Energy Expert Robert Rapier on America’s Biggest Energy Myth

Hello, you're listening to American Power. I'm your host, Nat Towson,

“stand up comedian, speedwriter, many other kinds of writer,”

and most likely to win me an award that no one's ever heard of, podcast host.

I am joined as always by our panel of experts in a form,

starting with our panelist expert on the military and foreign policy. Please welcome, Chad Scott, Chad, how's it going? Yeah, it's going great. I'm actually looking forward to this episode because I feel like I won't have to stand in Mr. Global Shadow today.

He's so impressive, but I'm really excited for who's going in for him today. Well, I can't wait for another shadow to be cast upon us, because we have another giant joining the panel, filling in for Mr. Global. We're very excited to have him here.

He is a chemical engineer with nearly three decades of international

“experience across oil, gas refining synthetic fuels and renewable energy.”

He's the author of Power Plays, Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil, and the brand new book, American Energy, a history of power, progress, and change. He's also a longtime Forbes contributor and one of the most respected voices in the energy industry.

His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Economist, and he's been featured on 60 minutes, CNBC, PBS, and the history channel, joining the panel as our energy expert, Robert Rapier. Welcome to American Power Robert, thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys, for having me alone.

I retract my shadow statement. I now feel inadequate again. I'm sure that is true. We are on the shoulders of giants. I know.

“Robert, I really appreciate you joining us here for this episode,”

and I was hoping for, you know, I gave a bit of an overview of your career, but I was hoping you could talk to our listeners and just explain a little bit about what it is that you do and how you came to this point in your career. Okay, sure. I graduated with a Master's in Chemical Engineering from Texas and University, and I went to work in the Petrol Chemical Industry,

and I worked in the Petrol Chemical Industry for the last, that's over 30 years. Took me overseas three times. I worked in the Netherlands. I worked in Germany. I worked in Scotland. I was in Hawaii for five years. I've been, I've been a lot of different places,

and somewhere along the line, I started to write about energy. Whenever I was working at a refinery in Billings, Montana, I started to blog about energy, and it started getting picked up by the National Media. I've salon picked up one of my very early blog articles, and it sort of took off from there, and I liked to joke sometimes that I was on the cover of Rolling Stone,

because there's a Rolling Stone that's got guns and roses on the cover, and there's a story about ethanol, mentioned up on the top, and I'm in that story. I'm quoted in that story. I was on the cover Rolling Stone sort of with guns and roses. You're basically in guns and roses. Yeah, basically. But yeah, so that kind of took off, and yeah, I'd done a lot of media now at this point.

Ford's tapped me to be a contributor, and now I'm a senior contributor.

My Ford's articles have been read, something like 12 million times.

I usually write a new article for them once a week. I also write for investing daily. I crank out multiple articles for them every week. So I'm a chemical engineer, an investor, a writer, and yeah, that's kind of me in a nutshell. I've got a passion for energy. I like talking about it. People call me from Egypt and say, "Hey, would you come on my show?" Absolutely. I love it. I'll talk about energy any time. They're not.

Well, you are in the right place, my friend, and thank you again for joining us. I want to take us right in from there to our first topic of the show. If you don't mind, it has been a minute since we had an update on the situation in Iran. Obviously, an energy adjacent topic, directly affecting our oil markets, but also something of a military topic. Last checked in on this situation a couple episodes ago, and there have been some pretty major

developments in the situation since then. Chad, do you want to give us a little bit of a recap of what's been going on in Iran? Yeah, for sure. So the war seems to be somewhat in a pause stage, as each side is reconciling their munitions, their capabilities, kind of feeling out where the future

goes here. Obviously, these munitions problem for both the United States and Iran is critical,

and I'll talk about that in a bit about why that's driving some of Trump's decision-making at the moment. But broadly, over the last three months, Iran has attacked roughly 30 commercial vessels, and that continues. This rate of harm moves does continue to remain closed, and traffic remains critically low. We saw like three vessels per day crossing over the last few days versus what used to be like a hundred plus vessels per day. So those vessels that are crossing seem to be

suggesting that Iran may be rebuilding their damage or underground nuclear facilities. Specifically

“it has a pickaxe mountain. That's a facility that theoretically our bunker busters cannot strike.”

So that is a concern. We can close off access by hitting the entryways, but it's not necessarily something that is going to destroy the nuclear material. And there's potential intelligence that said that they had moved a lot of their capability to pickaxe mountain before, or even the midnight hammer strikes last year. Now the thing about what is going on though is Trump is probably going to pull out of this war into clear victory. No matter what the reality on ground is,

he keeps tweeting that he's going to destroy power plants or bridges for every ship that are on fires on. Those single one-offs may continue, but the broader war is going to wind down from a munitions standpoint. Because Trump is starting to realize that there is no deal left for the United States to make. If Trump walks away, he doesn't actually have to acknowledge the failures of this war. And at least he won't have his, uh, have to acknowledge it to his domestic audience.

At least he won't have to say, "Hey, US, we failed." The world is going to realize, yeah, America failed here. But Americans largely just don't care about that. They care more about the personal financial aspect in my belief. And if that, and I hope, uh, if I'm wrong, please correct me. But he doesn't have to formally recognize Iranian control over the straight-of-forms. If he just walks away, he doesn't have to accept Iranian demands on sanctions. He can simply just declare that the United

States won high five to George Washington and his AI post that he does. And simply just call it a day. And a lot of this is being driven by what I was talking about earlier is that a lot of the high value targets, the missile sites, the command posts, the air defenses, the naval facilities, weapon storage locations, they've already been struck. And so at some point, we're no longer using our exquisite expensive munitions against meaningful targets. We're just burning through what is

a scarce munition at this point for lower value targets. So he can keep talking about this bombing campaign to project strength. And even his own advisors are saying, this is not going to work.

We're exhausting critical munitions that could be potentially used in a conflict in Europe.

If Russia decides to pivot from Ukraine or in the Taiwan straight. And therefore, he finally has kind of gotten a wake up call. All of the the realities of the world have come to bear on him. And he is either deciding to withdraw or escalate. And there's just no way with the midtermsist close. He's going to escalate. So I fully believe his best political option is for him to just basically surrender. What is essentially a surrender and declare,

but declare victory to his domestic audience and walk away. And I mean, that kind of brings up a question for me for for Robert here, because from an energy standpoint, if he does walk away,

“which again, I think that's probably his best route. How long would it take before the world”

actually feels the war is over? And gas prices normalize at the pump for Americans or even Canadians, because we have a lot of them as well in our audience. Yeah, so let's go all the way back to the start. I mean, when we attacked Iran, I said this only ends one of two ways. They're going to close the straightive hormones, which they did. That's this is why we don't attack Iran. I mean, we it despite problems people have with Iran,

there's one reason we don't attack them. They can shut down the straightive hormones. I'm sure it's been covered. They, you know, there's 20% of the world's oil flow goes through there and

even more than that of the world's LNG flow. So it is a major. It is the critical choke point

in the world. And so once Iran closed that, there's only one of two options here. We walk away and we leave them in control of the straightive hormones, which is what you're saying and which

“I think is the most likely option at this point. I think we just, I think Trump just walks away.”

