TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #345: There will be Bitcoin with Griffin Haby

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Griffin Haby to discuss an oil man's journey to bitcoin mining. Follow Griffin on Twitter Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data... TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

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Starting point is 00:00:00 what is up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce rip 245 of tftc i sat down one of my favorite texans one of the most eccentric humans i've i've met down here in tejas griffin habey co-founder of mountain lion mining getting the oil and gas industry into bitcoin mining mining himself oil man we talked about mining we talked about oil we talked about the values of texas and where the world is going from here considering the the energy crisis that is upon us i think you guys are really going to like this rip two hour dense if you're looking to learn about the intricacies of the global oil and gas markets this is the rip for you it was brought to you by our good friends at unchained capital just
Starting point is 00:00:51 picked up one of their koozies down the hall could use more structural fortitude but i'll take it's a koozie i think it'll it's one of those koozies that if you pull the the can out of a nice bucket it's a little wet your hand might get wet but it'll still keep the keep the drink relatively cool so uh beyond koozies unchained capital uh leverages bitcoin's native multi-sig properties to bring you a suite of services starts with their vault uh they have a lending desk they have an ira product they have a buy bitcoin product uh they're really building a bitcoin company leveraging bitcoin's native multi-sig properties and over the last few months as we've seen celsius voyager a bunch of these
Starting point is 00:01:38 centralized lending platforms go under it really highlights the importance of the model that unchained has taken which is use multi-sig allow users to hold a key so they have visibility into their vault and the multi-sig quorum for a lending product to know that their SATs are not being re-hypothecated. So you have certainty that you're going to be getting your SATs back at the end of the day if you pay off your loan. They have a white glove concierge service that's going to take you from zero to having a multi-sig vault set up. It's not associated with its loan product, but if you want to eliminate single points of failure, their vault is perfect to do this. It's a two or three multi-sig. You hold two keys,
Starting point is 00:02:17 unchained holds one you always have control of your sats in that multi-sig if you have those two keys uh if you're a business high net worth individual a bitcoiner with a with a considerable stack i would try to eliminate single points of failure as quickly as possible and unchained is here to do that with you go to unchained.com slash concierge to check out that product this RIP was also brought to you by our good friends at Brains. Just breaking announcement.
Starting point is 00:02:48 It's not breaking anymore. It happened like an hour ago. Brains is the team behind Brains OS Plus Firmware. It's the team behind Brains Insights, which is a dashboard where you can learn, not learn, you can see the landscape of the mining industry, hash
Starting point is 00:03:03 price, hash value, difficulty, hash rate, mining pool breakdowns, ASIC profit profitability calculators that's brains insights and guess what freaks they're the team behind slush pool but slush pool is turning into brains pool they're rebranding slush pool to brains pool starting in september they made the market aware of that uh about an hour ago so uh expect that if you're a long-term slush pool user uh they're going to change it to brains pool they're bringing everything under the brains umbrella slush pool we're gonna have to pour some out we might have
Starting point is 00:03:36 have like a special episode maybe tomorrow when we have jan capuchon who is the uh the co-founder of brains we'll we'll be talking about the transition of slush pool to brains pool but yeah be aware of that slush pool is getting moonlighted it's been an incredible brand and incredible product and it'll always be remembered as a pivotal point in bitcoin's history the first ever mining pool and i mean it's the same pool it's just getting renamed to brains so go check got everything Brains has going on at Brains, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com. Don't be an idiot. Use their firmware. It helps you stack more sats. You have an A6 that's compatible with Brains OS Plus firmware, and you're not using it. You're leaving sats on the table. And only idiots do that. So
Starting point is 00:04:20 don't be an idiot. Idiot proof yourself. Downloads Brains OS Plus firmware. This rip was also brought to you by our good friends at HodlHodl. HodlHodl is here to bring you a lending platform with no KYC, no AML, it's peer-to-peer, leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties as well. What you do is you put your Bitcoin up in a two or three multi-sig escrow account, you hold one key, your counterparty in the loan holds another key, and then HODL HODL holds the third key. Again, since HODL HODL is leveraging Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties and you have one key in that quorum, you put your Bitcoin up as collateral, you get stable coins in return as long as you're paying that loan back plus the interest associated with it, you're going to get
Starting point is 00:05:00 your sats back and know you're going to get your sats back so you can see that they have not left that two or three multi-sig wallet throughout the duration of your loan go to lend.hodlhodl.com to check out this lending platform they also have a peer-to-peer exchange again no kyc no aml and they're hosting the baltic honey badger conference in riga latvia in the beginning of september if you want to check that out i'll be there go to baltic honey badger.com this was also brought to you by our good friends at upstream data upstream data is here to take care of your mining needs whether you're an individual mining at home they have the black box you plug it in it takes care of the sound it goes from
Starting point is 00:05:40 asics are loud if you just have an open air that's what's going to sound like you put it In the black box, you close that box. It goes from to. It's going to save your marriage. Okay, you can't have Asics just running in your house. It's going to drive your wife crazy. If you put them in the black box, you put them outside. It takes care of the sound.
Starting point is 00:06:09 It also takes care of the heat. They have airflow that is going to make sure that the box doesn't overheat and your Asics don't overheat as well. if you want to get a black box use the code freaks you'll get five percent off the black box they also have bundles where you can get a black box and they'll also acquire asics from you so you can you can do everything in one spot and get your black box get your asics get it delivered to your house and then beyond that that's at-home mining they're the godfathers of mining in the oil field using stranded gas whether it be flared or vented or simply unable to be brought to market they have
Starting point is 00:06:42 their hash huts i am a happy customer of upstream data i have one of their 50 kilowatt hash huts i had that running on a stranded natural gas well have for a considerable amount of time and have had zero downtime outside of oil changes in the generator which you need to do so at small scale they have larger scale 900 kilowatts units as well if you go to upstream streamdata.ca you can check out the black box and you can check out these hash huts as well tell them that tftc sent you if you're going to buy a hash hut enjoy this rip talk a lot of oil and gas a lot of humanity energy is life cheap energy typically equates to human flourishing let's go flourish freaks
Starting point is 00:07:26 sticky. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Griffin Habe, welcome to the studio. It's good to be here. Pretty excited. It's good to have you here. You're one of my favorite Texans.
Starting point is 00:08:10 Long time coming, man. You're my favorite transplant. Oh, thank you. Waving the flag appropriately, which we're all welcome. Open arms to Uncle Marty. Well, as Parker Lewis describes it, we're getting into the hole here. and fixing things from Texas eventually will break out. I do have to get back to Philadelphia eventually to save Philly. This is your last bastion of freedom, so it just makes sense to start here.
Starting point is 00:08:35 But yeah, you've got some time to get back to Philly, but important things while the revolution's happening here. Yeah, it does feel like it's happening here. It is? I mean, we're here at the Bitcoin Commons studio in Austin, Texas, but things are hairy right now we're working on a bill
Starting point is 00:08:56 with Texas Ledge right now to get you know incentives for the flare capture at the state level
Starting point is 00:09:05 which you know the Wyoming's have done that they're a little faster move and they meet more often but you know that's kind of
Starting point is 00:09:12 kind of step one is nobody in Texas wants to regulate anything they would rather incentivize and
Starting point is 00:09:18 it's like one of the first little dominoes that i think will have some big you know impacts on the chain yeah and there's something unique about the texas state legislator too they only meet once every two years right and they don't get paid diddly squat really it's like i think a couple thousand dollar salary or something so you got to actually want to be a public servant yeah so exactly that's what i was going to ask like what does that incentive model produce yeah it's you can't just sit there and live high on the hog you actually have to uh want to be there want to you know see what your constituents want and represent them well yeah you gotta help the uh you gotta actually help the people which is interesting seems like a good model yeah we should we should
Starting point is 00:10:01 replicate this throughout the country but speaking of models i didn't think we were going to start here but it's on top of mind right now ercot the grid system what the hell is going on with the grid here. I think there may be some bad incentives on the grid in Texas that are, that are leading to. So I'm, I'm definitely not an ERCOT expert. Um, I definitely think the real problem with, uh, the grid and Texas in general is I do the 90% of your population lives here yet 90% of the energy is coming from here. And so you have all of the stranded energy where it can't be transported like a liquid or a pipeline because the electricity loses its power as it travels.
Starting point is 00:10:45 So the big surge in renewables, which I get it. There's a ton of wind. There's a ton of sun. It's the only place where you get the wind belt and the sun belt. It's kind of coming together out there and nobody lives out there. So you needed somebody to take that.
Starting point is 00:10:59 But at the same time, you needed to get reliable baseload for every megawatt you're putting on of unreliable baseload, in my opinion, you need to back that up with coal or nat gas or nuclear. And, you know, we just kind of never did that. We didn't have to do that. You know, we've had some, you know, kind of milder seasons the last, well, never mind, I take that back. It's been cold. Now it's hot. And yeah, I just think it's the, I love that it's, you know, deregulated and free market will always get you the cheaper energy. And in theory,
Starting point is 00:11:36 you should be, you know, seeing higher gas prices now. So you should be drilling more wells, which we have a age old tradition of over drilling when we get high prices. So we get the gas price down lower and more of it. And you're going to see some stability and a lot more nat gas generation, hopefully.
Starting point is 00:11:57 And if we could embrace more nuclear, we'd be, we'd be set to be worried about this that's what uh i've been pushing the last two weeks specifically and i think texas is the perfect breeding ground for it is with biden coming out yesterday saying we have a climate emergency and they're going to try to push us to more unreliable baseload i think texas wyoming tennessee other states just need to start ignoring the nuclear commission and just start spinning up nukes do what colorado did with marijuana legalization which was illegal federally and apply that to the energy sector
Starting point is 00:12:40 and just start spinning up nukes it's insane because i'm i'm the son of a nuclear engineer so i'm 100 on board with this right and he uh did the navy uh you know nuke subs with uh like Jimmy Carter, we can talk about having an energy crisis and his strategy of being the weakest White House ever. And now Joe Biden's like, hold my beer, watch this. But it's a hundred year transition, say if you totally want to get off oil and they're trying to shove it into a decade,
Starting point is 00:13:12 which it's unfeasible, it's asinine. And the only reason that this caught any sort of wind is because Wall Street basically subsidized all of the shale drilling. And so we just had the cheapest energy ever. And you could do lunatic things and you didn't see any consequences because gas was so cheap, right? We have gas coming out of our ears here. So if you can bridge nat gas to nuclear while you're setting that up, right?
Starting point is 00:13:33 You can't just wake up and start popping out nukes like you can go drill a well. And so the first state that really embraces nat gas to a nuclear bridge is going to have the smoothest landing, in my opinion. But on the climate deal, did you see his tweet today? he uh what he said he said there was a three-point bullets he said we're gonna create jobs we're going to protect the communities from extreme heat and then he said we're gonna vamp up wind offshore because the supreme court has totally thanks to west virginia just emasculated and castrated the epa uh he's yeah he knows that he's got to go offshore for this production because no states is going to listen to him and so his whole emergency is basically womp womp womp yeah well
Starting point is 00:14:25 it's it's insane that it's gotten to this point and i think especially here i mean texas has the grid is under a lot of stress for many reasons obviously the weather was really cold in 2021 it's really hot right now uh you have this mass migration out of the Northeast and California to Texas. So the demand has only been rising significantly over the last three years. And mass immigration. And mass immigration as well.
