clock in the morning and it was still light outside and I swore off vodka for two years. I was just like,

6:24 no, I'm never going to drink again. What has happened? There's a spiritual experience. There's a spiritual experience.

6:30 Yes. But I've been to Homer. Oh, Homer, it's beautiful love. It's gorgeous. It's incredible. It's one of the best places to grow up as a kid who loved it. You know, and it is a good athlete

6:40 in a small town. You have to play all the sports. So I didn't play organized football until high school. But I wanted to see, you know, could I play big time and send out stuff and Northwestern

6:49 came back and said, look, we've never seen you. You've never seen us. But we are with if you are, we think you are, you have a chance at a scholarship. But you got to come on as a walk on. So

6:57 you get a preferred walk on guaranteed spot on the team. So I bet on myself, I had never been to Chicago until the day I reported. Really? And I was a country bumpkin. I, uh, so, you know,

7:09 you get in front of the team, all the freshmen have to stand up in the team meeting room and introduce themselves. Well, I got two laughs because I stood up and everybody started laughing because I

7:17 was wearing a Harley Davidson tank top and my hair was long. I had like a bowl cut down to my nose. Nice. And then I said, Oh, I'm from Alaska. Then they laughed again. Like, who is this guy

7:28 is like, this is a joke and, uh, um, had the chance. And it's kind of worked my tail off. They had, uh, I was recruited as a fullback They had nine offensive linemen get hurt in fall camp and

7:38 they said, we need somebody to snap the football and scout team. And I was like, I'll go do it, start eating chrome and they handed me a foam football, the, the quarterback had a real one and I

7:49 would get in the stance with the team and I would do a fake snap on the scout and then, uh, do this. And then after a couple of weeks, they said, well, do you want to stay here? I'm like, yeah,

7:56 I said, okay, we got to, you got to gain 50 pounds. It was about, um, it was like two 60 at the time. Yeah So the next couple of years, that was gaining weight, getting bigger and trying to

8:06 keep speed. I'm a little guy for the big 10. I'm 61 and a half. Right. I ended up starting about two years. I was the left guard my senior year, the left tackle six foot eight. Wow. But the

8:18 center is about the same size, but we were both quick. And so we ran a lot of screens and zones. And basically if you were a detackle, my job was to chip you and go chase down linebacker. Nice.

8:29 But I love the story about being introduced to the team and all that 'cause one of my dearest friends on the planet's the singer, Jule. Oh yeah. And that's why I was in Homer. I went with Jule to

8:45 Homer and she tells the story about going to the fancy performing arts school, high school in Michigan, showing up on campus, getting sent to the principal's office 'cause she had a big knife with

8:57 her. We always carry a big knife in Alaska. That's what you need to do. Anyway, the principal's like, You just put that right here in my drawer. We're not gonna do that again. I went to high

9:09 school with like one of her cousins. There's a lot of the kilters. There's a lot of kilters. There's a lot of kilter up there. Yeah. The, and it was her brother, Oxley's band who was playing

9:20 that night when we got in. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it was cool. The story I love about that is,

9:27 you know, the reality TV series that the kilter family did. Last frontier. Last frontier. They didn't know that was Jules' family They just run it around Alaska. They find this outgoing family

9:40 and they do that. And Oxley calls and he's like, Hey, Jules, I'm about to sign for TV. And Jules like, Hey, don't borrow money for a TV. I'll loan you some money. Those interest rates are

9:52 like 18. And she's like, No. And Oxley's like, No, we're gonna sign for a TV series. And Jules goes, Don't sign anything. Call CAA, her agent. And all of a sudden you've got these,

10:06 hillbillies up in Alaska with CAA representing the National Geograph is going, what the hell did we stumble into? But yeah, that was fun. So graduating. So was Fitzgerald your coach? He was.

10:22 Randy Walker has recruited me. And before the start of my fourth year, he sadly passed away of a heart attack. He's only 53 in great shape And then coach Fitz at age 31 that summer was named the

10:36 head coach. So my last two years was with Fitz the head coach was Fitz's get a dude as they kind of say. That's truly is. Yeah, I love that story. Honestly, and I didn't even know this until

10:48 years later, he was the recruiting coordinator at the time. No way. And he never once told me this or shared this until like after I finished playing his family want to come to Alaska. This years

11:00 later, so his family came up and we We took them fishing and we showed them around Alaska. fits share. My brother asked him, uh, said, Hey, how did you remember? Did you remember Adam? Um,

11:10 he goes, yeah. So one year, Pat Fitzgerald was the linebacker coach at the university of Idaho. One of my older brothers played there and I went there to a summer camp and no one had sent my stuff

11:21 into Northwestern. He remembered the family name and said this guy is worth taking a chance on. No way. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And it was so he's such a cool dude. He never once like held

11:31 that against be like, I owe him anything on, but he shared that. And I even a couple of weeks ago, he actually held a fundraiser for me in Chicago. No way. Oh, that's so cool. I love that

11:41 story because unfortunately the history of head coaches at all the modders is just abysmal. And so him being able to kind of have some success and stuff. He's winning this winning this coach in

11:54 Northwestern history, won five bowl games when the school had only won one historically. Yeah, exactly. No, that's That's so cool, being a rice guy, you know, it's like always a. Plus

12:05 Northwestern was one of my investors back in the private equity days. So how long before you get back to Alaska? About 6 pm. tonight. No, but after, sorry, after Northwestern. Oh, how long?