And I've said that for a couple of months. The only other option is putting boots on the ground and trying to seize control. And that's, that's really nasty. And I agree with you. I don't think going into the midterms that he has the appetite for that. So what's going to happen here? If you had told me that five months after shutting down the straightive hormones and an almost continual shutdown, that entire time, that all prices would still be below $100 a barrel. I wouldn't have

believed it. You know, so how long before gas prices normalize, I would say that I didn't think they would normalize again while Trump is president. As long as Iran controls the straightive hormones, they're extracting toes and less, there's going to be less traffic going through because they have to go through a very specific route. So that's going to cut down the traffic in and out. So it will cut down the oil flow. I don't think we'll get back to the oil flows

that we're coming through there before. And there's going to be a search arjun now on the track, on the tanker traffic coming through. That's going to add to the price of oil. And so I don't, from a fundamental perspective, I don't think gasoline prices are going to get down

factors going on. So, you know, why aren't oil prices much higher than they are? Well,

US oil production continues to grow. I mean, we've been growing since 2009. We've added tremendous amount of oil with a large oil producer in the world. There are other countries that are doing the same thing. I've written article before the next big shale boom is an Argentina. And I just happened to see an article this morning. An Argentina is now setting records down there in their shale formation. So you have a lot of countries that are coming on and putting

oil on the market and that has helped. We went into this with China having a very full strategic reserve

“of their own. And that has helped immensely. Otherwise, I think we would have seen oil at $150.”

I'm surprised oil didn't go to $150, honestly. I think global inventories have been pulled down pretty low. So we're in a very different situation than we were in, you know, February before hostilities. You know, Europe has drawn down their strategic reserves. We've drawn down ours, China certainly drawn down theirs. And so, you know, even when things start flowing in the end, those strategic reserves will have to be replenished. And so, that's going to keep pressure on prices.

But, you know, I've learned the oil markets will surprise you. And I think many, many people, you know, competent, people predicted oil prices at $150, and you can see why, you know, that wasn't a crazy prediction. It was just looking at, you know, you can't take 20% of the oil's oil flow out and not expect to see an immense reaction. But, you know, it is what it is. We got, you know, inventories are lower. That's for sure. So there's more risk now out there

“for disruption. But, you know, if it continues to go on, I think there's some point that”

China's pulled down their reserves. We pulled down ours. You're supposed down theirs. And we say, hey, you know, there's nothing, there's nothing else to, there's nothing else to put out on the market. And, if you don't want me asking, what do you think, do you see from the administration,

like, as you mentioned, like, essentially the only choices where Iran has always controlled the

straight, but we effectively allowed them to prove their power through this entire action. Right? Like, I think this is really shown that closing the straight will hold the US's feet to the fire will hold our economies feet to the fire in a way that was more theoretical beforehand. Do you think that that has eventually affected the administration's strategy here? It is it's simply that Iran's war of attrition of just like letting us inflict, of inflicting the pain and letting us

feel it, is that functioning? Is that getting through to Donald Trump? Or what's to, essentially, we've known that this was the dichotomy, like, either either there's diplomacy, and we somehow get the straight open, or there's a full scale invasion, which I don't think we're going to do. I pray we're not going to do. That has been the situation for quite some time now. So are we really seeing the administration track differently? Is it a result of the midterms,

or is the policy shifting at all? So let's think about why we did this in the first place.

“I think the reason I'm going to go this in the first place was Venezuela was too easy.”

Venezuela was what we'd say. It was like clogging, like they thought they could pluck out another dictator. Yeah, so, and Trump, you know, we've seen world leaders, I should say. Well, now we see Venezuela's oil. And that's another story. Where's that? Where's all that old revenue going? We are taking their oil revenue and it's going to some dark hole somewhere. We don't know where it's going. And I think Trump decided, well, Venezuela was easy. Let's go in

there and list topple Iran. And he said, in the any many times, it's not speculation. He said, we're going to take their oil. And I think he probably had the same intention. We're going to grab Iran's oil too. So now we got our oil that is way less oil. Iran's oil, we've got a lot of oil revenues. And there's no telling where those oil revenues are going. So I think that was the strategy. And when the initial bombing didn't have a result in regime change, okay? Well, Iran now is

going to hunker down and they did. And so now we got in the situation where, and I think Trump's lost interest. You know, it wasn't a quick victory. And, you know, now it's really requiring strategy in thinking and, you know, public, the public's getting upset about it and gas prices are going up. And, you know, he's dealing with a lot more criticism than, you know, Venezuela, which just happened, you know, so, so quickly. I think Venezuela put up more of a fight. I think we would have

thought long and hard about going into Iran. So I think Trump is looking at a bunch of bad options right now. And I think the best option is to do what he does, just to clear victory and move on. But then I don't see in that case gas prices getting back down to where they were. I mean, we've already paid a tremendous price for this, you know, not just in what we spent in the military, but, you know,

now we've spent on, you know, higher gas prices and higher diesel prices. And, um, I don't see us getting back to where we were. So, you know, we're all paying the tax now and we're going to pay a tax, the whole world is paying a tax for this. So, DC, like, you who said diesel, I feel like, again, I'm not energy expert, but I feel like gasoline, what we, we feel at the pump, that's like the

the sexy headline that we always talk about. But I always kind of an increasingly believe that diesel

and jet fuel actually have a greater impact on the economy because, I mean, diesel runs our transport

“jet fuel runs are shipping industry cargo air cargo. Are those on different paths than gasoline?”

Are we looking at, yeah, gas may drop and we may see a balance in Trump's polls because gas prices drop and he'll get a tweet about it. But then again, in the background with Russia continuing to, to hold its own gas or diesel exports, does that mean we're going to see a worse recovery or no recovery at all because diesel and jet fuel are on a different path than gasoline? Yeah. So, the diesel markets are a lot tighter and you can go back and you could see when Russia

invaded Ukraine, the diesel markets went up a lot more than the, then gasoline did. And that's, that happened again because diesel markets are just tighter than the gasoline markets around the world. And so you're likely to see gasoline come down for sure more than diesel, but you're right, diesel runs the economy and diesel moves all the goods. You know, the grocery store, if we see

“inflation, you know, it's just not, it's not just commodity prices, it's because diesel is costing more”

to move absolutely everything around. And so there's inflationary pressure then that ripple through the entire economy. So, yeah, we got a problem with diesel and it's not going to be resolved any time soon. Russia, as you say, is making matters worse because Russia does export a lot of diesel to the world. And, you know, that's not happening right now and there's no indication that that's going to return any time soon. U.S. refineries are in sort of a difficult situation because

they can shift some, and this actually, they actually did this when Russia invaded Ukraine. They shifted production toward diesel, but then that takes production away from gasoline. And so now you've gotten, you know, you got shortages in diesel shortage in gasoline. And so you can shift your refinery back and forth a little bit, not a whole lot, but maybe 5% from gasoline to diesel. And, you know, that puts the impression gasoline. So you're just looking at, you know, from a

finer perspective, they're looking at where our margins highest. You know, they're not looking where's the shortage of worse. They're looking at prices and saying, okay, we're making a lot more on diesel. Let's try to shift as much as we can into diesel. And I want to ask you one thing about something you said a little bit earlier, which is just that we don't know where Venezuela's oil is

