In this podcast, Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey caught up with Oklo CEO Jake DeWitte for a conversation about:
- Why the buildout of nuclear energy stagnated and why that could change.
- How Oklo is using old technology to develop new reactors.
- A recycled energy source that could fuel the entire United States.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner's guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
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This video was recorded on August 24, 2024.
Jake DeWitte: The history of nuclear power. Nuclear power has produced the significant majority of clean energy in this country for decades. All the waste generated there from a volume perspective would fit inside of a Super Walmart for context. That said, from a recycling perspective, there's enough energy content and all that material to power the entire United States using fast reactors like we're developing in the recycling process here for over 150 years. Pretty awesome fuel reserve.
Ricky Mulvey: I'm Ricky Mulvey, and that's Jake DeWitte, CEO of Oklo, an advanced nuclear technology company. In this conversation, we discuss where nuclear energy could go in the next 5-10 years, the key problem that nuclear energy solves that other renewable energies don't, and how small modular reactors could fuel data centers, which is something that Oklo's chair Sam Altman might just be interested in. Jake DeWitte is the CEO of Oklo, an advanced nuclear technology company working on fast reactors, a little bit more advanced than what we do in podcasting land. I appreciate you joining us for an interview here on Motley Fool Money.
Jake DeWitte: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ricky Mulvey: This is the first time we've talked about Oklo, and I think it's good to set the table. How did you become interested in nuclear energy?
Jake DeWitte: I grew up in New Mexico, born and raised around this stuff, got the chance to learn about and get exposed to nuclear technology from the time I was a little kid and frankly fell in love with it at a very young age. It's been something that since I was a little kid, I've been pretty fascinated by, this thing that feels like science fiction, but it's actually real. Something that I've basically been working on since I got hired in high school into the national lab system and then just continued working from there.
Ricky Mulvey: Nuclear energy is one of those things that I almost see parallel to space travel, where there were tremendous advances of it in the mid 20th century, and then almost nothing since then in terms of full scale, not the technology, but full scale reactors coming online.
Jake DeWitte: No. It's one of those things where there are some similarities about all this innovation and development that was happening at similar times. It's funny we've got some folks that have joined the team that work in aerospace before, and a lot of them come over and, man, some of the similarities are so strong, and it's true. I think nuclear maybe was doing some of those things maybe a decade ahead of where aerospace was in terms of some of the work that went into it. Lot of brilliant people working on developing the technology, exploring it back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, set the stage for that initial surge of buildouts that started in the 60s and spanned, really frankly, all the way until the 80s but then you've had this pretty big throttling back in the late 70s, 80s amid, I would say overbuilt amount of capacity, high interest rates, a combination of different things that just ultimately slowed some of those projects, as well. Unfortunately, I think some of the opposition at the time was largely uninformed about the benefits and ended up actually causing a massive amount of carbon dependency that otherwise, I think today would regret having done. Now, we're in a spot where we're seeing a lot of people pick up this technology, pick up on the wonderful work done before, especially on these next generation systems that have all this huge amount of potential and promise to be able to now take those to market. You're seeing this flourishing new era of nuclear innovation that's really been, I would say, starting in the last decade or so, and we're really in these interesting ramp up phases no, still very early in that process, though.
Ricky Mulvey: In a recent shareholder letter, you basically said there's still outdated paradigms in nuclear energy, even while the technology has progressed. What are the outdated paradigms that you're dealing with in 2024?
Jake DeWitte: We see there's some stagnation that really happened in the industry for a long time, and now we're in a spot where you can rethink some of those old ways of doing things and thinking about things, including on the business model, including on how you go to market. All these factors that come together or so, just real quick, what you're actually selling? What do people want? They want the power, so maybe focus on making it easy to buy that as opposed to the highly frictional 1970s era model of trying to design the reactor to a set point to then sell that design off to utility who would then ultimately build and operate it. That can still work in some cases, but we've seen a huge shift in the power markets so that it's time we should be responding to where the market is moving to, and that's one of the core or theses around how we started the company and we're building it forward. Additionally around size, around technical and design approaches, a lot of this work, a lot of these advanced technologies have a long history of R&D behind them, and the specific one we're working on, I would say, is a mature ready to go to market technology, and one of the paradigms from before was a research and development mindset.
