Why Clean and Green Muddy the Energy Transition

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The first time the spotlight found Arjun Murti, he didn’t like it very much. An analyst at Goldman Sachs, Murti (BSBA 1992) had made a bold—but ultimately correct—prediction about a “super spike” in the price of oil, and his career would never be the same. He shied from the limelight and finished his career in mostly private-facing roles. But now, he’s raising his voice, hoping it can change the way the country talks about a transition away from fossil fuels. On the Voices of Experience podcast, Murti explains what the labels “clean” and “green” energy overlook, dissects the Inflation Reduction Act, and offers advice on starting a career and finding a mentor in the business world.

Show Notes

Arjun Murti is a longtime Wall Street energy analyst, formerly with Goldman Sachs. He now serves on the board of directors at ConocoPhillips and regularly publishes a blog, Super-Spiked. He graduated from the Reiman School of Finance in 1992.

Table of Contents

1:14 From Cornell to DU
2:19 The “Super-Spiked” prediction and its aftermath
9:35 What’s wrong with the energy transition discussion?
13:43 “Nothing is clean, green or brown.”
15:45 Evaluating the Inflation Reduction Act
19:27 The importance of mentorship
21:10 Picking your career path
25:29 Choosing work-life balance
28:18 Show notes and credits

In this episode:

• Arjun Murti’s Super-Spiked blog
• Wall Street Journal (2005): Goldman Sachs Analyst Has Last Laugh After Oil Soars
• Daniels Newsroom: Mentorship Program Builds Skills, Embraces Alumni

Related articles and information:

• New York Times (2008): An Oracle of Oil Predicts $200-a-Barrel Crude
• Forbes: Energy Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act
• NPR: What oil companies gain from the landmark climate bill
• Reuters: Oil prices turn more volatile as investors exit the market
• Arjun Murti on LinkedIn and Twitter

Questions from students

The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.

Transcript

Lorne Fultonberg:
This month, on the voices of experience podcast.

Arjun Murti:
Nothing is green or brown and nothing is clean or dirty.

Lorne Fultonberg:
What we know, what we don’t know, and what we thought we knew about fossil fuels and their alternatives.

Arjun Murti:
This whole discussion about energy transition, I think, has really gotten off track.

Lorne Fultonberg:
If you’re of a certain age, you might remember the name Arjun Murti, or at least his fame as “the super-spiked guy.” In 2005, Murti made a bold prediction about the price of oil and his career would never be the same. He’s retired from Goldman Sachs now, but he still serves on the board of directors at ConocoPhillips. And lately, he’s been blogging, helping make heads and tails of the volatile oil industry and the transition to whatever’s next in energy.

He’s also a graduate of the Daniels College of Business and the Reiman School of Finance, with valuable insight into mentorship work-life balance and starting a successful career. We talk about it all on the Voices of Experience podcast, an extension of the signature speaker series at the Daniels College of Business.

Arjun, thank you so much for joining us.

Arjun Murti:
Thank you, Lorne. It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Lorne Fultonberg:
The pleasure is ours. I want to start by working our way through time, starting at the beginning. You came to DU by way of Cornell, right?

Arjun Murti:
That is right. I’ll try and make a long story short. My parents came to this country in 1961 to go to Cornell. They’re Indian immigrants from India and I was born and raised here. I was, as all my friends knew, destined to go to Cornell Engineering. I have to say, I loved Cornell but didn’t love engineering, so probably not a great combination at 18, so I actually had a great time. One of the reasons I needed to take a year off and for a variety of reasons, I ended up transferring to the University of Denver and I have to say, it’s one of those lucky breaks in my life that you might think not surviving Cornell would’ve been a not-so great thing. I give my parents credit and I gave really DU credit and I probably made the most of it, but I loved, it ended up being three years in the finance school at Denver, and really, my life is, I’m very fortunate to have made that transfer and appreciative of all I got out of the University of Denver.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Cool. Let’s talk about something else that might be considered a lucky break. Your famous or infamous Super-Spiked prediction at Goldman Sachs. The year is 2005, oil’s like $54 a barrel and trending lower and you warned people about something called a super spike and that prediction turned a lot of heads and got you a bunch of attention.

