Big Digital Energy

0:00 All right, that. Well, no, we have to do this. Happy birthday, Kirk.

0:07 Happy jock. Happy birthday, Chuck. I got. Thank you and happy birthday, Chuck. I'm sorry. I missed your party. The, uh, I got to explain this story. Tell the listeners. I think because

0:16 this is a happy birthday, Mark. Did you miss that talk? Damn. How long is cluster birthday? Whoa, whoa, whoa. You didn't realize Mark's birthday, too? No. Yeah. Are we just doing? Chuck's

0:29 been left three within 11 days. Three within 11 days. Oh, wow. It's a happy birthday, Mark. Sorry about that. So funny sequence of events here in the office today. Chuck had his birthday party

0:40 at the house and Kirk didn't show up. And so Chuck's like, Kirk, why don't you show up to my birthday party? And of course, I didn't get an invite. I didn't know about it. And so we go and we

0:50 see the evidence. You know, of course, like, oh, I got the email, but the actual invitation picture didn't load. So he didn't know about it. And then Chuck asks, he's like, well, when's

0:58 your birthday? I don't know what Chuck was getting yet, but it sounded like he was gonna come get paid back on you, like not show up to your birthday party, whatever it is. I would never, but

1:08 anyway. And Kurt said it's in 364 days, and Chuck's like, Wait, your birthday party was yesterday? And we had this whole group chat yesterday that talked about it, and Chuck says he was hungover

1:18 and sleeping all day, so. The last person left my house of 4 am. Jesus Christ. And Mark sent his texts at 635 am So, no, that's understandable, but. And I got a response at around 530 pm.

1:34 yesterday. Just like the three scooges, this whole misunderstanding. The keys to our top. I'm glad you're here to make this all right. We're the thoughtful leaders in energy and we can't even get

1:44 a birthday story. By the way, when are we gonna get a sponsor for the mugs? Oh, we need a mug sponsor? Hey, if you're out there, I will. There you go. I will even, yeah, I will pour it into

1:55 the mug We will, we will, let's write a comment. Let's work on some sponsor.

2:01 So what do we got on the dock inside? No, we gotta start with this 'cause since we're talking keystone cops, the Apple commercial, so this Apple commercial, did y'all all see it? Yeah. Yeah,

2:13 so they do this very cheesy commercial where it's mother nature coming through the trees into the office and she's ridiculing Apple for their net zero emissions and this whole commercial is for

2:31 launching this new net zero product, which I believe is the Apple Watch, the new Apple Watch that's coming out. And anyways, I don't know if it was the chief ESG officer at Apple or head of

2:44 environment, whatever the title. Yeah, whatever the title is, but she stands up and she says, we're working to permanently remove all carbon from the atmosphere and to me out stood just it of

2:55 part that

2:59 Who's gonna tell her? I posted over on Twitter this picture of a frozen earth. It's just earth frozen solid. And I was like, it's like, this is a picture of earth when Apple removes all carbon

3:09 from the atmosphere, circa 2030, and it was like, I don't think people understand what they're actually talking about or saying in these things, because yeah, say you can remove your emissions,

3:22 we're getting a zero, but permanently removing all carbon from the atmosphere doesn't sound like a good time for life on planet The vegetarians all got together and we're like, no, don't take our

3:32 food away. Or they probably didn't even get it either. It was the actual plants. I think it was actually got together. Was it John Kerry that just came out saying that the farmers in the United

3:42 States need to stop growing crops because it's running in the environment? Yeah, I saw that. I mean, there's a war on farmers right now. Absolutely. Well, you saw their European countries.

3:51 Yeah, another ones for sure. Yeah, another ones, yeah. And so huge war on farmers I don't know if you'll saw that. Let's get an Agtech sponsor for the mugs. There we go. I like that. Chris

4:04 and Seleno, Tim. I love him. I love him, John Deere Green. I love him. Yeah, John Deere Green, I like that. The United Post of this other picture on Twitter knows a picture of a T-Rex and a

4:14 burning earth. And I was like, you know, maybe you have dinosaurs to focus more on ESG and carbon credits. They wouldn't have died of climate change. I was not an asteroid that killed them, but

4:23 is that science fiction? Well, no, the asteroid created very volatile climate change. And so happens, asteroid hits. And then boom, you have all of this debris. And so one, you go into an

4:35 instant, like everything burns, right? And so forests, everything are on fire. They say the dinosaurs probably died within like, couple months, like all life. And then what happened is all the

4:46 ash created a winner because it shaded out the sun. And the only living life was if you were underwater or underground, And then, or K-3 Richard's.