There's always more research and development to do on everything, but the technology's effectively been demonstrated and ready to actually be taken commercial. Instead of then moving to the next stages of research and development, let's productize it. A mindset about that, a mindset about a go to market strategy that's not reliant on starting with just needing a ton of government money, but rather something that's built toward finding a market fit, something small enough where we don't need to raise billions of dollars, but rather we could just do it with capital we can raise between the private and public markets, which now we've done. Now we can go build that plant and then start to scale from there, and then also different ways in which you can partner with the government, instead of just going in with your hands out asking for money, but rather find strategic partnerships with them about using fuel and their land and their expertise and their data. All things we've done, all of which helped radically change how much it costs to take new technologies to market in a very favorable way and accelerate that to happen faster.
Ricky Mulvey: There's a lot there with licensing, going to market, fund raising. I want to focus on the product, and that for your company is the EBR-II reactor. For those who aren't nuclear scientists, what's the history of this reactor, and why are you excited to bring this one to market?
Jake DeWitte: It's a fascinating history. It's a liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor. It means we use liquid metallic sodium as the coolant. That's because it's a really good coolant, really good at moving a lot of heat, and it's able to do that, operate at high temperatures without being pressurized while also being compatible with commonly available materials. That means you can design a system that's quite cost competitive because it's simple, it's efficient, and it leverages existing supply chains from other industries that are made in bulk already.
You already get significant economies of scale of production for your supply chain rather than a lot of times what nuclear does, which is a very bespoke non-recurring unique product or component design, approach on design that then leads to high costs. This allows us to tap into things that are already producing at large scales, and also make up a word, debottleneck, some of those constraints that might otherwise exist. But that technology was stuff that was developed for decades. Across the world, society's built more than 25 of these reactors. We've gained over 400 combined reactor years of operational experience. Notably in the US, we successfully demonstrated this in meaningful ways at two plants, one in Washington State called FFTF, for the Fast Flux Test Facility, and another in Idaho, EBR-II, which as you said, is the one we specifically built off of. That plant produced just under 20 megawatts of electric power, ran for 30 years, sold that power to the grid commercially, demonstrated fantastic operational characteristics, showed it could recycle fuel, as well as demonstrated these incredible inherent safety features, where just the natural physics of the system keep it self stabilizing and self cooling. You're not relying on external systems.
You don't need these backup systems. You don't need operator intervention, just gravity, thermal conduction, thermal convection, thermal expansion. Those phenomena actually drive the system to shut itself down, keep itself cool, all in a way that then leads to system simplification and significant economic benefits. All awesome things on paper, all done already, so now, we just want we focused on doing was picking that mantle up to carry it forward, and that's really great because now we're building on something that we know was done before, and where industry has approached this in the past has taken it and scaled it up quite a bit bigger. Three hundred megawatts are larger, which can be done but sometimes that introduces some different complexities and also just increases the total amount of capital needed. We intentionally stayed at a size range right in that envelope. We're starting at 15 megawatts, so we look very similar to that plants on purpose.
That means we can take that experience directly apply it, get to market quicker, and then learn and grow from there more quickly with actual revenue generating products that are servicing markets, and then allow us to scale that up forward from there. That said, it's a deep technology base across the board about how these systems operate, and it's actually fantastic that we can leverage that and avoid having long R&D programs needed to get these things out to market.
Ricky Mulvey: Who's the customer for that then, for a 15 megawatt power plant?
Jake DeWitte: It's a whole range of folks. We see support in the data center markets. We see support, which obviously gets a lot of attention today. You see a lot of support of it for industrials, for defense purposes, and part of the reason is because you're not just really building one, you're often going to be building more. It's the same story on the 50 megawatt side. It just expands that for some of the larger scale facilities that maybe grow a bit larger over time. But one of the features for us is we don't want to just build one plant that services maybe a 50 or 100 megawatt facility. We'd rather build several and build it up in phases because oftentimes we're talking about building. A lot of our customers are talking about building new facilities to be powered by us building new reactor. That means you're going to want to ramp up with them as they ramp up because it's not very common that an industrial facility turns on at its full capacity as soon as you finish building it. It ramps into that. Data centers in particular, they might have a campus that at the end of the day might use a couple 100 megawatts of power, but it might be building out an initial blocks that start between 10 and 20 or maybe 30-50 megawatts as they grow into that.