12:20 You know, I, so I finished playing, I walked and I played that fall and then I decided to hang out for about another five, six months. I lived above an LA fitness. And so I was done, I've done

12:33 coursework, done with playing football And I kind of wanted like a relaxed time. So I became a personal trainer and was training for like Northwestern grad students. And I did that for about six

12:45 months and then decided, okay, now it's time to, they gotta move on. Gotcha, so you go back to Alaska, what do you do? I start working for my family company. And so it's the largest

12:55 post-secondary training school in the States, mainly known for truck driving and eventually gets like a large welding program. So I was pre-med and I needed one class. It didn't take physics in

13:05 Northwestern 'cause the lab was during the morning when we practiced in the mornings. And so I, all the other sciences, and I was like, okay, I need this one class. I kind of slow roll it while

13:13 I'm working and eventually take the MCAT. And during all this stuff, the family company keeps growing. We get companies, Alaska Native corporations asking us, Hey, can you provide this career

13:26 readiness? And my brothers are like, you know what? You got to contribute So I got sent out to Point Hope, Alaska, at age 24 to teach career readiness.

13:36 And the goal was to just get folks who are gonna pay attention and show up to class, who's willing to learn before the native court pays to send them into town for like an eight to 12 week program,

13:47 which is, you know, pretty expensive. Do what I say or else you'll be doing what I'm doing now. And it was just a great learning experience It kind of rolled the 2009 Exxon Mobil kicks off the

13:60 Point Thompson project. And nobody in Alaska would like really meet with them from like the training contractor 'cause no one believed Exxon was doing work because after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in

14:09 the settlements, they ghosted. Yeah. And so they're getting calls and people like, ha ha, yeah, Exxon, they'd hang up. And I was down at the truck range and I was helping with the trucks and

14:21 my sister says, hey, Exxon calls, they wanna meet. And my brother say, oh, this descent, take Adam. And so I was in steel-toed boots and like car hearts And we drove in Anchorage, went to

14:32 Nordstrom's. I went into the dressing room, took off my clothes. My sister throws me underneath the door pair of khakis and a polo and I come out with the tags and we buy those and we go to this

14:40 meeting and they say, hey, we've got this corporate policy. We may send guys to the field and it's gonna be either by boat or helicopter. And so they have to have this helicopter underwater egas

14:51 trainer, Hewitt. And they say, can you guys provide that? And I said, yeah, we can do that, we couldn't do that And we left and I ended up finding this government contractor. We talked them

15:02 into coming up and they put us through the ring. We ran out this pool, we have these survival suits and they put us through the wringer to train us on all of this. Did you actually do that? Yeah.

15:09 I've never done that. So I'm not going off shore and we talked to Exxon instead of doing the full modular like dip thing. We had this was called a shallow water egress trainer, which is, it looks

15:21 like a portable airframe, but you can still test guys. You can revert them in water and they still have to practice pushing. So they said, yeah, that'll work for our protocol So we put this ad

15:31 and we did hundreds of people in like eight weeks of training, all the pools we could find in the Anchorage and Matt Sioux area in Alaska, swapping the suits out next on it kind of just kind of

15:41 rolled from there and it moved into, oh, can you do this and it ended up being that I helped rewrite and then deliver the orientation program that everybody had to take before they went on site. No

15:50 way. And then it moved into a leadership training stuff and again, I'm in like my mid 20s at this point as we're moving these things along and it's kind of kept rolling from there Well, I then. I

16:01 was pre-med. I had taken the MCAT. I'm applying to medical school and I go to a wedding and it was the teammate, the left tackle I told you about. He married his college sweetheart. Well, I met

16:11 her sister at the wedding and I married her. Oh, wow. It was a long distance. And at the of the second date, she tells me, she goes, look, she's electrical engineer. She goes, it's my goal

16:21 in life to be a stay at home mom. She goes, I won't wait a decade for you to be able to provide that. And so I was like, well, second date, but she was the one. And so I completely changed my

16:32 whole life around, but I was like, you know what? All right. Well, my prospects are Alaska. And she goes, okay, well, I'll end up moving to Alaska. And I was like, I don't want to give up

16:41 all this like my lifetime of like science education. So I literally Googled. It was like a master's executive program, health oil industry. It's like, what's going to come up? And Johns Hopkins

16:53 program came up. Okay. I called the program director said, all right, man, this is where I went to undergrad here's my scores, he says welcome to the program. Another investor in my fund. John

17:03 Hopkins. John Hopkins, very nice. So yeah, I got my master's in public health. And you were in Baltimore? Yeah. To do that. And it was a distance, it was a combination, this is before online

17:11 classes were a really good thing. So it was like, we did conference calls on our small cohort, some Adobe Blackboard courses, and then every six months for two weeks, we would have intensives.