4:58 And then at that point, even at that point, 90, 95 of all of those species were wiped out too. I just wanna, I mean, I've watched a few like documentaries, but why do they always say they died

5:10 instantly? 'Cause I just don't believe that everyone that dies, you're like, they died instantly. Well, no, yeah, I mean, it depends on - You said two months, I'll do it. It depends on the

5:20 time horizon. I mean, you think hundreds of millions of years to evolve to that point, and then within a matter of months, it's all dead So on a long enough time horizon, it doesn't happen to us.

5:31 That could happen to us. Very much good. I don't think that - And nanosecond or less on the geologic timescare. Yeah, exactly. I don't think that we take that threat serious enough of asteroids

5:39 hitting. I will say though, the reason I came in 2010 to get into oil and gas is because I believe that it's gonna be oil-filled services, the drillers that are gonna get on a spaceship, probably

5:51 on one of

5:53 Elon Musk's spaceships, and they're gonna drill this asteroid and blow it out of. the orbit heading our way. I only made a video on that. I think Bruce will, I love that. You know, I was always

6:04 kind of salty that, you know, I wasn't cast for Deepwater Horizon. They make a remake of Armageddon. I gotta be on that. Nice. That's my pitch. Covers out you're watching the remake of

6:16 Armageddon. That's me. My favorite reptile, Keith Richards story is, Keith Richards walking through a pet store, and the owner's like, hey, this turtle actually lives to be 300 years old, and

6:29 all, it's a great pet, and all, and Keith goes, ah, just like that turtle. You just get to know it, and then it dies on you. Have y'all ever watched the show? It's on Netflix called Ancient

6:40 Civilizations. No. It's really interesting with this, because a guy goes around and looking at all of these landmarks in these mounts. And there's actually one of them is in Louisiana. I didn't

6:51 know that Louisiana had so many mounts from ancient civilizations and. The very peculiar thing about all of them is that they're built within alignment of true north, and they were tracking the

7:04 stars with it. And essentially, the whole thesis here is that humans are actually much older than what archeologists

7:13 officially credit, and that they were wiped out by severe climate change and flood. And he thinks that the hypothesis is that they were so obsessed with the sky because they wanted to be able to

7:26 track when asteroids were going to hit the earth because that's what killed everyone. That's interesting. Yeah, it's super interesting. And it's also interesting because if you think about modern

7:33 day humans, we don't look at the stars because there's so much light pollution, right? Like we've lost our connection with space. Like we just don't think about space. No doubt. And so I've been

7:45 thinking about those things a lot, but I do not think that we take the threat of asteroids hitting the planet seriously. Now that you talked about ancient civilizations, at birthday dinner last

7:55 night. Wow. Thank you for the well wishes. Did you miss the invitation? And at the dinner table was this question I was asked, how often do you think about the Roman Empire and Roman civilization?

8:08 I was like, I don't know, maybe like two years ago? Boom, on my phone pops up learning about aqueducts which I actually am fascinated by, the Romans. Oh, there's a meme going around that's like

8:20 engineers today can't build without AutoCAD and

8:23 it's amazing what they built But the question is, supposedly men think about the Roman Empire all the time. Well,

8:32 no, Chuck came into the office this morning. He's like, Hey, why all of a sudden is everyone talking about the Roman Empire? Is this like a thing? And I was like, yeah, it's a meme that just

8:39 blew up. But it's funny 'cause I didn't know it was a thing and someone asked me, they're like, Hey, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? And I was like, honestly, I was like, I

8:46 think about pre-Romans, more the Greeks. You know, I got a picture of Alexander the Great hanging above my desk 'cause like that's more my era. And then I get over on Twitter and I see like people

8:56 talking about it and I was like, Oh, is this like a real? We also have a life-size version, which is not very big, of you hanging out of Digital Wildcatters headquarters. Oh yeah, we got the

9:07 bobble hand in the window. My Roman awareness is really sparked by the long-running meme video clip from Life of Brian where

9:19 he's selling concessions

9:23 And he encounters the people's front of Judea and they ask him how much he hates the Romans, so he wants to join the people's front of Judea and he says, A lot. So that was the only cracker to join

9:35 the group. George Harrison financed that whole movie. I knew that. But you talk about the Romans in ancient civilizations and let's tie this back into like energy and material science because just

9:47 recently a couple of months ago, I think we talked about it on BDE, but we discovered how the Romans made concrete. And it's better concrete than we have today. We did talk about this before.

9:57 Yeah, I think we talked about it. So fueling, basically. Yeah, and so really just when you think about energy, material science, engineering, you know, the aqueducts, really interesting

10:09 topic. More, we, I mean, we still, we come up, we organize our army based on how the Romans did. Yeah, and I'm ripped like a Roman soldier. There you go.

10:20 Last, last

10:23 thing, no, no, no. Last thing on Rome is the Romulus Augusta Lewis, something like that, was actually the last Roman emperor in

10:36 476, and everybody thinks that was the collapse of the Roman Empire. It went on for 200 more years. They just didn't have an emperor. The Senate was basically running things, which is interesting.

