The Oil and Gas Global Markets Financial Update – With Josh Young, Bision Interests and David Blackmon, Energy Impacts

Highlights of the Podcast

00:00 – Opening & Introductions

04:08 – Bison Interests & Building Bison Insights

08:04 – Global Oil Markets & Russia’s Influence

13:14 – OPEC+ Spare Capacity Debate

20:49 – California Energy Policy & Refinery Fires

33:08 – ESG, Corporate Governance & Oil Majors

41:35 – Layoffs at Imperial Oil & Corporate Culture

44:57 – U.S. Industry Leadership & Historical Parallels

47:17 – Methane Leakage, NGOs & Policy Critique

55:01 – AI, Data Centers & Natural Gas Demand

01:02:47 – Power Generation & Gas Turbine Shortages

01:05:26 – Government Shutdown Impacts

01:10:52 – Nuclear Energy Stocks & Market Bubble

01:15:34 – Market Rally & Economic Insights

Full Transcript:

 

Stuart Turley [00:00:08] Hello everybody, welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president of the Sandstone Group, but I’ve also got David Blackmon on this joint podcast. He is the podcast host with Energy Impacts. David, how are you today?

David Blackmon [00:00:22] I am thrilled to be here, man, just doing great. It’s a beautiful day in Texas.

Stuart Turley [00:00:27] I’ll tell you what, but we’ve got a special guest, one of my all-time favorite guys that I follow on X all the time. We’ve got Josh Young with Bison Interest. He’s got a hell of a substack. How are you, Josh Young?

Josh Young [00:00:43] Stu, I’m doing great, thanks for having me on.

Stuart Turley [00:00:45] I’ll tell you what, we are so excited to have you here. Let me just, what do you got going on over there at Bison Interest? Because you’ve got a hell of a substack role.

Josh Young [00:00:56] Thank you, yeah, sure. So here, let’s see. What I was trying to do is figure out how to share this. Oh, here we go, okay, I found it. Perfect. Just give me one second while I share this and then- We’re all trying to get our social-

David Blackmon [00:01:08] We’re all trying to get our social media stuff together here, folks, bear with us. By the way, I want to thank Josh for coming on because he lowers the average age of our panel today by about 15 years. So thank you for being here.

Stuart Turley [00:01:22] And he’s got a hell of a hairline, but let’s just go on to the substack here. I love Bison Interest, I’ll tell you what. It is your insights on X. I thoroughly enjoy following you on X and picking on you when I see you on other, any other interviews going on because I respect your opinion.

Josh Young [00:01:45] Thanks. Yeah, so I don’t know if people know, but Stu used to be with Entercom, right? Way back. Yeah, so Stu used to, back before we launched Bison, Bison Interest, which is the investment firm that I now run, I co-founded in 2015. Even before that, Stu used bring, I was with a family office and I ran a small long short hedge fund where my big takeaway was to not short stocks. Stu used you bring these management teams to meet with me. Typically, we actually, we were mostly on sort of the breakfast circuit. So he’d bring by teams to come have breakfast, occasionally lunch or occasionally in office meetings. And Stu is such a good sport because my style is generally, it’s very inquisitive. And so I would just ask people lots of questions and sometimes they would take it badly because they thought I was negative about them, but truly it was just, hey, if I could ask a management team 20 questions and they had good answers for all 20, I think they were probably a fraud. But if they had good answers for about 15, then and they stumbled a little bit and whatever, it was great. Stu brought me some of the best and worst investment ideas I’ve ever had. And so this is, it’s such a pleasure seeing you guys work together. David, it’s been great to get to know you over the years, but Stu, there’s just this very long history that we have from the dark ages pre-oil crash of 2014. So it’s a pleasure to be on here. I’m happy to talk about Bison, but I just really wanna, I don’t know if people understand just how deep Stu’s connections are to the oil and gas industry and how far back they go, regardless of sort of appearance of age or whatever. There’s something that just decades of dealing with these cycles and the people and the narratives, there’s just so much value in that that I wanted to highlight. And I have so much time for you guys. I really appreciate what you do and I’m thrilled to be back.

Stuart Turley [00:03:50] I love that line. In fact, that’s gonna probably be the title of the podcast as I get this issued out on Apple and Spotify is Stu brings you the best and worst deals. I don’t want to be associated with Kramer. I would be associated with you in a heartbeat.

Josh Young [00:04:08] Yeah, well, they’re not in consensus, right? You brought a lot of small cap companies, some much larger companies too. It’s always interesting when the, whatever like $50 billion, but like Italian or French or whatever company would like wanna do these same road shows that the $50 million Canadian micro caps would do. So, okay, so Bison, so we launched it. I co-founded it in 2015 with a good friend who was running private banking at UBS for a number of oil and gas and other family offices here in Houston. I moved out to Houston for it. We’ve been investing in publicly traded oil and gasoline equities now for a decade. My co-founder left. He started phasing out in 2018, left in 2020. And what happened in 2020, late 2020 was that we had this large university endowment that had basically backed Bison and was our largest investor by far in a paraphrase vehicle where sort of they controlled the money, but we had the discretion on the investments. They pulled their money in November of 2020 and trying to figure out, hey, what am I gonna do? One, I put more money into the investments personally. I sort of doubled down into the oil and gas sector. And two, I started to build a social media presence. Then there’s some stuff that you can’t really do when you’re managing full sort of institutional money that you do when you sort of manage your own money and family office money and sort of private client money. And so. The culmination of that is this Bison Insights that we launched recently. Basically we took everyone who was not a prospective client for Bison Interest and any time they signed up for our stuff, we put them on Substack on what was Bison interest and now Bison Insight Substack. And we basically kept giving them all our research that we were publishing to prospective clients and existing clients. And we did it for years. And so eventually I have 115,000 followers on Twitter or X or whatever of all this sort of stuff that we’ve done, which has been great for building a brand really helpful in terms of getting great inbound ideas. And basically. Took that, put it on Substack and realized, hey, what we should do with this is. Put a paywall up, put more of an effort into putting even higher quality publications out via this thing. And then doing that is actually while sort of stopping almost all other public mentions of oil and gas companies. It was actually good for compliance from what we could tell in talking to different compliance folks and so on, as well as being good in terms of a revenue generator to essentially fund publishing even higher quality research on a more consistent basis and so on. So anyway, that’s the background. So now I have two hats. I’m in Bison interest, which is a oil and gas investment firm investing in primarily publicly traded small capital and gas companies. And I’m the author, the main author with a lot of help from a fantastic analyst and sort of team of folks of this Bison insights, which has come out with a bang. I mean, a couple of our ideas have done just extraordinarily well and have a lot more to come. And so anyway, that’s the. Oh, no.

Stuart Turley [00:07:31] What did we lose? His devices are not connected. We just lost him on for our 297, 299 visitors. Let’s wait while he gets reconnected here because he was on a roll. I love Josh. This is absolutely.

David Blackmon [00:07:49] Here he comes. He’s coming back. I love how you can see this happening in real time. Here he goes.

Josh Young [00:07:56] Yeah, yeah, it’s always fun. Yeah. What’s going on? I think maybe I need a new computer to use some of these subscription dollars for this.

David Blackmon [00:08:04] We’ve got your audio, but not your video. I don’t know. We got in the video.

Stuart Turley [00:08:08] Yeah, we got you back. You’re back 100%. Thank you very much. And Josh, thank you for your excitement. Can you hear us? Yes, I can. Okay, great. Not only do you have great hairline, I love everything that you, the years that I’ve known you, this is absolutely, I’ve never been in such a news cycle, Josh. This is absolutely the craziest. This morning, I just wrote an article. Let’s see, the title of it is, Putin says oil prices could soar past $100 without Russian crude. Holy smokes, Batman. And you take a look at the Siberian two pipeline that he has just negotiated with China. The 14% natural gas and LNG that EU relies on to stop their deindustrialization that they got going on right now. Is absolutely hilarious when you sit back and think that they could even lose all of that. Would you think we’d have $130 oil if Putin’s removed from the market and he’s laughing about it? I agree.