“going. Obviously, not every oil sale is publicly entered into a tracker record, but I do remember”

Bloomberg reporting earlier this year, back in February, that Venezuelan crude was going to

Israel for the first time in 17 years, and that most of Venezuela's oil had gone to China in

the past, but they were starting to spell to Spain and other parts of Europe. So we know some of this, or I'm asking you. I don't mean physically where it's going. I mean, where the money's going. Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. So we do know where the shipping routes of this is the sales are. Yes, we don't know where the money's going. I mean, the money initially said, okay, it's going to go to an offshore count and Trump is going to control that money. And, but there was a story,

I mean, it was in the economist or financial times, and it said, "Where's Venezuela's oil money?" So there are a lot of people who are asking that question. There's no transparency here. We don't know where those revenues are. You know, Trump said in the beginning, we're going to take that money and, you know, we're going to use it and hold it and help Venezuela rebuild. But there's been no transparency on that at all. So, right, and for the record, I worked for Chronicle Phillips back

when Chavez expropriated us. And he took, you know, billions of dollars worth of assets that we put in the ground down there and we took up to a world court and won. And so Venezuela has been

huge arbitration rule against them that they've never paid. And so when Trump sees this money,

he said, "We're not paying those guys back. That's their fault." You know, they should have, they should have known better. So he blamed Exxon Mobile and Chronicle Phillips for doing business in Venezuela and said, "We're not going to use," and they actually have judgments that they are supposed to be paid. And so now it's makes it more difficult for them to get paid if we're essentially stealing their oil revenue. Interesting. Yeah, because I was, when I was reading through

some of the south-combriefings on this, they brought up the funding sources for the recent earthquake.

headline grabbing speeches about how we're going to help them out with their, with the post-earth

quick, the post-destruction rebuild. And we're now seeing that that's not even happening. A lot of it has to do with the fact that our ADR, USAID has been defunded and dismantled. But it brings back, I mean, what better place to use that oil money than put it back into the Venezuelan economy in a post-earth quick situation to help them rebuild? And it just reminds me once again that I feel like we're just dealing with an administration that loves the grift. They love to just

make money disappear. It's the board of peace all over again. It's all of that. And I worry that we will continue to see this as he gets closer to countries like Saudi. We've seen the Saudi nuclear deal that he's trying to push through. And that kind of just brings up to me,

“do you see the Saudi oil situation? Now, granted, I think the Saudi oil situation with the”

Houthis in Yemen is a bit different than what's going on with Iran. This is a longer conflict.

I know that Houthis are somewhat of a proxy of Iran, but they're also an independent group. So they make their own decisions as well. They can be influenced by Iran in the Islamic Republic. But we're seeing this blockade of Saudi oil through Bobam in Deb. They originally were blockading the Red Sea during the initial stages of strikes into Gaza by Israel. Do you see this blockade of only Saudi oil, as of right now, which is the biggest driver of oil through

the right belief through the Bobam in it? Do you see that going to impact any of this at all? Or is this just a hoarding run? Yeah, if it went on, so that is the emergency outlet, if Hormuz was the front door, that's the

“emergency exit. And if they are blocking that, then yeah, that's a problem. But I checked traffic”

just for coming online. It looked like ships are going through there. So they don't have the capability to do what Iran has done. Iran has functionally shut down the state of Hormuz, but it looks to me like traffic is still going through the Houthis do not have the ability to do what Iran did. And if you look at traffic, like marinetraffic.com, you can see there's essentially no traffic going through Hormuz, but there was a line of ships going back and forth in and out of the

Suez canal. So I guess that brings up why is this even a problem for the US then? Are we not, which to talk about this with Mr. Global? Are we not the largest oil and natural gas producing country on earth? I mean, if that's the case, why can this war? And to be quite honest, in the grand scheme of wars, it's not even that big of a war for the United States to try to manage. Why is this war immediately raising the price of gas here in my hometown here in Idaho? Why is that still a

problem for us if we're so star-spangled awesome in such a large producer? So that question came

up again and again. When I first started writing about this after it happened, people say why

should this affect, we don't import anything from me wrong. Why should this affect us? And the reason to fix us is this is global market. And if somebody's producing oil in Utah and you know, they're not going to sell it to, you know, their refiner's there for $60 if they can get $100 out of the world market. They're going to get it by a pipeline down to the Gulf Coast and get it out of there. So that affects prices. I mean, people are trying to, all producers are trying to sell oil

at the highest prices. And we have a crew, we used to have a crewed export ban in place to kind of insulate the US from that kind of thing. And that was repealed under President Obama in 2015 as a shale production continued to grow. They started to be a glut of shale oil in the US. And that was repealed as part of a package. It also gave Obama some renewable energy things that he wanted. And so so we now export a lot of oil. We export a lot of LNG. I mean, we're the largest LNG

exporter in the world now. And so when prices, when something happens in the rest of the world, and it affects the, you know, it affects oil prices overseas. It affects oil prices here too, just because oil is going to flow to wherever people are going to pay the most for it. Minus cost of shipping and so forth. But you know, nobody's going to sell oil in Utah for $40 less than they can get, you know, by selling it to Europe. Because it doesn't cost that much to get

“that oil from Utah over to Europe. So that's why it affects everybody. You know, if we had a”

complete export ban on LNG and oil, it wouldn't affect us as much. But, you know, that would cause a lot of a lot of other problems. Problems that were happening, you know, we wouldn't be producing nearly as much oil right now if we had that export ban in place. So that's why that's why it affects us because it's a global market. So just to clarify for everyone, LNG, liquified natural gas. That's what that actually is when he keeps, when he says LNG is just the,

got that by apologies. Yeah, I know where's, I just, yeah, just for everyone's awareness.

“Anyway, liquified natural gas. Yeah, there was a liquified chip it because it's,”

that they're for our listeners. They cool it to a point of liquidity to make it easier to ship and contain. Yeah, it's a fraction of the volume when it's liquified, but it has to be cooled down a lot. And 20 years ago, we were actually building import terminals because we thought there was going to be a serious natural gas crisis. This is one of the things where the energy markets can humble you. You know, 20 years ago, people were predicting we have a natural gas crisis

on the horizon. And in fact, Matt Simmons who wrote Twilight in the desert, it's back there on my bookshelf. He, you know, he predicted Saudi Arabia production is going to crash and the U.S. natural gas production is going to crash. And he said the only solution is to pray. And here we are 20 years later, we're the world's largest oil and natural gas producer because fracking came along and opened up all these shale reserves. And suddenly the import terminals we were building got

converted into export terminals. And if you had told people 20 years ago, if you'd made a prediction, the U.S. in 20 years will be the world's largest LNG. You look financial gas exporter. They would have thought you were mad. I mean, that would have been just a ridiculous prediction, just like the U.S. being the world's largest oil producer again. Because we had declined for 40 years, our oil production. And there was no reason to believe it was going to

turn around. And then the fracking came along and boom, we've been on an upward climb ever since.

