How Energy Became the World's Most Powerful Weapon

You're listening to American Power. I'm your host, Nat Towson. Stand up comedian, political speed trader, many other forms of writer, and most likely to make me forget to get a haircut for around three months, because it's an audio medium podcast host.

And there are people watching on YouTube, and I just don't know what the advantage is until today. There you go.

As always, I'm joined by my panel of visually beautiful experts.

“Our expert on the military and foreign policy, Chad Scott, Chad, how's it going?”

It's going really well. I'm glad we're back on our normal cycle here, man. Because we cost a bunch of confusion, I don't know you guys don't read the comments, but I was reading the comments and they were like, "Where's the least worse?" And I was like, "No, this is a special episode.

You only get least worst on Wednesdays." And so, good to be back on our normal Wednesday track. And I know our loyal listeners were so confused by us, putting up two episodes in one week. And I just want to say thank you so much for powering through that with us, for understanding this for about change, which is the least worst is every Wednesday and then Friday.

You never know what you're going to get at the crazy grab bag.

So, we'd like to keep you on your toes that way, maybe a bit of an hour long episode. Maybe it'll be an American power extra, a deep dive from one of our experts speaking of which. Joining us as always our expert on oil, renewable energy, all things energy and global energy markets. Mr. Global himself Matt Randolph. Matt, how's it going? I mean, not to move anything straight to the front, but I think the new least worst part of my week

is that people actually listen long enough to get to the least worst part of the episode. Like, I'm not sure. I'm sorry about that. I'm glad you're not saving that to the end of the episode though, because we wouldn't be rewarding those people. The least worst part of the week is me, a lot of the time magazine as kind of reward. That's like Walter MIDI. Make a choice.

I do appreciate our listeners listening to the end. And I love that they actually like that segment. I don't hate that they like the least worst is what I mean to say. It's the least worst feeling I have about it. Yeah. Wouldn't it your idea?

I was my utterance and you guys held me to it. I think you uttered it.

“Yeah, I definitely, I say a lot of things and then other people say you have to do that again.”

And then I go, oh, I guess I did say that. And that's the magic of the casting. No one else does that. Like I listen to any pocket podcasts out there and everyone has their own little things they do. And us, I think, our little one little thing that makes us unique is that least worst story. 'Cause it does, apparently the yelling on our editors to add sound effects.

Well, I personally feel they would be useful. Yeah, that's terrible. And making sure you get ready for that. First of all, you have to do a custom, yeah, thank you. Jamil, if you don't mind after I said that, thank you.

Okay, thank you. I'm being ready for the audio listener. I've do a sort of like a hand motion indicating a lightning hit. So this has been scintillating and we have a really exciting episode ahead of us today. There's a story, I really want to get right into because Matt posted a video about this this week.

Uh, this weekend. If you're not following Mr. Global on TikTok, Instagram and all other legal in America platforms, get over there right now because he's putting out videos all the time covering some of the topics we cover here. But also other things that we don't necessarily cover here and along with the breaking news. But anyway, Matt, you put out this video about effectively under reported or unreported.

Oil production in 2025 and I was hoping you could just start off by giving us, uh, I hadn't heard about this at all.

“Could you give us a breakdown of what this story is?”

Yeah, so before I get into that, I want to just clearly state that if I exist on any illegal platforms, it's AI. Uh, I don't participate in that. But, um, I have seen myself and I could fully understand why someone would create an AI version. I mean, maybe for only fans or more porn. Uh, I get it. Like I've seen this. Like I'm saying. This is why I encourage them to follow you on a legal platforms.

I didn't say you don't exist. Is an AI do you think nude on not legal platforms? I've seen your followers. So, yeah, uh, enough enough of that. Um, no, uh, Wall Street Journal investigative reporter with the Wall Street Journal yesterday uncovered that they've discovered that, um,

there's about a half a billion barrels, more of global inventory of crude oil supply,

commercial crude oil inventory than we previously thought. And that is one, one of the reasons that oil prices haven't gotten to the levels. A lot of people predicted, uh, in addition to, of course, the market manipulation.

this 500 million barrels of previously unaccounted for oil.

“Now, to take you back in time a little bit to around March, I believe it was of 25.”

Opet came out and said they were going to drastically increase production. And so I immediately said, this is going to cause the oil markets to crash.

And then oil prices fell, but the markets never crashed.

And in the months following that, that oil was never showing up in inventory. So, Opet was reporting this nearly 2 million barrels a day of higher oil production, but the oil was never showing up in global inventories, which is people like me, an oil analyst, traders, banks, financial institutions. That's one of the main things we look at, you know, we look at supply to man, you know,

how much production, how much, you know, current investment is going to impact future production. We look at all this stuff, but the global supply of any commodity is obviously the foundation to which you build your work on, like what's going to happen in the future. Well, it all starts with what you have right now in supply. So, what it means is what it appears, because I was telling people that I thought Opet was pulling

a head fake and just saying that they were going to increase production, but never actually did it, because the oil wasn't showing up in inventories. And that was what was keeping the market from crashing. Well, it appears that days before the war started, somebody found the oil with the IEA. I want to point out the IEA is an international reporting agency.

It is the international energy agency. The EIA is the one that is just the United States. It's part of the Department of Energy, you know, the administration.

The EIA has still never reported this half a billion barrels of oil.

So, what this means and this will work great into section A when we talk about using oil as a weapon. But what this means is this did not one. It did not happen in the United States. This was happening overseas, particularly with Opet, they were hiding oil inventories to artificially keep the price of oil higher. So, by hiding this oil, they're able to produce more. Yet it doesn't drive down the prices a lot. So, they get to capture all that profit and value

from producing more without having the natural forces of the market drive down the price when

“you're over supply. That's why they did this. And a half a billion barrels of oil is a significant amount.”