Josh Young [00:09:19] Yeah, I’m just looking for my 250 WTI hat. Here it is. Okay, it’s coming out. So this hat will actually be an understatement. Here we go. That’s always fun with the mirroring thing. This hat will be an underestimate if Putin actually pulled his oil off. He is just exaggerating. There’s no way Russia can’t afford to not sell oil to the broader market. But what Russia could afford to do is pull, they’re already producing less and selling less because of Ukraine’s kinetic sanctions on Russia. And so what they could do really easily is they could pull a little oil off and then their CPC pipe that they, an export facility they use to export Kazakh oil could magically go down for maintenance issues. And frankly, I mean, those would be not unexpected considering that Ukraine I think already bombed one aspect of that. And Russia could arguably say, hey, force majeure, we don’t want this thing to get bombed so we’re gonna turn it off for a while. Which actually is probably the highest impact thing they could do because it would stop a little of their oil exports and a lot of Kazakh oil exports and you would be back easily at 2022 high price levels almost immediately. Almost immediately. Yeah, so the other thing that people are not thinking about that I think is worth talking about on that vein is OPEC has been bringing oil back on the market, right? And part of the deal has been similar to 2018 that the US, Trump has this sort of lie going on. Again, wonderful things the Trump administration is doing on deregulation and so on. But unfortunately, there’s some stuff that’s hard to get away from when you run sort of decades of scams and all kinds of weird New York real estate stuff. Trump has this tendency to make promises that he doesn’t always follow through on fully. Again, I voted for the guy but I still, whatever, he just is who he is, he’s on TV. You can see a decade of him on TV, an apprentice, just whatever he is. He’s Trump. One thing he did in 2018 that he appears to be doing now is promising to cut off Iranian oil and he promised to do it in 2018 and didn’t and crashed the oil price in late 2018 and then he enforced it, enforced the sanctions and. It appears that’s what’s going on now too. We’ll see. But my theory is that similar to then, there’s a promise to the Saudis and their buddies that he will. For Serenian and other oil off the market and that they should be adding to their supplies in exchange for that and it appears that they fell for it again and the prices have fallen a lot since Trump came into office and I think there’s only a number of months that the Saudis and others will be willing to continue to fall for this and either they’re gonna go cut because the US is probably in a recession, at least a technical one, jobs data has gone negative, now the VLS has stopped, conveniently stopped reporting, similar to sort of some of Trump’s antics and some of his businesses way back when. Imagine, oh sorry, our printer broke the financials that you need in order to not default on our X, Y, Z business, whatever. You can’t default because we’re not printing, there’s no financials, similar idea. So anyway, I think that’s what’s going on. So I would watch what’s going on with Iran very closely and Israel and Gaza, there’s a lot going on there to watch that could lead to much lower total oil supplies even with OPEC bringing back on production and OPECs doesn’t make sense what they’re doing if you don’t think that they’re gonna have some sort of deal to get oil production cut off, maybe from Russia but almost definitely from Iran. So that’s the other big sort of aspect. I think people are just giving up on that I would be looking. Josh and David.

Stuart Turley [00:13:14] I’m gonna open this up as an open discussion and if you’re one of our 460 listeners already piling in, the question is, does OPEC actually have spare capacity that they’ve been unloading their cuts and is OPEc really capable of having that is a real question, Josh. I don’t know how much extra capacity they have. Iraq just opened up their pipeline that has been sitting vacant for a long time that they can now export and there’s a lot of interaction between Iraq and Iran. Iran is wanting to open and connect one more pipeline to allow them to sneak past sanctions and get Iraq, there’s some crazy stuff going on with the dart fleet and pipelines and they’re figuring all that out and yes. Do you really think OPEC and OPEc Plus have spare capacity?

Josh Young [00:14:18] I wanna hear David’s take on this first and then I’ll go.

David Blackmon [00:14:20] Well, I think there are a couple of countries in OPEC Plus that have spare capacity or least according to the data that is produced. I think Saudi Arabia still probably does have some. The UAE might and Russia probably does because Russia has been holding back volumes and having volumes forcibly held back by sanctions but other than them, it’s hard to know. I mean, I just, I think. Obviously because OPEC Plus has only been actually producing less than half of their advertised production increases, there’s real constraints within that cartel among most of the countries. But there are a few, just a few of the heavy hitters that I think probably still do have at least some spare capacity. What do you think, Josh?

Josh Young [00:15:13] So I think that the one other dynamic with OPEC and OPEc Plus right now and I used to joke that these guys had a bone saw they were sharpening for me and maybe this is gonna restart that or maybe not, we’ll see. Even mentioning the bone saw, I think, is very sort of off-size among certain folks. I think that Russia is basically out to some extent of their spare capacity. If you look at the estimates people had in 2022 and you look what had happened to Russian supplies up until Ukraine starting to do their kinetic sanctions, Russia appeared to have already been limited in terms of their exports. And this is based on both the analysis, there was significant analysis done by many, many different highly credible consultants and engineering firms and various other stuff in 22. So you take that stuff and you ignore what they’ve said since then, they get paid to do all kinds of stuff. Ignore that, you just look at the base analysis that was done that was highly technical where you saw estimates of a million barrels a day or more of capacity coming off. From then until now, there were some that said two to four, that’s not, those were wrong, but that million or so gets you down to about current Russian export levels before the impact of Ukrainian sanctions. So that would tell you that’s one way I sort of figure that. Another way is that some of the ostensible independent experts who either openly or the rumor has it are affiliated with some of these OPEC countries or funded by them or they’re their biggest clients or whatever. Have come out and publicly said that they think that Russia has no more spare capacity. And so a number of these different folks who are affiliated either directly openly or indirectly not sort of rumored. Have indicated that they think that Russia’s out and that one reason for Saudi and UAE and Kuwait who have invested a huge amount in their own spare capacity additions would be raising production is to get a reset of the calculated levels of quotas to then be able to, once they have that, they can kill potentially millions of barrels a day of plain spare capacity and then go back to cutting. But instead of having this nonsensical narrative of seven million barrels a day or whatever spare, it would be a narrative of two or two and a half percent. So I’m not saying we’re at zero, but prior to any additional additions or reversions of cuts this weekend or whatever, it looks like we might be at two or 2.5 million rather than seven. And so I think their goal that they’ve communicated indirectly is to sort of get to no spare capacity for a minute to show what’s happening and then be able to go cut, but then not have that extra five get counted against them in the paperwork.

David Blackmon [00:18:16] I don’t think we’re Russia’s concerned. Doesn’t it also kind of depend on how you define the term spare capacity because they’ve had a lot of their infrastructure has been hit now in the war. They have refineries that are at least partially offline. And so that limits how much, they may have spare producing capacity behind those refinerys, but the limitations now on the refining capacity and damage pipelines limits how much they can put on the market. So. I mean, to me, it kind of also depends on how you even define that term. And that’s gonna be constantly changing as long as this war goes on.

Josh Young [00:18:54] Yeah, I think the way I think about it is that they already had lost about a million barrels a day just through natural declines and sort of lower quality field management and redirection of labor and capital to the war effort versus the oil production effort. And so those numbers for me were before the Ukrainian attacks. And so then it’s just a question of, hey, I’m sympathetic to the arguments that Ukrainian attacks so far have had a limited physical impact because there was so much extra refining capacity and so much export capacity, partly because production was already down and exports were already down. So it’s sort of easy to see everyone would agree, I think that there was extra capacity in the system in terms of empty pipe and in terms. Not full utilization on the refineries. And so I think now it actually sort of weirdly, Ukraine sort of throws a wrench into the rest of OPEC pluses plans. Because if the goal was to show that Russia can’t produce more, but now Ukraine hit some Russian refinerys. It’s a little murkier and it doesn’t really fully accomplish what they’re hoping. And I think the risk to oil bulls in the short term is that that might mean that the OPEC plus folks keep production higher for longer in order to show the full impact and take away some of that question mark before they then go ahead and cut or not, depending on sort of what’s going on. I do think they’re likely to cut in the sense that I don’t think they want to be fully supplying the market. I think they want to have some spare capacity and the amount that they’ve spent to have that spare capacity is enormous. And so I don’t think they wanna take their tens of billions or more of investment in spare capacity and waste it in order to just get an incremental few percent or something of supply on a sort of a country basis. So that’s how I see it.

