Big Digital Energy

0:00 Well, we had a last minute bailout, so I had to put on a hoodie, so we were not allowed to do a hoodie-free episode. I also think that it's a fair balance today since you have two non-surfers and

0:16 one surfer, and the first thing that we're going to talk about is, I guess, one of the most pristine, surfing-rich, coastal environments in the world, certainly in the United States Have you

0:28 been following this? I mean, Phil Mickelson's like rants and raves, yes. What a stupid question I just asked. So, of course you have. I mean, the Ryder Cup is going on and Phil Mickelson's

0:42 talking about Sable offshore. It's crazy. I mean, that's awesome. I love it, but also, I'm like, you're as crazy as the rest of us Rest of California or the rest of us. I'm just trying to be

0:57 nice. He's as crazy as I am. So I chuckle at the randomness that he is as a human being. Didn't he relocate to Arizona for a while or is he still

1:11 his primary residence? I don't know if he's still in California, but I think he's sort of, I'm sure he has a home in Arizona, but I don't know how much time he spends there. I haven't seen him

1:22 around the bar. Well, I haven't seen him around the bars and casinos in the Scottsdale area So maybe he's no longer in the area. Anyway, so Sable Offshore has dominated, I guess, both the

1:38 oil and gas and environmental news. We'll kick off with that. And basically what you have going on here is a battle between Sable Offshore, which is run by Jim Flores, who for those of you who

1:53 don't know, had a prior CEO the as life.

1:58 in Chairman of Plains Exploration Production, which was the carve out of Plains Resources, I actually covered PXP for a number of years. And it was a nice

2:10 variety piece in my coverage universe because it was dealing with all things California, both onshore and offshore. And so he's back again with Sable Offshore, and they bought, as you know, back

2:24 in 2023, the legacy Senny Nez unit assets from Exxon. And what that is is a collection of three offshore platforms that sit in federal waters with a subsea and onshore pipeline network and onshore

2:41 storage, etc. in the Las Flores Canyon area. This is all proximal to Santa Barbara. So certainly a highly

2:53 adverse political

2:58 and demographic, but what has recently been in the headlines is, as Sable has begun to do the anomaly repair work, remember there was a pipeline rupture and a spill back in 2015. So Sanínez has

3:19 basically been shut in since 2015. Now they did do some single platform production, I think back in May I donít know how much is currently being produced and stored, but youíve got a collection of

3:33 three platforms. They went ahead with the work, both in terms of pipeline repairs, anomaly mitigation and some erosion work, both sub-sea and then onshore. And the Coastal Commission is really

3:51 the primary opponent here has stepped in and said, you you know, this is in violation of development plan and permit filing and SAVALS argument is under, I believe, both the federal consent decree

4:07 and the fact that this is maintenance and repair work, the existing permits and authorizations allow them to proceed. And so I believe they've hydro tested the pipeline system, but over the last

4:21 several months, the Coastal Commission has issued two cease and desist orders and in addition to that has fined the company to the tune of18 million. And of course, this is now in litigation at the

4:38 Santa Barbara Superior Court level. And two days ago, the judge issued a tentative decision in favor of the Coastal Commission.

4:50 And yesterday, there was a hearing for

4:54 ostensibly an affirmation of that. But the judge, as I read this morning, Judge Andrew Lee, who is actually 90 years old,

5:03 admitted that the Sable reps made some good points that he hadn't considered and that he was quote unquote, not fully prepared for this case and come to find out it's the situation in that court

5:17 system where you've got a very thin staffing of judges and they're overworked the caseload. And again, this judge is 90 years old and he's working a lot to clear his caseload. And so he's basically

5:31 said, I should be ready by December. So the, the stock's taken a hit. And there was a press release and an 8K issued yesterday by Sable basically vigorously disagreeing with the tentative decision.