10:46 I didn't know that. I always kind of thought boom, it just fell, You got Cleopatra this Roman. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't just wasn't just Egyptian shoes, send it of Alexander the Great's, one of

10:60 his generals. But anyways, interesting stuff. Let's do this. IEA says we're getting rid of oil for this decade. Not quite, not quite. There was an FTPs, I call

11:15 it a teaser that Fatih Biral, who's the executive director of the International Energy Agency. And Parris wrote, teasing the forthcoming report on calling, and the word will was used, peak demand

11:30 for fossil fuels within this decade. And so that was well covered. He was given a front page editorial page. Within this decade, like within, by 2030? Yes, it was short on specific

11:44 quantification and also with before, before the end of 2030. Yeah, we haven't hit. peak wood burning yet, right? I mean, we're still burning more wood today for fuel than we ever have in the

11:58 history of the planet. Well, and the OPEC secretariat issued a press release rebuttal that was very thoughtful and long on facts and pointed out really the danger of making these emotionally driven

12:13 type of prognostications and really deflecting energy policy or distracting energy policy making

12:21 dangerously away from the realities of what's going on in the world. That's the way I kind of summarize it. And so the FT, when I did a search, did not cover that. I love reading, you know,

12:35 speaking of GF, I love reading, you know, the media from Europe. But it would be great if they would actually take a commodity position on that. Why don't they bet by putting money down on people?

12:50 because the commodity traders are gonna have a heyday with this forecast, it's a projection, not a forecast. So they're trying to basically say, we're trying to get rid of oil and entering NFT

13:01 article, they go back and say, even with declining demand, there will be a need for investment in oil and gas supply due to the steep decline from existing fields, but they need oil and gas for

13:12 energy security, which is funny because in another article, published just a couple days prior, talking about how England's wind energy is in deep trouble, what they're saying is we need a lot

13:27 more wind because of energy security. So it's kind of funny how like energy security is thrown around as a term, that means something to somebody based on what the narrative is versus what the

13:38 reality is. So fighting this really interesting network, talking about peak oil. I always think it's also interesting of the answer for nondecipherable. a bashable demand assets is more non

13:53 dispatchable demand. It's like, oh, hey, you know, wind power is underperforming what we need is more wind. Yes, right. Well, didn't the G20 effectively commit to a tripling of renewables?

14:07 The

14:09 vast majority by 2035, I believe, or maybe even 2030. I don't remember the specific statement that came out of the G20, but the vast majority of which will be wind and solar. And so we're gonna

14:24 talk here a little bit about wind's. Is woes continuing

14:28 the timing of this report coincidental, or is it? Well, let's talk about it now, 'cause I mean, I made a comment before we started recording that I've just been amazed by how quickly higher

14:42 interest rates have started to integrate some of these one projects and Chuck had mentioned. Chuck recorded a podcast with Robert Smith sometime last year. 18 months ago and Robert Smith came on the

14:55 podcast and said that renewables were a zero interest rate phenomenon. That's it, basically a call on interest rates. Yeah, and I mean, interest rates go up, game over. It looks like he's right

15:07 in that assessment. And then, you know, yeah, these projects like in the North Sea that are getting, the blocks aren't getting auction on and, you know, companies are calling on federal

15:21 governments for more subsidies. And like that doesn't seem like a good plan for building a business. Seems like a story a week. And so - Yeah. There's three and a half factors attributed to why

15:33 peak oil, going back to that. Number one is the rise of clean energy technologies. Why are clean energy technologies on the rise? Zero on interest rates. I mean, and - And government, Jack.

15:43 And government, Jack.

15:47 Why interest rates are actually rising? But even on that, I mean, renewables aren't displacing oil and gas right now. I mean, it's clear that they're additive to oil and gas. Number two reason

15:59 in their projections, structural changes in China's economy, which is hilarious because they're basically saying that China's going all electric, which China's also building more coal plants one a

16:11 week than anyone in the world. Two per week. Two per week, sorry, two per week Third, and this is the major kicker, the global energy crisis.

16:24 What does that mean? What does that mean?

16:28 And then the house opened, my camera was off. Y'all were like, what? What? The one is Europe's shift away from gas after Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't think, so we talked about this

16:40 earlier, I was like, Europe's just going, we gotta get rid of gas because the only source of gas in the world is Russia. No, they've been buying LNG like crazy. The fact is they're dependent

16:51 upon Russia for gas, but I see that as a half point because that's not a real issue. And moving away from gas because of this little war I, just don't think is a valid reason, but it's definitely

17:04 a speaking point. Well, more fundamentally, and I was thinking about this over the weekend as I digested what is coming from the IEA, the numbers of people that will be added to the planet between

17:17 2020 and 2050 are not trivial 19 billion people.