Stuart Turley [00:20:49] Well, David and Josh, let me ask this question because the Chevron just had a fire in California this morning or yesterday last night. And that brings up the disaster that Gavin Newsom has absolutely devastated California. California is a national emergency waiting to happen, a national security issue because they import ballpark 70% of their oil. They’ve got another refinery going, fire going on. They’ve 20% of their capacity coming off. Those are some of my biggest stories on energynewsbeat.co. Those things go nuts on California. And Gavin Newsom is very much like Mallorca’s, a national security risk to the United States. How do you see, because they have to import their part, California, whether they like it or not, is part of the international oil market since they import so much. Kern County, they’re trying, Gavin Newsom goes, I’m gonna pretend I’m going to put my magic hands up and I’m to pretend to allow you guys to drill Kern County only. That’s not gonna solve any problems. How do feel about California?

Josh Young [00:22:06] David, you wanna?

David Blackmon [00:22:07] I mean, that was, so to clarify, that was at the El Segundo refinery that Chevron operates. It’s their only remaining refinery in California. It’s the biggest refinery on the West Coast, 276,000 barrels per day of capacity. It supplies 40% of all the jet fuel to all military and civilian air operations on the west coast. It’s a highly critical bit of infrastructure that Chevron has. Said that it has no intention of closing, at least no current plans to close, despite the fact that the Phillips 66 and Valero refineries are being shut down over the coming year. So it’s a critical piece of infrastructure. It sits directly adjacent to LAX Airport and the Los Angeles port facility right in between them. It’s been there for decades. It’s an aging piece of structure. And to me, the big question here now is, this incident, which is gonna bring terrible PR for Chevron, what does that do to their internal discussions about whether or not to even keep trying to operate that refinery? And what does mean for the national security interests of the United States if Chevron decides, hey, we don’t wanna operate this thing anymore. We’ll try to sell it, but if we don’t have any bidders, we’re gonna shut it down. I think this is a huge event that happened last night. That we’re gonna see a lot of news about in the months to come because of the critical nature of its operations there to everyone on the West Coast.

Josh Young [00:23:49] Yeah, California is a mess. I’m a happy emigrant from California. We have a new title for the podcast, guys. It’ll get a lot of views, I guess, but everyone sort of knows it. So I don’t know if that’s such a surprise. It’s like New York City being a mess, but then they’re gonna go vote for a socialist to be mayor anyway. So I get flack for talking about this stuff. People are like, oh, stick to energy. It’s this is energy. These guys are destroying demand. They’re destroying the local economies. It’s really, it’s terrible. I mean, California is the ultimate natural resources curse. People of California are so lucky. They’re a part of the United States of America with limitations and constitutional boundaries because otherwise, man, they’re basically just be Venezuela in terms of how they voted and the policies and so on. And so, there was real, there was actually another news item that came out yesterday where I think it was Schellenberger came out this, where apparently. There’s a million dollars a year per homeless person that gets siphoned into these NGOs and other sort of, actually, my brother was associated with this where he was running a set of detoxes and rehabs and so on. And he was too successful. And so we ended up getting sued and shut down by the state and insurance companies because his recovery rate was like 50% when the recovery rate for these things is normally like 5%. He actually cared and wanted people out of his program. And this was a huge problem because it was taking away from all the theft and the grift and all this other stuff in California. So anyway, I’ve seen this like very close in terms of just how big the mess is. So anyway so back to direct energy questions. So yeah, I can’t even imagine how expensive it’s gonna be to rebuild this refinery if it does get redone. And so, there’s real problems. I do think that Newsom has realized this and. You know, he’s been highly effective where he’s chosen to in terms of. Pulling back some of the like socialist communist nonsense. Like if you remember a couple years ago, they had the head of China, the dictator of China come in to meet with Newsom in San Francisco. And in the two weeks leading up to it, they kicked all the homeless people out, they cleaned up the streets, they cut down on crime. And it turned out that they could actually fully control all these things that they claimed were systemic problems and they blamed Trump. They blamed all these other things and it turned out it was fully in their control and they were just choosing not to do it. And so I think. Energy’s gonna be harder, but I think it’s a similar idea where, you know, right now they’re choosing to start giving a lot more drilling permits. And I don’t think, I think energy is harder, but I do think that they’re about to go play the nonsensical, oh, we’re pro energy and we’re good at policy because, look, our drilling red count went from five to 20, which is very doable. I got asked by a Reuters editor who’s brilliant and she was asking me, hey, like, how does this happen if oil prices are down? And the answer is, well, if you go from like 80 rigs running to five, there’s a right number in there because of regulatory and tax, there’s the right number and there it’s probably not five and it doesn’t have to do with oil, it just has the oil price that has to do with hey, what’s the minimum number of rigs you need to run or sustain existing operations? And so I think they’ll get that bump and then they’re gonna go claim credit for it. And so, yeah, I mean, he’s been good for Texas to some extent, I think he’s gonna be great for responding to the LinkedIn comment. I think it’s gonna great for these drilling rig operators and for some of the producers from here, this very, very low point, but there are ramifications from running bad policies for a long time that you don’t get to undo immediately and I think this refinery fire explosion, which is tragic and terrible, I think the aftermath is gonna be another sort of black eye for the Newsom administration in California. It’s gonna cost them way more, it’s gonna take them way longer and like you said, there’s a risk that Chevron walks. I will let them know if they’re looking for someone to be the face of their refinery, I will happily assume operations subject to hundreds of millions of subsidies and regulatory waivers and all the rest of the…

David Blackmon [00:28:12] I’ll be your VP of operations, I’d be glad to do that.

Stuart Turley [00:28:15] I’ll do that. I’ll work with you as well. Hey, I got a question though for you because Kern County, you bring up a great point Josh and that is his pretending to make this facade, I’m gonna pretend to give drilling, they went from 3000 permits a year to 12 and in Kern County they’ve made this push in order to get and our great friend of the show, Mike Umbro has been out there at the lead charge on this and his friend George, they’re out there trying to get this done but if they get Kern County, which used to be a huge asset for oil and gas production in the United States. It won’t even fill up that pipeline, they’re within a few thousand barrels of shutting down the main artery to get to the refineries in California. I don’t know that Kern County alone can keep that pipeline open. I’m trying to do the math and I went to Oklahoma State Josh and that’s why you saw me bring you some good deals and some bad deals. I’m trynna do the maths and the maths ain’t that mathin’ up man so anyway, I don’t know.