Arjun Murti:
That’s right. my career started when I graduated from Denver in 1992, and for the first decade, oil was in this $15 to $20 range, and we’ve been there so long people treated it as the new normal and a never-to-be-veered-from type range, and so when oil started moving up, we’ve done a lot of work. I was an equity research analyst, that’s my background career wise, and we just noticed on the supply side, our models for robust supply growth were not coming true. We were ending up with no supply growth instead of robust supply growth. Also, on the demand side, the expectation was, if oil’s too much above $20, demand would get hurt. But in fact, oil prices got the $30, $35 and oil demand was actually accelerating, so we did some work on the demand side, it concluded it’s actually the economy driving oil, not oil holding the economy back.

Arjun Murti:
Again, to make a long story short, it compelled us to revisit some of our core assumptions, and we made a call that for the next five years, plus or minus, oil would be in a “Super-Spike” paradigm, which was meant to connote a better or higher price range to try and rectify what was then a supply demand imbalance. But we used the word spike to denote this isn’t meant to be a permanent and forever rising oil price, it was going to come down at some point in time. Didn’t know exactly when, but we thought it would be at least several years into the future.

Lorne Fultonberg:
This prediction made some waves, right?

Arjun Murti:
My career, I’m old enough to where the internet wasn’t a thing at the start of my career. In fact, even Excel, I installed Lotus 123 on our computers at Petrie Parkman, which is almost comical now, but I used an original spreadsheet program. I was not prepared for a worldwide reaction to what was, I worked at Goldman Sachs at the time, I was probably a vice president, so mid mid-career level, if you will, and our clients were some of the top pension fund, hedge fund, mutual fund management and that’s who you interacted with and nobody else. You’d have these very sophisticated high end type dialogues, but only with this very narrow group. When suddenly the New York Times, the Internet, random people start pinging you, it took me by surprise, because they were not the audience for the call.

Arjun Murti:
The call was about a framework for how to think about the energy sector not we’re specifically forecasting some crazy or what was then viewed as a crazy high oil price. I actually don’t think I recovered from that experience till really the last couple of years, but when I realized, “You got to have to make friends with social media,” so you mentioned, I now have this Substack, I’m on Twitter and I’ve learned to make friends with this world that probably folks, Lorne, from your generation, take for granted, but as an older person, it was quite an adjustment.

Lorne Fultonberg:
I read an article from the Wall Street Journal from, I think, 2005, 2006, where Paul Leibman, a hedge fund manager and a mentor of yours said, “He usually tries to stay out of the limelight, it was probably a little discomforting for him.” What was that moment like for you personally?

Arjun Murti:
That’s exactly right. Paul Leibman was my first boss at Petrie Parkman and actually I owe a big … my first big career assist goes to Dr. Ron Rizzuto and the great professors at University of Denver. Then, they recommended me to Paul, so he was my first boss at Petrie, and frankly, he taught me how to write and he taught me how to critically think about markets and stocks and these things. Then, by then he’d retired from Petrie was, I think, managing his own fund at the time. I have to say that what I loved about Goldman was it was for institutional investors, it was for the largest companies, but that’s it. I loved more the behind-the-scenes role. I think it’s a big adjustment to have a more public facing, whether it’s a call, whether it’s a job, what have you. I was definitely not geared for it. I, for sure at that time, was a very private person. I gave very few media interviews or requests. I never thought that that’s … it never interested me.

Arjun Murti:
I cared about do our top clients, do they find value in what I’m saying? Do the top companies find value? That was my target audience and that’s who was my research was written for and it was what my job was at Goldman. It was not a public-facing job, so it was a big shock to have, literally, worldwide media attention, including for an, apologies for the phrase, but random people or certainly people who weren’t clients at Goldman Sachs. That was a big shock. I dealt with it poorly. I just was not into that kind of attention and tried my best to just keep my head down and focus on our core client base.

Lorne Fultonberg:
When you say you just recovered from it within the last couple of years, what do you mean by that?

Arjun Murti:
I had a 22-year career, mostly at Goldman, 15 years. I retired as a partner in 2014. I helped co-run the research department, but that was, I guess, the very traditional sort of Wall Street type career, and in the last eight years, you mentioned I’m on the board of ConocoPhillips. I’m a senior advisor as well to a private equity firm here in New York, and I’m also on the advisory board at Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, a public policy think tank non-partisan. I think all these three jobs are, again, behind-the-scenes jobs. You’re on the board of a company, you’re an advisory board member, it is absolutely not public-facing.