Well, not to be too critical of that. But isn't fracking a little bit more

cost to the environment than burning oil? Are we increasing our domestic carbon exports by relying more on fracking? Yeah, so that's a whole not a can of worms there. So fracking can be a lot of things. And if you live in a community that is a rural community that suddenly, you know, there's old discovery, and you got all these, well, it's traffic coming in, all the spraking going on, and you got, you know, you got more emissions, you got more traffic, and they're dust, more people,

people don't like that. I mean, I know people in rural Pennsylvania who, you know, if you live on a farm and you didn't, you weren't on top of a deposit, but your neighbor was, you know, their, their cases where wells were contaminated and, and these people got absolutely nothing for it. So if there's a boom happening, and people getting rich are not necessarily the people suffering the consequences, then you're going to have some pushback. And, you know, fracking's been associated, not the

fracking itself, but the re-injection of the waters been associated with earthquakes. You know, Oklahoma went from no earthquakes, hardly to number one earthquake state a few years ago. You know, and it was cause of fracking. So, but that's a whole, and that's a whole another show. I mean, there's, there's good and bad, you know, without fracking, we are heavily dependent on OPEC for oil. You know, we're, we're exporting massive dollars for petroleum, without fracking. So,

you know, I say again, again, there's no free launch in the energy sector. There's always,

it's always something, you know, if it wasn't for fracking, we would be supporting Saudi Arabia and we'd be supporting all these countries and sending them our dollars.

“Well, I think that's a good time to talk about America's ongoing renewable energy transition,”

or in some people's opinions currently halted renewable energy transition, depending on how you look at the administrations attitude towards energy right now, although there is a lot of innovation happening at the state level and other levels. You read an article recently stating that renewable energy is growing at an extraordinary rate, but our emissions are still breaking records. And I was wondering if you could talk about why this is happening globally, how it's, you know,

how that renewable energy development is happening asymmetrically in different countries and sort of where that increase of emissions is coming from. Right. So, you know, about the energy transition. So, I think a lot of people got really ahead of themselves with predictions, and I give an example. And I think about 2015 Bloomberg Rodin article about the adoption of electric vehicles, and it predicted that by, I think 2022 electric vehicles were going to displace two million

barrels a day, and that was going to cause the price to crash, and it would never recover.

And I took them to task in Forbes, and I said, you're overlooking a very important thing. Oil demand and energy demand is growing every year. So, between now in 2022, demand is going to be 5 million barrels a day higher than it is now.

“That's what you're saying to their calculation. Sorry to interrupt. Their calculation was based on”

the current level of demand. Yeah, they're not factoring in that energy demand is growing year after

be setting records and growing rapidly, but so are our emissions, because overall energy demand

is growing, and our consumption is going faster than renewables are coming online. And so that means renewables are setting records, but so are those coals. So as natural gas, so as oil, everything is setting records. Renewables are growing at a much faster rate from a much lower base. But, you know, the others, because there's not enough renewables to meet the total demand,

“everything has to go up. And so that's why we're setting emissions records.”

Now, you asked where it's coming from. So historically, the United States has put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country for about 50 years, though, our emissions have been pretty flat, where they've been growing dramatically, are in the Asia Pacific region.

And Asia Pacific now is a meeting more than three times the US and the EU combined. And it's been,

it's been dramatically growing, particularly China, not far behind India, Indonesia, but mainly China. And so I actually wrote an article recently, because a guy said, you know, this isn't China's fault. This is our fault. Well, it's both. Our, it's our fault that the historical emissions are there, but we cannot stop it now, because its growth is being driven somewhere else. So even if we got our emissions down to nothing, emissions were still be growing, because it's

“growing everywhere else. So that's why I say, you know, yes, we're responsible, but you cannot”

say that China's not responsible. They burn more than half the world's coal, and their emissions have grown dramatically. And, you know, they will surpass us for overall emissions in the atmosphere, at some point. So, you know, that's, that's a problem. It's, you know, we've got to acknowledge that yes, historically, we are the number one offender, but China is currently the number one offender, and they are meeting far more per year than we ever emitted. And that's, you know, that's what's

driving emissions right now. And I, yeah, this is not to, I'm not taking sides in any US China culture war that people are having in their minds right now. So I just want, I'm not, I want our listeners to know, I'm speaking practically, but isn't China also outpacing us in building renewable energy sources? Oh, China's doing all of the above. They've done like 430 gigawatts last year. Yeah, we've been doing that figure on. We were number one in a lot of

these renewable categories, but it was clear from China's growth, right? They were going to pass us. But what China's doing is they're lifting, you know, they're building everything.

“Remember, it's a millions of people from poverty into the middle of class, and they need”

every sort of energy. So, you know, every kind of energy there in China is increasing. Now, one thing they're doing, they're electrifying as fast as they can, and they are, you know, building nuclear power plants as fast as they can, and that will help. But until their coal consumption starts to decline, they will continue to drive emissions. The biggest single most, the lowest hanging fruit in the world with carbon emissions is Chinese coal. And, you know, if we could get that

under control, that would really help with emissions. Now, having said that, US coal, which has been on the decline for 15 years, research last year. So we saw US emissions, US emissions have been, you know, over the last 20 years, US emissions have declined more than any other country in the world. But last year, they went back up. And that was mainly because there was a resurgence in our coal consumption last year. It's interesting because we talk about

and I've seen this in kind of all of the studies of African nations. This notion of we for the last 50 years have kind of run rough shot across the earth building our society Europe, the same way they hit, I mean, to the point where they had acid rain and no kinds of problems. And now we sit here on our, from our ivory tower looking down with our high tech industries and saying, hey, China, you can't lift your people up with an industry now that,

because it's making our air dirty. I feel I've always felt that was somewhat disingenuous of us, but I get that it's a global problem. We have to, now that we recognize that we have to, and unfortunately, it's something that is something we have to deal with. Did you have something say about this thing? I mean, we, from from a per capita standpoint, we still use twice as much energy as China does. Yeah. So, you know, we don't have very much moral ground to stand on there,

but you know, the problem is that you've got 1.3 or 4 billion people over there. And, you know,

the atmosphere doesn't care. The atmosphere doesn't care. If it's a, you know, a billion people consuming half of what we consume, or, you know, we've got, you know, what 300 million consuming twice as much per person, we're still emitting a lot less overall. That's not to excuse us. We should

figures out something about the code. You know, that, that we are, we are powerless, you know, we, again, we should do all we can. Absolutely, all we can, but we're powerless to solve this, you know, laterally just because of the volume of emissions coming out of China. So, why did our goal be to search though? The Trump administration is promoted. I mean, they've promoted coal and tried to get coal fired power plants running again, and, you know, they don't see any

issue there at all. So, it's been a priority. Money has to be talked about a lot of previous episodes. It's just that renewables, the build out of renewables is cheaper in most cases now, but the Trump administration has been effectively booing fossil fuel, various parts of the fossil