5:51 No surprise there. but also something that's been floating around, which is literally infaratively is, look, we'll just go the OSNT or kind of think FPSO route, which then allows them to produce

6:05 in their federal leases. But the problem is for California, that that production, which at full capacity is somewhere on the order of 70 plus thousand barrels a day, can't make it into the

6:17 California refinery system,

6:20 which is, you know, in the Coastal Commission, I was thinking back, it's a bit of a story we covered a few years ago, and I forget the exact timing, but they did successfully after a 20-year

6:34 battle, managed to thwart or squelch a big desalination project in Huntington Beach. So this is, as I wrote a little piece on Collide yesterday, I would argue that the Coastal Commission probably

6:52 the most unilaterally powerful state regulatory agency in the country, if not anywhere. The California Coastal Commission. Yes. Of course. I

7:04 mean, what's interesting is that California produces 23 of its own, what is it, 16 million barrels per day of refining capacity, but it's now 58 reliant on imported feedstock and climbing. I mean,

7:23 yeah. And about

7:26 22 speaking of where those imported barrels come from, about 22 as I read, at least in 2024 comes from Iraq. So they need kind of heavy barrels just because of the refining configuration. A lot of

7:39 the refineries on the California coast and up in the Pacific Northwest were designed with Alaska North Slope crude in mind, but we all know that that's come way down. I think it's now less than.

7:52 10 of California's feedstock input comes from Alaska. I mean, it's like refusing to eat food from your own garden while ordering DoorDash from Venezuela. I mean, it really

8:06 better be careful if that Venezuelan delivery is on the water, it might catch a muscle. No doubt, no doubt. I mean, that's hilarious, did you hear? I heard the Trump's like speech on reporter

8:21 asking like you're knocking these boats out of the water and in total Trump fashion. He's like, these speed boats are really fast, but our missiles are faster.

8:36 Instead of what he was talking about how we're just killing people, he's like, our missiles are faster. Hey, I think I would think twice about heading to the United States and the speedboat filled

8:49 with drugs,

8:53 I'm gonna be shot at by missiles and probably it's 999 sure death. Yeah, I'm certainly going to choose to do my deep sea fishing somewhere else. You should. You don't want to be away from that

9:06 body of water. So on back to California, we've seen the imminent closure just because of the

9:20 monumental regulatory and cost challenges that California presents. They're going to lose refining capacity. Governor Newsom has reversed tone on that, but not before Chevron corporately left the

9:33 state. And so I looked this morning, retail prices in California are around 465, which is about a buck 60 higher than the average for the US And you know, if you're talking about putting, call it

9:51 70, 000 barrels a day. back in the California production stream, that's not an insignificant amount that can displace from some water-borne crude if you allow it to come through the Los Floris

10:03 pipeline system. Now, I understand the sensitivities around the 2015 spill, et cetera, but I think Plains, Sable, has some pretty good institutional know-how. They've done diligent work on the

10:19 anomaly repairs, et cetera, but, and they have legal standing. I saw one comment, forget the name of the expert opinion maker, but basically, yesterday's and the day before's decision, were

10:37 certainly, in his view, not supported on legal grounds, but rather on kind of transparently what's going on politically. It's a real conundrum for California in my opinion, and I think this is

10:51 one of the key issues. alongside the refinery closures, and now what they're doing to fast track really unsure, well permitting.

11:02 And so hopefully they get this sorted out, although I think certainly the way the stock is behaved, there's a pretty slim chance that December is gonna result in any different decision other than

11:14 just an affirmation of the tentative decision. I mean, I think the hope not right on, I mean, California is using environmental emergencies to erode property rights. I mean, it's scary. And my

11:31 friends that moved from the Palisades to Texas, I mean, they wouldn't have a home anymore. And Hayek warned in the road to surf them that emergencies have always been the pretext on which the

11:43 safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded. And we're watching in real time And I work. I applaud Phil, a golfer, to talk about it. Maybe he's running for some political office, but I

11:58 doubt it. But I think it's California, I mean, they're going to hell in a handbasket, they're going to hell on a missile. I mean, they can't destroy themselves any quicker. And it's super, I

12:11 mean, again, having been inside and at Shell and just thinking about how we treated California as its own entity because of all the environmental issues. Trying to sell products, having to offset

12:26 the sales, not saying that those necessarily are bad ideas from some degree, but overall, it's just a nightmare. Yeah, so, you know, stay tuned, but I see, you know, if the adverse decision

12:42 is upheld,

12:45 we're going to have some level of federal intervention, although that was. very vaguely alluded to, but I do think that, and I don't follow Sable as an analyst would, although I noticed that