Arjun Murti:
But this whole discussion about energy transition, I think, has really gotten off track. I really don’t like the way anyone talks about it, whether it’s right-of-center people, whether it’s left-of-center people, whether it’s environmentalists or whether it’s oil executives or the mass population. There’s no one who I think has … everyone has to be in one extreme bucket or another, and it’s motivated me to want to start writing publicly again. At the same time, and I’m in my low 50s, I said, “Listen, social media is here to stay and there’s some good from it. You can get a lot if you curate your Twitter feed or your Substack, you can get a lot of very different perspectives.” If you don’t like everything that the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times write, if one has a left wing bias and the other a right wing bias, there’s plenty of sources on Substack, there’s plenty of sources on Twitter, you have to weed out who’s legit, who’s not.

Arjun Murti:
But I’ve learned to embrace and appreciate, it’s a terrible phrase, but the democratization of information, it’s not all good, but with the bad comes some good. I’ve really made an effort and I’ve really actually enjoyed now, it’s hard to believe, publicly engaging through these forums. I am proud that a lot of my former clients and CEOs are signed up for this, but I’ve also gotten used to, I’m going to call it, the retail person out there, the regular non-crazy portfolio manager, CEO types also engaged. There are a lot of good people out there in the world and there’s some bad people, but there’s a lot of good people and I’ve been enjoying learning how to use social media.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Yeah. Super-Spiked is the name of this Substack blog, and we’re going to link to that in our show notes, so people can check it out as well. You mentioned this dismayal that you have about how the energy transition is being talked about. Can you tell me, just give me a baseline definition of what the energy transition is and then what’s wrong with the way that it’s being discussed right now?

Arjun Murti:
I think this could probably be a 3-hour podcast on its own, so I will try and give you a succinct version of it. I think, in a nutshell, people seem to either be in the camp that all we care about is that there’s too much CO2, and if you’re in that camp, then the view is we should get rid of fossil fuels quickly, and the best way to do that would be to limit fossil fuel supply for some reason only in the United States and Canada, because that happens to be the areas we’re in and where we might be able to put some pressure on companies, but I think there’s this notion that we have fossil fuels only because fossil fuel producers bring it out of the ground and somehow forced it upon society, which is, I think, the opposite of how it actually goes.

Arjun Murti:
When you look at our energy consumption, it is 80% oil, natural gas and coal, the fossil fuels. Everything in society, everything about this podcast, everything about all aspects of the clothes we’re wearing, the medical equipment, clearly, the cars you drive the power in your house, it all ultimately comes because of energy. We’re living in a miraculous time, where we’ve had the most robust population growth, really, since the industrial revolution driven by fossil fuels. You’ve also got people living longer. You’ve also got the least number of people globally in poverty, and it is all because of the energy revolution sparked by fossil fuels.

Arjun Murti:
Now, that has come with the negative externality of too much CO2, but I believe people need to get the order right. You need to provide energy for all. Lorne, you live in Denver, I live on the East Coast, we’re part of the lucky one to maybe 2 billion people who take energy for granted, where we don’t have to … occasionally, we’ll have blackouts, but by and large, we live pretty good lives. There’s anywhere from 1 billion to 3 billion people who either completely lack energy or are energy-poor. The question is, how do you give these people an opportunity to gain a middle class lifestyle?

Arjun Murti:
Now, you need to deal with the externalities, which we’ve done throughout history. We used to have lead in gasoline. That was bad, we took it out. We used to have sulfur in these fuels. We’ve significantly reduced it. That is good. We now have CO2, so we need to decarbonize. But the idea that you’re going to decarbonize by yelling at seven super large oil companies, it’s absurd, and it really misunderstands the nature of energy, so my first comment is always, you have to find and produce energy for all. To think that you’re going to shift to just intermittent sources is absurd. It’s not even remotely practical. People can always like or dislike individual fossil fuel companies, and some of them are good and some of them are bad. There’s certainly things they should do like eliminate methane flaring and so forth. But the idea that we only have fossil fuel consumption because these guys produce it at the ground is simply preposterous.

Arjun Murti:
I think there’s a need for significant energy education. Again, just because it’s preposterous, doesn’t mean we’re not trying to decarbonize. But you need policies that actually impact our usage of energy broadly speaking. How is it that we allow SUVs to continue to exist? If you really want to reduce oil demand, limit people to actually fuel efficient cars. Electric vehicles are part of the solution, but again, for the 1 to 3 billion people who are on the energy-poor side, they’re not driving electric vehicles, that is for sure. It’s really about solving our overall energy needs in a way that directionally gets you to a run. But when you start with CO2, which is where a lot of the climate conversation starts, I don’t think you’ll ever solve it until you first address people’s basic energy needs. I apologize. I know that’s too long of an answer as succinct as I think I can be.