“fuel industry to, I mean, to give carve out to his business buddies, essentially. But that's why we're”

seeing this, I mean, I was going to ask the same thing about coal, but I'm not shocked at the answer, which is that, you know, we're seeing sort of like a regressive this on some of our progress, when it comes towards renewables because he's trying to make fossil fuels competitive again. I want to look back to a question that Scott Chad and I talked about it on email, but it's related to the, it's related to the question of why, why fuel prices go up here,

if we're the largest producer. And the other, the other half of that is, aren't we energy independent? Why, why does this affect us because aren't we energy independent? That's the question I get a lot. So I want to talk about that a little bit because people get so confused about this because I know when Biden came in, people said, "Well, we were energy

independent under Trump, and now we've lost our energy independence." And the first thing I'll

“say is to find energy independence. What do you mean by that? Because there's two ways to think about that.”

One way energy independence means we don't depend on anybody else's strategy. If that's the case, we have not been energy independent in the last 100 years. Because we have imported oil from other places. We did under Trump. We did under Biden. We have continuously, even though our oil production has grown dramatically, we still import oil because it's a better fit for our refineries. So under that definition, we have not been energy independent.

We weren't under Trump, but I like a different definition. And that is, we produce more energy than we use. And we export some of the excess and we may import some that, so in that case, energy independence, yes, we're energy independent under that definition. And we were energy independent. We were, we've been on a trajectory for that ever since oil production turned upward under Obama in 2009. You know, natural gas turned up a little bit earlier, but we've been on a trajectory

“for that. And so we actually hit net energy exports in 2019. Now, Trump was an office then,”

but we've been on that trajectory for the last 15 years. And it continued to grow and it grew under Biden. It was, it was more under Biden than it was under Trump. And I've said that to people and they say, you're a, you're a liar. I mean, I, I actually had an article, a Matt Randolph actually mentioned it in a TikTok. U.S. Energy independence claims the highest level of 70 years under Biden. And people said, you're a liar. We've lost it on a bite. I said, look,

it's an energy information administration has these statistics on our energy exports. And our energy exports have grown every year. And they grew. They grew. So, so our imports decline steadily

under Obama until they finally hit an export number under Trump. But that export number continue

to grow under Biden. And so, so are we energy independent? You know, from the perspective of we produced more than we use, yes. And that grew under Biden. And we did not lose energy independence. Under the definition, we don't use. We don't import energy. We haven't been energy independent in 80 years. So, I guess I have a coming from. So, I'm a military expert. I look at energy independence from a different perspective. Let's say the worst case scenario happens. And we have a coalition

form between Russia, China, North Korea, Iran. And effectively, it becomes a scenario where, yes, NATO comes together to fight this. But the United States is going to be largely the energy provider, not only for itself. And I can't, it obviously plays a part there as well. And I don't mean to dismiss our Canadian. They produce a huge amount of energy for the global. But could we under my view of, I need we need to be energy independent to defend ourselves? Could we do that

if we just had to rely on our own? It becomes an every country for itself. We need to try to

win a war. Can we do that? You're thinking about the, my second definition where I said if we

export energy, we got a net surplus of energy, we're energy independent. Because if we had to, we could supply all of our own needs. Yes, we could do that. Now, it's not optimal. Because our refineries are not designed for the light, sweet crude oil. Let's come out of the Permian Basin

we can use it. It's just not optimal. It's not, our refineries are not designed for that. You can still run it through. Your yields are going to suffer a little bit. The cost are going to be higher.

“And so that's why we don't do it. But yes, if you built a wall around the US and you said,”

you know, you can only use what you produce. Yes, we could produce enough to satisfy our needs. So by that definition, we're energy independent. Even though we still do import oil and we export more, more, we export, you know, natural gas. Yeah, and I think Canada is kind of a helpful superpower there. And it's very frustrating that we've had our relationships so degraded by the Trump administration. Because man, I think between

if the United States combined with Canada from an energy perspective, I'm correct me if I'm wrong. It's like a superpower. We're basically almost like the entire Middle East able to handle all. Yeah, without the volatility. So yeah, you've got a reliable trading partner there, right, you know, that that historically very reliable trading partner that has a lot of oil. So US Canada, that's, that's an important relationship. That's, that's also why, you know, I was

always in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. You know, people say we don't need it. I said,

well, if we don't need it, then trans Canada at the time. So they just wasted their money. But if we do need it, that's there. You know, if we, if we find ourselves needing that oil, that pipeline is there. And if we find ourselves needing it and it's not there, then we're going to have to go get it from Saudi Arabia. Counterpoint, I would post to that is that a pipeline we're not using can still cause massive environmental issues, right? Like you're still disrupting the

coastline to build it. You're still, you're still disrupting a lot of nature to build a coastline.

“It's going to come right down. Sorry, not. Sorry. Sorry, I think of the Williams pipeline. Yes,”

the Keystone pipeline. Yeah. Effectively, I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would, I'm just trying to steer us a little bit to the ecological side of this conversation, which is, you know, talking about like who's responsible for emissions. And, and your point stands very strong, which is that like it doesn't ultimately matter. The environment doesn't care. The atmosphere

doesn't care where the emissions come from or how many people they come from, right? Like a billion

people using half as much as half a billion people is the same amount of, you know, as the same amount of emissions. I would also add that, you know, like Chad said, you know, it doesn't matter if it's fair, but we did burn a bunch of coal, a bunch of coal in order to industrialize our country, right? In order to lift a lot of our working class out of poverty. And so, you know, whatever, whatever moral standard is being leveraged against China in this argument. And, you know,

obviously, our international relationships under this administration are not really, you know, it feels with a very grudge-based international policy. So I find I'm almost reticent to acknowledge that, but like even if we are having a grudge match with China, essentially, we are creating that grudge over a thing that we did ourselves as a country, but that doesn't also matter because there wasn't as severe greenhouse gas problem as there is now. Like,

ultimately, we can't say it's fair for China to do this because we are dealing with an accelerating

crisis. So, as I loop us back to the renewable question of, you know, or the environmental question, you know, talking about building out pipelines, talking about how China is building nuclear, they're relying on every source. They're building everything out simultaneously, it's quickly as possible. We can't control that. We can't control their emissions. We can't control what they're doing. Obviously, some kind of global cap standards. Obviously, there is room

for diplomacy, but we can't pull a lever to have China change a law or something. We can't pull a lever to change China's oil industry. What can we do in terms of reducing emissions? You know, even if we're, you know, we're, even if our emissions are lower, what can the US do to reduce its massive emissions, but also is there in our renewable energy transition? Is there a military or

“otherwise global strategic opportunity there towards energy independence, whatever you should”

mean by that? If we're looking, you know, is there in the move towards other energy production methods? Are we leaving ourselves more vulnerable that way? Is there a way of creating less of vulnerability, of creating more safety, more, you know, should we have to go into a crisis moment? Is there more energy independence afforded by a potential increase in our renewable energy transition? Yeah, so, I mean, the biggest problem is you've got an administration of absolutely does not care

about emissions, and so right now speaking of theory. Yeah, so I mean, but what we should be doing, I mean, our low-hanging fruit as well as coal. We need to be getting the coal out. We need to, that is the highest, highest polluting source of energy, and we've got to get it out. And for the

Two reasons, tracking broad-owned natural gas and it got so cheap that it started pushing coal

out of power plants, but then the second thing was renewables. So you had, you know, natural gas

and renewables that basically took a dramatic market share away from coal and power production,

“that's why our emissions fails so much. And so that should be exported everywhere that's burning coal.”

