Grubstakers - Episode 165: Harold Hamm

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

Episode 165 is out. The subject is Harold Hamm; the Okie billionaire who made his fortune innovating horizontal drilling, causing earthquakes, and who is the right-hand man to Trump for his energy independence policy-making. He’ll “drink your milkshake”, because he has type-2 diabetes. Watch out!

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We have more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop.

The evil has gone. Welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined by all of my co-hosts. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffers. Yogi Poliwal. And so today we're going to continue talking about the coronavirus crisis,

but specifically we're going to talk about the group of people who are truly hurt by the coronavirus crisis, and that is the oil executives. As you might have heard, on April 20th, for the first time in U.S. history, oil prices briefly went negative. They're still hovering near historic lows. And our subject today is a billionaire named Harold Hamm, who was once in around 2014 worth as much as $18 billion. And today, May 2020, he's worth a meager $4 billion. This man has been destituted and wiped out by this crisis, and he has our greatest sympathies as we explore his life today. And so Harold Hamm is the founder of an oil company called Continental Resources, and he's a fracking billionaire, basically. He's fracked a bunch of what is called the Bakken Formation in North Dakota and Montana. This is this historic geological formation that people couldn't get oil out of until they innovated, you know, horizontal drilling and fracking and all this crap. So this guy became a billionaire by, well, you know, increasing the amount of earthquakes in Montana and North Dakota, basically.

Yeah, he claims to be the father of horizontal drilling. And in a Fox News interview, when the guy introduces him by saying the father of fracking he has a visibly disturbed face that says uh please please introduce me as the father of horizontal drilling not the father of fracking he's like please please i prefer to be known as the man who blew the backing out but you know it is something where uh as we're all stuck in our apartments, you know, watching the news and watching all these grim stories about America approaching 100,000 dead people from coronavirus, we do constantly see these people who are, let's say, given priority or treated better, you know. So, Harold Hamm might have lost, you know, $14 billion or however much, but he's in early April.

He visits the White House, meets with Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy. He lobbies for more, you know, oil and gas industry bailouts. April 30th, there's a Politico story about how the Federal Reserve has expanded its lending program. Fed's expansion of lending program sparks oil bailout worries. So we don't really know where all this Federal Reserve money is going, but we have to guess that this guy, Harold Hamm, as a donor to Donald Trump is going to be a beneficiary of all of these various oil and gas industry bailouts that they're trying to make happen. Meanwhile, everyone else just gets one $1,200 check,

and then fuck you, you're on your own. But think about all the oil you can buy with $1,200 now. If it keeps going down, you could buy a Harold Hansen tire stock with $1,200. Yes. The smart Americans use their $1,200 checks to buy infinite barrels of negative-priced oil. So there's what's called a break-even price for oil,

which is the price that WTI crude needs to be at in order for them to actually make money on a per-barrel basis. And typically for the last 20 years or so, it's been maybe $ 38 or 37 but new methods such as shale like uh fracking on like shale fields in the u.s and as part of the sort of energy independence thing where companies restart u.s production has lowered it a bit but i mean we've been under 30 for quite a quite a long time now historically speaking so that's ratcheted up the pressure on harold ham and his other oil industry executive friends to try and pressure the white

house into uh like reducing production or imposing sanctions or something to reduce production elsewhere so that the price goes up a little bit in their minds it's also pretty funny how he's he's a big trump supporter and obama opponent but like at one point he had 18 billion dollars and it's not like that evaporated overnight this last year he actually his his peak was around, we were looking this up, around 2015, 2016. And then over the duration of the Trump presidency, he lost it all. While backing his number one guy, his wealth just frittered away. Yeah, and it's like, so he's cutting back on his oil production right now. He's trying to get a more lean operation. Like we said, he's lobbying Trump for bailouts. Apparently, the Trump administration is exploring exploring options for helping oil and gas companies through the Treasury secretary and the Energy Department.

We'll we'll see what they end up doing. But despite all that, according to the Los Togol.com, as of April 20th, 2020, Continental, his company Continental Resources, wants 50% of their employees to return to work that week. So this is, you know, late last month. I'm quoting from the website. The employees will be tested for COVID-19 and have the opportunity to get an antibody test. Employees who are sick, live with someone who has a high-risk job, such as doctor, nurse, or Walmart cashier, or can't find childcare are excused for now, but they need to talk with their supervisor. And basically anybody who can't find a good excuse will be fired if they don't return to work as of the end of last month. So it's like he's shutting down, but he's still making all of his people come in and no work from home for you. You got to be in an office environment during

this deadly pandemic. Right. And we mentioned in a previous episode that a lot of oil guys are behind the Reopen the States initiatives and protests. And we did try to look into whether uh this guy harold ham uh has a hand in this and it looks like we couldn't find any direct links um he is connected to the uh kof brothers but um the who are actually behind um the convention of states initiative which was a spin-off of um Citizens for Self-Government Initiative and the Convention of States Initiative, is promoting the Open the States protests. But the only people that we could really find who have direct financial contributions to that are the Mercer Foundation, which is run by Robert Mercer, who we haven't covered because he is a loser who only has 125 million, according to Forbes. And then also only other people are the Kochs who just have their fingerprints on everything. So it's possible that he's funneling money to this through some dark channels.