12:59 Halfadozin or so, the analyst reiterated buys on the stock yesterday after it's been absolutely crushed. It's recovered a little bit, but I think it was down 30 when trading opened immediately

13:11 after the initial decision was revealed But

13:19 are we gonna see some kind of

13:22 loan program, refinancing, foreseeable? This is their only asset and operation. And so they've gotta get on with it. Timelines here on the OS and tier unclear, but it's certainly not as

13:38 immediate as if you could open up the

13:43 pipeline and processing system and get barrel flowing on shore and get them into California refineries. Well, it's something that we'll keep updating you guys on. This has nothing to do with the

13:53 IEA. Chuck will be thrilled. But we have to mention them for SEO purposes. That's right. We're gonna need the most, IEA is gonna come up on Clyde more than any other source in the entire planet.

14:08 So what's going on with BP? This happened several days ago, but

14:16 BP actually won its international chamber of commerce, arbitration against venture global, related to Caukshu Pass, deliveries under its long-term sales and purchase agreements that venture global

14:18 has with BP, Shell and others. And a couple of months before this decision in a similar arbitration case, VG, the

14:20 arbitrators decided in favor of VG against Shell.

14:48 So Shell lost that and the whole issue in context is around the 2022 time frame right after the start of hostilities and the Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine, you obviously had coupled with a

15:05 pretty brutal winter in Europe, you had blowouts in the spot market And so what venture global has consistently

15:20 argued is that based on the stipulation as I understand it, until you get to a fully commissioned project, you're not obligated to deliver under those fixed price long term agreements that you have

15:36 with BP, Shell, I think ENI is another one, a couple of others. And there are cases similar that are still pending. But, you know, Depending on what you read over that time frame, people are

15:52 kind of raising an eyebrow at the way VG has argued and blamed this protracted commissioning timeline on equipment failures, et cetera. But they did manage to take advantage of pretty significant

16:10 spot market opportunities back in that time frame. And so we're not really operational, but we're operational enough to kind of hit the arb that presented itself and it was very substantial. But

16:26 now they're looking at,

16:29 in a couple of cases, one, they won, VG did. And now you've got a completely different outcome. And I'm sure it has to do with interpretation of the contracts between Shell and BP and some key

16:42 differences there But

16:45 my understanding also recalling back to the. the Chevron Exxon arbitration at the ICC is those decisions are binding. So, undetermined yet what BP's damage award is going to be, but it's going to

17:00 be pretty substantial. So basically, what's happening is,

17:08 this is the energy equivalent of a contract dispute at a country club where someone promised UT times, but kept selling them to higher bettors. Right? That actually happened at my club.

17:23 I mean, it's basically promising to sell your name, tuck a beach house to a friend and then backing out because Airbnb rates tripled. Technically, you might have an excuse, but morally, you're a

17:34 jerk. I mean, the reality is, the Ukraine spot prices sent LNG to the moon, so they decided to back out. I mean, to me, contracts matter Without enforcibility.

17:49 markets collapse. And in this case, the fact that they could actually do it is actually disturbing, but what are your thoughts, Mark? The fact that there wasn't enough similarity, just the

18:02 different outcomes here, we're talking about essentially the same profile of counterparty between Shell

18:11 and BP. Again, I don't know the details of the differences in the contracts, but at a macro level, it would seem that okay, if VG was not guilty of

18:22 playing fast and loose with the commissioning rules, why would the templates regarding that be so much different for a contract with BP versus a contract with Shell?

18:35 Yeah, and I'm writing out a lawyer, it really doesn't give the industry or

18:46 the customers

18:49 firm hook to hang their hat on is the way I look at. I was just, I was a little surprised that the outcomes were, were

18:59 diametrically opposed in two seemingly very similar cases. Yep.

19:07 Awesome. Yeah. All we

19:10 know is we've got a lot of, a lot of volumes coming. You want to hit, do we want to hit Waja before oil, since we're talking about gas?

19:24 So Waja went negative again.

19:29 It first went negative in 2019, and in 2019 it had 16 occasions that it went negative It went negative again in 2026 times, only once in 2023, and then. 49 times in

19:50 2024. Waja's average, I think about 55 up to this point this year. And that's two X, what it averaged last year. And back in the 2019 to 2023 timeframe, I was surprised to see that Waja actually

20:08 averaged 291.