Starting point is 00:14:55 And it's just befuddling to me that we have people in charge at the federal level who completely don't understand energy systems and are trying to mandate what people should be using as their energy sources. We've passed the point of dangerous ignorance when a guy walks up there and during his primary debate is talking about ending drilling for oil and gas companies and then putting an energy secretary in there that has not even the slightest clue about any hydrocarbon industry whatsoever and is laughing at drilling more wells. and it's there's consequences you know for that for that much ignorance and yeah here we are today you've got germany which would be the best base like case study on this is what happens when you
Starting point is 00:15:51 don't drill your own resources well they don't have that many but like when you import and you're reliant on other people's hydrocarbons and you think you can go all um unreliable sources of energy this doesn't work they're the most expensive energy and now they're a lot of people are going to freeze unfortunately uh in you know europe eastern europe now they're importing wood you know our ancestors used to burn wood about you know 5 000 years ago and full circle here we are today yeah it's a regression we're going back to the stone ages pull that mic a little closer to your mouth um your face uh how's that that's much better we need we need the freaks to hear the soothing tones of petromundo but no i mean in germany they're decommissioning all these
Starting point is 00:16:37 nuclear power plants they're spinning up coal and now the river's so low they can't even get the coal up to the coal plants that they're about to turn back on it's the peak clown world not peak clown world i'm not going to say peak clown world excuse me it's indicative of a clown world people is becoming completely detached from reality and not understanding like you said we have an energy sector secretary doesn't understand the intricate supply chain and the hard work you mentioned buying and saying we're going to create jobs i think that's uh something that we can really touch on here is that we titled this an oil man's journey to bitcoin mining you've had extensive experience in the oil and gas industry and one thing that many people should know if you
Starting point is 00:17:23 don't know already is that the jobs that are created in the oil and gas industry are very good jobs it's hard work it's good paying when things are good and even when they're bad um and these are essential jobs to our modern economy if we want to live the life that we've been afforded over the last three decades it seems like we're actively trying to destroy that but what let's talk about your journey to bitcoin mining so you yeah you run mountain lime uh mountain line mining mountain line creek mining or uh so limpia creek before that yes so i When I first graduated, I studied energy commerce and then went to work at Anadarko Petroleum. Big shop.
Starting point is 00:18:07 I was not very good. Big oil. Lasted about a year there. Then went to TCU and did the ranch management. Then went to the field. And I love the field. The problem with Anadarko is they sent me to the field and I fell in love with the actual oil patch. And being a land man, you're negotiating mineral rights, drilling leases.
Starting point is 00:18:29 and found myself in every basin chasing this new shale thing because shale was really happening, you know, kind of as I got out. And then, so that was, you know, 2005 to 2008, and we know the bust of 2009, boom, wiped out, you know, half the industry. Then, you know, we kind of ticked back up, met a girl, then we moved to Houston.
Starting point is 00:18:54 So I was working for a Bakken operator and they needed $70 oil. And then once it went below 70, late 14, and then the crash of 15, I was kind of kicked to the curb. And it was, what do I do with my life now? And then Peyton McKinney and myself started up Mountain Lion Oil and Gas, started doing leases and mineral rights and kind of gambled on a top lease. It's where you're really nudging the exploration of this lease. And if they don't do it by a certain date, your lease becomes active. and we in classic like oil and gas just rolled every penny that we had into this deal and you
Starting point is 00:19:34 know thank heavens we got really lucky uh it worked out and so then we just started hiring people and growing mountain lion oil and gas and um we were talking the next bust uh what we had a great lucky divestment in 2019 so we had a lot of powder going into 20 and we all know oil went negative and 20 and uh you know it was bunker down but luckily we'd built an algorithm that finally started popping off um deals so we were just allocating capital to buying as much production that we could it's got to be cash flowing we're in and so we started you know kind of uh i got a buddy calls it a sea full of nickels right it's just a bunch of small interest here and there but you get enough of them they start to add up just a significant you know monthly income for
Starting point is 00:20:21 us and then uh i ran into a buddy who uh i was telling him about the algorithm and then he's like uh kind of telling me about bitcoin mining off nat gas and i was like uh let's just or four margaritas you know let's let's get it on let's let's just go full kimono open it up and so next you know we start chatting and he tells me the economics he's getting off of running he's a geologist geophysicist connor murphy and basically they were banging out these prospects um you know these they're reef hunters and usually they get anywhere from 50 to 150 barrels a day just kind of steady eddie all around and they hit uh this prospect there's just nothing but dry gas and they were 19 miles from a pipeline and so basically they had no way to monetize this asset and he you
Starting point is 00:21:10 know looked around tried to freeze um and strip off liquids uh maybe even do some like manufacturing and nothing made sense till steve barber uh comes down they build a bitcoin mine that's first stranded nat gas uh bitcoin mine in texas off you know field gas and so he had high nitrogen content so he's never going to build that pipeline um maybe a bcf worth of reserves so it just never made any economic sense to do anything but mine bitcoin and that was the first time um i had that aha moment uh what i first off i could never unsee the numbers he was making more off a stranded asset you know than selling his gas on henry hub and you know that market dynamic is going to change you know the economics of everything but that uh just you couldn't unsee that and then
Starting point is 00:21:59 uh you know the more i study like petro history that tool means more to this industry you know going forward than say the first offshore platform the first uh directional drilling with a hydraulic fracturing job and you just have these huge breakthroughs in technology that when they hit the industry um just totally change the dynamics of everything so you now have this tool that you're selling your oil you're selling your gas but if you can't sell them you now have this opportunity to mine bitcoin and monetize energy that you never ever ever could have done you know know before and i can i could get into my thoughts on the future of where that's really going but if you if you really look at that tool that's never existed it is so powerful because nothing is
Starting point is 00:22:47 stranded ever again and that's held back so much exploration so much production globally is that you just never had a market and when you have a digital uh global market that doesn't sleep in trades every day uh we just just got a little bit more dangerous right yeah so let's get into it Like, where do you think this takes it? I mean, obviously, I've been immersed in the Bitcoin mining off of FlareGas, Stranded Gas. I've talked to people who want to use it at the midstream to help suck in Flare from upstream on the well pad.
Starting point is 00:23:23 I've talked to people who want to basically use it at the utility center to create like a third customer. Absolutely. If they have just two customers, and Bitcoin can be another customer that helps them negotiate pricing. And you wake up every day and decide which route you're going to take.
Starting point is 00:23:40 Yeah. Whatever the market tells you. So this is a profound change. We're not just blowing smoke up people's ass to make Bitcoin seem more legitimate. Correct. Even if you don't believe in energy-backed money and hard assets, it's a tool.
Starting point is 00:23:56 And you can sell your Bitcoin every day, but it's a tool that you never, ever had. And yeah, so like you said, And after I got off with Connor, we were like, let's go raise some money. What do you need? He's running S9s. And we're like, let's go get some M30S pluses out there. And so we did a little raise and did that.
Starting point is 00:24:14 But in the meantime, I was doing nothing but Marty Bent Podcast and really just changing my whole view on what is Bitcoin? What is this? Because you walk into the operators, they're like, that's just digital baby babies. I don't know what you're talking about. but so let's say right now you've got the tool for a stranded gas asset you're totally far away from any sort of a pipeline um that you'll never be able to build and so boom you now have a market which you never did then the flaring um if you don't have a pipeline or you're waiting on a
Starting point is 00:24:46 pipeline um flare capture everybody wins on that one right the greenies like you the if you're president of the sierra club or president of chevron you don't like flaring gas and you're happy to monetize that asset or keep it out of the, and we're going to look back in 50 years and be like, I can't believe we're just burning that beautiful molecule into the earth, right? Like that was some of the most energy dense stuff humans have ever found and we're just lighting it on fire. And then, you know, third is when you have like an oil field that's depleted, you've lost a lot of reservoir pressure. And basically you built these gas pipelines back in the day because you had a ton of gas flowing, but now you're only chugging along about three to five
Starting point is 00:25:27 barrels a day maybe and there's not enough gas to justify these pipelines so that's another case to where you don't have pipeline pressure and you can just you know start start mining bitcoin and so those tools are going to be allocated here in the next uh decade and beyond and you know kind of how i think about it is uh right now the the bricks currency right you've had the petrodollar the biggest thing about when bretton woods said uh everybody's going to use the dollar we're on the gold standard and everybody has to sink their Navy. Right. So we have one Navy and like our allies have like one, one or two carriers, you know, that we'd allowed. And we just built up this Navy and said, every single bit of trade will be protected by us. And any free flowing
Starting point is 00:26:12 sea lanes, we will make sure they're a pirate free and anybody can do commerce. And then, you know, about 70, when we're getting off the gold standard and then we became, you know, we've like biggest number one producer of oil forever. We, you know, exported so much oil that won the world war two, you know, couldn't have happened without a petroleum or heck any war since industrialization. He, who has the hydrocarbons is going to win, right. Or at least access to the cheapest ones and the most. And so next thing, you know, we are now an importer. We hitch our, you know,
Starting point is 00:26:47 wagon to this petrodollar and the petrodollar works. um it really helps us when we're importing oil right because everybody's got to you want to sell oil anywhere in the world you're gonna have to use the u.s dollar well now all these you know countries think they're getting clever by making this bricks currency uh we're the commodity guys we're gonna have this new currency well out of brazil russia india and china that's like russia's or no no no probably india is going to be your strongest navy and almost everything's got to really flow through there. And so if Uncle Sam decides, hey, oh, you want to stop using the petrodollar, watch this, right? And the biggest event that could possibly happen is the United
Starting point is 00:27:33 States says, we will not protect sea lanes anymore. Unless you're our friend and you're going to help us out, good luck getting your oil, right? Because back before the nationalization of the 70s. It was the seven sisters, Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell, running their own tankers, their own oil fields all over the world, and then their own refineries and our gas stations. Oil stayed cheap as chips forever. Especially during the 90s, it was $20 or whatever because they had all their supply chains and America would protect the sea lanes. So you're able to get oil to countries that never had any oil like china in the last uh 10 15 20 years could not have happened without americans allowing them to uh import 85 of their energy needs right so the
Starting point is 00:28:25 day that we say no more uncle sam is not protecting your cargos anymore well now how does how does that play out right if before bitcoin they're they're done back to the stone age age of piracy government piracy, right? If you're going to try to ship from the Middle East through the Strait of Hormuz all the way to China and China's deep Navy is a joke,
Starting point is 00:28:53 like there's no way they can protect that and all of their exports that they're trying to get everywhere. And so the hostility towards the dollar could either end right there and they basically are like, okay, well, we'll use the dollar or like you read
Starting point is 00:29:05 End of the World is just the beginning, Peter Zion. and he's he basically doesn't believe in bitcoin so he's saying that you're just going to have these alliances and like basically the western hemisphere is going to be controlled by uh you know the u.s and all those countries are going to kind of come together but the east is is going back to uh infighting and if you can get access to hydrocarbons you have to protect your own access right like france could get their uh oil from algeria and they can have a safe supply line um you know russia can sell through pipelines um which they obviously have been known to weaponize
Starting point is 00:29:44 every now and again but if you're importing oil at that moment your your lights turn off and you cannot get it anymore unless you somehow build the baddest navy uh in a very short time frame which we know that takes decades and decades to put on so my kind of theory is okay say that happens. And now you have no market if you're an exporter. Let's say you're Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, where now you've lost all of your export markets, unless you have somebody that is picking it up, escorting your cargo, which is the slowest moving cargo on the planet. Sitting ducks. The biggest ships in the world moving 15 knots or whatever, trying to get around the ocean here.