And the Koch front companies are the ones that are kind of getting all the flat but we aside from his visit in early april to uh talk with trump about relief um we don't have any smoking guns on him at the moment uh with regards to the uh reopening protests though it is kind of funny that um he actually when meeting with trump he suggested tariffs against saudi arabia for flooding the market with oil, which were all the things to like when you've got a genocidal regime of all the things to call for tariffs on. It's they're they're making it hard for me to make money. Not cool, Saudi Arabia. Well, we don't get to pick our allies in the coalition against Saudi Arabia. And they're not even going to do the sanctions.

Well, like, yeah, so domestic oil producers in the United States, and it is something that's kind of worth noting and dwelling upon is what happened with fracking and the United States becoming a net oil exporter and, you know, now only getting somewhere in the region of 8% of its oil from the Middle East, is now these kind of domestic oil billionaires like Harold Hamm, they have incentives against the traditional Pentagon consensus where Harold Hamm, like in the late 90s, founded some group to lobby for sanctions on Iraq, Venezuela, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and accused OPEC of dumping oil. So some of these domestic U.S. oil billionaires are like very adamant about sanctioning traditional U.S. strategic partners with regards to oil. There's one Bloomberg article I read that came out in April of 2020 that Continental is invoking the act of God clause in terms of honoring contracts because of coronavirus. Yeah, and for insurance.

Right. Like for business interruption clauses in their insurance contracts, they say that the catastrophic drop in demand is an act of God in the sense of these policies. Yeah, the refinery trade group said it is the act of God in the sense of these policies. Yeah, the refinery trade group said it is the height of hypocrisy for a company to choose not to honor its contracts to supply

domestic crude to refineries while also demanding the administration impose restrictions on foreign crude. Like, what a fucking mook. The man just wants to drill, doesn't give a fuck about what anyone else thinks and doesn't care about the environment and or who he hurts to drill yeah and again we don't

like we said we don't have smoking guns linking him to these uh open up the economy protests but very clearly his incentive is open up the economy so people start driving again and that gas prices will go up and we don't have smoking guns linking him to a bailout from the federal government. But if you're listening to this, I will bet you $10,000 that by the end of the year, this guy has gotten some bailout money. And just one other thing, according to The Guardian, Continental Resources, his company has donated almost $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action. Harold Hamm also gave $50,000 to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee.

So, you know, I mean, this guy has spent a lot of money for Trump, and I think he's going to get his back scratched in return. I think we can almost guarantee that. I think one final important thing we should say about this guy before we go into bio is uh he looks like absolute shit um when you see a picture there are pictures of him like in articles where he's meeting with trump where it's like he's juxtaposed next to him and he makes trump look young and vivacious like his his you can look up his picture but i think his his general appearance is um mickey rooney on the autopsy table i was gonna say harold ham is our first billionaire where that we've covered where merely saying his last name gives you an accurate visual image of

him he looks like a melted mr potato head no Head. No, I understand why God said pigs are unclean now after looking at Harold Hamm. So I think it's useful background before we get into Hamm, the individual, to note that the two presidents prior to trump were very keen on energy independence or making the u.s a net energy exporter again and a big part of that was obama and like the things like projects like the keystone xl pipeline that came out of like those international agreements between canada u.s and mexico to uh move you know energy from the U.S. through the U.S. All of that came from this general push to reshore their oil operations. Right. They wanted all the earthquakes to be branded made in the U.S.A.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm a little torn about the Keystone stuff because in some articles he talks about that, like, fuck Canada, the U.S. is all I'm about. But then in other interviews I've seen, he has kind of like an opinion of like, listen, more pipelines mean more money for everyone. So I don't know exactly where his loyalty lies in terms of the Keystone Pipeline. I think in terms of like Pipeline going to Canada, it's just a way for him to extract value, whatever his opinions on Canada may be. Yeah, I mean, like, I think that, you know, because I'm reading this one thing from Newsmax, and it, like, the Keystone Pipeline was delayed six years,

and so Harold Hamm was like, we don't give a fuck about the pipeline. We're going to keep doing what we're doing. But if it wasn't delayed, I think he would have been a bit more gung-ho about it publicly. But so, to start the biography of the man of the hour harold ham i read a fair bit of this book called the frackers by gregory zuckerman um it's a it's a pretty sympathetic portrayal the guy's a wall street journal reporter he spent hundreds of hours interviewing various frackers and you can kind of tell that he ends up sympathetic to them kind of poo-poos a lot of the environmental damage stuff but it has some good nuts and bolts biography so

this is my primary source for just kind of running through what we know about the life of Harold Ham he's Harold Ham is born in Oklahoma in 1945 he ends up being one of 15 children from his father. So big family. And he's descended from a man named Thomas Buckland Ham, who fought in the U.S. Revolutionary War. And, you know, man, did his ancestors fuck that one up. Because Harold Ham grew up poor. And you don't often, you you know see a guy who like

descended from actual you know revolutionary war patriots in the u.s who who didn't have a significant nest egg passed down through the years um but he grew up poor he uh but mainly because his dad was just a dumbass like the basic story there there is Harold Hamm's father was a horse and cattle farmer. And then one year, a bunch of their cattle die when their feed was accidentally filled with splinters. So he had to sell his remaining cattle and become a sharecropper. And then his house burns down in an electrical fire.