17:23 12 billion of those will come from a handful of countries in Africa and the rest are coming from Asia. And so - India and China. Right, and so the ability within that

17:36 timeframe much less between now and 2030 to really leapfrog to a lot of which is still theoretical or unproven commercially scalable concept and do it cost competitively accessible and abundantly is

17:53 it seems like

17:57 on cursory inspection that

18:01 the prediction and the thesis are dead on arrival. And this is why this all matters. Let's pull all of this together. This is why it matters. We ignore CO2 in the atmosphere at our own peril. We

18:16 really do I mean, there is some evidence that it's causing and weather, climate, all that. So we do need to be thoughtful about that and be aware. Like I said, we ignore it our own peril, but

18:30 we've got to come up with a solution that deals with realities of

18:36 dispatchable power, China building two coal plants a week. We can't just willy-nilly it and say, oh, we're gonna build wind farms. We've gotta be thoughtful about this We've gotta know what our

18:50 existing technologies can actually address and maybe money is spent better on next generation technologies 'cause at the end of the day, there's only so much of other people's money we get to use to

19:02 solve this, so. That's a good point. I think that's what, so we're not sitting here being anti-whatever, we just gotta be thoughtful about. Now, we've talked at length about what the industry

19:15 should be doing, the oil and gas industry should be doing, which is fugitive methane. blaring reduction or elimination. And in the broader category of, everybody wants to mitigate or eliminate

19:28 pollution wherever they can, and if emissions is pollution and there's a practical economically viable way to do something with fewer emissions, or lower emissions, then we should do that. And

19:40 we've tackled this emissions problem before. Remember acid rain. You even know what acid rain is calling? Yeah. What is it? Love canal Oh, yes. That was technically, I don't know. Technically,

19:52 I thought you were asking. No, I mean, I heard of it. Is that something you remember, is it? I remember hearing about it, but I don't know like technically what acid rain is. You were like a

19:57 kid. Yeah, it was almost before your time. I mean, so acid rain has been dealt with because of emission standards and some other things. Yeah, but the thing is, is like, you know, people

20:07 bring that up a lot. It's like, oh, it used to be acid rain in the ozone layer, but we actually fixed that by banning CFCs and aerosols. And we did it with cap and trade. on the industrial, the

20:20 Midwest. But we'll never have an air conditioner in our car, even remotely close to as cold when we had those damn things. Oh man, they were great. Yeah. I don't remember. What if we spent a

20:31 trillion dollars putting together technology and giant scale vessels to go out there and start making headway against the giant plastic island that's floating in the Pacific? It's actually the

20:42 biggest fucking problem. That's a huge issue. There's no plastics. You just see this study that came out and this isn't a new thing 'cause I wasn't looked at it, but

20:51 talking about how essentially there's a, I don't know if it's a chemical reaction or if it's molecule, I have to go, I'm telling this story without any information, so. We call it a production

21:03 day. Yeah, let me preface with that. But anyways, I saw this study come out and I thought it was interesting, I started Googling it and there's even, like right now, I'm looking at an article

21:13 from NASA back in 2018 that greenhouse gas. detergent recycles itself in the atmosphere. And I was actually talking about the study that I saw was about how methane and CO2 are actually naturally

21:26 broke down in the atmosphere. And there's still studies coming out on this that we really just don't understand in its OH. It's a hydroxyl radical. And

21:37 it's a molecule made up from one hydrogen atom, one oxygen atom with a free electron. And anyways, I've never heard anyone talk about this and it's super interesting that, oh, hey, maybe - Let's

21:50 do some research and talk about it next week. Yeah, we should because I saw some study come out and it was from one of the universities and was talking about it. We still don't have a fundamental

21:59 understanding of how these gases are dealt with. And that goes back to our point that we've talked about a lot on the various podcasts around here that whales are actually one of the greatest

22:12 things for carbon capture. Oh, speaking of the whales Apple, you know, Apple has taken all their shipments. This is part of their plan from air by plane to see the vessel. And I'm like, we're

22:26 just fucking up the whale population. You know how many wells are killed by boat strikes? It's a ton of them. And just, just to rehash because I love this story, it's basically the average whale

22:36 will have, I think, 35 tons of carbon in it when it dies, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, which is a good thing And then about 40 of

22:48 photosynthesis that happens on this planet is done by Plankton, and the greatest environment for Plankton is whale shit. So the fact we've taken whales from about five to six million on the planet

23:02 down to about 12 today, kind of from 1850 to today, that's had a real impact. And now we're potentially killing them with our wind farms and apples killing with ships because. young whales are

23:15 curious about a ship, go up and boom, get bonked and die, so. Yeah, that's a

23:25 lot of nature's not gonna be happy about that in the next commercial. Well, I mean, do we need, are we talking about whales? We're

23:34 talking about whales. We're talking about whales. I mean - We talk about whales a lot. We've talked about sort of the wind farms, right? About that, then we talk last week about how there's the