20:12 But the problem is only, you know, obviously getting worse and we hit a record negative I think it was over8 negative at the

20:20 trough and a differential between Waja and Henry Hub of something on the order of 12 and change. So it was

20:31 quite substantial. So you can't produce more oil if you can't move the associated gas.

20:39 That's the issue, correct? Yeah, I mean it's, I like to say that gas. processing and takeaway or gas production is the ceiling on oil production. I saw it at Prudoh when I worked that field. We

20:57 became rate limited because of our ability to process and re-inject gas. And the system is really no different where you have an inclining gas oil ratio curve like you do in the Permian. I've

21:13 chuckled, Chevron's been auto posting It's milestone in the Permian where it's now producing over one million equivalent barrels a day. Well, what makes up a significant part of that equivalent

21:25 barrel is gas and gas liquids. So, if you're looking at areas with lower BTU gas, like you find down more in the southern part of the Midland Basin, your dependency or your leverage to gas prices

21:41 needing to be at some minimum economic level. is greater. And so there's just a ton of gas coming out of the Permian and a ton more on the way if we're going to continue to either hold production

21:58 flatter or modestly grow it. I mean, Mark, help me understand this. This seems to be a market failure caused by regulatory bottlenecks. If producers could easily convert stranded gas to power,

22:13 they would. The problem is permitting, not economics. I mean, there's, there's, there's use for this gas. They just can't do anything with it. I'm just curious, why aren't more producers

22:19 rushing to pursue off-grid power alternatives? You know, maybe there's a

22:32 lot going on behind the scenes, but I've been surprised that we haven't seen or heard more aggressive commentary out of the major producers in the Permian, because this is where the associated gas

22:45 problem lies. And if you think about the latest takeaway that came online, which is Matterhorn, you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who's in this, you know, more challenged

22:58 situation with respect to needing some reasonable price for the associated gas, you know, Matterhorn relief lasted like an nanosecond. You didn't get the price action that I think you would

23:11 otherwise expect. But the fact of the matter is, is that we're going to need

23:18 either expansions of one one is on on the books for Gulf Coast Express.

23:25 There's a couple of other new pipe projects, but those don't come on until 2026. So if I'm a producer and I've got a, you know, I've got to juggle my way around

23:38 trying to hedge both the index and basis.

23:44 That costs a lot. It's a huge distraction of my time.

23:50 There's not enough, I guess, power demand to go around to suck up all the Permian-associated gas, but as a producer, if I can get out in front of this and strike a deal where I don't know what the

24:03 number is, but I've got fixed price clarity for 10, 15 years on the supporting a power purchase agreement, why wouldn't I do that? Yeah. Why would not be doing that yesterday? I totally agree.

24:16 We've had six years plus of this problem. And, you know, it's, it's,

24:24 I think it's a real, you know, kind of limiting issue. We're obviously starting to see more stuff around water disposal as well, but associated gas is the big governor on, on Permian, kind of

24:38 the Permian wrap or

24:43 plateau. stating the blindingly obvious. But again, my,

24:51 my puzzlement is why we've not seen more, Lord knows, public EP companies need any help they can get in terms of generating interest among the investment community. And

25:08 I may be ignorant of what,

25:13 what actually ultimately drives decisions But if I see a big value stream coming in because I've locked in an otherwise almost worthless product for some meaningful value, then that would be a, that

25:25 would be kind of a boost to my valuation and certainly my asset portfolio. And the other thing I thought about is, you know, or royalty owners wondering the same thing look if you can go out and

25:42 get two bucks for gaside. You know, I got royalties on that traded at077 last year. Why not do that? I mean, it's a structural problem, it's not going away. I mean, producers sitting on

25:54 negative price gas need to pivot to power generation. I mean, that's, I invested in the micro turbine company to solve this exact problem in 2011 Now., they couldn't get enough traction and

26:10 negative gas prices shows you exactly why they can't get traction. This is a market, this is a regulatory issue, not a market issue. Interesting, interesting problem.