So this guy is just, you know, leaving toasters plugged in and putting a broken glass into his cow's feed bag just a comedy of errors with this silent film comedian that was his father but yeah so harold ham grows up in poverty um and actually they for a time his family relies on federal food aid so you know remember this when he's donating to all these uh republican politicians in one of the like oklahoma hall of fame videos i saw it said that he was the youngest in his family is that true i believe so i think his dad had like one more kid from another marriage his dad was married four times so he's got yeah yeah. But so after, you know, their house burns down in an electrical fire,

they move to a new shack with no electricity, no running water. His father is the founder of the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn, which is a Christian denomination that believes in faith healing rather than relying on doctors. So I'm sure no links to Harold Hamm's later diagnosis with type 2 diabetes. But yeah, so, and you know, he grows up poor, but Harold Hamm remembers it as a happy childhood in Oklahoma. He like runs around in the outdoors, you know, has a lot of fun. Though there is like one anecdote I just wanted to share with you guys

that might be a little creepy from from from the book the frackers uh i'll just quote here but some who grew up in the area remember ham as a quiet loner who could who could be insecure and withdrawn he did have some unusual pets to keep him company though he helped raise coyotes in the family's backyard brought a black calf to 4-h competitions and doted on a pet crow he kept the crow in the house his sister remembers and even managed to teach it to speak a bit one day he took the bird outside to get some fresh air when the pet seemed to become hot in the Oklahoma sun, Ham brought it inside and put a cold washcloth over it, accidentally suffocating the bird. So this motherfucker waterboarded his crow.

Yeah, that sucks. What a fucking... How old was he? Gosh, he must have been less than 10. Doesn't give an exact age, but this is like before he's yeah that turns you evil yeah that experience made him evil later right well that's the thing it's like his sister telling the story so it's like how do i put the nicest spin on my brother murdering small animals in the neighborhood and like he was raising coyotes in the backyard that i mean

that just sounds like he saw a coyote and fed it a piece of bread at one point like what does it mean by he raised a coyote he's coyote's mom he's fucking eating food spitting in the coyote's mouth it's also like killing a crow it seems like the beginning of a movie based on a stephen king novel where you have kind of an oddball kid who then is like deceived into murdering a small animal and absorbs its soul and becomes a demon he actually like I can I can get the poll quote later but later on he would be charged by the Department of Justice with uh murdering a bunch of rare birds at his uh at his oil fields yeah and he uh he gives some quote to uh gregory zuckerman

about how uh yeah but those birds weren't even that rare like it was a really common bird uh but yeah he killed a bunch of birds the charges were later dropped um but but we can revisit that later uh but yeah so he's a gifted pitcher in high school uh but you know the families like we said they're sharecropping so what they do is like they will work on um uh they will raise crops and raise livestock for other landowners like his mom his siblings his dad all kind of help out and then during like the uh the may or during the fall season they would travel to different farms across the region and pick cotton and watermelons and do other work on the farm so he's you know working from a young age helping his family out i thought you're gonna

tell me that he hit a bird and then he had to stop being a pitcher like randy johnson yeah the unit that's that's actually why he quit is that he couldn't do the randy johnson pitch so he decided to go into a business where he could kill more birds he's like he's on his way to the minor leagues and then uh there's a terrible accident you know i don't know i didn't mention this earlier but i don't know if you guys watched interviews with harold ham but he sounds a lot like Foghorn Leghorn. And this whole like anti-bird thing is starting to all make sense now. I just think that for his entire life, he was belittled for sounding like that bird.

And now he just has a vendetta against all birds. I think all fracking billionaires sound like Foghorn Leghorn. From what I remember of the Wilkes brothers, That's just like, you're born with that. I say, I say, I say, I say, if we dig up all the oil, they can't teach evolution in schools. I say, I say, tell me the name of your cell leader, Mr. Crow, or I will pour more water over this rag I have on your mouth. Now, I'm just a simple country bird suffocator.

He's fanning himself with a newspaper even in the winter. Maybe he just, like, hates wind turbine energy because they take all the sport out of killing birds. Like, there's no art to it anymore but yeah so he's uh he's a pitcher in high school uh but at the age of 16 he gets a job this is in 1961 he gets a job at a champlin refining company service station you know gas station basically champlin was a was a prominent local oil refining company in the region. So he's working at a gas station, pumps gas, washes trucks, fixes tires throughout his high school years. And kind of at this time, he meets local oil men.