23:41 no bid, the auction. Yeah, up in the UK In the UK, where we're no one bid on it. And the CEO of one of the largest renewable companies, RWE, came out complaining about it, saying they didn't

23:56 see any bids because the

24:01 UK government is not up on inflation because the price for the energy was too low for wind to be competitive. There's other sources that are more competitive So they're asking for wind, the betters

24:14 to be. bet on prices that were too low for them to make money. And so no one bit on

24:21 it. And so it's funny to hear in that story about how they're complaining that in order to reach UK's climate goals, they need a lot of wind. Including energy security and Europe's energy grid,

24:32 they're concerned about the security of the grid is you need a ton of wind farms, which is kind of an oxymoron. What they don't talk about, and one of the things we were batting around is about how

24:41 wind farms offshore are killing the whales.

24:47 You know, one thing I think that's funny about what you just said there is, people don't want to bid on it because of the price, but all you hear from renewable advocates is how it provides cheap

24:58 electricity. And I've always thought, I'm like, that doesn't seem like a great business, if you have to put billions and billions of dollars into this infrastructure, and your

25:09 cell point is it produces all this cheap electricity, because I'm like, how do you make money? Well, off of this. Let's get Senator Warren on this. This sounds like price gouging to me.

25:21 The kind of the nail in it, at least from the skeptic side, at least Doomburg is calling the nail in it was in yesterday's piece or Saturday's piece called wind baggery, right? They're calling

25:35 essentially for the total collapse of wind for this and other reasons. But they also cite the, in particular, the whale aspect because Noah came out earlier in the year and it's scientists

25:48 basically said may have an adverse effect on whales and other marine mammals, but it won't kill them or otherwise impact kind of their long-term fundamental well-being. And there's a documentary, I

26:03 forget where it is, there's a link to it in that sub-stack that Michael Schullenberger pointed out in his podcast that there is. definitive proof and this is This is what was implied or explicitly

26:19 stated definitive proof that there's been a cover up in a campaign of lying to to mitigate any

26:28 Correlation of of the increased whale deaths, which you're in the thick middle of it this summer on the Atlantic coast well, it's crazy man and and wind activity whether it's the increased vessel

26:41 traffic or You know the the sound

26:45 The sound profile of wind operations offshore. Well, what's even crazy is Someone playing this out to me on Twitter the other day because I was talking about the whale deaths up in the Northeast in

26:57 the Atlantic and Like hey, where are you getting your numbers from is that from Noah? And I was like, yeah, you know, it's from this report and they pointed out that there's this footnote in that

27:05 report that Essentially says that the whales could just be migrating differently and hanging out somewhere else And you start to look at like scientific organizations like NOAA, and even if you just

27:19 take out any malicious activity of hiding data or anything like that, I mean, remove that, it's still, it's like, we don't actually understand shit about anything. Right, don't know what's

27:32 happening to the whales. I'll link to a blogger wrote in February on this, but I talked specifically about the Baling whales, which use sonar too. They met low frequency sonar to communicate,

27:43 blah, blah, blah. But when you construct an offshore wind farm, use sonar to figure out exactly where you wanna locate the pilings, et cetera. When you actually construct an offshore wind farm,

27:55 you not only use sonar again, but you're also popping those loud guns. You're sending these seismic guns down below to make sure that where you decided to drill is actually the best place to drill.

28:12 two aspects in and of itself, we know already fuck whales up. Yeah. And so maybe it does move the whales, but once a wind farm's constructed, you've got substations underneath the ocean, you've

28:24 got those cables and we have, there are articles and there's been proof that the whales have problems with those because anytime you have high electric current running somewhere, even though they're

28:35 shielded, you still get noise. Yeah. And that noise impacts animals. Yeah

28:41 Those three things are not good for the animals. I don't know why everyone's trying to hide it because we know it's not. No, it's not. And that's what people would gasat you on Twitter. Like, Oh,

28:48 it's not a thing. I'm like, We know this is a thing. And not like just with like - The Navy knows - The Navy knows - The Navy knows - Yeah, there's some whales that you know that. Yeah, yeah.

28:57 We know that. We use the term pilings in the driving process. It's not a quiet process. Having driven drive pipe ops offshore. You know, we talk building these large scale wind farms, you're

29:11 doing a lot of that over a long period of time as well. Are you a pipe driver? I was. Yeah, we're getting that way down. Certified pipe driver. So hey, we were talking about price. The sea was

29:22 angry that day, my friend. Greatest sign felled. Second greatest sign felled episode of all times. So we were talking about price gouging. Yeah, go to my gourd. I was gonna go to my gourd.