Josh Young [00:29:26] Yeah well, I think if you can get, that’s where the 20 number comes from and I got some real pushback on that. People are like, oh are they gonna add any rigs? And the reality is look, if you’re already running rigs in California, you already have operations there, you’re all ready subject to their ridiculous regulatory scrutiny and absurd tax structures and all kinds of nonsense. If you’re a ready doing that and that’s were your assets are, so then you’ve already dealt with the big part of the headache, then it’s just a question of optimizing the wind down of your operations and so if you’re the CRC of the world, especially now that they’re merging with Barry, you’re gonna go, if you can get more permits, you’re going to go drill a bunch of wells that it’s not even really about growing your production, it’s about slowing the decline, fixing some of your midstream facilities and gathering systems, rationalizing some of you overhead and some of the other costs. Yeah, maybe your production will grow from a very, very low point. You know, it’ll go from a historical, let’s say for CRC, what is it, like 300,000 barrels a day on that total asset base over time, down to now, what is 70 or something thousand barrels a day, maybe you bounce it up to 100, it’s still way down from the high, but you get it to a point where you’re able to maintain your gathering systems for another 10 years, able to maintain some of these pipelines and so on and so the total cost impact, the total sort of, sorry, cost savings impact and the push out of the asset retirement obligations are so significant that it makes it worth actually going and running some of these rigs, even at 60 or $65 WTI. So again, does this threaten the global story on oil? Absolutely not. It’s not even close to moving the needle. Does it move the needle if you’re one of the top two rig operators and you have a bunch of rigs ready to go? Absolutely, it’s great. And then does it move the needle for some of these upstream guys who have suffered for so long to be able to maybe get some permits and then who knows, maybe some subsidies. It’s California, it’s like red light, green light. Red light, they destroy you. Green light, they give you money and they, so I don’t know. It seems like it’s green light for the energy guys in California for now and I don’t like being a recipient of state aid or whatever, but hey, I can invest in a business that’s been 90% destroyed by the state from its ridiculous owner of stuff and now it’s gonna get a 50% uplift from here so it’s still only 80% destroyed by the State, sure. I’ll take it for now and if it’s a small. For me personally and for funds I advise, I’d rather have that be a small portion of exposure and then have there be a lot of financial and operating leverage to that than have it be a large exposure or go actually own some of these things. Other than if they’ll give me the title for this refinery and then give me hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies and tax credits and regulatory waivers and so on, that I will do. Happily, I’ll come in, I’ll become a California taxpayer again, I’ll deal with the oil headache. I will take that refinery if Chevron doesn’t want it subject to those conditions. That is an offer and California, if you’re listening, whoever’s listening. I’ll take it, no problem. I don’t think they’ll take me up on it, but I would have.

David Blackmon [00:32:31] Yeah, dear Congress, you need to start working on the El Segundo Recovery Act of 2020. What is this? 25, yes, so we can take it up.

Josh Young [00:32:40] I’ll set up a public company, I’ll let the Trump juniors and so on invest 10% of it. The government can have 10%, the federal government can 10% of it too. They’ll get $2 billion of energy loans and whatever and give 10% to the federal government. The way these deals have worked, the Trump children and their associated funds get some, I don’t exactly know how that’s legal, but however that’s done legally, they can have it legally and I’ll go run it.

Stuart Turley [00:33:08] Josh, all these years I’ve known you, this is why I love having you on my podcast. I just, I’d give you a hug, but this has got to be a COVID man hug. Let’s take a look at this question from Rodney. Rodney’s Cool Cat on LinkedIn. Josh, how motivated do you think oil and gas to debunking CO2 alarmism? Do you think they’ve got self-imposed barriers perceiving a drop in price if scarcity is reduced or perhaps fear of buckling the ESG concern? Let me just throw this out there. I think ESG has done a outstanding job in one aspect in oil and guess. The governance side of ESG, two sides, the environmental and the governance side. US oil and gas companies have done an excellent job giving money back to their investors over the last 10 years and they’ve done an outstanding job. ESG has been good for the oil and guess industry with the environmental, taking care of the environment. We’re the best in the world and the governments in giving moneyback. Investing in oil and gas, it seems like Wall Street suddenly woke up last Friday and said, maybe we ought to invest in some oil and guess. And I’m like, wow, that’s kind of cool. But anyway, I just want to throw that out there and want to get both David, your thought on the CO2 and your thought this Josh as well.

Josh Young [00:34:41] That’s for Josh. I’ll let Josh go first. Sure, so Stu, I think I disagree with you on this one. I think ESG has been terrible both for the planet and for the country and for oil and gas. I think that what we’ve seen is the slow degradation and destruction of the wonderful legacy that Rockefeller left us with these oil majors. And I think we’ve see the bureaucratization and the morass of professional management nonsense through these giant organizations. And I think we’ve seen this perversion of these organizations and Rockefeller just absolutely spinning in his grave. Similar frankly to his descendants and foundations and so on. The stuff that they supported and that they support now versus his values and what he supported. I went to University of Chicago, Rockefeller funded University of Chicago to be a free-thinking organization, an institution that would be sort of focused on the good and the right and the non-political and just to find the life of the mind. And you look at the stuff that these guys support and it’s completely the opposite. So I think that’s a good analog. Like these organizations are essentially becoming like the state education institutions that push the wokeism and all kinds of weird sort of values, as well as like some of these Ivy League schools that have also been co-opted and sort of gone that direction. And why does that matter? Well, I guess it’s good for oil and gas that you have the Exxons and Chevrons and whatever the world doing absolutely nonsensical value-destroying garbage and lobbying for that and co-opting these lobbying groups and pushing that. So I guess that’s good because it’s pulled away some capital from upstream oil and guests. But really it’s very bad in my assessment because what I think these companies should be doing, and I’ve worked on a white paper on this. I should probably actually just do the full analysis but I think what these guys should be doing is what Rockefeller did, which is focus on their operations, shut up, sit down, cut all their nonsense out, spin out their international operations, spin out all their other stuff, focus on being the very, very best integrated, fully integrated operators that they can be. Not win through lobbying, not win through whatever nonsense, win by having low-cost assets where they have control of the minerals and then control of wellbores and control of pipes and control of the refineries and the chemical plants and the gas stations and just win by being low-cost integrated operations like what Rockefeller did. People have the wrong lessons from Rockefeller and these organizations could not be further from what was accomplished with Standard Oil. And I think that’s where you get lost and into all this sort of weird flavor of the moment. And yeah, did Exxon and Chevron do a better job of this than BP and Shell? Sure, but that’s a very, very low bar. And when you look at the tens of billions of dollars that each of those organizations have written down from bad deals and nonsensical investments based on the flavor of the day. And what they’re still doing, like, come on, give me a break, that Exxon and Chevron need to fight with each other publicly over a non-operated interest offshore Guiana where you have Venezuela ready to go invade potentially and you have all these questions on corruption and you almost like communist-style ruling party in Guiana right now with 99% of the vote and like just complete nonsense. What are they doing? Like, who cares? Focus on your enormous assets you’ve spent giant amounts of money on and get actual low costs of production. Stop lying about using like weird refinery byproducts as supposedly like the new age of completions. It’s just all kinds of, they’re so invested in their complete garbage. And honestly, I think it’s to the point where it’s impossible for them to back up and say, hey, we’re just gonna focus on being the low cost integrated winner. And they’re so focused on all this other nonsense. I think it’s actually hard. I think they need new boards and new management teams. I was sort of sympathetic to the engine number one guys. I thought that it was the wrong direction they were suggesting, but you look up, I mean, you look at like a Porter’s Five Forces, you look some of the sort of basic business strategies and they’re neither. They’re neither the low cost provider, nor are they sort of the highly specialized best or whatever. They’re just sort of in this like strategic middle. And so these guys desperately need to fix their own stuff. And you can tell them people have a problem with their own step when they get involved in all kinds of other nonsense. And they really need to just go and they need to revitalize their refinery. So they stop blowing up. This is timely considering up in California, Chevron’s problem is in California, it’s their Gulf Coast refineries and chemical plants that blow up and whatever and not owning their infrastructure. Like what are they doing? This is not Rockefeller’s vision. It’s so far from it. And it’s led to high operating costs and high development costs and just nonsense. Fire 80% of the people hire the very, very best people, make them accountable at the business unit level and be the best producer and the best transporter and the better refiner, fix their refinerie so they stop blowing up and catching on fire every year. Anyway, that’s my diatribe, but the ESG nonsense is I think a symptom of a very deep problem in these integrated oil companies. And I think they need to solve it. And if they don’t solve it, they’re terrible investments. Probably I should own puts on them as sort of a bet on as a protection against any sort of future oil price crash, but also just on a bet that these very sort of sick organizations that are decrepit and sort of involved in all these value strong things will underperform versus some other organizations that are owner operator, you know, led and run that you’re aligned with your shareholders and that actually. And again, I feel strongly about this stuff, but just when you study the tens of billions of dollars these guys lose at a time on deals and when you look at their accounting, including the losses that they’ve incurred and booked, I mean, it’s just astonishingly bad and totally inappropriate relative to what their mission is as fiduciaries for their shareholders. So anyway, that’s get off my soapbox, but that’s my problem with those guys.