Some of that might phase out over two, three, five years depending on their plan and how quickly that market is going to grow. Our ability to match with them is really important. But even perhaps more important is the ability to then not have a bunch of stranded capacity to achieve that for us and also deliver them the reliability and resilience they need. It's much better to have an N+1 dynamic. Just to use an analogy, if they needed, let's just say 60 megawatts, you'd probably build them 75 megawatts because that means you can actually have that extra reactor on hand. If you take one of those offline for service, you're still producing that power for them, which is really important to have that basically as pretty much all the time as they need it and then they can have it.
Ricky Mulvey: Just so I'm setting the table for listeners. Please correct me. I'm probably wrong. On megawatt is a little less than the energy usage of regular homes over the course of a month.
Jake DeWitte: A megawatt is a pretty good proxy for about 700-1,000 homes is what they use.
Ricky Mulvey: Seven hundred to 1,000 homes. I was doing my math very wrong. This is embarrassing when we are talking to a nuclear scientist.
Jake DeWitte: No. But what you were not too far off of was a megawatt hour. Megawatt is a little bit production of energy. Yes.
Ricky Mulvey: That's where I was going.
Jake DeWitte: A megawatt hour, you're pretty close. That's pretty close. That's depending on where you live in size of home, 2-5 homes use that energy in a month, as one megawatt hour.
Ricky Mulvey: When you mentioned data centers, I think it's worth mentioning that the chair of your company is Sam Altman. I'm sure he might have an interest in getting some of the nuclear energy going for a lot of these data centers to run these huge AI models that are sucking up a lot of electricity.
Jake DeWitte: That's a great connection to have, obviously. Sam has been a great board chair since more or less shortly after the company was formed, and a friend and a mentor before that. It's wild to see how quickly how just the pace of growth in the AI side and what that's going to lead to in the pace of energy demand. It's a great place to be in the energy providing business, I should say.
Ricky Mulvey: I want to keep talking about the science for a little bit because you mentioned the benefits of liquid sodium. A lot of traditional reactors, they use water as a coolant. Why is that a problem when you're looking at these small modular reactors?
Jake DeWitte: Water is an awesome technology. Water cooled reactors work really well. We know how to do them. They're great technology. The reason we went with sodium was we were taking a blank sheet approach about what had the best generalized economic potential and scalability baked into it. One of the things we saw was actually, starting with something new allowed us to rethink some of the supply chain constraints because of what you can do with sodium rather than needing high pressure water, because water cooled reactors are running at high pressure. That's perfectly manageable, but you need pressurized components to handle that, and then that comes at higher costs for those components. There's significant cost benefit that manifests as we think of it in a cost floor.
As we look at it, sodium reactors can be made simpler and therefore cheaper at the end of the day. But additionally, it gets into the fuel side. One of the really important things about being a fast reactor is what you can do to unlock the huge amount of energy in the fuel. That's a really inarticulate way of saying, basically, you need fast neutrons to get access to all that energy, because today's reactors, they only really use about 1% of the energy content of the actual ore that's taken out of the ground in terms of what's available. Whereas a fast reactor, you can get over 90% of that energy out over time. You're talking about a massive resource extension. What that translates to is, if you just do the math on this. Fast reactors and recycling have the potential. You're using known reserves of heavy metals that we have approaches on how you can actually pulls and mind those and extract those, harvest them from the oceans. You can power the planet for a few billion years.
That's the lifetime of the planet, more or less. That's a great place to be when you're thinking about, how do you set up a technology that basically has enduring competitive advantages, something that has effectively near limitless supply chain of fuel while also being sustainable and not having carbon emissions. It's a pretty great place to be, and you just can't get that resource extensibility out of water reactors. That was why we liked this approach and where we see this going forward.
Ricky Mulvey: What's the harder problem for you to solve as a CEO right now? Is it the physics and the technology of how to build these things or is it getting regulatory approval?
Jake DeWitte: I think it's mostly the regulatory side. But I would say there's other factors that tie into this. As we went into this, hey, this is a system we know work. They've literally built and operated these things before, so we know how to do that. Obviously, you got to build it. That's a challenge. You want to build the right engineering team, you want to find the right partners to do that. That's important and find capitally efficient ways of leveraging partners and building partners up. Like our partnership with Siemens.