I mean, we need to be getting them off of coal, whatever, whatever tastes to get them off of coal. If they go from coal to nuclear power or coal to renewables, it's the best, but if they could go from coal to natural gas, they're still cutting their emissions in half. Certainly, but building new renewables is a lot faster than building new nuclear plants, right? Yeah, but you don't have, you can't, you don't have, I'm not talking about existing

laser plant. You know, coal-fire power plant. You can't produce a solar farm to replace a coal-fire

power plant as you could, you know, nuclear plant. In terms of just the pure volume. So yeah,

I mean, you can have it distributed all over the place. So incrementally, you can add, you know, the equivalent of a coal-fire power plant, but it's going to be distributed all over the place. But if you've got a central power plant and it's a coal plant, you know, you're going to replace that with some farm power like a natural gas plant or nuclear plant. And again, you know, China's demand is growing. So they are adding renewables, but it's not enough. So they're

still needing that farm power to come in and displace the coal. So with regard to the nuclear discussion, you recently wrote in Forbes that like our trillion dollar companies, the big, the big heavy hitters like Microsoft Amazon,

they're pursuing their own like nuclear power. Can you explain that a bit? Is it driving,

is it being driven because of this AI movement? Is that why? I mean, it's almost like they are, I've seen, I have a, I have a data center. That's about 15 minutes from my house. And there's a solar farm right next to it. I felt like, hey, that's pretty adequate. Why would Amazon

“Microsoft be pursuing nuclear power when the buildout seems like it'd be longer more expensive?”

Can you explain a bit of the nuclear stance where we'd have these nuclear companies suddenly? Yeah, I think they're looking down the road here. I, I would bet that that solar plant does not supply the, all the power for that data center. I mean, I look into it, but those data centers are pretty massive power producers. It's a power consumer, sorry. And so that's, that's the reason, and the Amazon is not going to produce nuclear power, but they're, they're signing agreements

with companies to provide them with nuclear power. I think they, I think they can look down the road and see their power demands are going to continue to grow. And if they're not going to be ostracized by communities for, for, you know, the data center needs, they've got to bring their own power. And they've got to figure out, you know, deals like sign and sign a nuclear deal where they can produce power with no emissions or low emissions. I think that's the whole driver for the nuclear.

They see that could be an economical, low emissions firm power option for them. Now, alternatively, you know, batteries are coming on like crazy. And so, you know, batteries and, and when and solar, you know, those are going to be more and more adequate as time goes by. But, and you know, as long as the energy demand keeps growing like it is, as fast as we're adding renewables, we're still falling behind.

I just want to add to that also that processor density in terms of data centers is changing, and theoretically, we'll have a very different energy demand in about three or four years. So, while it is, these increasing, these data centers are, are sucking up a huge amount of energy, theoretically, as they expand, they should become more efficient, not not the existing data centers, but it's not necessarily going to scale at the current rate that the data centers are burning

up, which isn't, it's just going to like, it's not going to make us carbon neutral all of a sudden, but the rate at which the data centers are currently accelerating is probably where it's going to be for about two years, and then we may actually have a retraction in that. I don't know how long it's going to take companies like Amazon and Microsoft or the government rather to respond to that

“kind of thing, but I think internally, companies know, you know, maybe they're creating their”

own energy needs projecting that they'll be able to expand a lot more rapidly, because currently, the data centers are extremely energy, their energy intensive, right? But we will hopefully have at some soon where the density makes it possible for them to be less of a massive consumption of energy for like ever. And that doesn't even matter. Presumably, we're going to have a bubble that pops, and we may have a bubble that pops, and we see things go sideways for a while.

things that are backing up Google searches, things that are open AI, chatGPT, running LLMs,

“like some of those are data centers for our just in general more digital increasingly online”

world, and some of those are, as you said, Robert, something that very well could be a bubble, and then we'll be stuck with, I don't know, necessarily, stuck, but we will be left with infrastructure for something that can no longer fund itself, which will be an interesting juncture. Yeah, it's interesting because you bring up the, as they get more efficient, we should be able to reduce energy. Unfortunately, I don't know if that translates to, because you talk about

Moore's Law, we're using more energy now, and our compute is incredibly more powerful than it was

even five years ago, and I start to worry about things like quantum computing, which is starting to become a viable entity, and quantum computing itself is not, it's actually quite power, it's not power hungry at all, it's really going to be a great technology, it's everything around it, because managing the temperature, the quantum computers get extraordinarily hot, like unfathomably hot, and so it's 100 times the requirements are, we have to basically either build them in space

to keep them cool or find ways to air condition them to such a level that is going to require huge amounts of power, and that's where I get concerned about, I love this idea of, yeah, we're just going to keep getting better, I'm looking at a computer right here that is my gaming computer, it consumes more power than the computer I had that was my gaming computer 10 years ago, because it's on paradox, have you heard of Jovon's paradox? No, no. So Jovon's paradox, Jovon

will you understand, Jovon? 1865, he created, he formulated this, this paradox where he said, as coal engines become more and more efficient, we're using more and more coal, and that has happened throughout history, that as we become more efficient, we just use more and more energy,

so it never works out like, you know, our energy efficiency is going up, therefore our energy consumption

is going to go down, it's never worked out that way, and that's Jovon's paradox, that as our energy efficiency is increased over time, our energy usage is just continue to go up, and it's what you see with your computer and what we saw with coal, what we saw with oil, engines today are far more efficient than they were in the past, and yet our consumption just went up and up and up. So you're saying conservation standards, for example, aren't necessarily

preventative towards the increase in consumption, they're just right, they've, they've reflect the, they reflect the efficiency of that consumption, but right, so number consumption would probably be higher otherwise, I mean, if we didn't have confidence, but it's never been enough to actually arrest or make our consumption decline. Mm-hmm. Which strikes me as a pretty strong argument for the least environmentally impactful forms of energy, possible if we're going to be

inevitably scaling them forever, maybe not forever, but I don't know if there's any projection towards our ceiling of energy use. Now the dyson sphere goes around the whole sun and captures all of our energy, that's, that's where we're headed. Eventually, if we get there, then we will be