Lorne Fultonberg:
There’s a lot more on the Substack. I know there’s audio, there’s video.

Arjun Murti:
Thank you.

Lorne Fultonberg:
No, that’s good, and I want to understand, make sure I understand what you’re saying and my question, I guess, is, is the future green and non-oil dependent, and your opinion is just that it’s not as easy to get there as just swearing off of oil.

Arjun Murti:
There’s a lot of things about the language that I would push on back on, not from you, but from the broader conversation, which is this idea of dirty versus clean, green versus brown. Everything is a range of outcomes. To produce solar, if it’s being done in China, which has coal-fired power production, if it’s being done through forced labor, I’m not so sure what is green about that? A lot of the mining around the world is done in very challenging conditions, both environmentally and human rights wise. nothing is clean, green or brown. Nothing is dirty or clean either.

Arjun Murti:
I think these types of languages need to change. I think the issue is how do you provide energy for all and how do you continue to improve its environmental and climate footprint? It is going to be all sources. 80% of our energy today comes from, again, oil, natural gas and coal. The idea that that can change in 10 years is absurd. It is completely absurd, especially when things like nuclear power, which is base load, meaning it can run 24/7, 365 and actually has no carbon content is somehow off limits. You’re not going to have 24/7, 365 power from solar and wind. It is ridiculous to think you can. Or the cost of batteries, the cost of storage, the CapEx cost to build all these plants for high speed transmission lines is so high that you end up ensuring that everyone has to pay a lot more for energy, which no one wants to do.

Arjun Murti:
We get the $4 and $5 a gallon gas, and then people freak out. Again, there is a requirement to clean up all that we can on the traditional fossil fuel side. There is a need to clean up our supply chains in solar and wind. Nothing is green or brown and nothing is clean or dirty. That is language used to divide people into camps.

Lorne Fultonberg:
One of the attempts to take this on was the Inflation Reduction Act signed in August by the president. It was marketed, I suppose, as a way to focus on sustainability and incentives for renewable energy. But now, there are a lot of people saying that it’s beneficial to the oil industry as well. I’m just curious for you to evaluate this bill, how did it turn out?

Arjun Murti:
There’s no question, we need sensible public policy. Whether this represents that or not, time will tell and I think there are some things that I personally agree with in this bill. One of the critiques I find odd is, again, the language that, and we hear it broadly that this “helps” the oil and gas industry, so how does that help climate? Again, I think it’s a false binary. It’s false language. It is not the way to approach it. Why wouldn’t we want the US and Canadian oil and gas, in this case, the industry to be helped? Would we rather have production go to places like Russia and Iran? I am an American, so this is an American’s perspective, it’s my personal views. But if you limit production domestically, it will only go to places that are geopolitically more challenging, and by the way, have worse labor and environmental and climate outcomes to boot.

Arjun Murti:
What is the sense in that? When critics of the Inflation Reduction Act say, “This has some giveaways to oil and gas industry, first of all, it doesn’t really. I’m not sure offshore leasing is going to make a huge difference either way. But even if it did, we should be promoting, frankly, maximum US and Canadian oil supply. That is for the betterment of American workers, American families, and frankly, the climate and the environment. You can mandate if you want zero methane or at least eliminate flaring. You can hold companies to tough labor and environmental standard, which you cannot in Siberia. You cannot do it. Go visit oil fields in Siberia and check on the environmental footprint there. These are the choices you have.

Arjun Murti:
We need the Inflation Reduction Act and other policies 10X. We need policies that address demand side. How about banning SUVs? Don’t ban internal combustion engines, ban SUVs. How about that as a policy that would actually move the needle? Where’s the support for nuclear? 24/7. 365 power that has zero carbon and you’re going to have to figure out nuclear disposal and those kind of things. But where is that in these kind of bills? Where is the permitting reform to allow high speed transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines? We need energy for all and we’re trying to clean it up collectively. What are we doing to displace Uighur, forced labor supply chains in China and re-domesticate them here? Good luck getting a mining permit in the United States. Where’s the reform for that? How does that help or hurt all of our energy, including some of the future technologies?