29:32 Well, let's go to my gourd. Let's go to my gourd. Oh my gourd. Chef Hans, my gourd predicts 100 oil over on Squawk. Does Squawk box or Squawk on the street? Squawk on the street. Squawk on the

29:42 street. I thought this was pretty funny 'cause we're

29:46 already at 90 oil. So, you know, predicting

29:51 the amount of oil in there. 95 if you're talking Brent, so. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, why did he do that? Why would you go on TV and call for 100 oil? What, I mean,

30:03 why would you? I, look, I

30:06 think it's probably, This is an opinion in the background the administration has been once again calling refiners and and producers to make sure that The whole system from a an inventory and supply

30:24 chain standpoint is quote-unquote stable. I picked picked that up. I think it was a Reuters Reuters piece that there's a there's an active calling campaign now by the administration because they see

30:34 what's coming With respect to where we are now on inventories, which is below certainly below year ago and below five-year Levels

30:54 and so we talked about it Several weeks and months ago that the markets waiting on the show me well. Here's the show me on inventories We had a we had a kind of counter counter seasonal week last

30:59 year both last week both in crude and and gasoline distillate but on an absolute basis we're seeing levels where you know if we continue to draw from here meaningfully It's going to be, you know,

31:11 it's going to be putting upward pressure prices and we're heading into an election year. Was he celebrating the 100? We were just saying, hey, based on these fundamentals, I believe it's going to

31:19 be on. It's just a matter of fact, talking about the fundamental supplies tightening and inventories are drawing and look, we're in the 90s now. We fully expect to be at 100 pretty soon. And I

31:31 read Dan Pickering's August summary last night, he posted on Twitter for his investor clients, I guess it's for all of his clients, but he's revisiting or

31:46 putting the notion of 100 oil is not good for demand, it's not good for anybody, back on the front burner just so people don't get too giddy and remain cautious with respect to what it could mean

31:59 for demand erosion and energy stocks. But, you know, reality is, we're.

32:08 We're seeing what we expected to see absent or recession, right? And if you look at rig count and continues to drift lower, maybe week to week. Pops up and down, but we, we were down to again,

32:23 week over week. California weather, right. Right. Same thing down to

32:27 what are you hearing on the street in the, in the, in the oil patch on rig count, anything or anything. I mean, no one's really talking about it from what I've seen So I don't know if it's the

32:40 way that noticeable out on the party. Anybody talking about RFK juniors, uh, fracking ban? Well, that doesn't say it's like, man, that's going to send a oil up to pass a hundred. Um, I will

32:52 say this earnestly to him. RFK junior, please come on the podcast and let's talk about it. No one is say what you want. Which one dislike dislike and whatever, whoever. Um, whatever you say

33:05 about the guy, he is smart and thoughtful. I want to ask, and I'd want to have a discussion. Look, I want RFK to come onto the podcast. You're one, no, both, bro. Not as like, aha, I got

33:16 you, you know. No, not at all. But I just want to have a thoughtful conversation about energy, because here's my thing. If you're a politician, especially a politician that's running for

33:26 president of the United States, you can't speak with authority on topics that you haven't

33:32 really dove into and talk to people. And here's the thing about the internet is that there's no excuse to be ignorant on these topics because RFK could put out a tweet, hey, I wanna talk to the

33:44 subject matter experts on energy and boom. Scott Sheffield. Yeah, you get 20 people lined up and you know, RFK wants to go out to the oil field on the Permian and see what it's about. You know,

33:55 we can make that happen. And so anyways, you've raised this whole Twitter thread. This was his 10 point plan to fix the plastics pollution crisis So back to talking about plastic being. you know,

34:06 a huge issue in the world, which I very much believe it's one of the biggest issues in the world. And at nine rivers in China? Yeah. I mean, there's no, the biggest contributor to the plastics

34:16 island is the Philippines. It's the Philippines, okay. But I mean, the amount of like micro plastics that we're consuming to, it's just, it's a problem we're way too dependent on plastics. But

34:25 anyways,

34:28 so he had, so we're all good. We just had

34:40 a little power surge, but we're still recording on everything So this is his 10 point plane. Y'all want me to read it out? It's all one little quick things. Basically, I'll support an ambitious

34:43 international plastics treaty. Oh, Actory Strict Hazardous Plastics and Chemicals or promote a national bottle bill. I'll nationally coordinate an extended producer responsibility system for

34:54 packaging. I'll move to modern recycling facilities. I will strengthen closed loop recycling systems. And then here's the fracking. I will ban fracking, provides the feedstock for most of the

35:06 plastics produced in the US. And then - And that's a big deal that he acknowledged that, okay? I mean, most of the world doesn't understand plastic comes from petroleum. Well, okay, yes, yes.