We announced and we just expanded upon is an example of how we do that. Doing that in efficient ways is pretty challenging, but we're finding ways to do it, which is cool. Since the science is known and we built these things in the past, you just want to find the right most efficient partnerships and effective partnerships, which takes a lot of work. Those things are things you can approach in. Then the regulatory side. It has its own challenges for sure. The regulator is a very capable regulator, and I'm not saying that to say, oh, you got to say that. No. They license things. They have a long history of licensing and permitting things. That said, they have room to improve and continue to find ways to modernize and get more efficient. I think is a consistent theme you here in industry. We've been pleased with our engagement with ups and downs for sure. But generally speaking, it takes time to familiarize design, socialize it, and then make progress. Ideally, that will continue to accelerate. But at this point, we've been working with them since 2016 in formal pre-application, where the only of the non-light water reactor companies who has been engaged that long.
We're the first to start doing that. Now, we're coming up on submitting an application for that plant in Idaho, that we spent a lot of time to prepare the NRC and prepare ourselves to get into. I think the challenge, though, then is just managing some of those paradigms and I'll argue outdated paradigms around how we think about licensing these plants. Some of which you have to just deal with. But ideally, you create a platform in a springboard to show you can do it that way, but look at the better ways you can do it so that it gets better, not just for us, but for everybody. That's one of the things we tried to do in our first application was be very forward leaning. I think we were in a pretty good spot, but we got ahead of our skis a little bit because of the problems the pandemic introduced. Otherwise, I think we would have been more successful there, but we still made a lot of progress doing some pre-radical things one might say, and I think that was successful for everybody because it push the envelope in some areas, and now we know where to go back in successfully base on the engagement we've had in the last 2.5 years this one.
Ricky Mulvey: Saying the Aurora powerhouse, which is going to use the EBR-II reactor is going to get rolling in Idaho sometime in 2027. What needs to happen in the next three years for that to start generating energy and have all the approvals you need to get rolling?
Jake DeWitte: We've got the site use permit for that from the Department of Energy to build there. We've got fuel that was competitively awarded to us to fuel that plant, which is awesome. You've got the site, we've got the fuel. We've got a lot of regulatory traction in history. We still got to get a permit, though, and in our licensing approach is different. At the end of the day, if you're going to build, like a plant that produces power commercial, you have to have a commercial operating license.
Because of our business model where we own and operate and sell the power, and we're not just trying to charge licensing fees for people to build the plants from us and get people to basically buy our designs, we're going straight to the all-end license, one stop combined license approach to get the license to build and operate this plant. We anticipate submitting that application next year, so in 2025. The energy generally has looked at a 24 month review time frame, the Advance Act that just passed provide some recommendations that these reviews should be done in less than 25 months. Then that positions us so that at that point we can also and in parallel pursue, generally speaking, the ability to start building this plant, some parts of it, as we've seen some other companies do in the past, and then but just in the spot where once we get the license, we can complete the construction. We look at about a 12 month build time. If you parallelize some of that and we get a license in 2027, then you got the remaining window to do the rest of the construction that you need to have the license to do and load the fuel and start the plant up so that we can start producing power then. We're also relying on the government, obviously, part of the partnership with the fuel.
They're producing this fuel as we speak. We're going to be fabricating it into our fuel elements. But assuming all of that goes successfully a pace, that's how some of those timelines can match up. That said, there's always risk in those things. We've been trying to move as quickly as we reasonably can. But as we look at it, even the contingency plans where if things maybe take longer or slip on those schedules, we should still be able to start building that plant 2027, but then you start producing power, maybe in 2028, if those things line up. I get that question a lot, that's why I just jump in front of it, which is, well, what happens if there's slack in the system? Where does that push it? That's how we see it lining up. I think right now, we see a line of site for how this all lines up for 2027 for the things we can control. Things we can't control, still support that, but it's not impossible that as things happen, how we've built contingency planning as we get out and have that plan operation at that point onward. We've raised the capital we need to get all the way through even with those contingencies, so we feel like we're in a pretty good spot to just be focused on execution.
Ricky Mulvey: You're also looking to use essentially recycled nuclear material as a power source. This hasn't been done before at a commercial scale, right?