Stuart Turley [00:41:10] Josh, not only am I gonna give you a hug, but I’m gonna say that you agreed with me because I left out the social portion of that because I was about to go on the same tirade. So I’m going to back this up and then I’m to play you again and I’m a superimpose my friends on you and do the same time rating. That’s great. Great job, Josh. That was outstanding.

Josh Young [00:41:35] Can we talk for a minute? Can we talk about how Imperial Oil has massively outperformed its peers, it’s controlled by Exxon and how they’re laying off their Calgary office after these people have massively out-performed for them and how just foul that is. I mean, I’m all for business rationalization and cutting costs and aligning performance with shareholders and with organization, but when you do that, you should be rewarded for it and the people involved with it should be not fired and have their stuff shuffled off to some other geography and some other place. I know to me that was probably the real impetus for me doing all of that, getting on that soap box. It’s not just the ESG, it’s also like the punishment of the best performing people. The Imperial Oil people who just got fired or getting laid off are probably the best-performing business unit in the entirety of ExxonMobil across everything and here they are getting punished for actually living up to Rockefeller’s vision as they go allocate capital, all kinds of nonsense and all kinds. I think it’s because they’re in Canada. I think it’s because they’re making the Exxon people here in the U.S. Look terrible because they are doing such a good job. So of course we need to fire them and go, and again, look like the very senior people in these organizations are very well known. They’re always on CNBC or whatever, but who cares? They’re not paying me. I don’t own their stocks and frankly I have a First Amendment right to say whatever and they are really, I think, it’s just so foul to go fire those people. It’s not capitalism. It’s just like crony nonsense to do that sort of thing and I don’t even know any of those people. I can’t name a single person that I know right now with Imperial Oil who’s getting laid off in Canada and it’s still wrong, no economic tie and I think just it’s a symptom of a deep corruption and deep sort of move away from the base sort of idea of what we’re supposed to be doing, which is profit oriented capitalism, shareholder oriented capitalism. We saw it with Rockefeller and I think that news, he’s spinning in his grave, seeing the best people in his organization getting fired, essentially punished for delivering the best results in the organization and again, you don’t need to even look at the accounting metrics. Just look at the share price performance for Imperial Oil over the last, let’s say three years, five years and compare it to almost anyone. I mean, truly impressive and a truly sad day to see those people, instead of being feted and given extra bonuses and extra responsibilities, seeing those people laid off is just truly reprehensible and clearly not capitalist. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not good and I think it’s just this symptom of this much bigger problem with these large sort of government almost affiliated organizations that are so focused on this ESG nonsense and all this other stuff. So anyway, that’s, I’ll get off the set-box.

Stuart Turley [00:44:42] Do you think they’re going to be when Alberta becomes a 51st state and they’ve just sold off one of their best divisions? So just thought I’d ask that question if Alberta becomes the state since they’re not.

David Blackmon [00:44:57] I mean, that would be something. Yeah, that’d be really something. Can I, I want to address the first part of Rodney’s question though, real quick. Oh, you bet. Which is how motivated do you think oil and gas are debunking CO2 alarmism? The quick answer to that is not at all, okay? Not even a little bit. API, I mean couldn’t even be bothered to offer comments on the EPA’s effort to rescind the stupid, idiotic, ungrounded. Endangerment finding on carbon dioxide for crying out loud. And that’s all at the behest of the major oil companies that make up its membership. So they’re not focused on that at all. I saw this all developing in five and six, 2005, 2006, when I worked for Shell. It was in the early days of this ESG mania. And they were creating a whole department made up of people who believed all this stuff, right? They’re all nice people, really smart people who just were not focused on the core business whatsoever. And it’s. It’s become an enormous operation inside of Shell, still is. And every one of these other big major oil companies. So they’re not focused on debunking any of it at all, okay? And that’s been a problem with the oil and gas industry since Rockefeller died, basically, is none of the executives, senior executives at the big companies want to invest their personal capital into defending the industry they’re in. With a few exceptions, Chris Wright is obviously one of them. Nick Duleus. You can go down and name a few. They’re mainly an independent producers, smaller companies or service companies. But at the big major oil companies and the ultra big independents. So that’s just irrelevant. It’s not part of their mindset. And there’s all kinds of pressures they’re under that make them operate in that fashion. And it’s very unfortunate for the industry as a whole.

Stuart Turley [00:46:49] I just want to throw this out. My granddad was the chief geologist for Sinclair Oil when they discovered the North Slope. And he was attributed for discovering the North slope, which Alaska has been now just starting a resurgence. But Sinclaire threw his ideas out and ExxonMobil bought all the rights and Sinclar went almost distinct like the dinosaur.

David Blackmon [00:47:17] So at Burlington resources, we ended up inheriting what little was left of Sinclair and a lot of really good people from that operation in the 80s and 90s.

Stuart Turley [00:47:27] Anyway, I thought that was really, really good. We’re having some more comments here from peanut butter PB. Methane leakage is a new weapon against the NGOs. The finance sector expects ESG standards to strengthen to include monitoring and capture. What are the key challenges? That’s a big one. And I agree with Josh on this. NGOs need to go away. And I think that I’m hoping that we do shut them all down since they’ve lost USAID funding. I think there was a lot of climate change nonsense funding and I think the Trump week, much like shark week when he was at the UN last week was too hilarious. That speech was great. I think we may see some changes there. Wanting to leave you guys to answer that one.

Josh Young [00:48:20] Chris Wright I thought was a really good advocate for oil and gas industry and climate while he was CEO of Liberty. But I have to say I’ve been really disappointed by what’s happened since he got into his position as the Energy Secretary. And it’s relevant to this last comment because there have been some very weird rules and very weird financings and very, very other things going on. You have the government going and funding hard rock, lithium mine, or I guess soft rock, but still just very weird stuff that should have not happened with someone competent. And then you had Chris Wright go and hang out with his family. Paul, I disagree with that.

David Blackmon [00:49:01] I don’t agree with that at all. I think the military has lithium needs and it’s just part of their effort to reshore the supply chains for key energy minerals.

Josh Young [00:49:11] That move was totally justified. It’s a very high cost mechanism for producing lithium. And we actually have a lot of resource here that’s already getting funded and already getting developed. And so… Again, it’s this weird problem where on the road to serfdom, there are some excuses for doing various government involvement things in private industry, but for the most part, when you get the government in, you end up with these weird alignments and weird incentives to do things that end up being destructive on a lot of mechanisms. But the big, actually, it is funny you do the thumbs up. My big problem with Chris Wright is that they come in, Trump has this drill baby drill narrative, and then he goes to Saudi Arabia and stands by the first well that was funded by Americans, that was actually a dry hole, but it was the start of a big discovery. I think it was a dryhole. It was just the first-well drill. He stands and gives a thumbs up. Those assets were nationalized by Saudi Arabia in the 70s. And yeah, they paid a tiny amount for it, but the estimate is that they paid $110,000. That was the number I saw in the article. Maybe it’s not exactly that, but directionally basically stolen. They did pay something, but $110 thousand of the value today for Aramco, and maybe now that Aramcos stock’s fallen, it’s won $5,000, but still, they basically stole our stuff. Yeah, it was on their land, but we invested in it. We had a contract with them and they stole it. And you have him giving a big thumbs up on that. I mean, just this whole perversion of America first in exchange for these sort of dubious, very short-term benefits from people who say they’re our friends, but then take our stuff and don’t stand up for us where relevant. I don’t know, I think it’s very sad and concerning. It’s very bipartisan. It’s been sort of this direction that we’ve gone down for a number of decades. And I thought it was very unfortunate, and that was the moment where I could tell that it was just all the nonsense that he had said for years that I agreed with was not indicative of who he was because the Chris Wright who wrote all those things, said all those thing, is not the Chris right that would go and give a two thumbs up on this enormous, essentially national asset that American firms identified. Developed, discovered, and then had taken for one 10,000th of what it was worth. So again, just not just completely the other Marxist.