17:22 Okay. To where we'd have like almost as much in person like lab time as you would if you were on campus. Oh, wow So the Yates family story with John Hopkins, and they were a long time investor,

17:33 and I really appreciate that. But dad got into southwestern med school in Dallas and got into John Hopkins. And mom was gonna teach biology in high school to put dad through med school. And dad

17:49 went to John Hopkins campus, looked across the street and said, There's no way I'm bringing my wife to Baltimore So, Dad went to, uh, to, um. southwestern in Dallas, which weird long story

18:06 short, Parkland is the teaching hospital there. So dad is there in the mid 60s. So everybody working on Kennedy, everybody working on Conley. Those are my dad's professors from med school. Yeah.

18:19 Wow. Yeah. So lifelong fascination with the Kennedy assassination. That is that's pretty true. All right. So you get a master's degree, then what are you doing? And then the company keeps

18:28 growing. We get contracts with Shell, Alia Transolaska pipeline. So it's Aliaaska pipeline services. They outsource a bunch of stuff to us. We get these big contracts and

18:39 I'm running that side of the business. And we get politically active, more so in the fact that we're a for profit company and in a world dominated by non-profits and or kind of like apprenticeships

18:49 and things like that. And we go down to the state legislature and tip tell them like, look, you have to stop subsidizing the competitors and legislators go, Oh, so you want the money? We say,

18:59 No, don't spend the money. Yeah, save it. So we actually got a reputation for being the ones who actually just didn't want any money and said don't spend any money. And so that opened a lot of

19:08 doors. And so we got politically active and then as a governor Dunley v at that time was first campaigning, he was going around and he had a conversation about like, what would it look like at the

19:20 Department of Health? He goes, you have a public health degree, right? And I said, yeah, but I don't really use it that way. It was more just to have. And he says, well, we should consider

19:29 this And his idea was, is that the Department of Health is, and everywhere, is always either a former physician or a health care administrator. So their whole livelihood has always been made from

19:38 the status quo. Right. And he goes, take an objective viewpoint. You just worked on this large, like6 billion plus CapEx project to point Thompson. You understand, you know, how to run the

19:48 entrepreneurial side. He goes, take an objective viewpoint on how this can better run. Make sure you hire good health policy people around you and grow from there. And so we went through that

19:58 process you got elected. So I was like, you know what, I I applied, I put my name in, got interviewed by his team and they said, why would you want to run health? And I said, because that's

20:06 got the most problems. Nice. And so stepped up and I had just turned 34 when he appointed me the health commissioner of the largest department in the state by position count and budget, over 3000

20:17 employees at about35 billion operating. And has done Lovey the tall guy? He's the tall guy. He's the tall guy. I got a picture with him somewhere. I'll dig it out and we'll pop it up because he

20:28 came down to Houston Never a deal at Jeff Hildebrandt's house because obviously he'll, he'll corpse a big producer up in, in Alaska and so Jeff has a big interest in who the governor is and making

20:42 sure the governor knows some folks in, in Texas. So anyway, yeah, it was nice guy. Yeah, it was, it was a, he's a great guy. A big, big thinker, big intellectual has a great vision for the

20:53 state. You know, he's termed out, but you know, we kind of roll along at the health position. And so we have centralized public health in Alaska. So I'm front and center with my chief medical

21:04 officer and public health director who people that I appointed. And we're trying to like, how do we figure out Alaska? How do we keep our state open, but also protect? Because we've got the

21:13 lowest number of hospital beds called med surge per capita. We also have the highest indigenous population. And historically you look at a respiratory virus like in 1918, we had oral stories of 50

21:25 mortality rates in native villages. And so we were like, how do we protect this? And we think we struck a good balance. And then eventually when we saw we weren't going to be overrun, we could be

21:33 resilient. The governor says, let's open it up. So we were the first place in the world to have in-airport COVID testing in June of 2020, where people could fly in, get tested, and go see Alaska.