Starting point is 00:30:29 It's so dangerous now. And I see like state sponsored piracy and, uh, it's going to be a lot of, he's basically saying like de-globalization, you know, when you drive a car, you got parts from 17 different countries and they all come together and cheap energy makes manufacturing. So my opinion is instead of this, just destruction of, of kind of these Petro states, they're going to say, hey, where's my third tool now? Why don't I monetize my asset? Where's my market? My market's the Bitcoin network. You look at the biggest alpha oil man on the planet, Vladimir Putin right now, hates Bitcoin, but loves Bitcoin mining, right? Because he knows he's got cheap energy and some of the greatest natural resources on the planet. And instead of getting sanctioned, the beauty of
Starting point is 00:31:19 a decentralized network now everybody can monetize you know their assets and you know back to henry ford wanting like the electro dollar you know energy-backed currency you have to earn that money you can't just print it you're less likely to go spend it on fighting people you'd rather just keep it in your pocket exactly so that's the point i was going to make like i don't know if ironic's the right word but it counter-intuitively can lead to this de-escalation over time where everybody's just like, all right, we don't have to worry about exporting our stuff to you. We can monetize it right here on our own land, be profitable, have a nice nest egg. And then from there, it's like, all right, we're comfortable.
Starting point is 00:32:02 Let's figure out how we can do commerce with each other in a peaceful way. Right. But that's for the petro-states. What if you're an importer? What if you have no natural resources? Europe, China. like what are they going to do I have no idea then you get a nuclear right
Starting point is 00:32:20 that's what China's doing Europe's over here shutting them down and China and Japan are building them up Korea building them up alright Uncle Marty is going to put on his Marty Jones tinfoil cap here too I'm becoming more
Starting point is 00:32:37 convinced that there's been this somewhat like the US has known US government intelligence agencies are knowing for inciting color revolutions across the world to overthrow politicians they don't like in far off lands i think i mean with the insanity with energy policy here in the united states push and europe pushing towards wind and solar in favor of nuclear and hydrocarbons i mean nuclear the fact that anybody's shutting down nuclear power plants and saying because it's not green is
Starting point is 00:33:13 astonishing evil it very evil but like i like has there been like a like a propaganda campaign like incited by like the bricks of the world to try to destabilize energy markets in the west so that they can spin up their nuclear plants and fortify their hydrocarbon markets while to like weaken us i think i i with my tinfoil hat on like i would not be surprised if there's been And a multi-decade campaign that's been seeded by the BRICS countries, mainly China and Russia, to sort of destabilize our energy markets would become weaker, and then they have more leverage. And what's going on in Ukraine and the situation with Nord Stream
Starting point is 00:33:55 and Germany right now, you can make the case, I mean, the end result, if that was happening, that propaganda campaign was successful. right like germany's completely fucked russia is able to go into ukraine without any worries because they know they have all the leverage with all the energy and we're over here in the west like just trying to become completely energy poor the good thing is nobody out of out of any of those countries out of every single country in the world outside of the west when you said shore up their hydrocarbons, they can't do it. They cannot do it. A, they might not have the natural resources there. China's tapped out. They got very inferior shales over there. They just were not blessed with
Starting point is 00:34:47 a bunch of hydrocarbons. Russia does, but those were drilled by Western companies. Those were drilled by the Americans and the Brits and the free market capitalists because the oil business doesn't exist without free market capitalism. There's way too much risk in exploration. And so the fact that I could get on board to where like, yeah, maybe they see this as the last super cycle of hydrocarbons. And well, let's try to sell
Starting point is 00:35:17 as many solar panels as we can because all we're good at value add is cheap labor, right? The China's of the world. But if you look at like these, Russia's got days and days of natty gas and oil fields. But they don't have the skilled labor, the manpower, and the geography is horrible for trying to drill in Siberia, right?
Starting point is 00:35:39 Got to wait, you know, there's only a couple months where that permafrost is, you know, frozen over to actually drill out there. And the real technical, you know, acumen of these drillers, like there's not many new discoveries by national oil companies, okay? It's been done by Western free market capitalist guys that know that they're going to miss. But if they keep swinging, they could hit a gusher. And so the whole oil industry started by taking a risk in Pennsylvania and then Spindletop in Texas. And the incubator for all oil exploration was the USA. day. Right. And we went out and, you know, drilled in Persia. We went out and drilled in Arabia. And next thing you know, we're the, we're the ones that discovered all these things. And then the
Starting point is 00:36:36 national, uh, nationalization from, you know, the dictators and the countries, uh, that are, if there's friendly governments for like, Hey, these are my resources, quit exploiting it. Um, which, I mean, you, you can get both sides, but nine times out of 10, when, when, uh, the, the Americans leave, the production goes horribly and they don't find new assets. And, you know, corruption has, you know, really hamstrung a lot of, uh, a lot of companies nationally that, uh, you've never seen, uh, uh, uh, a company take nationalized and then production just ramps up. Right. Because for, I guess, kind of the, the four things that make the USA work are private property rights the rancher wants you to drill on his place he's incentivized everybody
Starting point is 00:37:24 to get out there um infrastructure we got you know pipelines and the ability to do it what we did before the latest uh the latest woke movement and then uh financial uh access to capital. Um, and then the amount of skilled lit, like the, the brains that come out of here are trained. I think the stats, like 90% of all petroleum engineers in the world graduate from a U S university. We are the ones that train them. We are the ones, these are really hard jobs and it's, it's, uh, they're dangerous jobs. So you gotta be sharp. You gotta, um, have a lot of training and you can't just, you know, walk onto a rig and start swinging chain and think that you're going to make a hand, right?
Starting point is 00:38:10 Like the skilled labor department is all Americans. Like you go to any of these, you know, oil fields all over the world and it was probably a guy from Odessa or, you know, Wyoming or Oklahoma that drilled that Odessa, Texas, not Odessa, Ukraine, that we were just traveling. Or if it's offshore, a bunch of guys out of Louisiana
Starting point is 00:38:29 that were really exploring and creating this. And it was because of the, just the super technical aspect of the business. And I've said it before, once there's probably like another hydrocarbon bust and when you have $100 oil, you're going to attract the greatest talent in the world. Nobody wants to go to tech when they're taking a dump and energy is finally back. And so you're going to attract all this talent. And what's that talent? It's American talent. And then when they see the Bitcoin side, I think that they're going to flip mining on its head when it comes to liquid immersion and heat efficiency and really just taking every bit of efficiency from an ASIC through coating or wasted heat and be able to just conquer any environment and really just maximize the hash rate. and good luck to anybody once you know the oil and gas companies start doing that well and then on top of that too what i'm really excited about oil and gas getting into bitcoin mining is the markets that they'll create above the hash rate layer hedging devices and futures markets and
Starting point is 00:39:40 forwards contracts and all that because i think that's desperately needed as well we need that type of financial futures modeling brought to to bitcoin hash rate and hash rate markets specifically i agree yeah it's coming yeah and i mean this is i forget what maybe it was in november no probably wasn't november it's probably like the beginning of this year when we were on a patent on houston together i posed the question who becomes who first do bitcoin miners become energy producers first or energy producers become bitcoin miners like what where does this market go in the future because 13 years in bitcoin has been a bit niche and it's been a bunch of crazy crypto anarchists who have basically plugged in machines and created this incredible bitcoin
Starting point is 00:40:31 mining industry that we see today but as we're learning and bitcoin's getting more established low-cost producers are going to win out in the long run bitcoin mining is an extremely just like oil and gas it's extremely high risk it can be extremely low margin at times and people get squeezed out and i think is volatile the first 13 years of bitcoin mining just an anomaly in the long run where you just had enthusiasts not enthusiasts but people who really believed in bitcoin before most of the world even understood it running the network and then as it becomes more established and people like yourself uh become aware of the opportunity provides your businesses as energy producers they just come and say hey thanks for getting us to this point um
Starting point is 00:41:19 we're gonna take over the hash rate from here yeah yeah yeah that's uh obviously i'm a little i'm a little biased but i i think that the energy uh industry has been kicked to the curve we've been villainized by every politician that anybody would listen to. And, you know, not one person said thank you for cheap energy, but the second it comes up, they're ready to just, uh, windfall tax us and block in our pipelines. And it makes us have to be the bad guy. And so we're kind of used to that, right? Don't get me wrong. You've some places where you, you know, tell people you're an oil and gas and, uh, just like a negative connotation. And I think, uh, you know, there's, there's a possibility that you could kind of flip that around to where you right now,
Starting point is 00:42:06 I kind of see the last two years and that's all I can really speak of is two years of me getting in into the business and seeing, uh, where, you know, Bitcoin mining is going. And when I first started natural gas was trained at two bucks, right? So pretty easy to talk to guys, uh, you you know, oil and gas producers, like, Hey, you got, you got some, you know, stranded assets or what's, what's, what's like your biggest differentials on what you're producing for and what you can sell for, you know, through the midstream process. And that's, that's a pretty easy conversation. Yeah. I'll mess around with mine. Let's go. And then, uh, but down the other side of that coin is they don't have capital to, you know, the CapEx on buying ASICs,
Starting point is 00:42:47 they're not cheap. So you, you gotta kind of do have that commitment or you got to partner with them and you can structure the deal anyway. But then as gas goes to like eight bucks, they'll find a market for that gas, right? Like that's an incredible number. And I don't think people have really realized how massive natural gas is trading for right now. We would have been happy at $3, $4, we were dancing, $5 is a miracle. And now we're like chilling at like six, seven bucks. And the other side of that is now all of a sudden they have cashflow, they have money and ASICs are going to get cheaper. And so you're going to see,
Starting point is 00:43:25 I think more people that their budgets allow more for, because like the big boys, the public guys can't really drill right now. It's a lot of the private guys are doing the exploration, but it's, why is that? Wall Street cut them off. You know, we incinerated a lot of capital. I'd like to say that we're fiscally responsible, but we got drunk in Saylor when it came to shale
Starting point is 00:43:51 money and incinerated a lot of dollars. And you give a driller a dollar, he's going to drill you a hole. That's the old thing. We can't help ourselves. And you give a large cap company a dollar and he returned you 80 cents. And we just kept that hamster wheel going. They said, no more of that, drill within cashflow. And that's kind of trickled down. And historically, it'd be the wildcats going out and finding fields and then you know private equity or mid-cap guy would buy them and then they would kind of uh explore it some more and then you know can kind of get the machine running and flip it up to a major and so you had this great trickle down which doesn't exist right now but i think as long as there's an energy crisis coming and you know
Starting point is 00:44:32 what i view is like basically uh the 70s all all on steroids of uh just especially europe um and and like right now we don't really know what the price of oil is right because i say we printed a third of the money supply so it's a hundred dollar barrel if you got a commodity that's priced in dollars could be 70 i don't know yet yeah and 20 it's 18 dollars or something like Yeah. And the strategic petroleum reserve that we're just draining right now. What's going on there? That it's never happened in the history of the world or sorry, in the history of America that we try to buy votes in November or affect the price of oil with that. That was literally there
Starting point is 00:45:16 for an emergency. And I guess this guy can call the weather an emergency. So that's how he's justifying it. But dumping all of that fake barrels into the market, we don't really know what the price is right now and my fear is that when this bull gets out of the gates he's not stopping and he and and like you want to talk about a super cycle like it's going to go up real quick because where's the supply going to come from uh you look saudi just publicly said they're tapped out these guys couldn't come to you know the united states and say hey let's drill here he's got to go i love that the left and the right are like oh he's he's a dictator killing people and we're just like, drill here, jerk.
