Ben Ferguson

And one of the people at the table was also White House.

And they said, what you don't understand is that our energy independence policy is also a national security policy.

Because when you take away the money that is to the leadership in Iran, to Vladimir Putin in Russia, Venezuela is another example of this, right?

Then the money that they need to survive and to hold on to power and to pay their forces to keep them in power

and to go after their citizens just completely disappears.

That is part of, I think, what Donald Trump, and it was very interesting to hear this kind of back and forth.

It was like, hey, I'm sorry that the price per barrel is not where you want it, but it's helping American families to lower gas prices, and it's a national security thing for us as well, and it's allowing some of these horrible people in the world to start teetering a little bit because they don't have the cash flow they had two, three, four years ago under Democratic leadership.

But that's that's on you for living in California, voting for those nut jobs.

Yeah, crushing middle and lower class families even more than anybody else.

It hurts a lot of people.

Well, and I was talking to some small refineries, and that was exactly their concern, Senator, was, hey, these small refineries that keep these small towns going that employ a lot of people, they want to make sure that they're okay as well.

And like you said, that's where this administration kind of has to weigh both ends of this because you don't want to hurt mom and pops.

You don't want to hurt the small ones.

Like you said, the big ones will be okay.

But these small refineries that literally power these small towns where they are, you don't want them to get hurt either.

It's an infrastructure.

It's just straight up infrastructure.

I want to ask you one final question before we wrap here.

We talked a lot about Venezuela in the last couple of shows.

We kind of know the state of play there.