21:43 I don't know why. And so we open up our economy, we move things forward. During that time, you could appreciate 'cause you mentioned Hill Corp. They're in the means of the midst of purchasing

21:53 BP's assets. And so in order to make this happen, travel rules, like, okay, if you come in Alaska, you have to do this. I got a call from some of the Govs office that, hey, these executives

22:06 from Hill Corp need to come into Alaska, but they're becoming on a private jet. What rules apply to them? And I said, oh, we don't have any. He says, like, well, we need to make sure. So we

22:15 put together protocols that, okay, if private jet, if you do this in your contact, this is remember, it's early in COVID. This is what you do. And so my claim to fame is that like I was able to

22:23 do the quick protocol for them to come up to Alaska to actually ink the deal to get it done so they could actually take over BP's assets in Alaska. Oh, nice. And what was the protocol you made and

22:33 basically get tested to show up? It was a pre-test or it was a self-isolation because like they'd stay on the plane and they wouldn't get off while it got refueled. And then when they got up to

22:43 Prudo, like they had their own camp set up like beds exclusively for them. And so it was, it was these kind of like quick things that I would then bounce off my epidemiology team. And I get a lot

22:54 of that stuff we were just trying to figure out, Later on, you start realizing a lot of these protocols are completely worthless 'cause

23:03 it's in the air. It's all the way around us. Yeah, no, that's interesting. And I'm a huge conspiracy guy. We've already touched on Kennedy and I believe the CIA had him killed, which may of

23:15 course get this podcast taken off YouTube, but

23:21 how much what pressure was there by them, whoever them is, the federal government, lobbyists, the metal community. 'Cause the one thing I felt like we had during COVID was you had kind of these

23:43 self-important people putting protocols in place for the good of everyone and in effect, substituting their judgment for maybe a market or individual choice and all that.

23:58 Fauci went from, you don't need mask to, well, you do need mask. I only said that because medical professionals needed mask, you know, you know, it did swing back and forth. It was really

24:10 interesting early on, right? We were worried about what they called fomites or solid surface transfer. Yeah. But then comes out to find out that you're not worried about solid surface transfers.

24:19 So, and that was in April of 2020. CDC said, don't worry about it. But by that point, every restaurant, everybody has got this cleanup protocol in a deep, deep clean of every dining room table.

24:30 Right. And you've got to use the, the, so it's like, became hygiene theater. Right. And once something got out there, it was really hard to pull back. And we even tried to message that, you

24:39 know, in Alaska, we had no vaccine mandates or masks mandates. We told people said, go outside, go enjoy Alaska. We actually, I think that the attendance in state parks was actually up

24:50 throughout and has held steady since, which is kind of cool. Yeah. Um, you know, the overall pressure kind of just come from, Who are you taking care of? Who's the vulnerable populations? How

24:59 do we move ahead? And we got a lot of diverse groups that you're trying to manage. You've got the hospitals themselves who've got overworked staff. They're scared because they've got stories of

25:08 their colleagues that have got this viral overload that they've either gotten sick from or passed away from. And so it's balancing all of those competing interests. And, you know, I would say from

25:19 the federal government side, we really just had a ton of support in that if we needed resources, you know, 'cause we had to have extra money and support just to make sure, look, we've got these

25:27 congregate settings. We've got to bring in and import thousands of workers to run the fish processors. Because we've got, you know, most of the seafood harvest in the US. comes from Alaska. And

25:38 so you've got these tiny little towns and villages that thousands of people need to fly into and live in. What protocol are you gonna do this? And so the federal government, both under Trump and

25:48 the Biden side on that part gave us a lot of resources to make sure that these guys were supported because once you manage a harvest, and then you stop managing it, it could collapse the harvest.

25:59 Like if you don't fish for the fish, like it could actually, it could overpopulate and then the next year you're not gonna have the same runs over time. And so you have to make sure you do this

26:08 maintain. So I would say from our side, it was that it was just the internal balance of politics and really getting to the fact that what is rational and how do we move ahead? It is very

26:19 frustrating when you come to find out like two years later that the six foot rule was made up. Yeah, things like that were very frustrating And honestly, and I knew from doing industrial hygiene

26:28 work in the oil patch that if you wear a mask, you have to be fit tested and you have to be clean shaven. You've got to sign on the wall right about H2S, poison, gas present, that's things like

26:40 that. If you've got a beard, wear it a mask, you're dead. I've got a beard, I've always had a beard. And so to me, a mask only works for a population of one. It doesn't work for a population

26:50 of N. My dad's a doctor and he came on uh, the podcast kind of the height of COVID and, you know, said, Hey, I'm just small town country doctor. He's a radiologist, but whatever. Um, and one

27:03 of the lines he said from that is this six foot rule has to be made up. I can sneeze 20 feet and I'm not even an expert at it. I haven't practiced, you know, and so the, the, uh, yeah, that

27:17 was, that was, that was an interesting time. I'd, I'd love to actually see some objective history because I kind of get on one hand, we don't know, but early days, the data was, was, you know,

27:31 it's just not that bad. You know, dad's take like in February of 2020. So before it hit, he said, well, you know, back in my day, when this happened, first thing you do is you give it to the

27:42 kids. Not too many kids die. Then you give it to the 20 year olds, not too many 20 year olds You give it to the 30-year-olds, then the 40-year-olds, then the 50-year-olds. And the whole time,

27:53 you lock up the old people 'cause they die from anything. And dad's like, we'll be done in six weeks. We'll have herd immunity at that point. And that's, you know, going forward, when you look