26:24 There are hopefully, hey listeners, entrepreneurs, what are you doing? I mean, this is opportunity. Now you have to navigate in the regulatory hurdles and we should probably have someone on the

26:34 show to tell us more about what is the real specific issues. I should probably call

26:41 a great entrepreneur himself that. that dealt with us directly to come on and tell us. What do you think the biggest regulatory hurdle is or what's the biggest headwind? I don't know. I really

26:54 don't.

26:57 It could be an infrastructure issue. Is it emissions? Well, that definitely is one issue because you do have to cap. I mean, I think emissions might be it. I don't know the answer. Someone does

27:10 Yeah,

27:12 I would think the bigger players probably need to figure out some type of net zero. I know there's stuff going on in, I don't know, pilot scenarios. Can't recall specifically where and what those

27:31 are. But we put a lot of stuff in the ground historically as an industry. If you've got to figure out the CCS side to put up large-scale generation, but also generate, you know, significantly

27:45 better realizations on your, on your gas stream over a fixed price long term period that would seem, you know, there ought to be a way to make that, that whole thing work.

27:57 And again, it's, it's timelines. These are very, very near to medium term things that we're going to continue to launch along with, you know, pipes coming online if the incentive is there, you

28:08 know, for the takeaway, the pipes will be built and it doesn't really take very long to build one of these being a half to be CFA pipelines. You know, the gas will be there. The question is,

28:21 what's it intended for at the destination? You know, is it the industrial Gulf Coast? Is it LNG export? I need to do a little more study on what that whole supply chain looks like. But as Chuck

28:33 has been saying, Ode to Chuck, for years now,

28:39 it's really an interpretation of the in P community needs to be talking to directly to Silicon Valley about gas molecules and electrons. Yep. What's next? What do we got else have we got? Speaking

28:55 of oversupply perceived or real, there's energy intelligence forum was this past week and you had a parade of big-time CEOs talking about, we don't see a lot, physical markets are tight, we don't

29:11 see the alleged barrels on the water and I saw one post right before we got started of look, Ryan Lance brought his 1990s perspective focusing on OECD inventories, I'm not sure, I agree with that,

29:29 but we have not seen this looming glut manifest in massive inventory builds yet So,

29:41 you know, the argument is the system's change lower kind of statutory or regulatory storage requirements for refineries. You got essentially a just-in-time system in some case, but I think for

29:59 those of us in the, you know, pay more attention to the physical markets and the paper markets, and we look at things like

30:09 lower pace of investment, activity slowdowns, offset by certainly efficiency gains. We know the the rock that's being drilled is not as, you know, not as core as it was, say five years ago,

30:25 talking about unconventional, but, you know, the the galette proponents have been successful in what you've seen on the tape in in terms of crude. going to flip it into Contango and certainly with

30:43 a five handle on it. Yeah. I mean, Trump's out, Trump's happy about it.

30:50 I mean, I've at the end of the day, oil is holding above 60 despite glut predictions, tells you demand isn't dead no matter what traders say. I'd rather be sort of where gun war and and traffic

31:06 here is in terms of, you know, they're, they're betting, and look, I mean, they don't own assets. And so I always sort of trust those guys the most because they're betting on just the commodity

31:20 price.

31:22 So interesting, interesting perspective

31:28 that everyone's sort of, you know, everyone's sort of positioning, but the oil prices is information and that information is, you know, I'm big on like that. Price is information and that should

31:41 tell us a lot of sort of what's really happening Yeah, I always listen to the commodity guys a little bit more because this equity guys tend to get emotional about things and You know ruthless

31:52 commodity guys. It's just do early on emotion purely on the other end the next year price discovered Yeah, and that's why I know I can don't worry and the words of Heidi Klum on project runway One

32:06 day you're in the next day. You're out So What what how are commodity traders and fashionistas fashion designers similar exactly they live and die by their next trade I'm gonna trust what they're

32:23 saying now. Maybe they're also trying to position the market Which is forecasting added my executive one of the senior executives that I worked for back in the original old days of my career He told

32:36 me said I used to do managed forecasting demand for a billion dollar business line of Michael Dell's creation. And we were talking about, we were trying to get to a billion dollars in our forecast

32:52 of one division. And I came to the table with all these executives. I was like, I just can't get to a billion. I don't know how we're going to do it. And he stopped the meeting and he lectured me.