Like you can't lose half a billion barrels of oil. You can't miss, you can't miss count. We're talking about probably half a billion barrels would probably be somewhere between 15 to 17 percent of total global inventory that was not there. So, you're saying there's just no way this is any form of oversight accounting for this. This is, well, so one of the reasons that we use the EIA is because it's really the only reporting

agency, even though we don't even trust the EIA that much. It is the only one that has to follow certain standards and has to report to people. And when you're taking data internationally from anyone, even our allies, I won't hesitate for a minute. I don't care if it's Europe or

anyone else. It's really difficult to trust the data. So, the least trusted data is always going to

come from China. The second least trusted is probably OPEC. And then you just go up the ladder of least trusted. But at least in the United States, there's can be some accountability. No accountability for international reporting when it comes to data, especially with oil, natural gas, and all that kind of stuff. So, what this means, one, is like I said, they were intentionally under-reporting oil production and inventories to keep the prices inflated. We know Saudi Arabia specifically has

had some issues with debt recently and recent years with their budgets. And they're kind of in a new phase of their history. You know, they don't Saudi Arabia. They don't want to have any debt. It's part of their culture is that debt is not good. Completely opposite to the United States.

“For what a reason we think debt's fantastic. That's why we got 40 trillion of it. But they don't”

like debt over there. So, and we, for the last few years, they've had some annual budgets where they had some debt. They had ransom deficits. That is a huge deal in especially Middle Eastern countries. So, this was definitely something that was coordinated and pulled off and it's been discovered.

in multiple locations through many of the different countries that OPEC comprises. Obviously,

“you're drawing the connection to Saudi Arabia because they have a major financial stake in all of”

this. But when you're saying half a billion barrels of oil showed up on the market, these are from

diverse sources, right? Yes. Within the OPEC Alliance. So, that would what you're saying represent a coordinated effort to increase production, but not report it? Is that what's happening? It would suggest a coordination, not just with countries, but also companies internationally, that report this stuff. And keep in mind, these inventories are reported weekly throughout the entire year. And, you know, so we're on top of it all the time. And then suddenly, in February of

2026, when they do their full-year inventory report days before we go into Iran, suddenly the IEA has a half a billion-buril revision. That means none of this oil was reported in inventory for the entire year of 2025. And it had to be coordinated by multiple countries, multiple companies working within those countries, and potentially some companies that operate in the United States, but also operate in within OPEC like, you know, Exxon. I'm not saying they participated in this. I'm just saying

“big oil that exists in the United States also exists internationally. That's why they're big, right?”

Yeah. So it could be any number of a dozen companies and countries that were involved in this, but there's absolutely coordination because one country can't just do this. It was too much oil. It was more oil than one of those countries would have produced. Right. So how do we know that they reported some of the oil that they did produce? So it couldn't even be max capacity for any of these countries. It would have to be above margins for a bunch of

different countries. Why? I don't know if you know how OPEC works, but you know, they basically give all the countries quotas. You're allowed to produce this much. And a lot of times they fight because some overproduce, because they want to be able to produce more than they're allowed to. And I think that might have something else to do with it, too, because we know there was several countries in 2025 that were violating their quotas. They were overproducing. And maybe that oil

was getting hidden somewhere to support the price structure. What I will say without a doubt is had all of the oil that was produced in 2025 been accounted for throughout the year. We would have had a very significant oil market crash in 2025. It got down to like 58 bucks. I think in the end of January of 25, you could have easily seen it at $40 a barrel, which in this market with inflation, $40 is absolutely a crash when it cost $70 to $80 to break even. And the United

States, $40 is totally a crash. Had all that oil been reported, we would have had a market crash

easily, which is what I thought was going to happen. But it never did. And then I couldn't figure out why

it didn't happen. Good day for the Mr. Global Information Empire, also. But let me ask you another technical question. So why, after not showing up on the weekly inventories, does it suddenly show

“up on the IES annual report? That's what they're trying to figure out. Really. So that is what”

there seems to me to be like a self-reporting like is that not obvious rather than, well, the first thing that seems very obvious. The answer that needs to be the question. I mean, that needs to be answered. This isn't jeopardy. The question that needs to be answered is where did they get that information? Now, there's saying, you know, what they're saying is that what they did is they started tracking oil inventories from the beginning of the war

in the shortages and the production. And this is an unbelievably tedious task. Like, I would never

even consider doing this myself. It would be, I can't even describe how tedious this. But basically, they tracked how much oil we were short and how much inventories were falling. And you're talking thousands of tankers, you know, dozens and dozens of oil producing countries. This is a monumental task. And what they determined was oil inventories should be here. And it's only fallen this much and we've lost this much. That means we were half a billion barrels short under reported. So basically,

at the beginning of the war, they were saying we had about three and a half billion barrels of commercial. This is not strategic inventories like SPR. This is commercial crude. And now they're saying it's 2.7. That's 800 million barrels. If you ask anybody, they'll tell you we're short at least one and a half billion barrels is what we've lost since this started. But we only, yeah, but we're only

it was. And it's been slowly entering the market or it has been entering the market. Yes, just not

anymore. And really all this means just keeping the prices a little more. Yeah, really all this means is all the stuff that was predicted earlier in the war is still potentially going to happen if this continues. It's just going to happen later than we thought. It does explain why there has been less of a spike in those prices or a crash in those prices. And then, you know, we're talking about spike in other costs as a result. Hasn't accelerated quite as quickly as we thought when we

when we talked about this a few months ago. And I'm wondering if that's related. I'm curious from the, I mean, you've laid out some of the reasons, but from the perspective of the OPEC countries, what would be the purpose of hiding? I mean, is it just to keep the price to keep profit? The price is up by by making supply looks slower. Like that's the purpose for everyone, just to make the market look like there's less supply. I mean, we knew in mid 2023 that we were going to

enter like late 2024 through 25 and 26, we're probably going to be in a low price environment. Like we knew that because this stuff runs in really long cycles. And so we knew this, you know, two, three years ago that we were about to go through a cycle of relatively low oil prices. And I believe that's when they said, yeah, but it's not going to be as low as you think it is.