You know, this is Oklahoma. There's always been kind of an oil thing. We don't have time to get too much into it. But, I mean, we should mention there's a very dark history there where Native Americans were pushed out into Oklahoma. And then later on, settlers, U.S. settlers realized that there was a bunch of oil under the lands that they pushed all the natives out onto. So they pushed them further. And, you know, there have been some, there were some unsolved murders of various Native Americans who happened to be sitting on the wrong land plots in the turn of the 20th century. But, you know, so. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 under President Andrew Jackson, and that basically gave the federal government and

state authorities the right to forcibly remove Indians and put them in Oklahoma territory. Later on, Oklahoma became a state, and within the state of Oklahoma, they consolidated where Native Americans were arguably illegally into reservations. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're telling me this country did things to the Native American population that were harmful and it was legal? Yeah, this is all covered in the famous musical Oklahoma. We're like, oh shit, that place where uh genocided them too has resources under it we really fucked that one up should have sent them to siberia or canada or something

both siberia and canada actually also have oil resources so never mind but so he's working at this gas station and uh throughout his high school years and this is where he meets the oklahoma oil men because you know in the Oklahoma oil men, because, you know, in the 60s, there are already these, you know, throughout most of American history, throughout the Industrial Revolution, there are these oil men who, you know, get strike a fortune on oil. You know, there will be blood. Daniel Plainviews. But he meets kind of the 1960s equivalent. So he sees at his gas station job, he sees these Oklahoma oil men who just kind of throw cash around. They just, you know, buy everything. They leave fat tips at the diner. They give him huge tips. And he thinks, hey, I'm a poor kid. I want to graduates high school. He does not go to college. But he gets a job driving trucks to haul water to oil and gas drilling sites in the early 60s. Yeah, from a Oklahoma University interview with Harold Hamm, he talks about he had to get a loan for that truck. And the interviewer asks if he paid the loan back or if he gave that guy stocks and harold ham was like i paid him back pretty quick he just wanted the money but so he basically has the same origin story as uh robert de niro and godfather 2 sounds like i haven't seen the movie andy

he becomes the godfather spoiler bro yeah so i mean like uh yogi was saying he he gets a loan to start his own company but you know first he's like working at this other company he's uh driving uh water out to these drilling gas and drilling sites uh he apparently quits after a few years of doing that because his boss was drinking on the job then he gets another job working for a refinery for champlin again this is the uh the company that he was working for uh at the gas station for but then he works at one of their oil refineries apparently wait you're telling me the guy who looks like mickey rooney got fired for drinking on the job no he's apparently he says his boss was drinking on the job but you know we just have to take his word for this because you know gregory zuckerman seems uh

very credulous with whatever harold ham tells him and actually like uh there's one other quote you know it's shorter but the only mention i could find of unions here comes from Harold Hamm describing how unions worked at this Champlin oil refinery he worked at. So he's working at one of Champlin's big refineries, but he grew unhappy. He couldn't understand why union rules prevented him from helping others at the refinery or allowed employees to sleep on the job and then complain at union meetings. He also missed the oil fields. So that's like the only mention of unions I found in the book was his thing about like, oh, it let them sleep on the job and then complain at union meetings. And they didn't let me help because I wanted to work so bad

and that fucking union got in the way. But unsurprisingly, he would rely on non-unionized labor for basically his entire business career. It was a family business. Yeah, he worked with his son, H.B. Hamm. But, you know, we talked about on, like, the Koch brothers episode, these are dangerous jobs working in, you know, oil extraction, extraction refineries. There could be explosion. There can be exposure to all sorts of cancer-causing chemicals.

So, you know, I mean, it is a bit of an insight into his mind that this is his justification for not allowing unions that might keep some of his employees safe, basically. Here's the thing about Ham is it's other oil companies that cause cancer. But Ham's oil, it's toasted. But yeah, so like we were alluding to earlier, he quits this refinery job uh because apparently the union rules he finds some guy who has fallen behind on payments for his tanker truck again these trucks that bring water to the uh the oil fields uh he takes over the payments on this truck uh with a one thousand

dollar loan and a cosigner in 1966 though the book does not specify where he got it and then and then the book skips to uh the literary equivalent of a montage where it doesn't explain how he got successful it just says he quote unquote outworked his competition took any job you know so again common billionaire origin story but basically he gets a loan for this one truck he's doing like a one-man operation servicing oil fields and becomes successful enough that he's able to start hiring employees uh buying more trucks and you know this is again servicing these oil fields bringing them water cleaning out oil tankers, etc., etc. And, again, the book's montages, too. He becomes the largest

oil, fluid, and hauling transport business in the region of Oklahoma. Yeah, from that Oklahoma University Christian interview with Harold Hamm, he talks about the first few years of having the business that he couldn't hire anyone

because he had such poor leadership skills that he was like i didn't know how to lead and when you want to hire people that is one thing they're looking for you know it's so hard to watch these interviews because no one's vetting these questions at all no one's like wait what do you mean by that no what do you you know there's there's no compelling journalism in terms of the validity of what these billionaires say about their past. And so they often all come off as jerk off pieces that make the billionaire look as the genius in individuals that they seem to appear as. Yeah. You mean the unions were allowing the employees to sleep on the job and then complain in union meetings? That sounds believable. Let me just write that down and put it in my book about you yeah you saw like one guy take a nap during

a break and he was like unions yeah this guy was a loner because he was a fucking snitch um but yeah so uh he's one of the he becomes the largest uh hauling transport oil servicing business in the region. In 1967, he incorporates his first oil exploration company, Shelly Dean Oil Company. He borrows another $100,000 to drill his first well, and he strikes early on two wells. By 1971, his company is making about $37,000 a month, and he has good timing, because of course, you know, there's the oil shocks in 1973 and 79.