Starting point is 00:45:55 And we're like, I don't know the same thing. That was just a bad trip. And so like, where are these barrels going to come from? I don't know. I'd say the Gulf of Mexico, but that's like three years out. We got three years of bull run energy. And even if you have a world economic collapse,
Starting point is 00:46:15 WTI is still going to trade and it's still an essential, gas is still an essential item. They're going to have to be using it. And I mean, I still think that's $75, $80 oil if that goes down. And then just as a well depletes, you're always drilling more to keep up with demand as reservoir pressure goes down. And we didn't drill for two and a half, three years, anything. And chickens are coming home and trying to replace those barrels takes time.
Starting point is 00:46:44 And the hardest part is the lack of people in the industry. We had, you know, the bust of 85, 84, 85 to 2005, nobody got into the business. And so you have this huge lag of all those guys are now dying and retired. And we were supposed to hang out for another 10 years before playing varsity ball and, you know, hang out in JV for a bit. And now there's just nobody else. And so we're kind of moving up and you're trying to find people and nobody's in the business anymore because we had three busts in my short career.
Starting point is 00:47:15 And that just weeded out a lot of people that didn't have the stomach for such volatility. and I don't blame them. You're trying to raise a kid and all of a sudden you're having to worry about your job every five, six years, that's tough. And so now we're trying to train these people. We're trying to, I mean, even the big service companies said like,
Starting point is 00:47:30 we cannot expand fracking because there's just no personnel. These are really sharp dudes and it takes a while to train them up and we just can't get production up. But I guess back to the original question, I think the mining that's gone on in the last two years has been cheap energy.
Starting point is 00:47:46 We had the cheapest energy and it was phenomenal. It was beautiful. It was kind of subsidized by Wall Street. Don't get me wrong. And so a lot of people saw this opportunity as a huge arbitrage. If you've got money over here and everybody's competing for this money
Starting point is 00:48:00 and they're paying 10 cents, 12 cents to get that same gold and I'm paying two cents, three cents. Wow, that's incredible. But as we're seeing, you can't get those three cents contracts anymore. Like they're really hard to get. there's a lot of niche and you know stranded stuff and so now uh i see that the energy guys
Starting point is 00:48:21 basically going to get priced out of that big arb that they had and you're going to see the producers actually say okay that that's what y'all are doing well i know how to find energy cheaper than anybody watch this y'all just sit back and watch this and i'll make the cheap energy and i'll mine the coin and if if they ever get into asic manufacturing good luck good luck to you that that would be fascinating if they get into producing asics that's like that's been my favorite part of the last what's the 2022 three or four years that i've fallen down the mining rabbit hole i mean i've been bitcoin since 2013 uh really focused on the economic side of things and the monetary aspect of of bitcoin network and the peer-to-peer uh distributed
Starting point is 00:49:06 nature of the protocol and what that can do for freedom in the digital age but the last three to four years of my life have been really falling down the mining rabbit hole and the conversions of this digital network with the physical world in terms of the energy sector is just fascinating because you have so many variables on both sides of the equation, the distributed protocol and the specialized hardware that allows you to tap into that and produce bitcoin and uh on the energy side just the whole energy supply chain like i had no idea how oil and gas worked in 2018 and now i like to think i have a good grasp on it i'm completely blown away at how texas boy but it's it's so let's let's get into let me ask you real quick
Starting point is 00:49:58 sure thing what or when do you see energy being priced in bitcoin how long how long are we till there i think it could happen within this decade um especially so so that's again with the newsletter in this podcast i try to incept my ideas of how i think the world should work into into the the psyche of the few the thousands of people who tune into this and read the newsletter and then hopefully they go and spread that message elsewhere but i think particularly here in the united states with how i forget who was who was it um maybe it was luke roman yeah it was luke roman earlier this week he said that he dropped the winston churchill quote which is like america um will will do the right thing eventually i think they'll exacerbate all options but at the end of the day they'll do
Starting point is 00:50:54 the right thing you know i don't think that's the u.s government i think that's americans just the the spirit of freedom and making things happen that lives in our nature of course we have gotten away from that a lot of americans have but i think i mean you're a perfect example that that spirit still exists here in these borders and i think going back to when does energy get priced in bitcoin i think at some point you know the next two three five years that we continue down the trajectory that we're currently on energy producers are going to wake up and realize they have all all the leverage energy is life energy is the basis from which our economy moves and through which we can do things like have these lights do this live stream talking to this mic and there's
Starting point is 00:51:39 going to be a point i believe a tipping point where energy producers become emboldened and they say hey we have all the leverage here like we're like you mentioned like people have villainized oil and gas not realizing that it has provided them with the modern day society that we live in today and at some point there's going to be a psychological social tipping point where the energy producers say enough is enough like we provide the base of our global economy and we have we know how to do this like we're not listening to the federal government anymore and if you want our energy you're gonna have to pay in bitcoin because it's a better money you're inflating away our resources like yeah i think but you said these precious molecules
Starting point is 00:52:24 like we're just burning them with flare gas and now we're hitting a point where you've printed a third of the monetary base within the course of two years and these people doing extremely hard work taking extreme capital risk in the energy markets are going to say hey like this it's untenable that we continue to do all this hard work and take all this risk and you're just inflating away the value of the precious resources that we're bringing to the market and at that point i think people just start demanding payment in bitcoin i think we're already seeing that process play out with monetizing straight well russia's doing it but like even here in the united states like monetizing these stranded resources with bitcoin like yes a lot of people are mining
Starting point is 00:53:03 and liquidating right away into U.S. dollars. But there's going to be a point where you stop liquidating into dollars because it's losing value at such a rapid pace and you just continue to hold Bitcoin. And at that point, so you have that tangential alternative revenue stream where you're building up a Bitcoin hoard
Starting point is 00:53:22 on your balance sheet using wasted assets. And then that's going to bleed into the assets that you're not wasting in your sell on the market. You're saying, hey, i don't want your dollars anymore i want i want sats and i do think that could happen rather quickly this decade i'm here for it i am too it's gotta i think this is the way out right like this is the way we get out of the system that actually brings us back to a question i wanted to ask earlier which is griffin habey if you had the magic wand and you could dictate
Starting point is 00:53:54 energy policy here in the united states like what would you do how could we prevent the historic volatility that's existed in oil and gas? Unleash the beast. Like, I think we're always going to have volatility just because it's just free
Starting point is 00:54:13 market capitalism at its finest. When you have high prices, we're going to go exploring. When you have low prices, we're not going to go exploring until you get to that pinch point of what's economical. But, you know, volatility, you just got to accept that.
Starting point is 00:54:28 Like, I don't think anybody really minds that part. It's the, like Trump, you know, you can say a lot about that guy, but the industry felt like he had your back and he hated high prices. He's on record multiple times. Like, I hate high prices. Let's get these lower.
Starting point is 00:54:45 And then all of a sudden you got a guy that's just literally pushing, you know, regulation and not allowing federal lease exploration or claiming that, oh, you've got 9,000 permits. Go drill those when you have no idea what, geology looks like and so when you're you know if you're like an evil genius and say like some bond supervillain and you've got a lot of oil assets right um your goal is to either decrease supply or increase demand and you can't go out and get any votes or media coverage if you're
Starting point is 00:55:19 out there saying y'all should drive more y'all should burn more fuel like let's let's get after it. But you can say, Hey, let's, let's decrease supply. Let's go out there and watch the president of a country hashtag, keep it in the ground in France, Macron, right? Like, so we're kind of laughing, like guys, you know, that like, we're going to make more money. Cause all you're going to do is just drive up the price. And as a guy that owns assets, he's like, well, I guess, I mean, I don't know if I can vote for Republican again, if this is what I get every Democrat that comes into office right and so uh i think that if you just like pipeline regulatory needs uh needs a lot of help right so if i always take things back to history and when they drilled the
Starting point is 00:56:06 1859 drake well in western pennsylvania their biggest problem was there was no takeaway they had all this oil coming out of the ground but they didn't have enough barrels to you know ship it off and, you know, horse and buggy. So they had a takeaway issue. Too much product, not enough takeaway. Let's fast forward to 2008 and they had too much product and no pipelines, no takeaway capacity, right?
Starting point is 00:56:30 So they're getting diffed out, making like a 75 cents in MCF because there was no pipeline. And the fact that they can block a pipeline going to the East Coast from a huge field, the Marcellus is like the greatest. The Marcellus Utica, you just got enough gas there.