“You know, I think they hit oil to keep, you have to understand what even $5 dollars a”

barrel means to a country like Saudi Arabia that produces 8,9 million barrels a day. I mean, you're talking, you're talking 40, 50 million bucks a day. And if you can just change a number on a spreadsheet and make 50 million bucks a day more, who's not going to do that? I mean, I wouldn't,

I would never do that. But so stop first of all, stop asking. And also to all these EIA recruiters or

IA recruiters who are asking Mr. Global to did the global oil inventory. He's already said on record. It's two tedious and you won't do it. So back off. I want to point out, if you remember early in the war, oil prices spike significantly. And I talked a lot about the paper price of oil and the physical price of oil and how the physical price, I think it got, I think one of the grades of crude got around $170 a barrel. You know, the paper, the futures market prices never got that high.

And then when they came down, they never recovered even to 100. And that a lot of people were

“really confused about that. And I think the word was getting out that the inventories had been vastly”

under-reported. And that has, we know there's market manipulation in the futures market, probably by the U.S. Treasury, maybe that, that Whitcoff and Kushner, those guys that Iran's been accused of doing it possibly. But this would be a significant addition to that in suppressing oil prices. If other people around the world knew that inventories weren't as low as previously believed, that would have a huge damper on oil prices spiking. And now that this

story is out, we'll see what happens. But what do you think it would have looked like if they, oh, sorry, go ahead, Chad, you got a question. Well, I was going to say so, I guess this brings up a major concern for me because this is a traded commodity. And do we actually know how much oil actually exists in the moment? Because other realms, whether it's stock trading, this would be fraudulent. Things like dark pools or iceberg orders or the hidden ownership

tricks that people use. Yeah, they can temporarily hide what you're doing when it comes to stock trading. You can do things like disclosure avoidance. But eventually, you got to lay all your cars on the table. This sounds like they can just do this. And we don't actually know what the market really looks like, which can be dangerous for little me here, who's like, I'm going to put some money into the oil market. I have no idea what I'm doing because generally when it comes to stocks

or hell, even the real estate market, there's a physical thing you can go look at. But now you're telling me that we have just oil that can be floating somewhere or sitting somewhere and people just lying on paper to say, hey, just to manipulate prices, that's a racket. That's not a true market.

“So I'm just, is that what we're saying is we don't really know what this looks like in real life?”

Well, every inventory report has the word estimate. Oh, yeah, the catch-off. But

you don't even miss estimates by half a billion barrels. You don't miss a global oil inventory estimate

by 15, 16, 17%. And the thing is, the likely number is even probably higher than a half a billion

So that means you're talking about a fraud to the turn of more 50-ish billion dollars is the value of that oil that they were able to sell, but not report an inventory to keep the price higher. So that's a massive fraud. And no one has ever believed at least in my world that the numbers were

100% accurate. Like, you know, there's always probably a one to two percent, you know,

it's kind of like polling, one to two percent accuracy, whatever. But this, when you get in, when you're getting in to half a billion barrels missing, that's definitely fraud. That's definitely coordinated. It's definitely manipulating global markets for your own, you know, gain. And a lot of countries in the Middle East have surprisingly kind of struggled a little bit financially in the last few years, because they're trying to actually get off oil. You know, Saudi Arabia

visions their vision 2030 plan, you know, they're trying to get off of depending on oil for income. They're diversifying their income. They're, you know, they're trying to find new sources of revenue

“generation. And I think this all plays into that, because that costs a lot of money to”

completely diversify your entire economy. Are we living in a golden age of oil fraud?

But to go to, I mean, possibly, I mean, I'm, you know, I mean, this is unprecedented, right? Like, between between this and the Trump administration and the Kushner is like, it does seem like more money is being made. And I don't know the history, but just seem like more money is being made now on specifically energy market fraud than in the past games. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, literal, literal scams, grifts, whatever, whatever you word you want to use for it. And my follow-up

question to that is, if more money is being made in that space than ever before, is this one of those things where by the time you've heard of it, it's too late to get in on it? Or what do I got to do to start manipulating oil markets myself? That's trying to get in on it to the tune of billions. Because honestly, this podcast game was fine, but I don't know, it just seems easier than I thought it would be. You just lie and say there's less oil? Absolutely.

And we're on it at California. No, yeah, they did. I mean, I mean, we've, we've talked about that part of the world, you know, more Western type values being accepted over there. I think this is a huge sign that that's actually happening because it looks like they're all turning into crooks, just like we are here. But no, there's all the anti-globalists who thought Trump's collaborative here. He is spreading American culture and values to other countries.