So, he strikes oil, like, right in the early 70s, and then oil prices explode with OPEC and all that bullshit. So he's able to sell his drilling company for $30 million in 1982. Wow.

And, of course, there's then an oil crash in the 1980s. So he gets lucky enough to have some fortunate timing, both in striking oil and then selling out before the bottom falls off. I really have to commend the amount of billionaires we've covered that their real secret was they had an exit strategy at the right moment like there's so many of them seem to build something that really doesn't work on paper or in practice and then right before it's about to crumble they're like all right sell this shit let's get the fuck out of here like it is such a like the match

insurance fraud burn the buildingdown type of system almost that it makes me think that it's commendable at this point. Yeah, no, I think billionaires are the people who are really good at the game hot potato. Take this dot-com stock. Yeah. But yeah, so he sells his company in 1982 for $30 million. And then at this point, the book basically transitions to every other paragraph about him is, and then a geologist told him to do this.

And then he hired a geologist who told him to do this. You know, drill here, et cetera, et cetera. But he's got $30 million. So basically, like a bunch of people with master's degrees get hired from him and then point out different formations that he starts to drill for right yeah that makes sense the entire notion that in the 90s he both invented a new way to drill oil and discovered the balkan fields in north dakota and and found the billions of gallons of oil that are hidden underneath the U.S. soil. Seems very, very suspect, and not that he paid eight different dudes that, or women, that knew their geology slash oil knowledge

to figure out how to make more money from it. We've known about the Bakken formation for a long time, right? It was discovered in the 1950s, yeah. So, like, they knew about it, but they couldn't exploit it, I think, efficiently for a couple decades. Right. So according to the book, the Bakken Formation was created 360 million years ago. It was discovered in 1953, named after a farmer, Henry Bakken, whose property overlapped it. But yeah, basically, oil companies have been trying to get oil out of there for decades, but it wasn't until horizontal drilling and fracking came about that,

basically, the way the sediment was set up, only those techniques were effective in getting oil out of there. Otherwise known as the reach-around. Yes. I think with regards to this guy being called like you know he likes to call himself the father of horizontal drilling or you know getting called the father of fracking it's it's kind of like a milder case of the elon musk thing where you know you all these billionaires uh they're really just money men they and some of them are a little better at knowing where to throw their money than others and And so, you know, they just hire, they hire an army of, um,

scientists, geologists, whatever, who know how to identify an oil field. You know, they hire some engineers who know how to make a drill, um, that doesn't just go straight down. And then because they're the ones who make the most money off of all these people's work, they're the ones who are called like the genius inventor. Right. At the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah, you just have enough money and then you get the credit for inventing something,

basically, is how capitalism in the U.S. seems to work. He also, I just wanted to note this, so we mentioned he only has a high school education, but in the 1980s he starts taking a bunch of Dale Carnegie classes. So the speaking clips you see of him now are actually with the Dale Carnegie education. So you can only imagine how bad it was

before Dale Carnegie started working the magic. And that whole thing about him being poor at leadership and not being able to hire people, how bad it was before Dale Carnegie started working the magic. And that whole thing about him being poor at leadership and not being able to hire people is what inspired him to go into the Dale Carnegie training, which I took the free class and they keep calling me. And hey, Dale Carnegie people, I'm not

taking the fucking training program during coronavirus. Take the fucking hint. You don't want to win friends and influence people, Yogi? I do. I just don't want to win friends and influence people yogi i do i just don't want to do it with 18 other strangers in the room all right so we're gonna teach you how to win friends and influence people within 40 minutes because we only have the free version of zoom no the program costs 700 They can afford the paid version of Zoom. $400 to learn, like, yeah,

ask questions about someone's interests. It's, like, so much more minuscule than that because it's, like, you know, it's, like, like, okay, this is what I should remember. Oh, I know, I skimmed it as an insecure 21-year-old. Andy, I took the class in person and they told me to give someone flowers they have to receive the like there's a whole like a rhyming scheme about taking and receiving flowers and it was all about like giving compliments and taking them it felt very cult-esque

like i remember i joined a eagle's lodge uh for a concert thing that didn't work out and it's it felt the same it's just like okay recite these things and then if you do it correctly we'll let you use our space for 200 on a weekend like very odd what can't can't wait to read the reddit comments about yogi's eagle lodge membership i think he's the mole uh but so, as we mentioned, the book transitions to he just hires a bunch of geologists. He hires a geologist named Jack Stark in 1992. Jack Stark convinces him to look at the large formations in North Dakota that we have mentioned. They start looking in 1994.

He actually learns another company called Burlington Resources. They were making good strikes in North Dakota by drilling horizontally rather than vertically. So the way he becomes the father is him and his engineers just sit in on their public meetings and the public disclosures that this other company is required to make to the government and just copies the technique that they're using. So that's what they do. They have a strike in the Sedera Hills field in 1995 in North Dakota. Crude prices briefly collapsed in the 90s. He has to do layoffs down to 50 employees, make everybody take a 15% pay cut. And around this time, he becomes a founding member of Save Domestic Oil Incorporated,

which lobbies for tariffs on oil from Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Iraq, and accuses OPEC of dumping. But oil prices recover by the late 90s. Was he a billionaire by the time he was making people take these 15% pay cuts? I don't, I think he was still just a several hundred million dollars. I think it wasn't until the early 2000s that he hits full billionaire status.