28:02 at in public health school, the things they tell you to worry about the most is a highly contagious airborne respiratory virus. That's the thing that is the most terrifying thing in the world, of

28:12 what it can do. But, you know, I think we failed to actually identify who are the at-risk groups. And, you know, knowing as we kind of worked our way through it, we realized in Alaska, it was

28:21 our seniors. And so we gave them as much resources as they needed, the extra staffing, the extra money to pay for overtime, things like that. Locom Tenons, right, these contract health workers

28:32 to bring up. And that was our big focus, and you try to open it up. And I'd say, going forward, if there's ever any sort of pandemic threat or anything, what is the at-risk population? How do

28:41 you do this? Because you cannot shut down the private sector. I'd say that's the one thing that if we take anything from COVID is we have definitively proven worldwide print enough money to replace

28:53 the private sector. All it does is create rampant inflation and ruin your economy. And then the second big thing I think too, is if kids aren't dying from it, then send them to school. Yep, yeah.

29:07 I mean, we have set back a generation - Social emotional. Dramatically. I mean, watching my three kids kind of do online, like my daughter Sarah was a freshman in high school, watching her have

29:20 to do online, not getting to meet kids. You know, it's been a thing. Yeah, it really has. And that's a really sad thing about it. Statewide, we actually shut down the second half of the year

29:34 from 2020, or the second half of the school year, so until about May, is when we go. But we set open up, but it was, we made it a local school district choice. And then some of them would open

29:44 up

29:46 And that's what you saw this patchwork around the country. And so the social events, the kind of key marker milestones for kids in their high school years, they missed. Yeah, that's right. And

29:56 it always winds up hurting poor people the most. That's

30:01 the one kind of horrible thing about all those rich people have a tendency to bounce back. They have resources to do it. Poor people just don't. And do this real quick. So you're running for

30:15 governor Do y'all still have that weird - what's it even called? Preferential voting. We have a ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting. What is that? It happened via a ballot measure during

30:27 2020. So when everybody was doing mail-in ballots, and it's squeaked by, and it created a jungle primary, and that means every candidate, regardless of party or party affiliation, is to

30:40 altogether And then the top four vote getters move. to rank choice voting in the general election. And that means you vote for your top four candidates. And if the least, and after round one, the

30:54 candidate who has the least amount of votes, they wipe off, but whoever voted for that person, whoever voted that person first, their second votes get reallocated. And it creates this weird

31:07 process, and it's an algorithm. You can't hand tally this. And as this, the goofy thing about this whole process Yeah, that, you know, I've killed some brain cells on that 'cause Kelly

31:19 Chewbacca walked me through that when she was on, and I've thought a lot about it. I haven't been able to wrap my head around that. That just, I mean, I get George Washington's whole point of

31:31 let's avoid factions and all, but to some degree, we've been doing it, you know, a certain way for a long time. And I think we're okay, you know, so. It's a confidence in the process. It

31:44 feels like it's not one person, one vote. And your vote, either some votes count more than others. Because if, what if there's only one person that you morally and philosophically can vote for?

31:54 You bullet point that first and they get off and then now your vote is tossed. And the denominator changes. 'Cause you do these calculations until you, it's 50 plus one. And so if you got people

32:06 who they call it bullet voting, who only vote for one candidate, well, if you have 200, 000 people vote, but 20, 000 only bullet voted, then on the second round, your denominator is only at

32:16 180, 000. So it's easier to get to that 50, which that, that feels weird. Well, and there's an element there, and I'm talking to my future second wife out there of, there doesn't really need

32:30 to be ranked choice of voting when it comes to finding your wife, you know? I mean, they're just an element of having backup, I don't know, it feels weird. So how many folks running,

32:41 We, it is a crowded race. And so there's 12 Republicans and two Democrats on the race right now for Alaska governor.

32:49 And it's interesting because the governor's turned out, people jumping in and the parties don't have any control over it. And so it's a free for all. And people feel like, oh, they got their name

33:01 because if there's so many people, then the margin of the vote share you need in order to actually move forward to be in top four is really small. What we've seen in Alaska since the elections,

33:10 doing this system in '22 and '24 is in '22, we had like 192, 000 votes in the primary, which decent turnout for a primary for a state of 740, 000. In '24, that 192, 000 in the primary was 108,

33:26 000. 'Cause people feel like the primary doesn't really matter.