33:04 There was like 15 people in it. And he lectures me, the most junior guy in the room. He says, listen here, Kirk. He's like, forecasting is telling people what we're planning. We're not

33:18 forecasting what we think we're doing. We're planning on what we want to do. I was like, oh, okay. So basically I had to go back and read around the numbers. But I think in many ways, that's

33:30 this game here is everyone's trying to plan what they want to see versus. truly forecasting. There is no forecasting except people have no skin in the game, they forecast. The rest of those that

33:42 have skin in the game, they're planning. So we need to read and hear those words of what they're thinking the market's going to do based on their planning, which I love. So it's fun to watch.

33:54 Yeah, and I do think somewhat conspiratorial or cynically that going all the way back to Trump's visit to the Middle East on his investment,

34:08 junket, foreign investment, junket. There's a real political angle here to have this continue

34:19 through the midterms, or at least up until the midterms are pretty much decided. Although

34:29 You know, he, uh, I watched. guess that wide ranging press conference in the Oval Office, they were talking about crime and FBI, et cetera. Of course, when it got to Q and A,

34:42 everything was fair game. And he even brought up the fact that

34:50 not his words, but something he would say, they're beautifully low.

34:56 I think he was being told, look, Mr. President Cruz below 60 now So he took time to air that out a little bit in the midst of talking everything from the 2020 election, the FBI crime statistics

35:13 and what do they call the

35:18 operations summer heat with federal help in some of the cities that have had some significant crime problems So

35:28 that, even though it's not

35:33 frontline topic, it's still front of mind because I do think there's a real, you know, just an instinctive electoral type of messaging value. Look, I can point to this. And I still believe that

35:49 even though, you know, energy prices, I guess except for power have come down, pretty substantial percentage of an individuals cost per man. So how could it not? We're paying, we're paying the

36:02 same or less for gasoline at the pump for, you know, than we were 20 years ago. No doubt. So to to summarize what we've talked about, I think this should be one of our clips. So while California

36:17 commits energy suicide, venture global learns contracts matter, oil chiefs debate gluts and Waja goes negative for the 49th time. I'm just over here on the Antucket

36:30 wondering if anyone's actually running the asylum.

36:33 Milden Freeman and Hayek would say, let markets work, not judges who aren't prepared, not commissions that block pipelines, and not traders who break contracts. And as CS. Lewis might add,

36:47 courage means doing the right thing even when it's unpopular. Like building pipelines, honoring contracts, and admitting we need oil and gas for decades to come.

36:60 That's my take Yeah, and the major CEOs have got to continue to walk the tightrope of transition versus kind of reality. I mean, Exo never does that. They're the only, I love them. I mean,

37:14 they're the only guys that are like, fuck it. We'll just say what we really meet. Well, that was a great summary and leave it to you to bring in some great quotes to really tie it all together

37:27 Talk about

37:30 tightly threading together. a disparate collection of run of show topics. Well, it's amazing, man. We have Phil Nicholson to start it all off. So I don't think if you're track, I mean, this

37:44 hits close to home 'cause a couple of my golf buddies are friends with Colt Nost and

37:51 I don't know directly, we know each other on social media, but he just came out and said that he's gonna apply for a reinstatement as an amateur. He's won the Walker Cup, he played on tour, he

38:07 won on the Cornfairy Tour, played six years on the PGA Tour. Never, in fact, he turned down his invite for winning the US. Amateur for the Masters to turn pro. And I mean, so Twitter golf is up

38:25 in storm over this 'cause and I'm on the side of, If you play professional golf, you're never an amateur again, you're a professional. And so I got knocked out, I missed the US mid amateur by one

38:39 stroke. Wow. And I got beat by a former professional. And I'm thinking, this is semi-professional golf now. And I'm like, let's just call it. And these guys like, oh, I'm not as good as I

38:57 used to be. I know you're not as good as you used to be, but you're better than every amateur out there. 'Cause most of us amateurs, number one, we've never spent the time to be pro, we'll never

39:07 be good enough to have been pro back then, or we would have done it if we were phenomenal. And you guys spent years playing professional golf, which is at such a high level. Now you're coming down

39:19 to

39:21 Amnerville, claiming that you're not as good as you used to be. Of course you're not as good as you used to be, beyond tour, but you're better than we are. So they're better than you're used to