Arjun Murti:
Again, I think there’s actually a lot to like in it, there’s some things to dislike, but if the goal was, in part, some notion of compromise and pragmatism, we need that to be scaled up 10X. It should be doing frankly a lot more to allow more oil and gas pipelines, especially out of Canada, but also out of the natural gas Appalachia, with the goal of energy security, displace Russian, Iranian, and other Middle East supply, to provide natural gas to Europe, which they badly need, to accelerate permitting reform for the benefit of solar wind and natural gas and crude oil out this country, to improve the ability to mine our natural resources that we need for solar and wind in the newer technologies along with oil and gas.

Arjun Murti:
There’s still a long way to go, and unfortunately, as long as people still talk about green and brown, dirty and clean, we’re not going to get there, and that is a hope of Super-Spiked and other pragmatists

Lorne Fultonberg:
Let’s talk about your career broadly here. We’ve spoken in the past and you’ve talked a lot about the significance of mentorship in your professional and personal life, and you’re also a part of the Reiman School of Finance’s mentorship program here. Can you tell me a little bit about why mentorship has been so significant and why you wanted to get involved back here at Daniels?

Arjun Murti:
It’s been core to, frankly, all of my success. Whether it was someone like Dr. Rizzuto at the University of Denver, and he was a professor, but I consider him a mentor as well. Paul Leibman, who you already mentioned, my first boss at Petrie Parkman. There was a gentleman, Chris Corapi at JP Morgan Asset Management, and then lastly, Steve Strong at Goldman Sachs. These were my four core mentors that taught me different things, but really helped guide me or especially early in my career, both in terms of just how do you do core analysis or write, what are the mistakes they made, but how do you interact with people?

Arjun Murti:
There’s so many different benefits to having had a mentor, and I ultimately, became a partner at Goldman Sachs and it would not have happened without all those mentors that I mentioned who taught me different things along the way. At some point, there is a goal to give back in different ways. I was very fortunate that my first mentor-mentee relationship at the University of Denver worked out with Carolyn Lucca. She’s just been a remarkable person to get to know. you want to help people who want to be helped and frankly, who you think can be great.

Arjun Murti:
When I say great, I don’t necessarily mean highest paying job or they have to work at a place like Goldman Sachs or anything like that, but she has a passion to be successful in what interests her. There might be some mentoring things along the way that maybe I can help with. I have a lot of respect for students like Carolyn and hope that there are others out.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Well, you’ve given us a perfect segue to a new segment that we’re doing here on season two of the Voices of Experience podcast, which is some questions from students. We’ve got one that we’re going to put on the show here and then a couple more where we will put your answers online on our show notes. Here is that first question for you.

Vishesh Adlakha (student):
This is Vishesh. I’m so glad for this opportunity to speak with you. I’m currently a student at University of Denver. I have had a background in equity research. What I want to understand is, as a student in finance and investment banking, there’s a lot of opportunities that I can pick from here. I am at a stage in my career where everything that I’m looking at looks very attractive and I want to get into. What are some factors that I should consider before I make these decisions, because this is a pivotal moment and I think that the decisions I take in the next one year will determine the next two, three decades of my life? According to your experience, what are some of the things, especially as an international student, I should keep in mind before I choose my next steps?

Arjun Murti:
I think, I want to adjust one part of the question, which I think I didn’t feel this way when I was graduating and maybe because I had that little bit of a bumpy path. I think, people do think they’re making these 20- or 30-year decisions, they’re not at all. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t set yourself in a bad way or short way that could compound, but the idea that whatever this student decides in the short term is going to impact him for a couple decades, I will actually disagree with that and say, “Don’t think about it that dramatically, quite frankly,” especially in this modern age, there’s so much ability to adjust. I think the most important thing is, are you going to a place where you do have a good mentor to get back to that basic philosophy?

Arjun Murti:
I started working at Petrie Parkman in Denver for most people wouldn’t have heard of. I think I’m lucky I started there and not at JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or one of the “good investment banks” in that era, because I actually got much better training in mentoring than I likely would’ve at those places as a first or second year out of school, especially in that environment and the way that they’d machine through people in those days. Same thing with the sector. I covered oil and gas in the 90s when it was out of favor. Petrie Parkman was an institutional quality firm, even though it was a small firm, you know, and so can you go to a place that will develop skills, that will develop mentoring, critical thinking and so forth? It does not have to be the name brand firm. Oftentimes, people have these choices of a recognizable name and it doesn’t mean the boutique is always right. There can be plenty of bad boutiques where it’s some crazy founder and it’s all about that person.