33:31 Interesting. And so it really drove down turnout in that, which when you've got a massively crowded field, kind of negates the point Right? Exactly. Exactly. So most of my audience is energy

33:45 stuff. Although you know what's crazy in today's world, this is kind of our stick around here is that content is the greatest source of leverage you have with the reach of the internet. I mean,

33:56 all 8 billion people on the planet can hear us talk if they want. And so I actually have a garbage crew in Seattle that listens to the podcast and they send an email about every six months, Hey

34:06 Chuck, what did Adam mean by this? And I'm kind of like, What are y'all doing? Well, we just like listening to you. And supposedly one of the nuclear submarines in the Navy listens to the

34:19 podcast every Friday. That's really cool. Yeah, and so it's kind of a while. And then I've got,

34:25 it may be just a bot farm, but like 4 of my listeners are in Venezuela. Wow. I have no idea. I like to say it may be a bot farm at all. But

34:37 Most folks are energy folks. what do we need sitting here in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado? What do we need to know about kind of Alaskan energy? Because y'all are what? The sixth, I

34:52 think the sixth biggest oil producer in America, fifth biggest, something like that. And we've fallen down the list, you know, and I think 90, 91, we were like two million barrels a day

35:01 produced. Yeah. Purdue Bay was big for you. You know, we're down to like 480, 000. But I think it's important to note that Trans-Laska pipeline first started flowing oil in 1976. We're going to

35:13 have the 50th anniversary this coming year. It's pretty cool. So you've got these super basins that oil folks know of Prudhoe Bay and Capark, and they've been producing for 50 years. Well, coming

35:23 online, we're going to have Santos is doing the Pika project, which is just a little bit west of Capark, and

35:32 it's advancing towards NPRA or National Petroleum Reserve Alaska. And this is formation

35:38 Um, they're going to have 80, 000 barrels per day come online in about, I think the March is there shooting in 2026 right next to them. Conoco's got the Willow project that's going to be 180, 000

35:48 barrels a day in 2028. And these are just the first phases of these projects. And so these massive oil plays are going to go. I just read the stat right before we started this, uh, you know, oil

35:58 group in Alaska. It said that, uh, there's about from now until 2034 is 22 billion dollars of the project spend that's going to go on. And by 2034, over 60 of the throughput in the Transylaska

36:10 pipeline is going to be from fields that aren't putting a drop in the pipeline today. Oh, wow, which is pretty cool. When you look about, we've got this 50 year field, which has been producing,

36:20 but there's still so much more. There's other prospects that are continuing to be worked. There's the Harrison Bay side, Bill Armstrong, right? We, we, the, we call him the, he's like the

36:30 godfather of Alaska, but a bill knows rocks because Bill's the one who discovered, how do you drill the nanoshook?

36:37 He's got another prospect. He just announced this year called the sockeye, which is on the east side of the field. And it's a new badami area and BP poked holes in the ground there for years and

36:47 couldn't figure out how to get the oil out. But Bill was able to do that and get a successful flow test. And so there is still more plays. And so I want folks to know that Alaska is still opening

36:57 up and it's we've got critical infrastructure there in this whole road in the Trans-Alaska pipeline and a lot of feeder and gathering lines and these other fields are really starting to open up and

37:08 going to be putting more and more oil in. We actually project that we're going to have more throughput in the next two years than we have today, which not the case in a typically declining field.

37:18 Right. Oh, that's cool. That's pretty neat. Is there a is there an energy initiative, an energy law, energy government related thing that you'd want to change if you became governor. You know,

37:37 it's the getting folks to understand how our tax system works. In Alaska residents, they got a lot of, there's a lot of misinformation. They'll get fed a bunch of different stuff. We just hit

37:47 like the longest, most stable tax regime we've had. And it was like 12 years without changing it. But every couple of years, there'll be a ballot initiative to do the saying that it's, we're not

37:57 getting our fair share. But the reality is we have a net tax system. Um, and because it costs so much money and it's such a long lead time, you have to spend billions before you see any money out

38:08 of this. And it really just pushes the tail, right? So the state doesn't get cashflow positive from the oil production tax, um, for a couple of years, but the tail of the revenue gets shifted

38:19 out longer. And, but this means companies have to have some return on their investment in order to develop these resources. We still get the royalties collected off that. There is a portion and

38:28 that actually goes into our permanent fund corporation. So I'd say getting people to understand that. Um, to make sure that keep it stable, because that was the entire point of this, it was

38:37 called SB 21. It was a Senate bill 21 and 2013 that got passed to change from this massively progressive system called ACEs. And this has allowed us to actually have smaller companies come in, but

38:49 also look at these projects and actually develop them over time. And now we're getting this reward out of it. Got you. All right My pet peeve, believe it or not, and no idea how this became my

39:03 thing, but it is my thing. Freaking hate the Jones Act. I cannot stand the Jones Act. You've got to hate it too, right? It is very limiting for Alaska. You know, I didn't even realize it was a

39:19 part of it or similar. There's something called the passenger vessel act, which is similar to the Jones Act and that actually restricts cruise ships And so our congressional delegation during COVID

39:29 in 2020 had to push a one-year exemption to the passenger vessel act. for Alaska so we could have cruise ships in 2021. Yeah. It's the most amazing thing that they have to do this. And you know,

39:41 you see these laws and we can fact check. It was sometime in the 1800s, it was when the Jones Act was passed. I think it was, I think it's 100 years old. So it was like 19, 1908 or whatever.