David Blackmon [00:51:43] Do you think there’s any value? That all happened half a century ago. That nationalization of those assets was literally half a centory ago. Don’t you think it’s a little unfair to judge the current energy secretary in 2025 for not, I mean, what was he gonna do? Say something nasty to the host for that, what was obviously a high priority meeting for the president, right? So I’m not sure it’s really fair to judge.

Josh Young [00:52:10] Jim, for that. I completely disagree. I think that the things that we do now are indicative of our values now. And him endorsing the Saudis having taken this field 50 years ago is a question about now and priorities now and signaling. Who we are and what our values are and we stand for. And so I don’t know that it matters so much when it happened. It matters if we are in favor or opposed to something. And I think that the theft of our resources, particularly of. Privately developed and discovered resources by our companies, which again is sort of the American concept. It’s not this sort of fascist state owned, state controlled, whether it’s fascist or communist, but those are not American values. Those are foreign values.

David Blackmon [00:53:02] Well, let me ask you this then. So the president just had this state dinner with the king of England. The British burned down our Capitol building in 1812, which was two centuries ago. So, I mean, are we to condemn president Trump for doing the state dinner with the British king, you know, who we sacrificed thousands of lives, American lives for to gain our independence from a British king. And who burned down our Capitol building in 1812. So, I mean, what’s the difference? These things, at some point, you have to deal with current realities, don’t you? I mean. I just think it’s unfair to condemn Chris Wright for that photo op. I just don’t think. So I think it.

Josh Young [00:53:47] So I think it’s great. Really fair. I think is great to clarify this. So I like it’s exactly, this is a very important clarification because I think like what I’m saying could be misconstrued. I think if Trump took a picture in front of a picture of the White House being burned down in 1812, and it was a commemoration of that, and it in the UK, right? And he went with the King of England, not the prime minister ever, but he went the King Of England and gave a two thumbs up by a picture of the white house being burned down at a memorial to that in the U.K. I would also have a problem with that. So that I would have a problem with. Chris Wright meeting with the Saudis, I obviously have no problem with, that’s very constructive. Chris Wright giving a thumbs up by the sight of the expropriation of enormous. Privately held assets. Again, there’s a huge difference between those two things. It’s not the same thing to meet with someone and to give two thumbs up on the thing that they did that was horrible for us. And so again, it’s like America first versus America last. I think those are actually very important distinctions. Symbols matter, things matter, and there are distinctions, and so it’s not.

Stuart Turley [00:55:01] I agree with both of you and I am no longer a Republican. I’m an American first. And if you’re not voting American first, get primary. Let’s take a look at this one. I don’t know who this LinkedIn user is. Do you have a view on the hypothesis of U.S. Data centers, demand will be fed by gas and constrain LNJ going to the Atlantic, or is there just so much extra gas? Demand will be absorbed. This is a great question. And I’ve seen some great information on bison interest. This fantastic substack about different things out there, and we want to make sure that we get your advertising. We’ve got just a few more minutes here, guys. And Josh, can you give us your thought on AI and data center and LNG and natural gas?

Josh Young [00:55:49] Sure, it’s a great question. Yeah, we put out some stuff. We had some various industry experts come on and do interviews on it too to try to calibrate sort of my own view and my team’s view versus some other folks involved in planning and analysis and dealing with some of the hardest problems associated with this. So I love this question because this is sort of the optimistic demand case, which is there’s so many people who are pessimistic on gas demand. There’s been this running gas bear thesis basically for the last decade, but really, let’s say since 2021, it’s been, I think Goldman came out with it publicly in 22, but they had been writing about it in 21, that there’d be this massive glut in LNG supply and that therefore it would crash. The price and actually back up natural gas here in the US. This is the opposite of that. This is that demand is so high in the U.S. For data center is that it would limit the supply. Excuse me, and honestly, I don’t think either of those are right. So I think demand is gonna grow here. It’s gonna grow a lot more than people think. I think supply will grow here on the natural gas side, maybe more than people think. I think we’re gonna get a wonderful price environment for natural gas. That’s gonna be probably in sort of the plus or minus $4.50 in MCF at Henry Hubb. Plus or minus $0.50 plus inflation. And so I think that’s sort of my base expectation. I think it’s phenomenal for many natural gas producers. It’s great for the services companies because we’re gonna need a lot more gas rigs running in order to accomplish that. It’s Great for the pipeline guys. It’s Greek for the LNG facilities because under most circumstances is LNG facilities, despite what the CEO of Shell just said, saying, hey, they’re not gonna be economic. I think they ended up being economic. I think we’re in for a really nice. Almost Goldilocks type scenario for natural gas here in the US. So I think the data center demand is good, but it’s not gonna be as big as it would take in order to pull back supply. I think that gas supply is gonna be great at $4.50. You can drill a lot of stuff in the mid con. You can draw a lot stuff in them, the Appalachian area in the Permian and various other spots. And so I think it actually looks really good, but I’m not a doomer sort of on either side on the gas side. I think there’s gonna be a lot of supply and I think we’ll just have a little higher price than people are thinking. What do you think David?

David Blackmon [00:58:10] Oh, I totally agree with all that. I think supply is the enormity of the resource is just so immense that I hope we get up to 450 prices. I think that’d be good for everybody if we did. I just, the history in the past is that we get to that point and then we activate 20, 30 additional drilling rigs and drill the price right down to two, $3. So maybe they’ll avoid it this time, but the resource is so much more immense. Then the reserve estimates indicate it’s just incredible. So we’re blessed with natural gas.

Stuart Turley [00:58:47] I wanna give this one right here. Chris Wright, again, I’ve known Chris Wright for as long as I’ve know you Josh. So I absolutely love him. He’s, this was Liberty Energy’s bettering humanities and he really does have the heart for energy. And I just wanna give him a shout out here. I love this comment. Give me Chris Wright energy secretary in the UK is Ed Miliband. Ed Miliband is actually like a muppet or is it Wallace and Gromit? Do you remember those?

David Blackmon [00:59:17] Gromit, yeah.

Stuart Turley [00:59:18] He is more like a Wallace and Gromit character. Ed Miliband single-handedly is destroying the UK. Yeah, and Keir Starmer loves it. You gotta love that. And then the two AI. Chris, we’re winding down here. I mean, not Chris, Josh was speaking of Chris, but we’re whining down here, tell people how people find you and how people can get in.

Josh Young [00:59:43] I’m in touch with you. Sure, yeah. So for my, I have sort of these two hats. So I run this investment management company, Bison Interests. And if you go to bisoninterest.com, you can find out more about that. It’s really relevant for sort of accrediting Qualified investors and again, none of this is meant as an offer, solicitation or recommendation but since you asked, that’s where people can find that. And then we launched a sub-stack and a separate media company called Bison Insights and so bisoninsights.info or just Google Bison insights and you can find it. And then one exciting thing to reference what David just mentioned in terms of the potential for another boom in gas production and bust in price, we’re going to launch a little merch store. There’s a few items that I have from way back when and so we’re going to start offering these bumper stickers that say, Dear God, give me another gas boom, I promise not to blow it again. So, I’ve been looking for those everywhere, wasn’t able to find them so we are going to start off offering those, along with the oil equivalent, a couple of 250 WTI hats and some other stuff. And again, it’s less about making the money, I don’t know, I’ll probably end up just donating that money to some food bank or something here in Houston. I’ll probably cost you more to make. Yeah, I don’t know, maybe we’ll overcharge for them and just donate the proceeds or whatever, but I think it’ll be fun and I think that is a concern and we’ll see. But I think for right now, that data center demand is big and then someone left a comment, maybe I’ll close on this, none of these data centers are getting run on solar and batteries. They’re saying it, they’re claiming it. Just not happening, not even close to the reality. You listen to the recent comments from the CEOs and you listen to the folks that are building it. Even the folks who are supposedly on the clean energy side or whatever, this Fermi IPO where they’re like, oh yeah, we’re going to do nuclear, but first we’re gonna go build multiple, what is it, gigawatts or whatever of gas power gen. So, we are going to build that, but yeah, I promise in a decade we’re going to have some SMRs and some other stuff. We have the land for it. So, when they figure out that technology in 2045, we’ll build it. So anyway, none of it, there’s no evidence that nuclear is going to supply any of this stuff for a long time.