Starting point is 00:56:45 Gucci gas. Yeah, it is right in the market's backyard. It makes all the sense in the world on paper that that should be where your market is and they can't really get it there. Meanwhile, they're importing LNG from Trinidad and Tobago up in Massachusetts, right? The pipeline part baffles me,
Starting point is 00:57:07 but I think that you even see it coming this November or in two years from now, if you're up on this hill chanting, the world's going to end. And, um, you know, we need to call this a climate emergency and we need to block all hydrocarbons. You're not going to get elected. People don't want to hear that right now. They want to know how can they, uh, reasonably fill up their car? How can they put food on the table? And, uh, it's, it's a time thing. Like you said, Americans will figure it out. Like I, I, I do believe Churchill was correct on that. Uh, it's, it's going to take some suffering
Starting point is 00:57:40 unfortunately but i feel like the tides are turning i do too i mean that's the thing is it's like the mainstream media and the political apparatus of the administration that's in charge right now is just like casting a spell like there's many polls that have come out in recent months like asking americans like what are your biggest worries and climate change is literally like one percent one percent it's like it's a manufactured problem it seems it's and if my favorite thing is is you can start out every argument with a climate catastrophist okay well why don't we go nuclear and like oh no nuclear nuclear just like okay so you don't care about the environment this was all this is all fake you're done here you have zero grounds to stand
Starting point is 00:58:22 on nuclear has no emissions if you if you're going to demonize carbon that's that's the bad guy how can you not be building nuclear and it's uh that's that's when you know you use any logic in a conversation with these catastrophists it's uh they don't they don't really care uh they're the anti-human uh argument is what it is you're either pro-human or anti-human and you know all signs point to if we are in this um warming period that's that's going to kill us all like man has always out engineered his environment and human, the human race will go on and go on and go on. But if you're trying to figure out the next big thing, say it goes nat gas, nuclear, and then fusion, fission, whatever, that's above my pay grade. To study all that, you're going to
Starting point is 00:59:17 need a lot of research, a lot of, you know, R and D dollars, and you're going to need more energy, not less energy. You're going to need more energy to keep the lights on to where every single nuclear engineer scientist can figure out what is the most efficient way to go to zero carbon. If carbon really is the bad thing, even though it's what plants need to survive, then so be it. But you're going to get there by keeping the lights on all the time, not waiting for the wind to blow or on a sunny day or a cloudy day, you have to turn off the lab and wait till the sunshines again. And so the, the fact that like you're betting against mankind, like it's not a good bet. Uh, we're pretty darn handy. And it's even all like the, the doomsday guys say we have
Starting point is 01:00:05 a hundred, 120 years, and it's going to go up by 3% or three degrees Celsius. That's, that's plenty of time for us to figure this out. How about y'all just chill out, let, let the big boys, you know, figure out uh the next step you know in the energy transition and uh let's let's not absolutely destroy our economy in the process yeah well i mean if you amend reality with the projections of temperature rise like it's just not happening like the the models that al gore was pontificating about in 2000 2001 uh airball like it's the temperature is going to rise two degrees celsius by x year um we're not gonna have any oil by 2020 like this stuff just has not happened and at what point do people wake up and stop listening to these models which are manipulated to produce
Starting point is 01:01:00 a certain outcome so that they can then go fear monger to push industry one way as opposed to another like it's you're it's the unproductive that's the other thing too that's another thing i'm trying to meme into the psyche of the masses right now is the unproductive class these people are unproductive they don't drill wells they don't make end products they just make policy which has got us into the situation and i think another weird part about america today is that a lot of our trust has been allocated to this unproductive class it's never built anything and they demonize the productive class, the oil and gas producers
Starting point is 01:01:39 who provide us with modernity. And something at the social level needs, a switch needs to be flipped where people begin taking advice from the productive class who actually is providing these things and ignoring the unproductive class who's just pontificating.
Starting point is 01:01:56 It's happening right now. I like, I promised myself as I watched Bitcoin go up to 65,000 bucks, uh it's like man if it ever gets back down to 20 i'm just gonna back the truck up i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it and then all of a sudden it gets 20 and i'm sitting there like i would love to but this is going to be like one of the greatest super cycles of my life let alone career in oil and gas and now i'm i'm uh i'm going after the energy and so we're we're basically uh on the oil and gas side because i went from you know about 10 oil and gas to 90 bitcoin mining to then um you know
Starting point is 01:02:38 olympia creek uh we got lucky and partnered with uh a firm that's building up you know probably like 600 megawatts out there on grid and then you know kind of once we handed over uh the operations there we've been strictly oil and gas like 90 10 and we are like so bullish on this next cycle and like, like currently in the middle of it. And, uh, and then all of a sudden, you know, with the, with the fall in Bitcoin now it's really time to buy ASICs. And I think that, you know, smart money is going to be buying ASICs. So now we're, um, going, going back and, uh, doing like a mix between off grid and on grid with mountain lion mining. And the The moral of the story is energy is what is the foundation for everything Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:03:28 And I can, I sure I can buy, you know, on the actual asset, but if I'm really betting on the long-term mining position, I think it's more important to secure your energy resources right now to have access to them. Because I don't know what the future looks like. Like you said, this unproductive class, something's got to give to where the guys, like we're literally we're leasing right now like i haven't leased in a decade right and i'm trying trying to get our hands on um you know as many uh molecules as we can um whether that's through minerals royalties or leases just we want that production to kind of hedge us out when energy prices go
Starting point is 01:04:07 parabolic right like because america's gonna be fine like europe's not um you're gonna have your haves and have nots, maybe with like in, uh, the United States itself, you know, the, the Oklahoma, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, um, North Dakotas are, are going to have a lot more flexibility maybe on their energy versus, um, the coasts. Right. And so when I, when I picture the doers, the builders, uh, it all starts with energy, energy's life, right? So we're really, uh, really going after like trying to control the actual molecules because then you can control your own destiny on uh on the mining side and i don't have to worry about what a commodity market is going to be doing uh with the actual asset class of bitcoin and the uh yeah man i think
Starting point is 01:04:58 the future is really bright in uh owning owning any oil and gas and like i said there's just not that many people in the industry anymore and it's i think it's going to grow a lot and right when this collision with Bitcoin and oil and gas is kind of happening and it's happening fast. And it's going to be a fun ride. Yeah, well, that brings up another point, going back to when does energy get priced in sets? I mean, it's very possible,
Starting point is 01:05:28 and I would not be surprised in the least bit, I'm probably actually betting on it, you're going to have parallel super cycles in energy and Bitcoin. And if you have a portfolio of energy assets and bitcoin mining that produces bitcoin at the end of the day that sits on your balance sheet like that that supercharges your balance sheet for that and then you can go out and drill more and provide more uh energy to the market so like there's maybe that's maybe maybe we do need this commodity super cycle in energy specifically to sort of break away from the unproductive class
Starting point is 01:06:00 where you guys will have all the energy and then a lot of the bitcoin as well that's that's what i'm here for yeah yeah because the the thing that blows my mind when i talk to you know old dogs in the industry been in uh you know poking holes for a good bit and i say like what if i told you there will never ever be a natural gas bust for the rest of your life you you literally now wake up and the market tells you do i go drill for more gas or some like existing gas or do i mine bitcoin If I've got $7 gas, I'm not going to be mining Bitcoin. I'm selling that all day and you can buy Bitcoin instead of mess with the computers and the generators and all that good stuff. But the fact that there will never be a bust again is crazy.
Starting point is 01:06:48 And so what's flip side of that is, let's say gas stays stable and Bitcoin stays stable. Well, that's all we've ever wanted in the industry is zero volatility. That's no problem. We can handle that. And so, yeah, when you got high prices, you go out and look for more. When you get low prices, you mine it. And that's just something that's so mind-blowing. If you've been in the industry forever and never had that option, it's really, like I said, it's like the most important evolution that's really happened since, I'd say, fracking.
Starting point is 01:07:22 Yeah. It's going to take time to get there. And this brings us back to what you mentioned earlier, is like the lack of talent in oil and gas right now. like i spoke with a friend in the industry who's uh who's working on weld pads drilling right now and he said the biggest problem is you can't get you can't get drilling teams like they're they're all booked out and you have people basically saying hey let me know if uh you have delays on your pad we'll rent your drilling team for you so they can come work on our pad and so and if you can get them yes you're gonna have to pay up and so like and then you can't get any pipe if you
Starting point is 01:07:59 drill the well you can't case the well um it's like there's a sand shortage um because nobody like the industry just went stagnant for two years and you can't just you know come in and turn it on if you're running um a frat crew of five different of you know trucks like a five truck fleet or whatever and all of a sudden nobody wants your service uh you you know say that one guy's running a five-man crew one guy's running a five-man crew you then like pretty much have to downsize and just keep the crew chiefs and turn into one team. And then all of a sudden they come back two years later, like, Oh, Hey, I need not only all those five to go back to work. I need 10. Oh, Oh, okay. Just give me one second. I'll throw a really sophisticated, dangerous job into the hands of
Starting point is 01:08:44 a green horn and just see what happens. Right. And you cannot, you can't get ahold of the people or the products. And like I said, it looks good for oil bulls. Yeah. Well, let's talk about how this has affected bitcoin mining in the oil field because i mean you mentioned generators earlier i think that's one thing uh the bitcoin mining industry those of us who came in from bitcoin mining and uh wandered into oil and gas flare gas stranded gas uh are learning the hard lesson of of the intricacies of exploration and one of the most important factors not only for bitcoin mining but for drilling and operating on the well pad is these generators. And that is a big part of the all-in electricity cost of a mining operation is power generation.
Starting point is 01:09:35 And as we've seen the price of oil and gas go up and more drilling go down, and you've had all these drilling teams booked out and hard to get, demand for generators for upstream production is high as well. So the price of that generation has gone up, which has led to less favorable economics for the Bitcoin miners who wandered into oil and gas. And they're realizing, oh, shit, like you're raising our lease rate month on month to this. That drives our all in power costs from three, four cents to eight, nine cents. And so the Bitcoin mining industry that came into oil and gas is sort of learning these hard lessons. We're like, we need cheap energy.
Starting point is 01:10:19 It was there in 2020 when the oil markets tanked and you were able to buy gas for $1, $2 an MCF to mine with. And now not only is that gas price has gone up, the demand to drill has gone up. Therefore, the demand for generators has gone up and the price of that generation has gone up on top of that fuel source. That's why it's good marriage, right? uh instead of having one one guy winning and the other guy losing and then this guy's winning and then this guy's losing you're all on the same team you just you just wake up and decide which one works better and the yeah the real niche is is power generation like uh if you're renting expensive generators your your economics like you really got to believe in and in the price
Starting point is 01:11:06 increase of bitcoin um and then i would i would kind of say that the future is abroad um going like you know we're kind of talking to um a country in the middle east about uh you know they're they're stranded assets that they don't care really what the price is if it's stranded They can't sell it. So you're going to see opportunities on scale that way. And then domestically, I think the projects are just going to get a little smaller. And real niche mining, like kind of how it started, those guys are going to be doing pretty much something that's going to be abandoned at $2 gas.
Starting point is 01:11:57 It's just not worth messing with. um you're gonna see a lot of those i think kind of springing up um hard to scale but uh you know where there's a will there's a way and a lot of bitcoiners are like feisty uh individuals that will you know go get their hands dirty and take a risk and um you know kind of figure it out roll up their sleeves um and then yeah you just i think you you really wait for the next oil bus it's going to happen i mean i've i've seen i've seen the charts too many times to think it's going to stay up forever but uh the the the real advantage for you know oil and gas bitcoin mining is when there is no option or there is such a low price for your product that it's just it makes economical
Starting point is 01:12:47 sense to really flirt with this idea to then deep dive in once you know you do get to the next bust Yeah. No, I mean, I'm experiencing dabbling in the lower scale stuff up in Appalachia, where you have a bunch of these stranded gas wells that produce anywhere from 15 to 120 MCFD, which is not a large scale. But there's dozens, hundreds, thousands of these wells all throughout northern Tennessee, southern Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana. And you can get scale. You're going to have to piecemeal a bunch of operations together. And at that point, it's a logistics problem. It's not really an access to energy problem. It's just trying to figure out how to have many different sites across a wide geography.
