Hello and welcome to the Punch Bull News Readback Podcast.

I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen, and this week I'm joined by Anthony Adrogna,

who's coming back from Arizona, where he participated in a number of panels at the Sedona Forum.

Anthony, welcome back. How was the Southwest?

Oh, my gosh. The Southwest is beautiful. I don't know if you've ever been,

but Sedona is, I think, one of the most special places on Earth.

It's got these beautiful red rocks overlooking everything.

And, yeah, we crammed a lot into two days of a conference, but such a

special place to be doing it. So tell me about the conversations you were taking part in. I know

there are a lot of members of Congress there, including also some foreign officials, including one

from Venezuela in one of your panels. So talk to me about that. Yeah, so I was,

I was asked out there to lead this panel. The panel ended up being about kind of the future of

Venezuela, so everything from energy development to democratic reforms. We ended up being the

first panel of the whole thing. So it was kind of an honor and a bit intimidating

to lead off the whole conference.

But yeah, I had a Venezuelan opposition leader,

Leopoldo Lopez, who was on the panel along with

Representative Craig Goldman of Texas.

He's a freshman, but from energy country.

And it ended up being a really interesting conversation.

I feel like Venezuela has sort of receded from the front pages.

So Mr. Lopez had a really, obviously, a grounds-eye view about what's going on in the country,

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