But it was still one of those situations where it's like, yes, everyone has to tighten their belts. Well, it's like, you know, I mean, it's the same thing we said with all his employees having to go back to work. The guy has type 2 diabetes. I'm sure he's working from home right now. But yeah, so, and you know know the kind of story goes on oil prices recover in the uh the late 90s and then another geologist on jim stark's team a guy named jim kochik uh he pitches uh harold ham on 200 000 acres in the back end formation uh you know we mentioned the back end formation. You know, we mentioned the back end formation already. They originally buy up or they lease the drilling rights to 200,000 acres in Montana. Then they go back and

they lease another 300,000 acres in North Dakota in 2003 because they think actually the real strike is in North Dakota, not Montana. They begin horizontally drilling and fracking the back end in 2004. They have kind of mixed results early, but then by 2006, they have a new fracking technique, which, you know, is kind of technical. I can, you know, describe the technique for anyone interested in the uh the show notes but basically they like section off different parts of the sediment and then they put uh fluid in a little bit at a time but they change up the technique is the long and short and then in 2006 they start striking really well in north dakota initial public offering 2007 and by 2010 the back end formation is pumping 250 000 uh barrels of oil per day their company in the back and 250 000 barrels of oil per day and about 10 of that wealth is

personally going to harold ham which is how he becomes worth worth 18 billion dollars and um they during the ipo to start from the time of the ipo in 2007 to the time of really ramping up production of the the oil fields these new ones the stock price increased by about three times and it spiked it spiked in 2008 right before the crash went down a bit but ultimately it was like um seen as very solid investment. Right. And also, one of the few times the book mentions environmental damage, they mention the movie Gasland, which you all might remember came out in 2010. The famous scene of the people living nearby the fracking field lighting their faucet water on fire. And he kind of dismisses the movie as a um as a muck raking operation the author does uh but i just like that uh paraphrase a quote from it uh around this time

when the movie comes out as people start asking like what the fuck is in that fracking fluid that you're uh putting into the sediment and the the paraphrase from the book is the industry says it's safe but won't divulge what's in the fracking fluid as it's a trade secret so you know they don't do themselves any favors with press it's vodka that's what it is I like that they call it a trade secret as though

some like DIY person is going to start fracking and put them all out of business it's just like pee water as though some DIY person is going to start fracking and put them all out of business. It's just like pee water. Yeah. But yeah, and that kind of brings you up to the Obama administration. We mentioned between 2009 and 2012, he's fined for poisoning two creeks

with thousands of gallons of brine and crude water um he meets obama at the white house obama gives him some like platitude speech about well uh you know we're going to be very reliant on uh gas and oil these uh next few years but eventually we want to uh transition to green energy and uh he he becomes a real obama hater and gives Mitt Romney $1 million because of this savage takedown that Obama launched against him. How dare Obama make him the most rich, one of the richest humans in the world? Throughout, well, just to round out the market history at least, like, the stock price pretty much increased linearly at a pretty good clip until like throughout obama's tenure pretty much to the time he left office what a piece of shit barack obama doing this to him yeah from the dickinson press it talks about a speech that harold ham

uh gave and harold ham cut down a speech to three words beat barack obama i mean he's making me too rich the man's weak at one point somebody uh in oklahoma made a facebook post about him and he threatened to sue him for 75 000 dollars uh the the he filed a lawsuit against ok City oil man Mickey Thompson over a Facebook post accusing him of attempting to squelch OGS efforts to establish good science on seismicity. Andy, you got some more on him squashing scientific research in terms of earthquakes due to oil drilling? Yeah, yeah. to take a step back we covered this a bit in our wilkes brothers episode but that was uh that was on patreon so i'm

gonna just do a quick uh retread on um the the whole earthquake thing with fracking which is that um fracking does not cause earthquakes is uh the line that comes out if you ever try to look it up online and there is some truth to that the process of fracking where they force water into an oil well is apparently much too shallow to cause an earthquake the te fault lines are much deeper into the ground. But what does actually cause earthquakes is the process of wastewater disposal, where because fracking and general extraction causes massive amounts of toxic chemicals to get pulled up out of the ground um in the form of just like horribly contaminated water they have to find a way to get rid of it um that's uh and apparently they can all get away with pouring it into uh creeks so much and so the technique that

they came up with was um uh forced wastewater disposal where they just inject wastewater really deep into the ground and what that does is it fucks up the dynamics uh like just the um uh fucks up the pressure between like rocks deep underground and uh triggers earthquakes and a little statistic on that is in Oklahoma, earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater increased from an average of 1.6 a year before 2009 to 585 in 2014. And so you'd think it would be pretty hard to bury the research on that. But our man Harold Hamm really, really tried.