Starting point is 01:13:34 and how do you solve that logistics problem of having people go check the gen sets, repair miners at scale. Yeah, and that's what kind of really stopped us from doing it, to be honest with you, because for us, when you think of gas mining, you need a pumper to make sure that this well is producing all the time, steady flow of fuel.
Starting point is 01:13:58 Then you need a generator set, you need a mechanic that can fix those when those go down. So then an electrician, if you're fixing switchboards or panels or whatever, and then you need hardware, software, a firmware guy. And so it's almost siloed. It's really hard to find one guy that can do two, three, and nobody can do all four of them. That's really rare. So our problem was getting personnel for that. That's why we went to the grid.
Starting point is 01:14:29 way on the grid was just really cheap and it was a weird time with china checks it uh coming over here trying to you know get as much capacity as they could but you know you'd be surprised uh if you can incentivize a local to um say hey you're gonna get part of this bitcoin mine uh but you got to make sure it's running i'm not gonna fly out of austin to go check on 10 machines uh you know that two of them are down right like i can't ever make a profit doing that but uh finding the right people which uh you know the networking these days like through the bird app and everything is nuts and i never thought i'd be a big twitter guy but the amount of contacts you can get and um access to so many ears uh and eyes is incredible and so if you can incentivize
Starting point is 01:15:24 the guy on the ground to, you're going to be receiving this Bitcoin, but it's up to you how much comes out. It's up to you how much our uptime is. And it's up to you how much you have to pay for these services or you figure it out. And, you know, people learn. We're still in the first inning, Marty. We got so much time to figure this out. This is the first inning of mining, like what 2140 i mean we got we got a lot of time but the real um the thing that always just uh 6.25 we're gonna you know that's that's a big number and you know once those kind of go down we're gonna look back like man why didn't i just do everything i could while we were at 6.25 right and they're mining less than a bitcoin uh of rewards they're uh they're gonna look back and
Starting point is 01:16:11 grandpa be like dang those were days you were there it's gonna be it's gonna be that meme of the World War II era father
Starting point is 01:16:19 with the sun on his lap what were you doing during the 6.25 block subsidy I was plugging in A6 legend in the morning
Starting point is 01:16:27 no it's well so we're in the first inning and bringing this back to like how EPs will implement this like I've always had
Starting point is 01:16:39 a grand vision like I mentioned earlier Like Bitcoin mining can be applied upstream, midstream, at the utility. And now with Steve Barber's black box, like down all the way down to the residential consumer at their house. And I have this grand vision for oil and gas specifically where Bitcoin mining gets implemented into drilling schedules. where a lot of the problems you have when you IP well, a lot of producers have delays because in some states and some basins,
Starting point is 01:17:11 they can't drill unless they have a pipeline to take the gas away to market. And in other states, you can drill, and you can flare after that, but you can only flare for a certain amount of time before you have to shut down that well because you're breaking environmental laws. like i have this grand vision of like mining at scale upstream when you ipol you you get the oil
Starting point is 01:17:40 you get that to market you take the gas you funnel it to generators you mine bitcoin then you basically implement it into your your drilling schedule that could be completely off in this tell me if i am right where drilling crew frack crew mining crew yeah and so you just drill well it has plumbing has that steep decline as the well declines and the gas volumes fall you just peel off miners, and then you go drill a well down the road. Yeah, because that doesn't make sense as a third party, but it makes sense in-house. And it's kind of happening now,
Starting point is 01:18:09 because right now they are using third parties. We were talking to Pubco about chasing a rig in New Mexico, which they just hard ban on flaring. and it made sense for us you know just basically for the experience the deal credit the
Starting point is 01:18:34 this the badge you know but on paper it was rough right it's a lot of work it's right when you get settled you're like okay let's mine but on to the next and it's
Starting point is 01:18:50 pretty, pretty volatile in some, you know, you're, you're dealing with mother nature and some dragons deep down in the hole and you don't know how many are coming out on what days. And so the the, the logistics were tough for a third party, but if you're doing that all in house, then, then you don't really care because you can understand the economics on both sides um you you know might lose the oil for a day um but but you know that you'll you'll make it up you know in the future or you'll just go ahead and run uh maybe maybe oils down that month and uh you're you're happy to just get it into storage um to where to where you can keep this mind going and not have because you basically have to charge them a penalty if you're not getting
Starting point is 01:19:37 any fuel and so if you don't have to pay that penalty just i mean it all comes down to how much dollar per barrel dollar per MCF dollar per Bitcoin yeah and in the future it'll be MCF per Bitcoin
Starting point is 01:19:50 yes sats per MCF sats per scuff yeah and what was I going to ask I just lost my train of thought oh
Starting point is 01:20:03 pubcos like so I mean David Bailey founder of or the owner of BTT Media came out publicly yesterday and tweeted that
Starting point is 01:20:11 one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world has just signed on for a two-year sponsorship of the Bitcoin conference. And so it seems like pubcos are getting, without naming names, obviously, do you think the big super majors are going to come in within the next few years? Three to five.
Starting point is 01:20:39 Three to five? Three to five. At scale? They've got to drill oil right now. Eye on the prize right now. Eye on the prize. It is time to get some barrels out of the ground and explore. You don't explore $20 oil. But, sorry, you drill a $20 oil because you have cheap service costs and you're then heavily rewarded once the price swings back up and you got flowing barrels instead of having to go expensive rig prices and try to produce more. And so that's like right now, drilling for oil at $20 is, I see the equivalent of buying ASICs, $20 terahash, right? Like that's, uh, it's kind of the smart money wins, but a lot of, you know, it's still, I'm still risky.
Starting point is 01:21:30 Everything, everybody's scared and it could hang out at $20 barrel forever, or Bitcoin can hang out at 20, you know, K forever. And so I think, uh, sure in the future. Yes. But, but right now, uh, we are one trick pony of like get as many flowing barrels. Cause when this thing rips, uh, it's going to rip, but you know, unfortunately it's going to probably do a lot of damage uh to the global economy that any importer can't afford to import anymore and uh it'll the music will stop you know so it's make money while the hay is shining or
Starting point is 01:22:08 sorry make hay while the sun is shining because we've been uh kind of just lull for seven seven ten years of no real like hot action and i think uh i think that's what we're walking into sleepwalking into an energy crisis right now. And how long it lasts, I don't know. But if I'm a major, I'm thinking, let's start exploring. Let's go elephant hunting. Let's go find some big, big production fields that we can replenish all those reserves that have been depleted in the last three years when we haven't been drilling. And being forced by ESG activists to divest stuff and invest
Starting point is 01:22:48 in uneconomical green unreliable projects. That's one thing that worries me. It's like ESG going to fucking... I was literally about to bring up ESG. And then you mentioned it for me. I mean, Exxon, you have
Starting point is 01:23:03 the activist investors on their board and they're publicly posturing like, we're going to transition away from fossil fuels. It's like, are there any anti-ESG players in that space that are saying, all right, we don't fucking care.
Starting point is 01:23:20 We're going to drill a hole. All the privates. None of the public guys. Like, so if, yeah, no. I don't think that that is sustainable. I think after a lot of people die in Europe of starvation because of lack of fertilizer,
Starting point is 01:23:35 because it's derived from natural gas and people freezing to death because they pickled the beast on NATO and they can't get access to a heating source, it's going to be really tough to go pat yourself on the back and say, I'm trying to save the world for ESG. It's just becoming more apparent every day that it's a huge scam.
Starting point is 01:23:59 And once they start saying that nuclear warheads are ESG or missiles are ESG, and now all of a sudden everybody's backtracking and using coal, and all of a sudden now nuclear is cool. um they're just they're pulling that thread and it's just unraveling uh every single day and i'm here for it because it's dangerous it's uh it's anti-human uh you just you literally are going to make a lot of people suffer uh without a lot of means or access to cheap energy has never gone
Starting point is 01:24:28 well uh ever and the only way to like get yourself up uh as a developing country is you know access cheap energy. And there's nowhere in the world that ESG has lifted anybody up. I mean, let's talk about Sri Lanka, the beautiful ESG score. How's that going for you? It's terrible. It's really sad. I don't mean to stupid Sri Lankans. They didn't vote for that. They got kind of manipulated into it. And it's just one domino that's, like I said, just going to keep kind of falling over until, you know, like I said, if you're trying to get elected on screaming ESG, uh, and Johnny Q public is kind of sick of it and ready to control his own destiny and save his money. And, uh, this is, you know, kind of not the way when you're paying, uh, the expensive,
Starting point is 01:25:22 you know, prices at the pump and your energy bills have gone up and you're having to cut out certain things in your life because, uh, I mean, let's, let's face it is this is kind of a dangerous policy that is it's not sustainable and we're seeing like kind of the house of cards fall and if if you can still be for it while watching what germany is about to go through at the end of this year then uh you're a different type of human being than i special kind of idiot well that's and that's again going back to the luke roman conversation i had earlier this week that was sort of what we ended on it's so mind-boggling because it all comes down to is a decision if we have all these resources at our fingertips we have the intellect and the
Starting point is 01:26:06 capability to make it happen it's just this weird political will that's preventing us from man-made yeah 100 man-made i think we could have everything we could be clean we could i mean and that's the other thing like the whole climate change and denigrating oil and gas is it's just like it makes it seem like the only way to get oil and gas out of the ground into market is inherently dirty where it's just simply not the case like we made crazy improvements with the safety and cleanliness by which we we pull these molecules out of the ground i'm still speechless yeah but i i like you said earlier states need to just disobey like the future of texas and does texas have it does texas have it in it to disobey
Starting point is 01:26:56 Yeah, yeah, I think they do. I always tell people there's about five points. I was chatting on the stage with you right over here. It was first, the Spaniards came over here looking for hard money, gold. And they gave every single settler, the incentivization was heavens to the center of the earth.
Starting point is 01:27:20 And that was like the best private property rights ever, heavens to the center of the earth. so you have this like cowboy you're out on these huge ranches nobody's coming to save you from the Comanches like you got to figure it out so you got this independent spirit
Starting point is 01:27:37 of you know I control my own destiny don't tell me what to do get off my land then the revolution happened and you know Spain became Mexico and the Mexicans decided to populate this Tejas area
Starting point is 01:27:58 with a bunch of, you know, they might've been a little part outlaw of guys that saw a great economic opportunity. If I work hard, I get to control my own destiny again. And so they got the private property rights when, you know, the Mexicans decided that they were getting a little too populous and a little too wily for them.
Starting point is 01:28:18 And they said, hey, give us that cannon back. Come and take it. And we said, come and take it. And that's like still right here. And 99% of this state or republic, future republic, outside of the cities, that is still 100%, 100% our mindset. The most dangerous thing, like the person said, nothing scares a government more than a bunch of armed citizens willing to defend their private property. I believe that is number one. Are they going to take our guns, Griffin Havy?