35:18 But listen, someone asked me, they replied, and they said, Is this true? And I said, Yeah, it is true. I said, Most products in modern day life, including plastics, are derived from

35:30 petroleum, on the petroleum base And the guy said, Yes, I understand that. He said, But, does the feedstock for most of the plastics in the US come from fracking oil? And I was like, Oh, no,

35:43 it doesn't. I was like, You're right. I was like, That isn't truthful. I said, It's a global market, isn't it? Actually, we export. Most of our, like, grade crude from fracking and import

35:52 a lot of heavy crude. 'Cause our refiners are set up there. Yeah, so what he interpreted is that - 40, 50 years. We like Venice Island but let's not forget natural gas. in the plastics value

36:04 chains as well. Yes, but well said. To say that plastics are a direct result of only fracking oil and gas isn't correct. Like you could get rid of fracking and plastics are still gonna exist,

36:15 right? One of the pangents I will take the liberty of going off on plastics is looking back to the global response, the medical community's response to the pandemic, would we have wanted to take

36:32 that on without the huge miracle that is plastics and PPE, you don't have surgical equipment. And you

36:40 can ask the same question about diesel and jet fuel and gasoline, et cetera. So let's, you know, the problem is not the plastics themselves, but it is the lack of rigorous displacement rigorous

36:57 disposal practices. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that

37:03 countries and economies that have more to worry about, like the Philippines example is being the biggest contributor to Pacific plastic island than, you know,

37:17 plastic pollution mitigation. I actually disagree with that. I do think that plastics are a massive problem. It's not just the disposal level, but it's single-use plastics. Like I was in HEB.

37:28 the other day, this pissing me off. I'm in HEB. and they have a little wedge of watermelon for sale. And it's in a little wedge of watermelon. Like you're just like, cut out a little piece of

37:39 watermelon? Yeah, and it's in a plastic container. And I'm like, this is fucking ridiculous to have single-use plastics like this. And then I'm a big believer that the sudden increase in

37:51 infertility rates is due to microplastic ingestion. And so I think that there's two facets to the problem one, how much plastic that we use and then two, how we actually dispose of it. Well, it's

38:03 the purposes of the plastic. So I don't think we disagree that much. Okay, so I think

38:10 the kind of overuse in the micro-packaging is beyond silly. Yeah. In examples like that, right? So, but it takes on this life of its own - It's like it's got its own fucking skin. That's what

38:25 it's for. Well, it takes on this life of its own where now it's not, and we've talked about this as well, as it relates to fossil fuels and emissions, the narrative has moved from capturing

38:35 emissions from fossil fuels to the elimination of burning of fossil fuels altogether. And now that the industry is proving some viability and commercial scalability to carbon capture, wait a minute,

38:47 that's not what we meant. We meant let's get rid of it. So let's condemn plastics is kind of the way the emotional reaction would happen in today's world in that pendulum. you know, I don't think

39:03 it ever will, but that pendulum could swing too far in the detrimental effects of not having plastics in some critical areas like medical and food storage and you know, all of that type of hugely

39:17 human beneficial. Well, let's show the incentive. 'Cause when I was surfing a lot, especially when I was younger, I'd take these trips to Mexico. Middle of nowhere, we'd drive, we'd take a car

39:28 and we'd stop in some small town like, Man, I just want to Coke right now And we'd like, I want to Coke. Oh, a Coke. A Coke, Coca-Cola, or whatever. Not Pepsi, I'm from the south, whatever.

39:39 Not some Coke. Hey, can I take the first time that's ever happened to you, they'd take a Coke and. And then they'd pour it into a plastic bag. I'm like, What are they doing? And then they'd

39:49 wrap it around a straw, tie it off and give it to me. I was like, Why, what the hell? Because they would recycle the can. And this was more valuable to keep this. and give you the plastic. And

40:01 they gave me the plastic. So I was like, of course. What do you think that plastic ended up? I'm sure, I mean, I didn't throw it in the ocean, but someone did. Yeah, for sure. No, it's kind

40:11 of stupid. No, that they're doing what made them the most, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the incentive. Plastic sheet. Yeah, I would say that if you've pointed out some things on, you

40:25 know, why did the public universities get to keep so much of the endowment of wealth that is oil and gas, royalties and - Oh, gosh, here we go Aggie versus, you're about to do a dig at the long

40:38 run. No, you know the Aggie joke around that, right? I love it. Why did the Aggies get one third? They got first choice. Yeah.