I mean, it's no doubt Western values have definitely spread around the world because now they're all criminals. So yeah, I mean, well, that's just criminal to grifters, right? Like

“it's your, you're working grifting into the fabric of your government, right? That's what we've”

done, essentially. Whereas governments once protected people from scams, we now actually have a scammer at the, at the helm. There's, there's kind of a little bit of a romantic flavor to it though over there because when Saudi Arabia grifts people, their grift actually flows down to their people because their oil is nationalized. So their people pay less for gas and they pay less for energy and just like the other countries over there too. When we grift in the United

States, the people actually get harmed more because all the money is horded at the top. At least over there, they share their grift with their people. That's a good point. That's rather romantic, you know, I think it's great. And if you don't know anything else about the government of Saudi Arabia,

that sounds really good. Yeah, in a, in a box that sounds amazing. Yeah, it's, and I assume

that they take all this stuff about like driving cars and of journalism. I, I surely had to all that really well as well as well. Yeah, a model society, but it's too late for me to get in on the grip though. I just want to, if we could loop back to that. Well, I mean, I'm American. That's the problem. How can, how can I as an American citizen start if you can afford to buy a contract for WTI, you can get it on it. All right. It's about $80 million today. One contract. You hear that,

listeners? Chad, what's your question? We need to advertise just so we can get it on it. Now,

“but I think it's preventing advertisers right now. Me open this thing. I will take your money to do”

fraud. It might actually be illegal to give me money right now. I feel like it's not going to be running commercials on American power. I just feel like that's not a thing. If they give it a cursory overview, they might just be doing AI search to say, oh, yeah, American power. That sounds like our thing. Well, it's, it's interesting because I'm looking at, when I watched the video that you put out

when you, when this war started, it seemed like China was weirdly not affected by it.

Like their imports supposedly fell from 11.5 million barrels to seven, but they had no meaningful

changes in their, their economy, their consumption rose during that time. And so I'm like,

“immediately, like, they're drawn on inventories that we don't see. And honestly, it makes strategic”

sense. So your enemy, you're not necessarily enemy, which is strategic foe, looks out at the world and goes, it looks that you look at the US and the Chinese can assess, well, the US says they have this many barrels of oil and can produce this many barrels of oil. So we need to calculate for that war making capability. We do the same thing for China. We do it for Russia. It doesn't matter. We have, we have portfolios on every single oil producing country in the world. And if China's

able to hide that, if they're, they're finding ways to make it disappear, we don't truly know what their capability is. So this may be not just a grift, but a tactic for these countries to truly hide what they're capable of, of doing from a war time manufacturing standpoint. It's just really fascinating because when you were talking about the, the hidden oil markets, I was like, we hide everything else or enemies don't say, we are all of our stock piles of everything

is usually hidden. And now we're seeing oil hidden in a way that it's presented as a war time necessity. So China doesn't want us to really know how much we have. It's just very fascinating. I just kind of made that connection when I was watching that video. So it was very, it was a very good video. I just wanted to toss that in there. We actually have, we believe we have a pretty good idea of what China has. I don't know that we actually do, but we believe we, we know what they have.

It's somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 billion barrels of oil in their strategic reserves. And the

reason we believe that is because we believe that it's all currently stored in tanks on the surface that we can see satellite images. And we also know that they're currently in the process of constructing underground storage similar to what we have on the Gulf Coast. And China really did the world a huge favor. And I kind of wondered if they were going to do it because in my mind, I'm like, they have so much oil that they bought for literally nothing. They were bartering with Venezuela and Iran.

And in those deals, they're not even really paying for that. Yeah, they would loan Venezuela $10 billion and say, just pay us back in oil until we tell you to stop. And it's like a buy here pay here type thing. Or it's like getting a TV at Renaissance or that you make payments on for seven years. And so they have all this oil. And the average price they paid for is probably less than $20

“of barrel. I've quoted 40 before, but the truth is we really don't know when it's probably 20.”

But why would you buy physical oil when it was 150? Why would you buy that oil for 150 when you

have a billion barrels or one and a half billion barrels that Venezuela gave you to pay off their

debt? Like, and that's what they were really doing. And we all benefited from that a lot because it prevented a ton of the price spikes. It put a, it put five to six million barrels of oil that they back on the market that they wouldn't have been consuming. So they actually did us all a big favor. And it did confirm at least some of what we thought about how much oil they had because to just cut off, say six million barrels a day, that means you have a significant amount on hand just sitting

there that you got really cheap. So, and that's what they did. That makes a lightning off because it, I'll go ahead, man. I was just going to say, unfortunately, they're back to buying oil again. They're restoring those, those previous levels. And we'll just see if they continue to do that as prices rise. We don't know yet. And it had, so the light bulb that went off is, of course, they would lie about their oil reserves because you just said it.

All of their stuff. So everyone talks about how oil has oil has China has this massive strategic reserve of oil. And they do. However, they have put it in tanks that are just easy to strike with missiles. So the US could easily wipe out their entire oil reserve. Pretty, it's not, it's not hard for us to do that. So of course, they would sit there and go, well, we should lie about this so we can hide it out in the ocean or hide it somewhere else

“as we build because all of the majority of ours is in like salt mines. If my crab, I believe we”

put a lot of ours in salt mines. And so ours are protected from those missile strikes and the ability of enemies to destroy our oil reserves. They don't have that luxury. So a minute of war happens.

So we don't necessarily know how much oil. And we can sit there and think, oh, we got it all.