Starting point is 01:28:52 Fuck no. They're not going to take our guns. Absolutely not. Not from my dead hands. And so, and like, there's a ton of me out there. We're, we're there. We're, you're, you will never take my guns. Too many of us are going to die on that hill that nobody wants to fire that first shot because it's, it's, it's a lot of, it's a lot of bloodshed and like, for no reason. Unnecessary. Yeah. For trying to, uh, you know, take somebody's private property. And so, yeah, that's still in our ethos today. And, uh, you know, I run with a lot of dudes that think the exact same and, you know, from that come and take it that, that was like, okay, now we'll defend these private property rights. And then they become English common law. And that, you know, that kind of right there with the Texas mindset was always, uh, we'll defend my private property. And I understand like, if you get the, the oil rights there, then the wind rights or
Starting point is 01:29:44 shoulder rights, whatever, you know, there's, there's just a lot of upside that, that came from that. And that's just a really special, uh, crossroads of, of everything coming together perfectly. And then, you know, kind of from there spindle top happened, they, they drilled for oil and, you know, any Joe Blow that wanted to go out and risk it and use his own capital could control his own destiny again. And that, uh, I, I, God, I think it's still, I think it's still here today. And I, and I, I know you don't need a hundred percent of that mentality, but I don't, I mean, there's enough wily, wily boys still in Texas that you could, you could do it on five to 10% and still be a horse to reckon with type deal. And then, uh, you know, the deregulation of the
Starting point is 01:30:26 grids when it comes to the Bitcoin mining, you know, you can still, you know, you control your own destiny. It doesn't matter what Washington's telling you to do. If you're truly off grid or, buying electricity in a free market deregulated system, you, you can, you can control your own destiny. You don't have to worry about what the Fed is printing. And the day that Texas basically says, okay, you're not going to secure our border. Okay. We're going to do that. Like you're not going to, you know, bail out the oil companies, but you're happily going to bail out every other bank or, you know, any industry that you think is cool. well why why do we need the federal government here in texas like you know i'm not saying we
Starting point is 01:31:08 secede today but at the end of the day we we have all the leverage and the more uh you know crunch in the energy space uh it looks it looks good for texans and let's control our own destiny and you know one of the biggest things is like we're gonna stop giving you funds and it's like well if we could make our own funds here because we have cheaper energy than majority of the world like you're falling on deaf ears here uncle sam yeah and this bitcoin mining permanent funds like you use a strand of gas to mine bitcoin and maybe you roll that into a permanent fund like the alaskan oil permanent fund and the federal government says hey we're not going to give you funds anymore you say we don't need them yeah oh this those fun coupons that you printed
Starting point is 01:31:54 trillions of thank you and yeah then that's i don't know you could you could kind of see if if this bricks things really takes off i don't think it will i mean the the petrodollar still because of the navy uh my dad was in the navy so i'm a little little biased there but if you look at like since the brits kind of controlled the deep seas the portuguese the spaniards the you Kind of control of everything that's transported on water. Everything is transported on water. And then unless you can do it domestically, which nobody really has everything going for it,
Starting point is 01:32:33 like near as much as the United States and especially Texas, when it comes to just resources and the ability to manufacture, you need cheap energy, you need a large population, you need pro-business, you need private property rights. It all kind of makes sense here. And I think you've got enough, actually, I know you have enough people that will defend that, you know, kind of forever. So I'm really not worried about, uh, the rest of the world getting ugly because, you know, USA and Texas should be fine. But if, if the United States
Starting point is 01:33:02 decides to stop, um, you know, making sure that there's free sea lanes, uh, it's brick, brick currencies don't work. Right. Like, so I don't know what the marriage is going to be between a dollar. I think we'll see the digital currency dollar. But I believe in the layered money where Bitcoin will be like the gold and then the CBDCs will be under that. And that can still be hard money. And if you want to trade, or if you literally want to trade, you pretty much have to pay the taxes of that free shipping lane and AKA using that dollar, keeping it relevant. And then I don't know if you basically can just go sanction pirates and the brick currencies are done, right? Like get some Blackwater dudes out there to go harass some ships and you can put some real volatility on some currency without a Navy.
Starting point is 01:34:00 Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting times that we live in here. Yeah. It's fun though. I know. It's scary, but it's fun. It's, it's, it's, I, it's hard to deny that we're at the, uh, good times creates or hard
Starting point is 01:34:16 times, great, strong men, strong men, create good times, good times, create weak men. And we are at the weak men creating hard times right now. I mean, it doesn't get any softer in the white house than, you know, I almost feel sorry for the dude. He's doesn't really feel like he's there and just kind of being controlled. And, and there's consequences for putting weak men in office. and like I said
Starting point is 01:34:39 time to raise strong men make sure your boys are hard western men that's all you can do hey I have a natural born Texan in my family amen my second son was born in Texas congratulations on that he's our Texas anchor baby
Starting point is 01:34:54 raise him strong it is that's the thing too we're both fathers and I'm looking at my boys they're two and a half and a month and a half old. I'm like, what the hell are you going to what is the world going to look like for you
Starting point is 01:35:09 too? Yeah, I tell my son like sorry, I had it good. You're about to go through tougher times than I have and nobody's going to listen to you complaining. I'm sorry. It's just the way life is. We had it so good. It was incredible. You didn't realize what kind of world we were living in. That was phenomenal.
Starting point is 01:35:26 90s baby. Not a care in the world. Downloading AOL on your gateway computer, eating Fun Dip. watching Nickelodeon and you wake up two decades later and the world's falling to shit. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:35:40 Because I don't know how long this current thing kind of is sustainable, but it just does feel like a fiat bubble is kind of ready to have a lot of pops kind of all over and what's going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. And I'm just thankful
Starting point is 01:35:58 I live in the United States of America and especially Texas that we'll be fine and we'll still have plenty of food to eat. We've got the greatest geography for growing crops and a river system to transport them to where it's not too expensive. And we have all the natural resources for energy.
Starting point is 01:36:17 So it's never gonna get out of control here. And we're very fortunate. But I do think there's gonna be some knock-on effects kind of globally. And what does that look like? I don't know. I feel bad for the Europeans right now. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:36:33 yeah and they don't seem like the the kind to be aggressive to go fix their problems yeah tell the dutch kind of kind of proud of the dutch right now yes shout to well the dutch farmers right yeah let's just say again marty jones coming back tinfoil hat back on here it seems like people like the wef class the davos class and have infiltrated these governments and seems like they're actively trying to depopulate the world i mean if you look into what's going on with the Dutch farmers specifically, they're using the guise of ESG and environmental catastrophe
Starting point is 01:37:08 to essentially eminent domain farmland. If you actually look at the plans, they just want to take that farmland and put up like cities of pods where people will go live. You know what I tell my kids? What? What's the number one rule about firearms?
Starting point is 01:37:27 Never let the government take your guns. because there's just prime examples of why you don't do that uh that's like you know i could say we have the greatest geography in the world and when it comes to natural resources but at the end of the day uh i mean shout out to the founding fathers and creating um the different branches of government that they can't do that right like whoever's handling biden right now uh would love to be pushing all of this down our throats and just got absolutely stopped in his tracks on that EPA ruling.
Starting point is 01:38:06 The concealed carry. I mean, we had an example. The second amendment. And it was just like, okay, dang, I guess I can't do anything. And so the Supreme Court, and that's how important that Trump win was, but to put those three seats on there,
Starting point is 01:38:21 that if that was Hillary, I don't know if I'm this optimistic right now, but again, shout out to the founding fathers. We have the ability to protect our private property and we have the ability to have access to cheap energy because we don't have these mandates being forced down our throat from the federal level. Sure, they can do it on activists through public companies, but at the end of the day, they can't mess with your private property and thank God. no well yeah i mean the gun debate right now is infuriating like again thank god for that concealed carry law too in indiana yeah the cia agent who groomed that that mass shooter
Starting point is 01:39:04 at the indiana mall was uh probably crying when he saw that dude uh concealed carry shooting this guy from 40 yards away 15 seconds legend yeah well i mean hero that's the thing obviously the gun debate is hot right now the Evaldi thing happened here a couple months ago we've had that thing in Indiana mass shooting meme is pretty big here
Starting point is 01:39:31 in the United States that's the thing that frustrates me the most these mass shooters are typically on SSRIs and very depressed and nobody wants to talk about that problem it's like no we have to take your guns and it seems like it's somewhat of a manufactured crisis to take people's guns
Starting point is 01:39:48 it yesterday literally the president leader of the free world came out and said that the weather is an emergency and then four hours later tweeted about gun grabbing and like historically if you like there's no way you can't be like that's kind of a red flag nobody look emergency okay now i need your guns and what's the emergency oh uh it's hot it's summer but yeah on uvalde like my my ancestors been in Uvalde County and I've been there like between Uvalde and County County, like every summer of my life. And that school's maybe like eight blocks from my grandma's house. And it's when I go and talk to people,
Starting point is 01:40:32 I was in Uvalde last week and nobody, nobody feels good about this. Every single person there is like, it's suspicious. Nobody is like, I want answers. This is not, this doesn't happen, you know, in, in Uvalde. And this, uh, it's, I'm glad the Texas Rangers are involved and, you know, what's going on there. Uh, so first the FBI was investigating and does that give you any warm and fuzzies? No. Um, and, but also the Texas Rangers are teamed up with them to do the investigating. So I feel a little bit, uh, you know, better about having a real law enforcement agency that, um, it was actually not, you know, politicalized and
Starting point is 01:41:15 weaponized. Um, so I don't know, man, it's a terrible deal. It's so sad. Uh, you know, a lot of friends, um, and you know, family there that have, you know, it's obviously it's the worst tragedy it's ever hit, hit Uvalde. But, uh, like I said, I don't, I don't feel good about it. Nobody, nobody like has a safe feeling of, Hey, give up your guns because the police will protect you. And, and that that's your, can be your argument for coming to take my guns when I just saw like the incompetence there. And a lot of people say like, first it was the school, uh, police and then the Valley police and then the state troopers. So then state level, and then the border patrol makes it a federal level. And it was, uh, it was a big bungle. Don't get me wrong,
Starting point is 01:42:01 but uh yeah it's it's not a great argument for hey take take my guns because the police will protect you especially when you juxtapose with what just happened in indiana it's like that kid acted in 15 seconds and these guys i mean there's pictures of them like checking their phones and smiling in the hallways when this shit was going on it's like how i like thinking about it let's let's go on to the next subject they'll never take my guns that's uh that's my brother's favorite griffin habey uh story in a bit block boom last year we were at the barbecue and you just walked up to my brother like you just moved to texas he's like yeah he was like you know one thing about texas everyone's like why he's like don't never ever ever ever ever take our guns i don't
Starting point is 01:42:45 know i don't know who that guy was but he was probably speaking the truth it's uh yes it's like one of the best just government backstop tools you can have armed citizenry. Like I think it was you tweeted out one day, the people should never fear their government. The government should fear their people. Yeah. And that like, that keeps authoritarian
Starting point is 01:43:17 and overreaching power grabbing politicians at bay. And it's, I mean, it's a tool and don't get me wrong. There's some terrible people out there and there's evil all over the world. And if they get ahold of guns, yes, you know, do some bad things, but like passing laws and taking it away from law abiding citizens is never going to be your answer.