39:54 And it was basically a Senator from Washington wanting to screw with Alaska. Yeah And it restricts how, basically for folks who don't know, it's a, unless it's an American built flagged vessel,

40:09 if it's a foreign flagged vessel, it can't go from an American port to an American port. It must touch into a foreign port first. Yeah, it's built in America, it's staffed by Americans. And it

40:21 sounds great. In today's tariff protectionist world, it sounds great.

40:27 I mean, we've built one Jones vessel in what the last five years, something like that. We have completely outsourced all of the ship building in the world. And so therefore it really damages us in

40:37 Alaska. Well, and y'all have all the natural gas on the planet. And if we could put that on ships and take it to the West Coast, that would be great. And we have one, and I believe, we'll fact

40:52 check this, but I believe it's 40-year-old vessel and the Jones Fitt fleet that could actually transmit that natural gas, that LNG. And I don't think we can do anything with propane. So it's like,

41:06 we have one vessel that can do this. And it limits the resources we can get off. You talk about our natural gas, we just got, we have all the oil, we have like 50 trillion cubic feet of known

41:17 proven reserves, and 220 trillion cubic feet probable and like 590 trillion cubic feet with technological advances because of methane We have so much gas, and they were so far west, a lot of people

41:29 don't realize how far west we are and removed from the United States.

41:35 We have this Alaska Gas Line Development Corporation has this flyer that says that from the Gulf of America, say there's no Panama Canal issue, to get from there to Tokyo is a 16 days. You know how

41:48 long it takes for Alaska? Oh. Eight. Yeah. We're that far further west It takes nine days for Australia. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? No, that's absolutely crazy.

42:01 And to landlock all that resource,

42:05 I have pushed multiple times. I have coffee, it feels like, I don't know, two or three times a week with Congressman Troy Nells. And he's actually chairman of the Transportation Committee. And I

42:18 have pushed, we gotta get rid of the Jones Act. At least exempt energy from the Jones Act I mean, military is. Massachusetts is sitting there. I mean, this is 2017. So it's a little hyperbole

42:32 from me. They took a Russian tanker of LNG in Massachusetts at the Everett facility that takes it in. They are getting their natural gas, not from Texas, but they're getting it from Trinidad

42:46 because of the Jones Act. And it's like, Why can't? Anyway, I should have refreshed on the Jones Act and the implications for Alaska, but I did talk to Dunlovey about it when I was

43:01 at Hildebrand's place. And he's like, Yeah, right off the bat, 25 more. We pay for everything. Just stop hurting us. You know, I'm not even asking for help. Just stop hurting us Even if there

43:13 was an ability to take LNG offshore from, say, Point Thompson, right, north of Alaska, ship that down because we're going to have an energy shortage for a couple of years in south central Alaska

43:24 where the bulk of the population is.

43:27 we couldn't deliver gas to ourselves via tanker. Yeah, I know, it's just a most absurd thing. It's the worst and we were talking on the podcast of what we need to do. And my running joke is

43:42 always, well, we gotta get a Kardashian involved. You know, if we can have a, and we were actually thinking we could have a big concert to highlight the evils of the Jones Act and think of the

43:53 coalition we could pull together Let's get Jewel, she's Alaskan, right? So we'll get Jewel's singing. We'll have Ted Cruz there. He's very anti-Jones Act. Who's the guy that wrote Hamilton,

44:05 Lynn? Manuel Miranda. Yeah, he's Puerto Rican. They get screwed equally to Alaska. Oh, yeah, they would, yeah. Yeah, and then I

44:16 think Bad Bunny, you know? I mean, this is, and maybe the Kilcher family, 'cause I don't know if you've ever seen aughts,

44:25 great song, right? That's our big concert. Highlight the evils. Can we do that in home or maybe? I would. Yeah. I think it would be tremendous to point that out about how this is actually

44:35 damaging us. And there's there's got to be some exemptions. You talk about like, why not for energy? They do it for the defense contracts all the time. We got six icebreakers that were in the one

44:43 big, beautiful bill. We contracted all out to Finland to build Yeah. And the, you know, I even pitched Congressman Nell's on, all right, we'll exempt people from the Jones Act stuff and we'll

44:58 throw it tariff on it. I mean, not the perfect solution, but we'll at least try that and it's the ability to develop our resources is what Alaska was promised at statehood. Right. And that's,

45:09 that is, that's what Alaskans really want is how do we actually continue to do this? Because the other thing is, I get asked from people said like, Oh, you know, I'm pro development, but I like

45:18 wild places. I was like, have you been to Alaska? You know how big Alaska is? Alaska is so vast that We are the ones who take care of it because people in Alaska love to hunt and fish. And, you

45:30 know, it's like one of the caribou herds and I think it was either the central Arctic or the porcupine herd in, before oil and gas in 1975, they were down to 5, 000 caribou. And like just 10