40:47 I don't think everyone on this, listen to podcast knows, but most of the University of Texas, and the whole Texas University system, which includes AM, receives a massive amount of wealth from

40:58 university lands, university lands, which has. a lot of oil. Not just oil and gas, there's all kinds of revenue, everything, but I got on a rant about it, but yeah, I've gone on a rant about

41:09 it sometimes. Yeah, he's got to vote first. So anyway, RFK, if you're listening, please come on the podcast. The finishing point was, if there is a kind of redistribution of wealth for greater

41:23 good, I'm much more in favor of that transfer from wealthy countries to help poorer countries do things like mitigate plastic pollution. We need to debate the redistribution of wealth for any

41:38 purpose on a show. Well, I mean, it's still like, I mean, that's something I'm super passionate about, like with university lands, is that, you know, that money is extracted. University is

41:47 the people, that

41:50 public university. If we had the value and wealth has extracted out of

41:56 a place in West Texas, And none of that money flows back to West Texas, a place that has some of the. Biggest underperforming. That's a good point. Elementary schools and high schools, and now

42:05 you look at UT's endowment fund, you know, the richest endowment fund, UT doesn't need any more fucking money. So not treating the Permian Basin like

42:14 an extraction colony and reinvesting back into the place where the value is created. All right, we can debate public education. I'm just saying I might be in favor of the Plastic Pollution

42:23 Reduction Act. Wow. Is that where you're getting right? That's a really long way. I have an idea, and it quite, this has been bothering me ever since we found out he's a pipe driller. Is a pipe

42:37 driver. Pipe driver. Don't we need nicknames? And should we have our audience pick? What is your side track? Side track. Side track. We're side track is your self-proclaimed - I'm fattied.

42:47 Mike Fraser. You're the only one that doesn't have a nickname. What's your nimble fattied? Nimble fattied. Oh, of course I did, you can't do that. No, someone has to come up with that. No,

42:56 no, I thought it was perfect. Nimble is fat guy you ever made. He can't change his nickname. Yeah, exactly. And you are a frackslack. Yeah, all right, fair enough. All right, we'll come up

43:06 with tech talk it. But I was thinking, speaking of pipe driller.

43:13 Oh, it's a setup. We'll work on it. Golly. Surfing frecker. No, I was talking about a big story. All right, initial, you got BP's loony, it gets canned for drilling without permits. It's

43:25 his finger of the week. I don't think we can technically give it finger of the week, but - Third leg of the week? Yeah, BP's loony got let go for - There's an inside joke on this one too.

43:36 Inappropriate relationships, and thanks for stealing my joke. I was so proud of that, drilling without a permit. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe I'm gonna get a tight hole somehow. Let me

43:46 think of that. I'll tweak that one out of it He didn't retire or resign because of inappropriate relationships because in BP's code of handbook, can book code, whatever it's called, it's okay to

43:58 have relationships with other people within the company. What he did was he lied to the board about the nature of those relationships. Okay. He didn't disclose them. He didn't disclose them. So

44:08 the title joke really is true to be clear. To be clear, this wasn't any sexual misconduct in terms of sexual harassment or rape or anything like that. They were consensual relationships that were

44:20 just with BP personnel, is that correct? Yeah. It's been fairly cryptic in terms of the details, so. Okay, and it is coming from the end of the slides. I think if it was of that nature, you

44:29 probably would have heard about it. Okay, so my story on this, I'm running, you know, Cain's private equity funds. Brandon Brooks, the starting right guard for the Houston Texans, is our

44:41 intern. He randomly called me up, said, Hey, I want to learn about private equity. Can I be your intern? You don't have to pay me. Great dude, best dude on the planet So he comes down there

44:51 and. comes to work for us. We get Lexi who transfers in from Chicago and joins our office and something is going on. I don't know what it is. You can just tell, you know? And no one wants to

45:04 come tell me. I call my assistant Stacy in. I'm like, Stacy, what's going on? She goes, I don't have any idea. And I'm like, something. Well, finally, it comes out that Lexi's dating

45:16 someone in the office. And I call HR and it came I'm like, hey, what's our policy on this? And it's like, hey, it's OK if people date. You just can't have

45:27 somebody setting compensation for somebody else. And we went through all that. I said, it's great. And so then I'm sitting there going, well, I think she's dating Brandon. And so I'm kind of

45:39 talking. And I finally, Stacy is like, oh, I don't know what's going on. Finally, I just call Lexi in the office. She goes, yeah, I'm dating Todd. I'm like, really? Is it all cool? Blah,

45:49 blah, blah, go. Here's the policy here that works. She's like, yeah, it's great. Five minutes later, Stacey's in my office. I've never lied to you before. I'm so sorry, it all fits. And I

45:58 was like, hey, Brandon, I'm sorry. I thought you were dating Lexi and all that. And I didn't, you know, technically she outranks you 'cause you're the intern, but you are six, seven.

46:11 But anyway.

46:13 All right, well, we'll see who takes over that spot for BP, but you understand this. I do need a job, guys, BP. That's why, so there we go. Who's CEOs? We could do a lot of

46:26 damage. There we go. We could do a lot of damage in a good way. Yeah. We could see a lot of them on Tricio, or what would that be? I think it would be, I think it's two in a box because one of

46:36 us would always be somewhere else. Yeah, exactly. We're just rotating.

46:41 Rotate depending on the week. All right, with that, we'll sign out. We'll see you all next week.