“And then it's like a run suddenly 700 more drones show up, even though Donald Trump said we got”

all their drones and maybe it's the same situation. And so it's the same playbook and it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, no. So, you know, this is about OPEC countries. Is there evidence in this report that China is also hiding oil? No, is just because, because it's on the similar, we're talking about commercial inventories. Yeah. So it doesn't matter if China is hiding oil in strategic reserves as it's not in the market for sale. So we're sticking, this is strictly commercial crude inventories that impacts

the futures market and, you know, the price. If oil, if China had 10 billion barrels of oil in

their strategic reserve, it would have no impact on the global price of oil. Because it's not on the market. It's driving the price. It's not counted in supplies. Just like RSPR, it's not counted in global inventories. And it's, it's counted in inventories, but not commercial inventories,

“which is what impacts price. Yeah, I took it from a, from my perspective of not necessarily”

as the oil expert, but thinking strategically of who is going to, who, who benefits from hiding the amount of oil they have. And I don't think there's no one that has more of a reason to do that than China on, on our right now. So they're not hiding it for financial purposes. They're hiding it for strategic purposes. Like you're talking about. Open hides it to make more money. Yeah, it doesn't really think the U.S. does do so. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe we can use that to segue

to something else we want to talk about this week. Because that method of using or different ways of using oil supply and manipulating oil markets for military advantage, for geopolitical advantage, something that we want to get into a little bit deeper here and talk about ways in which energy is used as a weapon globally. And Chad, I was wondering if you wanted to, start off the discussion. Yeah. So this is kind of a fascinating area that I've just started

diving into. Mainly, just so I could become as smart as Mr. Global here. And just framing it in a way that is, that is kind of how it works on the geopolitical geostatic stage. And, and there really boils down to four, I call it 4.5 points of leverage. So you have your dependency on energy, the scarcity, the replacement difficulty, and the amount of time to replace. And then also, you have kind of this additional diplomatic leverage that you have. Because some countries just

don't have energy, but they have strong diplomatic, great Britain, for instance, is just one of the

“diplomatic powerhouses. So those type of things are very important in the countries use that”

in different ways. So you see it, one of the most direct ways. One of the easiest ways is just an embargo or just a supply cutoff. We've seen this with in 1973 the Arab oil embargo. We saw those

gas lines in the United States. It basically demonstrated how producers could connect energy access

to another country's foreign policy demands. Russia tried a similar method, and it worked briefly in Europe. After the, they invaded Ukraine, they were trying to leverage the oil markets to get Europe to back off. The immediate effect was higher gas prices, electric prices, inflation, things like that. However, you can go too far and Russia did. Russia went too far saying, "We're shutting you off. You better not support Ukraine." And now Europe has pivoted to find other

capabilities everywhere for getting oil and natural gas and energy. And so in the short term, Russia may have caused a small amount of pain, but in the long term, Russia lost a massive customer. And that customer probably isn't coming back, at least definitely while the war's going on, if not while Putin or his, whatever his lackeys take over that regime is in place. And so what we see is that's one form of weaponization of oil is this, the embargo is just shutting it off.

The US, we have, we can embargo as well, but we don't necessarily do. We use something that's actually a

bit more powerful in our ability to manage global financing, insurance shipping, and sanctions

enforcement. And that's kind of what we're doing to Iran. We can target specific producers, banks, the different tanker companies. The brids can do this because they manage the insurance market for the most part. And so that's another way to weaponize it. There's a very crude way of doing it, which is what Iran does, but it's incredibly effective. You just control the geographic choke point. And we have several of those. You have not only the, obviously as we've seen, the state of

have the Suez Canal at the other. Egypt did that. They decided to shut that down. Panama,

let's be honest, they could do it, too. They control the Panama Canal. The US would have a pretty big said about that. But these are everywhere. You have the Taiwan, the straight. You have the, the democracy straight, which would absolutely harm China in a way that they probably would be, they probably would have about 90 days of the democracy straight before they could, they would have to seriously back down. So there's just kind of a broad overview. And I'll let Matt explain more because he's

way smarter in this. That's kind of the weaponization. You have the ability to manage the, the flows, which is the supplies that you have. You have the ability to manage the money, which is what the US does. And then you have the ability to manage the geography, which is what Iran is doing to us right now. And apparently, Oman is getting on board with that and saying, hey, we can make some money out of this, too. So yeah, I mean, you thoughts on this, Matt? Yeah. So one thing I think a lot of

people don't truly understand is that Russia had cut off Europe from natural gas before the Nord Stream was blown up. And so when they blew up, when whoever I'll put it to you that way, Chad might have an opinion, but I don't have no idea who blew it up. But when the Nord Stream was blown up, it was a response. To me, I think it was a response to Russia cutting off Europe already.

“There wasn't, and that's why when it was blown up, there wasn't, do you remember the video”

of the ocean Chad when of the ocean bubbling? Yeah, it was like, it wasn't a, I always wondered

that why was there some massive oil spill? Because there wasn't hardly any gas flowing through it already because they had already cut off Europe. So basically what was just left sitting in the pipeline is what leaked when they blew it up. Like there wasn't millions of cubic feet of gas flowing through that thing every day anymore. They had cut your up off. And that, you know, I think it was three to four weeks later after they cut them off in like stages, if I remember,

they like, they cut off a certain percentage and then another percentage and then eventually got to where you ain't getting none. And I think it was three, four weeks after that. It was when it was finally blown up. And when they blew it up, they blew it up. I think in like two, three, four different places along the pipeline as well. But there wasn't any gas flowing through it

“when it was blown up. That's why it wasn't this huge ecological, a bigger ecological disaster”

because it was just what was sitting there. It wasn't actually flowing under pressure when that happened. And a lot of people don't realize that. So when they're trying to figure out who blew it up, I'm like, well, who did they cut off? Like, I, you know, it was like, they were using Russia was using that pipeline, which is an energy pipeline as a weapon. And someone said, okay, and that was their response to it. That was their counterattack was to blow the damn thing up. As now,