Stuart Turley [01:01:57] There’s two things real quick. I think you have great comments in here. Mel Ban isn’t the technology illiterate. He’s the muppet. He’s that beeper. How fun. That’s great. I just wrote a couple of articles on the gas turbine situation that we really need take, and I’ve been interviewing AI data center guys that are installing all this stuff and you take a look at the gas turbine. It is the supply chain issue. There’s a five year wait, long term wait out there and that is an issue, but there are workarounds out there through micro grids and our great American technology and all of it’s going to kick in. You can take a jet engine, throw it out there, make some modifications and then use those as backup. So, I’m all in on getting those done. There’s going be a workaround.

David Blackmon [01:02:47] That’s what they’re doing at the cameras for GROC technology outside of Memphis, Tennessee.

Stuart Turley [01:02:57] Jet engines that they’re lining out there. I just interviewed the guy doing that out there, so.

Josh Young [01:03:05] And the manufacturers are ramping up their supplies. So, there’s three main turbine manufacturers for PowerGen and at least one of them, I think it’s GE, Vernova has increased their supply. I think, it’s going to be delivered for next year. Yeah, Mitsubishi is working on it and then there’s one other and they’re all either already ramping it, running extra assembly lines or they’re in the process of expanding them and they’re about to. So, I actually think we’re going to end up with a glut of all this stuff, but it’s going to use so much natural gas. And frankly, for the manufacturers, it’s wonderful because they’re getting multiple years of orders and so on, but we’re in this amazing cycle. I don’t know if it’s a super cycle, probably not, but for natural gas demand and natural gas PowerGen, I mean, it’s actually weirdly accelerating and we haven’t seen almost any of that impact right now. So, I think that’s where a lot of the skepticism around this really affecting price. But I think on the PowerGen as well as on the LNG exports where they’re doing these modular facilities, both of those are giving the producers, the off takers of gas, the ability to ramp at an accelerating pace. But the demand up until now has been growing linearly and so I think when you get that acceleration, that’s when you start to see 450 gas. And I think we’ll overshoot for periods. And then we’ll have these things come off for periods where we’ll undershoot. And that’s where I think, we’re going to get that. The bulls for gas, the super bulls may be very disappointed, but the bulls thinking that price is going to get a little higher than the forward curve. I think David, that where you’ll be positively surprised. That’d be fantastic.

David Blackmon [01:04:38] That’d be fantastic for everybody.

Stuart Turley [01:04:41] And I’ve been tracking the oil rigs and you can see that the oil rigs are coming down, but the natural gas rigs or flat. I mean, they are just constantly working and working through the system. So it just also depends on the different kinds of plays. I would bring this last question up to you too. How long do you think the Schumer shutdown will stay on? I wanted to get, I love the memes going around. I’m sorry. I think this is one of the funniest things on the planet. I had to get in here. I was going to have a sombrero, but Josh, how long do you think the Schumer shutdown is going to be? How long do think the schumer shutdown’s going to be?

Josh Young [01:05:26] So I’ve read different things about it. One thing that was exciting, so there are folks who are critical to the functioning of the United States of America who may not be getting paid right now. So to those people, I express my sincerest sympathies and I hope that they get paid soon. So that’s not okay. There is an upside from this, which is maybe I’ve read, and I don’t know how true this is. This is not my area of expertise, but I’ve read that if this goes on for more than 60 days, it could be the impetus to go fire a bunch of the folks who are not those critical workers and who governments had, the administration’s had trouble firing up until now through Doge or whatever. To the extent that we can go fire the sort of middle management layer and a bunch of these folks that are not so productive, similar to what I was saying about Exxon and Chevron and so on, I think bureaucratic creep is one of the biggest risks of, you know. Ultimately, of fiscal issues and, you know, mismanagement and poor governance. And so if we can really cut a bunch of that sort of bloat, and again, while maintaining the people who do critical, I’m not an anarchist. The government has an important role in our lives and in society. Those people need to be paid and need to be kept on. Unfortunately, we have a lot of other folks who are not that, and it would be wonderful if in 61 days those people get fired. Actually, which tells me that probably this goes 45 days, and then the Democrats freak out, get worried about those people who are their donors and their voters losing their jobs, and they’ll end up caving. But that’s my bet, probably 45 days. What do you guys think? 45 days, David.

Stuart Turley [01:07:05] How about you? Next Tuesday. I’m more in with David because there are social programs that end in 10 days, and the Democrats rely on those social voters. So I’m guessing that we only need about four or five of them. And I did not have on my bingo card, actually, Fetterman showing up as being the state’s… The voice of reason. Democrat party. Holy smokes, Batman. That man is absolutely hilarious. You know, in my day job, I evaluate oil and gas deals. Is this well worth drilling? Is this one worth drilling. Bring me your deals. I almost want to be, what’s that? Bring me that Monty Python, you know, bring out your dad. Bring me, bring me your deal because I think oil and the gas, I love oil and gass deals. Bring me you’re deals. I want to evaluate them and then get them to people like Josh.

David Blackmon [01:08:00] I just want, I just Want Elsa Gundo to go to Josh. That’s what I want to do. Me too.

Stuart Turley [01:08:05] You and I will be working for Josh.

Josh Young [01:08:09] Let’s do it. We can set up a GV. It’ll be, it’ll be fantastic. Unfortunately, anyone listening, that’s probably not happening. What’s probably happening is some other group that’s politically connected to Newsome will probably take it over. They’ll pocket a lot of the money. It’ll take forever. It’ll cost a lot more. The California voters will suffer. California drivers will suffer, but don’t worry. Taxes and electricity prices will rise also. So anyone that’s bought an electric vehicle in California will also suffer along with the ICE drivers in California.

Stuart Turley [01:08:42] I do want to give Steve Hilton a shout out. I just interviewed him and I, Steve Hylton, if you’re listening, please win the governor race. He has a plan for oil and gas in California. It’s shout out to Steve. Got a shout-out for General Flynn. I’m talking to him this week, next week. So anyway, got to throw out some advertisements here. So we’re going to have to go ahead.

Josh Young [01:09:06] 2,000 live viewers right now. Is there anything else that we should talk about? Should we keep going for about five minutes? Sure. Absolutely.

Stuart Turley [01:09:16] I’ll tell you what, Josh, when you had Intercom, I loved Intercom. I love all the folks there. And we had so much fun talking about investors. And I loved interviewing the CEOs and bringing them through that whole process and everything else. I tell you, it is critical to thank for the economy. Chris Wright and Donald Trump. And Doug Burgum and Lee Zeldin. The three apocalypse, the three horsemen of the energy dominance apocalypse is what I call those guys. The three horse, let me say that again. The three Horsemen of The Energy Dominance Apocalypse are Lee Zellman, Doug Burgom and Chris Wright. And I absolutely think that they’re the right men to get it, Josh. I do however think that President Trump is lacking in the foreign diplomacy department trying to end the Russian war. I’m looking forward to visiting with General Flynn on that one. So I think we could do better in that one group.

David Blackmon [01:10:25] I’ve got a question for Josh. Do you get semaphore? Do you read there?

Josh Young [01:10:31] I’m not a subscriber, but I do read some of their stuff.

David Blackmon [01:10:33] They had a piece this morning that I thought was fairly well reasoned that there may be a bubble developing among nuclear energy developers, startups and developers with their stock valuations being overvalued. I wonder if you have a view on that. Do you look at nuclear stocks?