Arjun Murti:
I don’t think there are any absolute answers, and I actually think, for any student, the student mentioned he was more global in orientation, but whether it’s an American or someone more global-oriented, it is a global world and it is more interconnected and there are a lot more startups. The key is what are the skill sets? It’s not compensation. You’re not trying to target max compensation. You’re trying to target skillset, networking gain. I did it by accident.

Arjun Murti:
I’m now 53 years old and I’m extremely lucky that I’ve never actually had to look for a job. Dr. Rizzuto recommended me to Petrie. JP Morgan asked to interview me from Petrie. Goldman Sachs came calling from JP Morgan. Then, when I announced my retirement at Goldman Sachs, both ConocoPhillips and the private equity firm came calling the day Bloomberg ran some crazy headline about Super-Spiked guy hanging it up for a day. I’ve never actually, it is all because I had the sense, I think, to go to where I might get mentored, networking, skillset gain. I never, to my best of my knowledge, did it for highest compensation or that stuff. I think students come in at Denver have a real opportunity and I wish everyone the best.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Great advice. Thanks, Arjun. A reminder that his answers to all of those questions are on our show notes online. As we bring things home here, Arjun, as a voice of experience on the Voices of Experience podcast here, is there anything else you’d like to pass on to our listeners?

Arjun Murti:
I was a partner at Goldman for eight years and I’d been an equity research analyst for 22, and it is the kind of job that gives you an above average income and so forth. I have never been confused that what I always loved most was actually spending time with my children and my wife and family. My wife had noticed that, I became co-director of research my last three years at Goldman, they expect you at some point to help manage an integrated investment bank and I hated the management job. I loved being an analyst. She said, “For the first time, even though you’ve always worked too much and you’re never really around and all that, even when you’re around, you’re not really here, you actually don’t look happy in the core work, you should rethink it.”

Arjun Murti:
I actually went to them and said, “I want to stop working.” I’ve never been confused about work-life balance. I want to be clear on that point. When I worked at Goldman, it was 24/7, not quite 365, but probably 350 of the 365. The balance there was, if you put in a full career at Goldman, you then get to enjoy life later, that’s the work-life balance, but you still have to pick it. You still have to pick that after 22 years on Wall Street, I was going to pick life. I got to catch middle school and high school for my three children.

Arjun Murti:
I will tell you, there is no amount of compensation that makes up for that amount of time that I got with them and frankly, and not to be too personal, but even your relationship with your spouse is significantly better when you’re not a Goldman partner working 24/7 and only caring about the client calls and so forth, and so, from a family perspective, I am so much better off, but I’m also better off from a career standpoint, because I have different experiences now. I’ve been on the board of a company. I’m involved with public policy at a university that was not my background, so I have perspectives on the environmental movement, the climate movement that’s neither right nor left wing, but that also informs my, let’s call it, pragmatic approach to solving these things because I don’t work as an equity research analyst anymore.

Arjun Murti:
I picked life, if you will, but it’s oddly, actually, I think helped my career as well. I would tell people, you can’t get locked into I’m only about either making money or frankly, the opposite that something I want to make a lot of money, but also this great work-life balance. There are some choices to be made and they can evolve. I picked work, quite frankly, for 22 years and then I picked life for the last eight. Now, as my kids go to college, we’re doing something in between.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Arjun Murti, a long time Wall Street energy analyst and a newcomer to the blogging and writing sphere. Arjun, thank you so much for sharing your perspective.

Arjun Murti:
Lorne, these were great questions. It was a real pleasure to be here and thank you for all you do for the University of Denver. Again, I remain very proud and appreciative of my time there and thank you for this podcast.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Take a trip back in time with us, if you will, to 2005, when Arjun initially made his “super spiked” prediction. You can read the, may I say, pretty entertaining 17-year-old news coverage from the Wall Street Journal when you visit our show notes. You’ll find them at du.edu/voe-podcast, along with links to Arjun’s blog and answers to more questions from students.

The VOE podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the Daniels College of Business, sponsored by U.S. Bank.

Patrick Orr is our sound engineer. Alumnus Joshua Muetzel wrote our theme. I’m Lorne Fultonberg.

Like us, rate us, review us, and we’ll see you next time on the Voices of Experience podcast.