Jake DeWitte: Yes and no. The French do do it. They do it with an older technology, but they do do it actively. The US has done elements around it and tested some things historically in the commercial side. But the approaches we're doing in the modernized size and what we're taking here is going to be different from those. That said, the recycling technology we're taking forward has demonstrated to EBR-II. It's going on today. It's operating as we speak today at and by Idaho National Laboratory, and then it's actually producing the fuel we use for our first plant. Then we're partnered with Idaho and Argon and other groups to work on how do we take that technology into commercialized use. But that's one of the really exciting things for us for expanding and extending fuel resources while also opening the door for fuel cost reduction.
Ricky Mulvey: What's it look like getting this recycled material? Are you getting a jackhammer into Yucca Mountain to grab some of that uranium that's stored there? What's the supply chain on that look like?
Jake DeWitte: Well, actually, all they use fuel today is sitting on the sites of the nuclear power plants. There's nothing ever been shipped to and I shouldn't say nothing that's never been, but there's no fuel at Yucca Mountain. It's all on site at the power plants where they generated it. The plan there is working with the owners of that material and finding pathways by which we can then transfer it to then our facility once it's built and operated so that we can start recycling it. There are a number of sites that have decommissioned plants that are just left with these dry canisters holding this material, and that's all that's left. They very much want to get that off site, so you go through a process of loading those into transportation canisters and having those moved. We have a lot of experience about how you move this material.
At the end of the day you just want to find the right folks who are going to be constructive partners, and there's a lot of people who want to find a way to get this stuff off their sites. Not only that, it's managed and it's solvable. The history of nuclear power, where nuclear power has produced the significant majority of clean energy in this country for decades. All the waste generated there from a volume perspective would fit inside of a super Walmart for context. That said, from a recycling perspective, there's enough energy content and all that material to power the entire United States using fast reactors like we're developing and the recycling process here for over 150 years. Pretty awesome fuel reserve, but it also means it doesn't take a lot of space, but these groups would like to get it of site. We have conversations about that. It's a little early for us to form any significant partnerships there yet, but we are engaging with different utilities who are interested in this and different groups that have this material in sight, just because as we execute on this plan, that's one of the key things we're going to need, and we're excited to be partnering with groups to take it off their hands.
Ricky Mulvey: I imagine you can't just stick it in a pick-up truck. How do you move that stuff?
Jake DeWitte: They have these specially designed canisters that move it by rail or by truck that are certified and they've used and they have around there, so just work with that existing infrastructure.
Ricky Mulvey: Want to be mindful of your time. A couple wrap up questions. What's your dream about where nuclear is 5-10 years from now, or even 20? Goes as long as you want, where nuclear is cooking in the way you like to see it.
Jake DeWitte: I think we'll be in a massive scale up and scale out of nuclear technology as a whole. The market opportunity is so massive. There's going to be room for a lot of us. I think it's not unreasonable to think that we could be in a spot where you see something like 1,000 plants being developed around the world at that time with hundreds already built and operating, including the ones we already have globally speaking, as we think about where we could be in the 10-20 year time frame. It was supported by recycling infrastructure going on in the United States, where we can take used fuel. We can take this stuff that people have a lot of concern about because it's this radioactive material, takes a long time to go away, and you can recycle it. The thing about used fuel is it's 95% unused fuel, well,90-95% unused fuel. You can take that material and then, I should say obviously, you can use it as fuel for a reactor like ours. That's an awesome thing to do. It reduces fuel volumes. It preduces waste decay times and half lives.
All in all, that's a huge benefit and it extends resources and reduces fuel costs. All in all, when you're talking about the scale, deployment there supported by recycling, you've totally changed this paradigm. Accordingly, we see meaningful benefits to consumer power bills. We see meaningful electrification and transition happening. Let's just say electrification transitions happening. That's what I think we could be in the stage of, and it's a very exciting time and very still early in the dawn of this.
Ricky Mulvey: There's a pessimist in me that sees the growth of solar and wind energy. That was supposed to bring down electricity costs. I look at states like California, and that absolutely has not happened. In Colorado, I'm paying about $0.18 per kilowatt hour. It's a lot. Why should I be more optimistic about nuclear energy lowering my electricity bill 10-20 years from now than these other technologies so far have not done.