I don't know if we did it or if Europe did it, how Russia might have done it on their own, but I doubt it. A lot of people think that, but who knows? But the oil embargo is 73 is definitely the thing in my mind that that sticks out the largest when you think of oil as a weapon or energy as a weapon. And energy is by far the greatest weapon on Earth to me because you harm the people. You, you, you harm the economy. Like it, it runs through every facet of life. So when you use

it as a weapon, you're, you're not, you're not collapsing a building. You're collapsing economies, which is to me strategically a weapon that exceeds all other weapons, except maybe the nuclear weapon. But you know what I mean? Like, there's no better weapon than crippling someone's economy and

“bankrupting them. And that's why energy is such a powerful weapon in itself. And when you also”

only often see early military strikes on oil tankers and on refineries. Like, they're just, it just flicks that much pain because the energy is so ubiquitously necessary. The reason Saddam burned down as he was leaving. He saw the US was going to beat him. So he's like, you can't, if I can't have it, no one can. And so yeah, if you're going to, if you're going to

shoot a missile at a boat, I'm going to shoot a missile at the boat that has, you know, $180 million

worth of oil on it. Like, that's the one that's, which is not only $180 million for the profit, but also is going to disrupt a multiplicative amount of commerce. It's not just the profit on the sale of that oil. It's what that will, you know, second and third order consequences of those sales. When you, those second and third order consequences are you drive up energy prices for everyone in the country that is the aggressor. In this case, it's the United States. And then they turn on

their leadership and they don't approve of the war anymore. And suddenly you've won. Right. Like, you know what I mean? So while Iran may not spend a trillion dollars a year on their defense,

They don't have been nine, but still. Because all they have to do is drive up our energy prices enough

“to make us say, we quit. And that's exactly what they're doing. Like, that's how you will.”

Well, there's a, there's a preventative aspect to it as well, where even a country is smallest Taiwan will look at China and go, here's the deal. We have this missile capability that you decide you want to start building up across the straight, the Taiwan straight, which we would see. The whole world would say to be just like we saw the build up outside of Ukraine. They would have

to build up a massive force. And Taiwan, the minute that first boat launched, they would immediately

start launching on Chinese oil infrastructure. Those those tanks that we just talked about, there's strategic reserves. But not only that, the, the backup of the pipelines that come out of Russia, they would strike those. So within 48 to 72 hours, most of Chinese oil would probably be destroyed by the Taiwanese. And that is a preventative measure. That is to that is telling China

“hey, we have an understanding here that you are a bigger stronger military than we are, but we can”

bring you to your knees, we're using energy that's your energy against you. So it can go, it can go all different ways. And you see this actually right now in Ukraine. Ukraine has yet to blow up some of Russia's oil pipelines, even though the Russia's oil goes through their country. They have absolutely the capability. They're happy to blow up refineries and things like that. But there are some levers that Ukraine holds on to to potentially keep Putin from going to the ultimate measure

of of using nuclear weapons because their nuclear option, quote unquote nuclear option, is we can absolutely devastate your true oil industry, oil industry here when it's moving pipelines and things like that. We don't want to because we want this word to end. And basically that that keeps this war confined because Russia doesn't want to move the war moving to that realm. We kind of saw when they when the Ukrainian struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea. And Iran said, hey,

we're going to attack you. Ukraine looked at Iran and said flat out, you do this. It's going to be a problem for you. And we're going to continue to strike your infrastructure now too. And we have

the capabilities as you can see across Russia. Iran said, all right, work cool. Never mind. We're

we're just going to. And so that kind of it's very power. It's a very powerful tool as Matt was saying. I mean, everything to turn every. Yeah, it's a deterrent. Yeah, it's a deterrent. A lot, I truly believe the integrated nature of the energy markets is just as powerful as the nuclear deterrent on the international stage, because people just don't want to lose access to it. It's not just like being able to charge my smartphone. It's like we got to build up food and clean our water and

stuff like that. So this is an extremely powerful tool. And the more we integrate, even just price caps, the G7 will price cap, Russian oil. And that gave, I mean, you saw India and China and are like, yes, we can make a good chunk of money on that. But Russia was devastated by that. There are economies in really bad shape because the G7 led by the United States, but also, you know, like Japan, United Kingdom, etc. came out and said, flat out, you guys want to trade and

trade with Russia. We're going to price cap it. And if you go over those caps and pay them more,

you're going to feel the sanctions in China as powerful as they are. They were like, we got you.

We're not going to, we're not going to mess with your, your stuff. We're going to get it to that. We're going to buy oil on the cheap, but it's not going to be as cheap as we want to because they don't want to lose access to things like the dollar. So there's the financial aspect,

“Britain threatened the insurance companies of oil tankers, because they managed, I think,”

Lloyds is the biggest insurer of all the oil tankers. So it's so fascinatingly interconnected where a lot of countries have their hands in the pot. And when someone country pulls their hand out, it causes a huge ripple effect. So it's both good and bad. We have a lot of power in the markets with multiple countries, whether it's geography with Iran or whether it's production with Russia or it's financing and production with the US or insurance with Britain. It keeps this balancing act going,

but when someone does something stupid, like the US and decides, we're going to attack Iran, and that forces them to close the, the straight of our moves, that balance gets knocked off kilter. And other countries start to wonder, I wonder if we can do that. I wonder if we can close, I don't know straight, like Britain's like we can scroll it closed and start charging tolls for Gibraltar because they manage that even though it's Morocco and Spain that are on either side of it.