“fully energy independent. That's the, that's the maximum, I think that's a level three society,”

it's known as in a science fiction, something like that. We're, we're showing our, we're showing our true colors here, Robert, but all we would need is a few dyson panels orbiting the Earth,

first of all. That would be, we need a space elevator and a few panels, we don't need to fully

consume the star. There's more than a few soft eye books on the shelf by me. I'm not shocked. For those listening who don't know what we're talking about a dyson sphere is a theoretical, highly advanced form of energy consumption that involves harnessing the star at the center of your solar system. It is a theorized, a higher form of civilization than the one we're currently living in, which is a type one civilization. They massive, massive sphere that captures 100% of the solar

output and, and uses that for the civilization. It's a science fiction concept, proposed years ago, and actually, you know, sometimes a telescope will see a dimming star and they'll possibly, well, maybe that's the civilization building a dyson sphere. The big part of how we, you know, the question of how, how do we not see other civilizations in space is perhaps they have blocked off their star. Now, obviously, we're getting very sci-fi here,

but a lot of these concepts from solar panels to hydrofraking were science fiction initially,

“and I think, let's get the fusion first. Yeah, I mean, I've been here nuclear fusion is a 10,”

it's been 10 years away for the past 40 years, but it's only 10 years away. But that's that, like, I mean, a lot of the ideas, I, as much as we joke around, like, I do encourage people to think

because so much of, so much of what we have learned is that like, thinking innovatively is like

how we find solutions in terms of, you know, technologies that we wouldn't have otherwise expected. Yeah, so I want to pivot real quick because to respect Robert's time here, but there's something

“that is near and dear to both Robert and mine's heart, because he's an Arizona, I believe,”

and I'm an Idaho. Now Idaho, people think of it as a mountainous state with potatoes, but I'm in southern Idaho, which is a high desert. And water is a problem for us. And water, obviously, is a problem for the American Southwest. It's a problem for California, it's a problem everywhere. And when I say, it's a problem everywhere. I mean, it's starting wars. India and Pakistan, they have water, they're starting to get concerned about water, and it's starting wars.

This is a hell region. A lot of the migration, the refugees that leads to terrorism and building of extremist organizations. These are just people that can't farm anymore and have nowhere else to turn because of water scarcity. And we talk constantly on this show about whether we have enough oil, the oil independence, we just talked about it gas. I mean, we've talked briefly about the uranium being stopped because of the Korean war and power generation. I really do

think that one of the things that is going to be a problem in the future, and is going to cause a lot of death instruction because we need it for life, but also it's going to cause a lot of wars

“is water and water scarcity. Is that something you believe, Robert, that we're missing?”

It's a problem with our supplies, or now we're trying to divert it to energy infrastructure to cool things off for computers and AI. What are your thoughts on that? Because I know you've written about it. Yeah, I think people tend to think about water in a different way than they think about oil, because water is recyclable. It comes down to us as rain, and you burn up a barrel of oil, and it's not recyclable in our lifetimes. But water is, and I think people don't worry about that

as much. If you're in Arizona, like I am, you do worry about it. I mean, the first time I've

ever flew into Phoenix, I looked out the window, and I was shocked at the number of golf courses after flying across all this desert. Suddenly, there's all these green golf courses, and I thought, that must be a tremendous water usage. There's a lot of low hanging fruit there, but people people don't want to lose water to their golf courses, but we're using a lot of water in ways that don't impact on our survival. I worry about a place like Phoenix. I don't know how in the long-term

Phoenix is viable as a city because we're depleting our water resources. You know, late, late mead is being depleted. The Hoover Dam is, I don't know how much longer that's viable, because it's, you don't have enough water coming in to replenish that. And we're seeing that a lot

“of places we're seeing aquifers being drawn down. You know, the Ogalala I think is, I don't believe”

it's, I think it's continued to decline. Now, you may have some massive rains that just do refill some of these reservoirs, but you know, in places where aquifers just coming down and down and in places where, you know, you've got lakes that are just drying up. Yes, that's going to be a big problem. You know, we're bringing in water here in Phoenix from California. You know, we've got, you know, aqueducts bringing in water from far, far away here that, you know,

those places are growing too. I mean, we've got our water supplies are all coming from far away. So, as those places grow and they need more water, I mean, there are options, but they're pretty expensive. And they're pretty energy-intensive. You know, desalination is very expensive. It's viable, technically, but it's expensive and it's energy-intensive. So, yeah, I think we've got water, water issues, you know, a lot of issues, top-story issues. We've got, we've got a lot of issues

to face that I don't think we're taking seriously enough. It's interesting that you brought up golf courses because in the Treasure Valley here, Boise, and where I live, we have like one of the highest concentrations of golf courses in the world. Like for a population of our size, and like there's something like 32 golf courses within a two-hour drive from where I live here in Boise, and we have only like 800,000 people, but they get used. And it's fascinating. We've been talking

about data centers because there's just more controversy. They're growing fast. A lot of it surrounds the uncertainty with AI. They use far less water than golf courses. Like a single golf

course on a year uses like 20 million gallons of water and a single AI data center uses around

I mean, they've got probably cooling towers, so they're coming in and they've got some blow down

“in the cooling towers that they're losing, but most of the water gets recycled. So, you know,”

consumption there, yes, it's a concern, but the water is going back into the air and it's going to come back down as rain somewhere. It's not like, you know, some places that contaminate water, like fracking for instance. If you're using fresh water for fracking, that water is not usable. It's not drinkable when it comes back up. I mean, you're going to have to use it for something else. So, you know, if they use brackish water or something for that instead of

fresh water, the problem is contaminating fresh water supplies. When you're contaminating fresh water

supplies, and that's, that's a, that's no good. Yeah, and I would just add to the, comparing those statistics. I know what you're saying. It's interesting what we choose to focus on, but there are more, there is more consumption per golf course, but we are not building thousands of golf. Yeah, those are declining. That's something I would say. There are 16,000 golf courses roughly in America, and it's not going up. Especially anything adjacent to urban areas

is getting developed for housing and everything, you know, New York lost a lot of New York no longer has some of the golf courses it had, because, you know, obviously our population exploded, but the rate of change when you look at data centers is, it's only increasing right now, actually.

“So, the consumption is not only growing. It's accelerating. So, I think that's the, I mean, aside from”

the fact that they're building these giant, you know, rectangles and people's backyards that feel imposing and people want to fight back against them, I think that's part of it. Aside from that, I think it's the rapid encroachment that's made it more of a hot button issue, because they are really accelerating. And as we are approaching the end of our episode, it's time to move on to our final segment of the show in which we highlight a highlight of our week. If not the best part,

it's time for the least worst part of my week. Up first, Chad, what was the least worst part of your week?