45:43 years ago, there was a survey and they're up to 75, 000. And it's like, as gas flowed, they actually thrived because caribou really liked gravel pads. They liked to walk the roads. They liked

45:52 to get out of the swamps It's fine, it's warm. Yeah. 'Cause the bugs don't follow 'em on the gravel as much. And so it's like, you're able to actually see these animals thrive and we protect the

46:03 area. You know, the Inuit population on the North Slope borough, you know, there's seven communities, about 10, 000 people total up there. They collect the oil and gas property tax from Prudhoe

46:13 Bay and Kaparek. They have a400 million operating budget. Their life expectancy doubled when oil started flowing because of the resources they were able to get. Yeah. When you stop burning dung in

46:25 wood in your house and you burn hydrocarbons, your life expectancy doubles. Yeah. So they still live a subsistence lifestyle. They whale and seal skin boats in the springtime and they actually do

46:36 this. I got to go up to it. It's called Nalukutuk and pass out whale cell, but to the community. It was an awesome experience, but they still regularly do these things and they live up there in

46:46 this place that people would say, oh, this is inhospitable, but to them, it's paradise And they're able to do that and live this lifestyle because of oil and carbons. Yeah. I always think most

46:58 things in life are water-blowing. You push here, this side pops off. There are no answers. There are only trade-offs and stuff. So when we talk about

47:09 the environment and going forward and all, I always, if you're so strident, well, we just need to get rid of hydrocarbonate. You're always like, we're trading a life 100 years from now, maybe,

47:20 if we can't adapt. for lives today. Yeah, and that's, honestly Bill Gates, his pivot before COP30, that exact same thing. Yeah. It says we actually need to look at this. You know, with my

47:34 role at Commissioner of Revenue, which I did after health, I had a seat on the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, which is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the US, funded by oil money. We

47:44 took a non-renewable resource and turned it into renewable resource, and it's grown, it's86 billion. And we get a lot of people all the time, like you got to divest from fossil fuels. And

47:54 typically, you never respond to public comment, but there was this report this gentleman shared and you read it, but it all brought about like, oh, these developed countries have to stop doing

48:03 this and we have to cut all these out. And I said, okay, that makes sense and all I said, but what do we do for the 800 million people in the world that have energy poverty? What do we do about

48:13 them? Do they not have the chance at a lifestyle growth? And there's no answer, it's crickets. Well, and wars were started for less, you know? I mean, it's, they have the right, like, you

48:23 know, you don't have telephone poles and lines crisscrossing Africa. They didn't go from, you know, telegraph, you know, Morse code to telephones to cell phones. No, they just all of a sudden

48:35 poof had cell phones because we're able to do these massive stepwise functions of growth in technology. And so, like, you know, with Bill Gates, what he said, was like, we have to actually grow

48:46 the economy and bring technology to bear to actually lift these people out of poverty is the most important thing we can do. Yeah. And we've actually reduced emissions in the United States because

48:55 of wealth. Wealth's the only thing that allows it to happen. So, I do have to, I choked on his name earlier, Colin Grebo at the Cato Institute is the world's expert. I don't know if you've ever

49:06 met him or seen his stuff. Never read up, read his stuff. You've read his stuff. Yeah, when you win the governorship, to bring Colin on. He's the world's expert on the Gen Zag. I've had him on

49:16 the podcast twice. I love the talk to him. I'm gonna have to go listen to those. Yeah, he's so good, he's so good. Well, Adam, appreciate you coming on. This was really cool. Good luck in

49:25 the race. Thank you. It's exciting time, you know, it's, I'm a dad. I wanna make Alaska better that we can grow. We can grow the state and make a place that my kids wanna come back to. And we

49:38 can make Alaska with all of this energy potential And we even talk about AI data centers and all the gas we have, we can really truly grow and transform the Alaska economy and make sure that we are

49:49 protecting not only the Arctic, but the rest of North America. And this is where Alaska can really step up in a big way and I'm excited to be out in front. Big, biggest cost to the data center is

49:58 cooling it. And you guys kind of have that on lockdown. I think we got that on lockdown and also, you know, they need water, okay. Yeah, 40 of the US. is surface freshwater in Alaska. There

50:07 you go, that's perfect. How do people find out about the campaign? You've got a website. Yeah, I have the easiest one. It's adamcrum, CRUMcom. Nice. And

50:17 so there's a video there that actually gives a background and a history and you can read a little bit more about me and you'll send in emails. We'll talk and respond. Are you active on social media

50:25 too? Active on social media. Alaska primarily is Facebook. We're moving towards Instagram and probably gonna start YouTube as the campaign kicks up more My favorite joke about social media and the

50:37 slow adoption of certain states is Vernon Maxwell, the old rocket's guard, one time went on Twitter and said, Hey, Utah, I'm really sorry I tweeted that out. Had I known y'all had the internet,

50:51 I wouldn't have done it.

50:54 We have the internet up there. We do that. Adam, appreciate you coming on.