Or maybe Denmark's like with the Danish traits, Russia, you got to close across to the Danish

And so it becomes very, very fascinating, but also very precarious where those geographic pinchpoints

“can become a problem or the US just using its power over the, with the dollar to, to create”

kind of a pseudo choke point in financing. It's, it's all interconnected, interconnected. Well, there's also a lot of times it's used as a weapon and we don't even recognize it, like I recognize it and when I say it, people look at me like I'm crazy. But when you talk about impacting elections of world leaders around the world, like you drive up energy prices in a country, you can impact their elections and we've seen OPEC do this to the United States.

They've been trying to do this to the United States for years. They did it under Barack Obama. You know, how do you explain record high oil and gas prices under Barack Obama when we had the largest increase in oil production ever in history? And it was because OPEC was cutting production throughout his entire presidency because they wanted him gone. They did the same thing to Joe Biden, you know, record oil production. You had the Trump 2020 deal, which was specifically designed

to sabotage the incoming president, like OPEC uses energy as a weapon more than anybody, and they use it against the United States more than anybody. They drive up, they cut production,

“and they have, like, I think four, five production cuts during the Biden administration,”

to artificially keep oil over $100, knowing that Joe Biden would get the blame for that, because they hated Joe Biden. They don't like any president that's, that's support human rights,

basically is what I believe it comes down to, but they sabotage democratic presidents in the United

States, mostly, I think, due to human rights issues. And they also sabotage US companies, you know, at the end of the Obama administration, they kept oil prices as high as they possibly could for most of the Obama administration, and when that didn't work, they flooded the market and completely crash the entire global oil market and put a bunch of US companies out of business to make Obama look bad that way, like they, they crashed oil by artificially inflating markets.

But this time, or that time, they actually reported the inventories, unlike this time, where they didn't report it. And if you notice those oil prices in 2025, they kept them right there at a level that made them the most amount of money possible with increased

production, but also kept the price of oil low enough, where US companies couldn't invest.

Like, they were right there at the perfect price point for it to benefit them the most, while they were increasing production, and not suffering the consequences of lower prices. Because, oh, peck knows, we need oil to be, you know, $7.75 in the United States for oil companies to continue drilling. So what did they do? They kept it at 68. While increasing production and oil should have been 40, they were able to keep it at 68. You win everything, because you get more market

share, because production in the United States drops, because we can't drill at 68, but it doesn't crash the market in the United States, so it doesn't get the oil industry pissed off it Donald Trump. Like, so it wasn't bad enough for per-bile to fully crash the industry, just rolling up to prevent us from producing domestically. Yeah, and they fully understand the price structure we need to to continue drilling. And in the United States, we have to drill a lot

to maintain our oil production, because our wells, the flow of production from our wells, the pleats rapidly, you know, Saudi Arabia can compete with us in production with like 20 drilling rigs, and we would need like 450 to keep up with Saudi Arabia, because their oil wells just flow thousands of barrels of oil a day forever. Like ours fall off very fast, so we have to keep just drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling. And Saudi Arabia knows all this, and they

have fine-tuned this weaponry, this energy weapon that they use over the years, they used it on Obama, they used it on Bush at the end of his presidency, they used it on Biden, and they used it during the Trump administration to keep prices high, but they did it in a way that wouldn't hurt Donald Trump. Like, they figured out a way to put as much money in their pocket as possible

“without hurting Donald Trump. And that's why you think of these buddy buddy with MBS and doesn't”

care. Yeah, and Trump doesn't say they're promoting human rights, you know. That's what I was saying. It makes specifically because he is openly celebrating their autocrat leader. Sorry, I don't mean to be because sometimes I shy away on the podcast from saying things that are horrific, because I don't feel like reliving the worst news stories of the past 10 years, but you should totally say her to her. Yeah, he's friends with the autocrat because he allows him to murder journalists.

Like, it's not a, and many other, agree just human rights, you know, violations that Donald Trump loves and wishes that he could do here without as much pushback as he gets for occasionally

be like murder that guy. I don't like what he wrote in the news. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, sympathetic to Trump, you know, it's the kind of global order that they're looking for. Yeah, and what's fascinating is Obama actually talked about this during his presidency and everyone said he was crazy. You know, Obama was saying we can't drill our way out of high oil prices.

OPEC is, you know, oil production doubled in the United States under Barack Obama. That's never

happened in the history of the world, the biggest oil boom in history. And we were still, you know, oil way over $100 a barrel. So, you know, that is OPEC controlling as much as they can, policy of the United States leadership elections, all of it. Like they have an enormous amount of control over. And so when we kind of reached back and kind of regained some of our energy independence from them, where we weren't so reliable on them for like physical barrels of oil, they're like,

that's fine. We don't have to sell you the physical barrels as long as we can control the price. Because if we can control the price, we can control your elections to some degree. We can make

“politicians very unpopular, you know. And so that's what they do. Like OPEC uses energy as a weapon”

against the United States on a daily basis for most of my life. And people just, they only recognize it during like the oil embargo of the 70s or some other event. But it's literally an everyday thing going on between us in OPEC. And it's a war we can't win, by the way. That's fascinating. I'm curious. Well, that's going to go ahead, Chad. Well, I was actually, because it made me think of something you said previously, Nat. And I'm going to get, I want to get your thoughts on this, too.