In 2011, he threatened the University of Oklahoma. This guy, Larry Grillett, who's the dean of the University of Melbourne, or the university's Mewborn College of Earth and Energy, he said that in a meeting with Harold Hamm, Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select Oklahoma Geological Survey

staff dismissed. These are the good geologists who fight back they use their power for good rather than telling people where to drill yeah yeah so yeah the story behind this is uh this email was actually it was found by uh bloomberg in a um uh public records request. It was an internal email in the university. Ham also indicated that he was discussing with Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin the prospect of moving the OGS out of the University of Oklahoma.

And when Bloomberg contacted the governor's office, the governor's office refused to comment as to whether that actually happened, but they did note that the governor does not have the power to decouple ogs and the university of oklahoma so it was kind of just stomping around and making a big fuss out of it um and uh to the department's credit it looks like they completely ignored this guy but some of the conflicts of interest involved uh in 2011 at the same time that he made these demands harold ham also donated 20 million for a diabetes research center to be named after him at the university of oklahoma so on one hand you

could say that it's a very charitable thing that he's doing pushing this uh diabetes research center but the other hand he's clearly using it to get leverage in geology and sort of the reporting on the geological consequences of his actions. It's also worth noting that the president of the university at the time, David Boren, who was a former U.S. senator, sat on the board of directors of hands con ham's continental resources company um so he at the president of the university actually had a financial stake in them burying the uh research on uh wastewater disposal earthquakes um there's another incident in 2013 where the Oklahoma Geological Survey stated that they were evaluating possible Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the state's oil and gas companies. He was also pulled into another meeting with Harold Hamm, as well as the president of the university.

And he said the basic gist is that continental does not feel induced seismicity is an issue and they are nervous about any dialogue on the subject wow and the top geologist this guy austin holland he described to the press he described the meeting to the press as quote just a little bit intimidating now wait a minute and. You're telling me scientists say something called wastewater is bad for the environment? I love this idea that just digging it deeper into the ground is a solution. It reminds me of when I have a blackhead. Sometimes I'm just like, just push it back into the skin. Nothing will happen.

Out of sight, out of mind. Yeah. When you have a high- a high velocity fracking rig every every problem just looks like either taking liquid out or into the earth at high velocity yeah real quick uh he's been divorced twice his uh first divorce he had three quick kids his second divorce uh was with sue and arnell she was married to him for 26 years. Their divorce was almost going to be one of the most expensive divorces at the time, the previous one being $1.7 billion between Rupert Murdoch and his wife.

But basically, the divorce proceedings began, and oil dipped at a certain point. And as The Multinally Fool reported it uh as luck would have it ham was right because that wealth that was given to him by high oil prices leading up to 2012 was vastly reduced by late 2014 as oil prices began to collapse right before the divorce was settled uh due to this instead of her receiving what would have been around 10 billion dollars she ended up getting uh some property and a check of 972 million at first she rejected the money but then a few days later she cashed it and so when she appealed that uh that ruling the the supreme court of oklahoma was like sorry lady you cashed the check, you divorced. And I love any woman that's like, $970 million? Not enough.

I like to think she took the $970 million just to avoid getting a Grub Stakers episode about her. Stay right under the threshold. And to continue on what Andy was talking about with the diabetes center center another aspect of it that I wanted to discuss before we close out this episode with a few more things is that like Oklahoma is one of the most obese states in the nation and it has a high rate of diabetes as well and you know he's given millions of dollars for diabetes research. But as somebody that was diagnosed as pre-diabetic,

diabetes research boils down to three things. Eat better foods, exercise, and don't stop trying. And when it comes to Oklahoma's obesity epidemic, it really does boil down to something that we were discussing earlier, and that fact that the U.S. government doesn't give a fuck about Oklahoma. And a huge part of that is one in every 12 residents of Oklahoma is a Native American. And I think that from the U.S. government's perspective, they're like, we don't give a fuck what happens there. between Senator Jim Inhofe and a guy like Harold Hamm, as well as the rising epidemic of obesity just being unregulated and uncared for while billionaires are pumping money

into supposed research into it. It is just glaring that people don't give a shit about the problems going on in Oklahoma. But perhaps you guys would like to hear his theories on why he has diabetes. Oh, yes yes go on uh he fucks too hard from the book the frackers so in uh in 2000 in a routine health screening he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and he gives this quote uh quote it is a very pervasive

disease particularly in oklahoma all of us probably have Native American blood. There are 39 tribes here and it seemed to be more prevalent among them. So basically he blames his Native American blood for his diabetes. Him and Elizabeth Warren. Also from Oklahoma. I like how just like being a white person

from Oklahoma, they all like to turn a history of genocide into something they can use to their a history of genocide into something they can use to their advantage. Oh yeah. Right. Turn it into like cool facts about me. That's a very white, oaky thing to do is to claim Native American heritage.