Josh Young [01:10:52] So one of the things I do in my day job in… Running this asset management firm is I try to find very asymmetric bets. And with a very small amount of the capital that I manage, I try put on asymmetric nets in addition to trying to find value-priced, well-run, great longer-term oriented oil and gas equity investments. And so one of the… I try to basically find two or three kinds of leverage and then buy premium via call options where they get exposure to essentially right-tail events. And I can’t say I’ve traded this very well because typically I’ll get these exposures and then I’ll sell them after a double and then we’ll sell the rest after a 5X and then some of them you lose money on. And in the end, it’s been very good. And again, none of this past performance is non-indicative. I’m not soliciting whatever. But the reason to share that is so I’ve had a lot of uranium exposure which has been fantastic because I owned these calls particularly on URA that were way out of the money. And when this SMR and Oklo bubble kicked off and I’ve dimmed views on both of those particular companies because neither of them have actually done anything and they have no revenue and they’re beautiful PowerPoint presentations. And again, I don’t own them and I’m not short them and I’d made a lot money from them. So thank you for the great stock promotion. I’ve never owned the individual securities and I have no plans to. They pushed the price of URA is actually the thing I liked least about the URA ETF is that they own so much of these sort of nonsensical zero revenue, non-uranium miners that have these sort hope and a dream type things. They pushed their price way up. So it was very, very profitable for me, thankfully in this very, small position, which ended up, I don’t know if it really moved the needle overall but it was a good bet. But so I’ve gotten to see the movements of this stuff as well as try to evaluate the intrinsic value and. I think this is part of my critique on Chris Wright and how the Trump administration has sort of done this government intervention into private businesses. It’s really pushed valuations of companies that I don’t think would have gotten those sorts of valuations purely in the private market. It’s pushed up valuations of companies that I think for the most part would just never have gotten that sort of valuation attraction. And in the end. In most cases when companies trade to way higher levels than they should, they end up eventually trading down a lot. And there are many people who end up getting hurt by buying at peak enthusiasm and peak hype. So anyone that has exposure, again, maybe they go up more, please don’t rely on this. Who knows, talk to your own financial advisor. But what I found over the 10 plus years of running vice and interests is that in the end, valuation matters. I mean, the sector is down 70% or so since I launched in 2015. We’re up a lot, which is great, through value oriented, careful investing. Not everything I do does well all the time, whatever, lots of risk and uncertainty, but we’ve done well over a 10 plus year period, partly by avoiding situations like this. And so I see a huge amount of risk, a huge number of uncertainty, and so many things that need to go right for an Okla or SMR or whatever to actually work. And it’s really sad because SMRs are a great idea, and they should, we should have them, but I don’t know that these are the people to do it, and I’m pretty sure that the valuations for these companies are way out of whack versus what’s actually. So anyway, I guess the short answer is I completely agree with that semaphore analysis. I’ve actually made money on this unintentionally, and I no longer have any exposure that I can tell, and I would emphasize a high amount of caution. It sounds like similar to what semaphore says. I completely agree.

David Blackmon [01:15:02] Well, I agree too. I mean, it seemed to make a lot of sense to me, but hearing what you say about it, then it makes even more sense. So I appreciate that. The other question is the Dow just rocketed up over 47,000 today. We’ve been told that a government shutdown is gonna be ruinous for the stock market. What in your view is driving the Dow and the other markets to be so much higher? I believe that’s an all-time high for the Dow, by the way. What’s driving this boom in the market today?

Josh Young [01:15:34] So I think broadly stock markets are hard to fully understand, I can guess. But again, I don’t know that anyone really knows. So one, there was a fund that pitched me many years ago. I worked for this multi-billion dollar family office. I met with, I dunno, 200 funds or something while I was there for a few years, and one of them I loved. I don’t know if we allocated, but it was a great idea. Basically, they owned stocks when Congress was not in session, and they shorted stocks when the Congress was in session. And- The back test on this strategy was amazing. I don’t know how it did. I didn’t follow it. I just, I loved the idea. And so again, there are critical functions in the federal government that should be funded and should continue. And I don’t think that it’s good for either party to risk that via nonsensical great budget stuff. So I think it’s inappropriate, however, but- Generally, I think these guys were right. And I don’t know if it really works like that day to day, but I do think that over time, unfortunately, given the enormous amount of bureaucracy and the enormous number of waste associated with what’s going on in the federal government and state governments and so on, I think we’d be better off with dramatic cuts to these various government programs. And so, hey, a shutdown could end up actually being really bullish. That’s actually, maybe you guys are right and I’m wrong. If the stock market goes up for the next few days, I think the Democrats might get worried and just- Right.

David Blackmon [01:17:09] Whoa, whoa, whoa. We oughta stop.

Josh Young [01:17:11] Yeah, and I think it’s worth saying where the dispute appears to be. There’s different ways that people are saying this, but the best I can tell, the dispute is around federal funding of medical care for illegal immigrants in about a dozen, mostly Democrat run states. That’s the best that I can can tell.

Stuart Turley [01:17:34] What offends me the most right now is why California has made so much money off of Medicaid because they put illegals in there and then they turn around and get the funding from the federal government that nobody’s talking about. And we are now about to break over, please, one or two more viewers and we will have, 2,000, we hit 2,005 viewers. Out did, out did, CNN for the whole month. This is absolutely out to it.

Josh Young [01:18:10] Maybe the whole year, I don’t know. They’re recorded.

Stuart Turley [01:18:14] Yeah, and look at this, and this is only, this is because of the Schumer.

David Blackmon [01:18:19] The Schumer shut down. Thank you Chuck.

Stuart Turley [01:18:20] Outdone, CNN.

David Blackmon [01:18:23] The caption on that, by the way, was Chuck Schumer is ending his congressional career serving as AOC’s intern.

Josh Young [01:18:33] Honestly, the racial aspect of that particular thing bothers me a little. The rest of it is hilarious, right? I feel like it should be him with the sombrero with like another random white guy who hates himself and hates the world and whatever. I don’t think that needs AOC. I think it’s just the nonsense around what they’re doing. It’s almost like the confusion that David and I have around Chris Wright generally versus Chris Wright at Saudi oil wells that were stolen from America with him with two thumbs up. I feel like you can sort of miss the forest with the trees sometimes.

Stuart Turley [01:19:09] Josh, out of respect for you, because I really want you back on the podcast. I did not play any of those videos because I didn’t want to get a shutdown cut off, or anything else because of the sensors will get you.

David Blackmon [01:19:27] Well, while we have 2,000 people here, this is a good time to say everyone needs to go to Josh’s sub stack and subscribe, okay? That’s absolutely the address. Sure, bisoninsights.info. Bisoninsight.inFO, folks. And if you’re feeling incredibly generous, you can also go to Stu’s sub-stack, which is.

Stuart Turley [01:19:52] Theenergynewsbeat.substack.com or energynews beat.co. We get an average of 100,000 people to 200,000-people day on the site, depending on the day. So it is kind of fun being where Google, I drive Google nuts, you know, and they try to shut me down, but I keep popping up like whack-a-mole. And David, how do people find you?

David Blackmon [01:20:13] I’m at the newly rebranded Energy Editions sub-stack. It’s Blackmon.substack .com. My feature article today is about the donut of prosperity being promoted by both the journal, Nature, and the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. It’s a lot of fun, really, really a joyful talk.

Stuart Turley [01:20:38] So with that, thank you, Josh. And again, I gotta give you the old man hug, COVID hug, because I really appreciate you and all of your knowledge because I am a stalker, I mean, a fan. I follow everything that you do. And so with that David Blackmon, I appreciate you as well. So for all of our great listeners today, thank you all very much. And we will see you guys next time. Talk to you all soon.

David Blackmon [01:21:05] Bye y’all. Oops, Stu left.

[01:21:12] Okay, I guess that means we should leave. Thank you.

David Blackmon [01:21:14] Well, we haven’t ended the stream. Here we go.