Jake DeWitte: It's a good question. I think it's a couple of things. One is, I think the story painted about renewables and what I was going to do on the cost was honestly consistently not fully told. In other words, I think there were some significant aspects of it that were underplayed or just maybe not shared and not talked about, which was the implications it puts onto the grid and what you have to do to firm up the power for an intermittent renewable source. At the end of the day, that might reduce the cost of electricity. Solar has done a really good job of reducing costs of the cost of electrons, kilowatt hours coming out of the panels. But the cost of actually making those kilowatt hours usable and how we use electric energy adds a lot to the grid level and system level costs throughout the system.
All of that has manifest in high electric rates. It's a wild thing when you look at declining renewable charts or cost curves, and then you lay on top of it like what energy rates have done, which has gone up. It's not only because of renewables, but the massive deployment and in some cases over deployment of renewables and the resulting stresses on the grid and all these other factors have created a non-constructive environment for price reductions. In other words, the actual cost was always going to be increasing cost, and it was always going to increase the costs. It was just that, we focused on only one part of the story, which was the costs out of the panels, but not the actual cost delivered to customers. Because, again, the amount of backup power you have to build, the hardening of the grid, the expansion of the grid, the induced burdens and robustification, I don't know if that's a word, but things you have to do to build out transformers to accommodate all of that. It drives costs higher.
The reason at the end of the day for that is, because of intermittency, because of what's needed to actually deliver firm power because we as a society, power use changes over the day, but we do need that fixed baseline amount of power, and at the end of the day you can also manage dispatchable controlable power to fill in some of those gaps and then use renewables to back fill on top of that. You actually optimize the system toward those goals of the cost. Definitely, they can help drive costs down, but you need to augment that with things that have significant cost benefits, and that's where nuclear has that in hand. Interestingly, one of the criticisms that nuclear had is some of the high costs of some of the recent builds.
Well, I'm not surprised because we're doing some stuff for the first time in a while, but the cost curves are very promising for these to drop largely because of the general economic efficiencies nuclear has. I think the most fundamental metric on economics for any energy source is the total amount of materials needed per megawatt hour of energy generated. How many kilograms of steel, copper, concrete fuel, etc, do you need per megawatt hour of electricity that you produce? Well, when you look at all energy sources, nuclear fission requires the least by far. It should, as a result, have significant economic advantages and benefits. As a result, when you're talking about developing and designing new technologies with that, as I think of it, cost physics on your side, you're in a pretty good spot to be able to drive those costs down. The challenge and realizing that is making sure you have a sustained order book to help you get through those initial deployments and get into the benefits of volume procurement.
One of the ways we tried to accelerate that is by being smaller. That's one of the other benefits about being smaller. In our earnings update, we shared, we've aggregated basically 1,350 megawatts of letters of intent that we're going through PPA negotiations and developing now. That's a lot of reactors depending on exactly how those projects shape up. Probably something between 30, 35 or so reactors between the two different size ranges. At the end of the day, that provides us a lot of, I guess I'd say leverage. When we talk with suppliers she say, look, I'm not only ordering and buying for one plant, but for a roadmap clearly that points out to 30, 35 today, and maybe more on the back of that. It works pretty favorably for how we see these things coming together to then, as a result, be able to position us to drive costs accordingly lower. Which is what we feel, hey, the cost physics are on our side, so we should be in a good spot to actually do that, as well as be producing a reliable, controllable output of energy so that it actually adds resiliency and stability to the grid, so it reduces or doesn't, I should say, add to the grid straining costs that we all have to pay for in various ways. That's a really long answer, but it's, I think a really important thing because you pointed out a massive thing that is a real factor, and I think a lot of people are seeing this and being, what the heck is going on here, and with good reason, it's a problem, and it's not OK that happened that way. But now we're in a spot where I think we have the right pieces in place to stabilize and ideally over time drop some of those rates, so how I see it.
Ricky Mulvey: That's why we got podcasts. You can give a long answer. We're talking about nuclear energy. That takes a second. Jake DeWitte is the CEO of Oklo. Thanks for joining us on Motley Fool Money. Appreciate your time and your insight, and it's a company that I'm looking forward to continuing to follow.
Jake DeWitte: Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
Ricky Mulvey has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