So, you know, you know, I'm always focused on the marginalized population, specifically women and

children, really, really genuinely good news came out, even though, and I don't want the good news to override the broader situation. It does, there's a problem, and we need to solve it. But the

“United Nations latest food security report showed about 645 million people experience chronic hunger”

in 2025. That's not a good news. The good news is the population of those experiencing hunger dropped from a higher level. It was roughly 700 and 5 million. So, 60 million people came out, came, we're elevated out of hunger. And this is interesting because what we're seeing is more of the population is being helped by countries that previously, we're not helping as much. That's a good thing. I will say the reason is bad because the United States has taken a massive

step back, where the most powerful, most wealthy country in the history of ever, and the Trump administration

has dismantled USAID. And I've talked about this before. USAID was a dream job for me. I always wanted

to work for them to go and help. People transition my military service and all the logistics stuff I have to help in them. Unfortunately, that's not the case because they've been dissolved. Nonetheless, the world has responded. And even in the face of Trump eliminating aid to around the world, we're seeing private entities, charities, as well as other countries such as Japan, I spoke about, our excuse me, South Korea, I spoke about last week,

really elevating food security around the globe. And as such, we are seeing again, we're returning back to levels that we saw pre-COVID COVID was pretty hard hitting. Most improvements are coming from Asia and Latin America, as well as India made substantial progress. So food security is growing again. That's a good thing after it dropped from COVID. And then it dropped again in the initial stages in 2024 from Trump cutting off aid. Now the world has somewhat evolved and adapted.

And we are now seeing them a better world because of it. So yeah, that's my least worst. I'm always happy to report good news around the world when when children are getting fed and whatnot. Thank you, Chad. I didn't know that. That is good. That is good news. Robert, you're joining us for the first time, but I'm curious if you have a least worst part of your week you'd like to share with us. I can't compete with feeding hungry children. You want me to do something selfish in

between here. I'll do a really selfish one. Well, I'll go next then. Mine is considerably more selfish, but as a professional podcaster, it is incumbent on me to talk about podcasting and little else. I was lucky enough to be a guest on the excellent podcast Dr. Game Show on our

vehemently apolitical. But I had a great time on the show. It is a show in which listeners submit game shows and then have to compete in them. And I was a guest host and they only got slightly annoyed with me for injecting my politics into every sentence. So I would say

I was very well received and it's always nice to be a guest on another show on another network

“and see how other people do it. So go take a listen to Dr. Game Show featuring me. I believe the”

episode is called Nat Towson the Eldrich God, which is a reference to a joke I make very late in the episode. So just pretend it'll make sense. That's the least worst part of my week. Always a pleasure to be on another podcast and go check that out if you can. I had a great time. Robert, you might have some exciting news for us. What was the least worst part of your week? Well, so about a decade ago, a little over a decade ago, I published a book and it was a publisher came to me and he wanted me

to write a book. He'd been reading my Forbes articles and in between, since then, I've had publishers coming to me several times and I've always resisted. But a year ago, my son graduated with a degree in history. And one of the ideas I had was, you know, we should write a book together about the history of energy in America. And there's a graphic that the energy information has that shows the rise and fall of different energy sources in the country. And I said, let's tell that story.

And so for the last nine months, we have worked on that together, you know, basically from

pre-colonial America to the wood, you know, to co- and how that shaped the country, how, you know, it shaped our ability to, you know, to be a superpower. Basically, if we didn't have the energy resources that we've had, we, you know, arguably would not be a superpower. And, you know, it was fun working with my son on this, you know, he brought the historical perspective. I brought the energy perspective. I think we learned a little bit from each other. But it just hit the Kindle Store hours before we

broadcast here, before before we recorded this. It's called American Energy, a history of power progress and change. It's written about a high school graduate level. You know, I'm just trying to tell the story about energy in America. And I will say, if you read it, you'll know more about energy than 99% of the people in the country. It's not political at all. It's just telling the story about how our energy sources, you know, how they developed into what they are today.

And, you know, the last chapters kind of forecasting where we're going from here.

Well, congratulations. Not a super cool thing to do with your son. But congratulations on your second

book. And at a high school reading level, upwards of 65% of Americans will be able to read that.

“And I think that's really important to be here. That story. Yeah. The rest is on. I hope you enjoyed the”

other book. Some children will be able to read it. And learn. That's true. This is true. There are. This is the help and children episode. Will there be an audio book as well, Robert? I don't know. So I've got the, so the Kindle version is hit. The print version, I've got a copy coming to me so I can review it. There's color graphics in there. And color graphics, they start to get expensive to print.

The Kindle version is only 999. But the print version costs more than that just for cost. So it's probably going to be twice that. But, you know, some people like, you know, like to have a book in their hand. I've got my- Yeah, go get yourself a nice hardback to consider on the shelf. There's my, there's my first one. That was, that was the first one I did.

“You know, but, you know, I think it came out in 2012 or so. And, you know, I missed the whole”

fracking boom. You know, it was 2012. It wasn't that far into it. And I don't think I said shale one time in the book. And this one, I covered it heavily. And this is one of the things where my son got to learn something. Because he wrote the old chapter. And when I read it, I said, you've missed the whole shale boom. And so I came back and I edited that chapter. And I said, to tell the whole story of American oil, you know, he started in 1850s and went basically until

2000. And I said, there's a whole another chapter after that. I mean, there's a huge, if you're missing that patient, missing a huge piece of American energy that most people didn't see coming. And so, you know, we went back and forth like that. He came to me with some, you know, historical perspectives on some of the chapters and how, you know, how it affected our ability to wage war and how it affected our, you know, development. And you know, there's a fun project

to work on with it. Well, congratulations. I was part, worse part of your week. What's your question, Jen? I have an unrelated question. It's related, but unrelated. So I got it. And to be fair, I've asked Matt this, not on the show, but separately. Is every landman? Do they all have just

Bob Thornton's his landman out there? Oh, here's a funny, here's a funny story. I had a woman

contact me and say, hey, I'd like to interview you about some, about some things. And she was a landman.

And she was a very attractive woman. And when we interview, I said, I just, I don't think you're

“what pops in the mind when people think of landman. I think they're thinking Billy Bob Thornton.”

And she said, I get that all the time. She said, I, but she said, I'm a lady landman. Yeah. Oh, and so not all landmen look like Billy Bob Thornton. Not all cable guys look like,

Larry the cable guy, but some of them look like Jim Carrey. Never the less. Robert Rabier,

thank you so much for joining us on American Power. Really appreciate you filling in on the panel. Not just filling in. Share in the show with us. Chad, any final thoughts? Robert and Final thoughts before we go. I just, like, thank you guys for having me on. And, you know, if you,

“if you, uh, need me again, just just tap me and, uh, you know, I'm there. Well, you have to talk about”

energies a good day. Well, like I said, once again, you've been in the right place. It's been great having you here. And we'll definitely have you back if you're available. So thank you so much for taking the time for Chad Scott and our guest panelists, Robert Rabier. I'm Nat Tousen. And this has been

“American Power from Findout Media. And remember, power corrupts, but American power corrupts.”

American Lee.