Starting point is 01:43:35 And they'll find a way, you know, kind of to break the law because they're evil people. And so making it harder for everyday Americans who just want to live their life and be left alone. Yeah. Yeah. That's the point I want to get. just leave me alone. I just want to raise my family. Yeah. I think a lot of libertarians
Starting point is 01:43:54 got at it once they were sitting at home, having more time to research, uh, you know, the history of tyranny and in different, uh, aspects of history and countries out there, it's just, you know, less government and it's a pendulum. You're going to swing back and forth between big government and small government throughout the years. And I think we're kind of, uh, at, at the, at the top of big government welfare state and nobody wants to just keep subsidizing offshore wind or whatever is going to be the next offshore wind lunatic idea that's coming out of this current administration. I don't think the American people want big government spending. They want to hold on to their own money. Yeah. And another shout out to
Starting point is 01:44:40 the founding fathers. We are a republic. At the end of the day, this country was founded as a republic not actually a democracy a lot of people don't understand and i think the last three i mean i'm in texas now why did i come to texas i was in northeast i was in new york philly area i was like these people are not respecting my autonomy so i'm going to go somewhere that does which is texas i had the ability to move freely to do that and you have an optionality of different structures that you can live in here in the united states due to the fact that we have autonomous states that can make their own laws and huge win that's i mean and that's something that we need to keep the momentum going on is states asserting the rights i mean we've mentioned it a few times in this show
Starting point is 01:45:27 but we really need to drill that home for anybody listening is like if you live in a particular state and you want something to happen go to your to the state level and say hey like let's build some nukes um let's not participate in this insanity going on at the federal level and let's really flex our muscles and show like hey we can take care of ourselves we don't need your help yeah if west virginia can do it what are we waiting for i don't know what we're waiting for yeah west my god virginia i'm so proud of them mansion keeping it real yeah he's a democrat too is he he's a logical thinker at the end of the day uh understands that you can't just put more burden on on the american you know working class right now when we're trying to
Starting point is 01:46:15 get by we're trying to succeed and thrive and man-made roadblocks coming our way it's just not it's not helpful unleash the beast we have everything we need here unleash us i'm telling you. We, uh, we could, you know, we could get gas down to two bucks, give me and the homies, you know, 20 drilling rigs and the, you know, Marcellus and the, the Haynesville. And we can have so much gas just flowing out of our ears. Uh, but you need to know that like the, the government's going to back you. You need to know that if, okay, say you went and did that and you made some money, are you going to get windfall taxed? Like, that's not something you should be worrying about by your
Starting point is 01:46:59 government. That's something you should just, like, hey, we need gas. Go get it, boys. What can I do to help? Not, oh, better not make too much money or we'll windfall you. And it's just so counterproductive. But we got resources
Starting point is 01:47:15 here for days. And yeah, drill, baby, drill. How do we... Now you got me thinking, like, how do we... I don't know. The law needs to be passed. An amendment needs to be made, but to give that certainty
Starting point is 01:47:31 to producers. Right now, you had Chevron when Mike Wurch came out, CEO of Chevron, and said, we're not going to build a refinery because you're telling us that we're not going to be able to sell our resources to the market in a decade. Why would I build something that has
Starting point is 01:47:47 a 30-year payback if you're telling me I'm not going to be able to have revenue produced from that asset 10 years from now? Straight up venture business risk. right and you you weigh those every day um i don't think more laws is going to help it uh i think market sentiment is going to help it and it's enough uh people calling their reps and saying hey i don't like paying high gas prices yeah and the reps are not you know they're
Starting point is 01:48:14 basically going to go up the senate and and be telling their colleagues like hey all of my constituents want this regulation out of the way like stop and so i think it's more of instead of it's incentivizing it's just like stop the regulation yeah because i can texas like i said we're we're all about um incentivizing them to go out and drill and not have to do any regulation when in washington they're all about how can i regulate you more and uh that attitude's got to change um and i i don't think you get it done on paper uh personally i think it's it's more or less uh cost of living is is too high and what's what's like your quickest fix it's cheap energy everything thrives on cheap energy and uh just get out of the way yeah get out of the way it's
Starting point is 01:49:05 almost like not to get like biblical here but like the bible many could view as like a book that helps you bootstrap morale you're going to read the bible it's like here's how you'd be a good person and just how you should live your life in terms of like um providing value and living a life of morality and good ethics like maybe we need that for energy like hey i mean not to like write a new bible or anything but there's a story that gets told throughout time like hey cheap energy is good we need it to thrive like that like talking about building not building raising strong children just instilling that in them like don't ever let anybody take your guns don't ever let anybody tell you that energy usage is bad pollution's bad uh that's that's where they've
Starting point is 01:49:53 controlled the narrative on energy usage is bad yeah because they because they conflate it with pollution it's just it's two completely separate things that um they're just attaching to each other to to make to fear monger like oh we're going to pollute and destroy the world it's like No, you can provide more energy and electricity to the world without polluting. It's trying to get that message out there. Yeah, we got a long ways to go there. And they always say historically,
Starting point is 01:50:26 like the, sorry, I keep saying that, the energy density physics is why the oil and gas industry has never had to advertise, really. It's because at the end of the day, humans will migrate to the most efficient use of their time use of their energy to get certain substances out of the ground to you know burn burn them as fuel for energy and you know the the density compared to wood to coal to you know
Starting point is 01:50:56 oil and gas to uranium it's uh it's like you you're not gonna have the wood say you're not gonna keep burning wood today but that's that's where we are in germany right now they're literally getting firewood in the middle of the summer just to you know be prepared for the winter the uh just how efficient and uh dense you know hydrocarbons are they'll they'll always come to us and so we never really had to worry about it and this is like the first time i've seen like just a straight up attack like people gluing themselves to the last supper saying no new oil like what what do you really think uh it's a fucking oil painting everything on your body how you got there like everything and then the the uh the f1 driver who's wearing like the no
Starting point is 01:51:49 tar sand shirts when he's wearing like a walkman holding his iphone he's got a petronas on his fucking car yes yes and it's uh it's the this virtue signaling that is uh it's like i said it's not sustainable. It's starting to fall on deaf ears. When people have real problems, you never heard about global warming. When we were in 08, 07, everybody was talking about global warming. And that's where they really started these things because everything was going great. And then all of a sudden you have real problems and nobody talks about it. So my theory is as long as they're talking about global warming and then the climate, that means we're still in good times. Because when people are legitimately starving because
Starting point is 01:52:35 your harvest numbers are down, because your inputs for the fertilizer have gotten priced out of most of the farmers around the world. And so your yields are going to be so much lower. And when everybody wakes up and sees that Ukraine and Russia were number one and number five of weed exports. And a lot of people rely on weed as part of their diets. And those people aren't going to care about what you think about some teenager from Sweden wants to tell you about what she thinks about the globe. It's just a matter of not having real problems. And unfortunately, real problems you know are coming and i i think that yes yeah it's looking it's looking like we're kind of stamping out that uh that that fear every day but it just takes time and messaging i would
Starting point is 01:53:30 not count on the oil and gas industry for messaging i think parker said it the best it's going to be the the bitcoiners that that squash the uh we're coming in to help that squash the uh the esg messaging better than the oil and gas guys ever will well how's from your perspective how has it on the narrative side as bitcoin are sort of infiltrating oh it's unreal gas oh it's unreal um yeah like never never did did i think that i would hear like some of the best you know the safe safe deans out there you know just absolutely demolishing anybody uh that's afraid of carbon or energy usage uh mallers like two days ago had a great pow and nick carter's done more for like the texas mining um industry environment industry every bit of that upgrowth uh it's it's just been
Starting point is 01:54:27 phenomenal and we can never convey that message like he could right and so um it's it's been really fun i've been i've been thoroughly enjoying seeing it and i'm loving just the collision course of these two paths that's where i think the uh where we can be the biggest value and obviously hey we're gonna help you monetize your stranded assets but we're also because we've been picked on for 13 years now like you fucking idiots like we're running this ponzi it's like shut the fuck up like no no more we need to fix the money we need to fix the energy we're here we just got to make fun of these people yeah and how do we get these uh these wily cowboys on board oh okay
Starting point is 01:55:08 we hate ESG too okay come on it just kind of worked out I absolutely love it yeah cyber hornets are real yeah
Starting point is 01:55:16 and they're like kind of the first ones to pounce on on a lot of these things so it's been fun to watch yeah let's end it on the positive
Starting point is 01:55:23 let's end it on bitcoin mining oil and gas too what what do you want to end it on in that regard what does
Starting point is 01:55:31 this convergence of these two industries mean for humanity in the long run oof Deep. Like I said, it really depends on how the future of money looks, right? And if the future of money really does look like an energy-backed currency, and Ford was onto something 100 years ago, then it brings power back to the petro-states. And I don't care if you're Texas, I don't care if
Starting point is 01:56:03 you're Argentina. I don't care if you are Saudi Arabia. I don't care if you're Canada. If you've got a bunch of natural resources and all of a sudden you've lost a market of being able to sell, you'll burn oil to make Bitcoin at that point. And at the end of the day, I really do feel like the old phrase was, he who has the gold finances wars. And if you actually have to earn that gold and you didn't inherit it and you went out there and proof of work made you, um, just earn that, uh, that gold, then you, you're just less incentivized to go drop bombs on random people. Um, which is, which is a great thing for mankind. Uh, I mean, it feels more, more peaceful if there's less, you know, fake, fake money being printed to supply, you know, warheads and the
Starting point is 01:56:55 war machine and i think you just really slow that down but uh and in texas like texas terms it just uh it really sets up nicely for a just a just straight up bastion of free markets you know cheap energy which leads to cheap manufacturing which leads to greater supply chains and just more domestic thriving right here we've got access to the coast. We've got access to a lot of energy resources from the windy plains to these sunny mountains of West Texas to the tons of hydrocarbons in the ground. We've got uranium deposits here. And the states that embrace Bitcoin mining, they embrace private property and the self-sovereignty, more or less,
Starting point is 01:57:51 I think is probably what I'm looking for. And I think other people are going to take notice of that and they're either all going to come here or say, hey, maybe I can make a difference where I live and go back, I got a state to save or something like that. But my kids are, I mean, eighth generation Texans, so they ain't going anywhere, they'll be here. yeah
Starting point is 01:58:14 times may be tough right now freaks but I'm very optimistic oh yeah I couldn't be more optimistic I've never been this busy in my life too neither have I it's crazy obviously just had our second son so went on a bit of a paternity
Starting point is 01:58:31 leave but everything going on from here and TFTC to the mining side to 1031 there are things happening it may seem like the global economy is coming to a halt but Bitcoin doesn't stop Texas will be just fine
Starting point is 01:58:47 USA is going to be fine and just stay laser focused right here it's going to be fine if you American freaks out there listening take initiative and actually tell your congressman you want cheap energy
Starting point is 01:59:03 yeah go do it we'll end it there go tell your congressman you want cheap energy and he's going to get it out of the ground for you piece of love freaks

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