39:34 be. That's exactly right. They're always be a gap, no matter what progression of age or skill level, just from the performing under the pressure of the biggest stage out there. I'm not totally

39:54 true. Well, I've gotten a little cynical over the years

40:02 I don't, I remember the Olympics when it, at least from the US perspective, it was purely amateur. And there was something really cool about that, you know, the US beating the Soviets in 1980

40:13 and getting screwed in '72 and basketball against the Soviets. But you had a real kind of David versus Goliath. You had people that spent all of their time training for that moment. And now, you

40:32 know, starting in whatever it was, I believe '92 was the first dream team. Maybe it was, maybe there were professional basketball players in the Olympics before. It just, you know, just kind of

40:43 lost some of its appeal to me. But, you know, the way the world's going now, you look at college football, there's a pretty significant boring of the lines between amateur and professional now Oh,

40:58 back to the subject of golf, I just saw a post

41:04 commenting on live financials for

41:09 the season. It was characterized as they spent850 for every dollar they generated. Yeah. Hey, it reminds me of shell ventures. And man, we had a CFO, Robert Leak, I hope he listened someday

41:27 'cause he was phenomenal.

41:30 It's on, I mean, it basically live as PR, of course. I mean, they spend eight times more than they make, but it reminds me that Shell Ventures, 'cause we

41:49 were always trying to validate that we were worth keeping. And how we did that was we were a break-even after all salaries that we were, and that's on paper. I mean, of course. Yeah, you can

41:54 make anything break-even.

41:57 But Liv is like, I'm like, man, we're worth keeping because every three months would go into shit, we're gonna get shut down. So just a question, what is your runway shell versus the Saudi

42:14 Permanent Investment Fund? Yeah, no doubt. I mean, we're only at the mercy of the executive team 'cause we didn't have an evergreen fund. And when YL, not CEO at the time, but incoming. Ask me.

42:30 I said, to be honest to you, this is a PR organization. I mean, yeah, there's an opportunity that we might save the company with an investment. But I guarantee you, if it's important enough,

42:44 we have a big enough balance sheet to buy something and that's what Exxon does. So ultimately, Exxon doesn't have a venture team because they have the cash to buy something when it matters enough

42:55 And so I think while y'all looked at me like, you know, and I did this, I said things that put my own job in jeopardy,

43:07 but these people are not stupid. He's not stupid. So saying it makes them realize, well, maybe I'll keep you around because you're one of the honest ones that will tell me that I'm wearing no

43:19 clothes when everyone else around here is tell me how great I am. So who knows? I'm sure my colleagues would have killed me they knew what I said, but I was very honest. We're PR, man, and live

43:33 as PR. It's just PR.

43:35 Maybe Brandl Champlies ride on some case, but anyway.

43:41 I'm sure some of our oil and gas golfers will hate me for that statement, but maybe not. Well, how's the weather in Antucket before we sign up? It's all the day, but we got through a Nor Easter.

43:52 My first one, I love riding the hurricanes I surf the swells prior, I love the hurricane, but I'll tell you, the Nor Easter was nothing. So it's not a big deal, but the scary part about a Nor

44:09 Easter versus a

44:13 hurricane is this is cold weather hurricane. Maybe not, it's not blowing like 50 to 60 mile an hour winds. It's not the same thing as a hurricane, but man, that weather is cold AF, so And this

44:27 is an appropriate time to run. to remind everyone that we've yet to have a name storm make landfall in the US. Yeah, it's October 16th. It's not over yet, but

44:41 maybe you'll get that chance. Hopefully not, but

44:45 great seeing you. Mark is always likewise, man. Missy, buddy.

44:53 Well, I'm sure we'll have more new and exciting stuff to talk about next week. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. Yeah. Like subscribe. Give us a like. Tell your friends. Actually, I saw today,

45:10 I think it's in November. I think it's in mid November. Chuck is participating on an SPE Gulf Coast section

45:22 forum panel featuring or it's the title of the panel is Podcasters Live.

45:30 So we got a little boost from our friends over at SPE. Fantastic. Love it.

45:37 All right. Maybe we can go, maybe we can be there and turn Chuck's slide since we're. I mean, we're the bench guys. It's Chuck, yeah. I mean, it's Chuck, but all right. All right.