Just for all of them. Or if they don't do it explicitly, then say like, there's so many other... I might have had a relative later or something earlier and right right or they i have diabetes because of my indian blood yeah it's never a benefit to have native american blood unless you're trying to get a diversity scholarship or something then it becomes yeah yeah it's like it it's a it's a hardship that they can claim in some way it's also something

you can say when you're like when that picture of you in a headdress at a frat party goes viral oh man imagine if there's like a music festival footage of elizabeth warren just fucking decked out in the most native garb in 2008 uh harold ham founds the domestic energy producers alliance and this is an organization that's primary goal is to lobby politicians to believe that oil is the way if you go to their website the first thing is like two videos talking about how batteries and wind power are not enough and how oil is the only way to achieve greatness in this country. I mean, the man is riddled with bullshit.

Like, in 2014, he warned safety issues could threaten Bakunshale Boom. Like, he's literally going, listen, we can't have more issues because I need to keep making more money. And it's like, take care of your fucking workers, you goddamn idiot. You know, this incident that happened... keep making more money and it's like take care of your fucking workers you goddamn idiot um you know this uh incident that happened he keeps the unions that would allow them to sleep on this dangerous job he keeps them out of his plants and protects their safety a crew installing a telephone cable pole struck a gas main in that with the fracking exploded a house. So, you know, this unregulated drilling in our ground for natural oil is fucking over our environment but the country.

In 2011, he talks about he's going to yield 24 billion barrels. I mean, this is a man that is fucking hoarding oil. And up until 2019 in December, when he steps down as CEO of the company, he just fucking wants to all that goddamn black gold in the dirt. Why is it got to be black? And crazily enough, though, he knows how volatile the oil industry is because an article from february he loses a billion dollars overnight due to coronavirus and stocks that sell off going on on wall street so i don't know what where the harold ham story ends up but for me it just seemed like he has won in terms of getting the wealth he has and then leaving on his own terms i think he's been selling off some of his oil producing properties in recent years. He has.

He's been getting into liquefied natural gas instead. He's cut off, I think, 30% of his North Dakota operations. But this, again, was before he had retired. So who knows what the next batch of people at Continental are going to pull off. But I mean, you know, it's crazy to me the amount of shit I had to learn to figure out how toxic this fucker was. But everything points to the man's obsessive nature with oil comes from killing that crow with that towel from a child. And he sees the black in the water,

and he remembers that crow and knows that nothing can truly be his friend. Nothing can be his rosebud. Did you guys want to hear about the time the Department of Justice attempted to bring his bird serial killing spree to an end? Yes, please. Yes.

So it's like, after he meets Obamaama at the white house i'm quoting from the book the frackers ham's frustration with the government grew he began to detect growing delays for drilling permits that year continental and other oil companies faced charges by the justice department for allegedly killing 28 birds in the back end in continental's case the charges revolved around a single bird, a Saze Phoebe. The charges later were dropped, but it still irked Ham. Quote, he says, quote,

it's not even a rare bird, Ham said, explaining his growing unhappiness. Quote, there's jillions of them, unquote. What a fucking boss. He's trying to claim it's a starling or something. They're like fucking boss. He's trying to claim it's a starling or something. They're like fucking pigeons. It's legal to just murder a pigeon, isn't it? It's not like there's been a mass pigeon extinction in the United States in its recent history.

Oh, and I did just want to mention earlier, in 2012, not only does he suppress fracking earthquake research in oklahoma and oklahoma has seen an increase in earthquakes uh not only does he suppress the research but in 2012 he starts fracking in oklahoma again so he uh suppresses the research and contributes he starts uh basically a 26 year old geologist tells him about the scoop formation scoop and in 2012 he starts fracking it again so he's he's doing his part just in awe of him blowing 14 billion dollars in four years yeah one billion of it is to his wife or he did the john maybe he did the john mcafee thing where he claimed to have lost 14 billion so he wouldn billion so he wouldn't lose so much in the divorce.

That was on purpose. Yeah. There are some rumors that are similar to that, Andy. She did have footage of him cheating on her, and the lawyers wanted that footage to be revealed so that they could like actually like verify and stuff. But apparently, apparently in 98, he wanted her evaluated for a psychological exam and then want her divorced then as well, but then decided to rescind that. So I don't know what's going on in the fucking relationship they had, but they were were very angry at each other I can assure you that those lawyers were the only ones who wanted to

see that footage I was going to say she couldn't actually use it because showing a jury videotape of Harold Hamm having sex would be a violation of the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment it's just him fucking a bird.

I'm going to need you to caw now. The only way I can finish. But we'll see what happens with Harold Hamm. We'll see if he gets his government bailout, if he survives this oil price crash, if the coronavirus that disproportionately impacts people like him, if he makes it out of this okay. But, you know, first of all,

if you're going to look up a picture of the guy or you're going to check our episode description, do be careful because if you look at a picture of him, you are actually breaking kosher. Also, a shout-out to Rona and her husband, Michael. Happy sixth wedding anniversary. Thank you for listening, and thank you for being fun patrons. And a shout-out to Sam Turner.

You know why. Yes, happy sixth wedding anniversary to two of our most loyal Patreon subscribers we're glad this podcast gives you something to argue about in your marriage keep the DS9 tweets coming and with that this has been Grubstakers I'm Yogi Poyol

I'm Andy Palmer I'm Steve Jeffries I'm Sean P. McCarthy thanks for listening we'll see you on the Patreon and we'll see you next week on the SoundCloud bye