But one of the strongest counterweapons to countries that are using oil as a weapon is disresilience. And so one of the easiest ways to be resilient is just to have it. Like the United States is probably in the overall strongest position. But then you see countries like Norway, who is incredibly resilient, because they have major oil and gas exports, Canada, Australia, are similar Russia as another one that the reason they're so hard to pry out of Ukraine is because

of their resilience. But then you see countries that have made active efforts to become more resilient. The Chinese model that we just talked about. But they have vulnerabilities that are far greater than the US. The European Union is probably the most improved case, but they had major vulnerabilities. They've kind of diversified. And then you look at Japan who has been making huge efforts to prepare because they're extremely important dependent. But they have strong alliances. And

at once against points to the alliances, Gulf States, et cetera. But as you've alluded to Nat, one of the greatest residencies you can have is renewables. I mean, do you have any thoughts on that specifically at all? You asking me, you asking Chad? No, sorry, you asking Matt. You're either one of you. I mean, I can't decide between Matt and Matt a lot of times.

“So I mean, I'm bullish on obviously I think that that divesting from global oil markets is one”

of the and building domestic renewable energy is obviously good for reducing our dependency on foreign oil and our susceptibility to this kind of manipulation. I actually would be curious to hear what Matt thinks about the same issue. Because on one hand, you know, we were actually talking to this with Senator Martin Heinrich last week. I was asking him about replacing major sources of energy.

We're talking about nuclear and geothermal. And I pointed out that, you know, one of the crucial

differences between the two is that one creates toxic waste at last, 10,000 years or longer. And an interesting thing that point he made is like, you know, solar arrays are really valuable. Geothermal is really valuable, concentrated solar power. I don't think we actually got into CSP on that episode, but single sources of energy like a nuclear reactor are hard to recreate. Now,

“when I'm curious about what I think is interesting is does a more distributed grid or does a more”

distributed generation make from a like military from a weaponry security standpoint? Does that make us more or less vulnerable? Like, if you can take one nuclear reactor offline, obviously you can take a lot of energy offline, but there are still pipelines, there are still energy, there's still energy grid work that can be disrupted one way or another. So I'm curious what you think, Matt, about, you know, would that am I being optimistic to assume that reducing our dependency on oil would

also be a national security boost as well? Not at all, it's a huge nation, any energy that you can create that is non fossil fuel boost is good for national security and gives you and disconnect

you further from the global energy markets and specifically opaque. And one thing I was very critical

sometimes, but I felt like the Democratic Party made a huge mistake by tying renewable

the need for renewable energy to climate change because to me you sell what you can, right? And it's very hard to sell, especially in American, like if we don't do this now, it's going to be really bad in 20 years. Well, Americans are the very epitome of instant gratification, like, and it's really hard to sell this climate change thing, but it's easy to sell, eliminating our dependence on

“opaque. Like that is something I think Republicans, Democrats, everyone can get behind. And it's”

not that the climate change thing isn't 100% true, it's that it's just not the best selling point. And I thought from the beginning the whole pitch or whatever you want to call it to renewable energy

should have been more about relieving national security as you're talking about and removing

us from being dependent on opaque. To me, those are things you can actually sell and messages that resonate and we'll get people to say, you know what, and then lay out examples where opaque's been fucking us over for decades and people will say, you know what, you're right, let's, you know, everybody won't, but I think you get much, much higher participation rate and much more approval by selling what you can. And I felt like it was too focused on climate change, not that that's not

a pressing matter, not that that's not a huge thing, but like I said, you, you sell what you can, right, and climate change as the years go by is becoming an easier sell, as it becomes more obvious to everyone, as we sit in the 115 degree temperatures, right? But in those days, in the early days, when it mattered the most, because obviously, combating climate change, it's like a retirement plan,

the earlier you start, the better your results at the end. That's one thing I was critical of.

I was like stop talking about climate change and people would take that and say, well, you don't believe in climate change, and I'm like, no, I do believe in climate change, but I also believe in selling what you can. So you're a thousand percent correct on the national security thing, disconnecting us from opaque, any source of energy, renewable, nuclear, otherwise, what if you want to call it as better from a security standpoint and disconnecting us from opaque, then fossil fuels

will ever be? The climate change is actually the most important thing, but it's the hardest thing to sell.

“And so that's where I'm at on that. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I would like,”

I want to add a little bit to what you said about the democratic strategy there, because I think they've been terrible on the climate and renewables for in many ways, and I think in many ways get too much credit, just due to being the default less bad party in that regard, and not saying democratic administrations haven't done good things, but I think the messaging around climate change, which we called global warming at the time, right, in say the 1990s, was very,

okay, to some degree there was a belief that if you told people there was a global threat that the world would ban together and solve it, we were, this was the we are the world era, there was a little there was a lot of economic prosperity and also like this sort of belief of like, hey, we're all in this together, maybe we really can make a change, and I think that was obviously not true, but I think that the strategic error that I would take a bigger qualm with just then,

I think I don't, I don't know, I wasn't an adult in 1991. I can't decide if that optimism was completely foolish, but what I think, when I look at the way that we talked about global warming as I, and the environment as I was growing up is there was this huge, and this was from liberals, there was this huge focus on individual responsibility, right, like global warming

“is real, and that's why you need to recycle. And like, yeah, ultimately we were sold a deeply”

false bill of goods that was a class dependent, right, like if you're middle class in America, all of a sudden you'd better be buying the eco friendly version of that thing that those, those non-carrying low class people are buying, you know, it's the same thing as like the cultural position of organic food, right, like organic food is good for a lot of reasons, however, is also created as a middle class position to not only, you know, brand things that

aren't necessarily healthier, but also to create class division, to create these like class types where we decide what is best for certain groups of people, right? So, one of those issues of the 1990s was global warming and do you recycle, do you participate in anti-global warming action? And, you know, in retrospect, the global recycling's gotten a lot better. The recycling of that era was pretty inefficient and did not stem the tide of global warming and wouldn't have if

instituted on mass. We'd have reform recycling since, don't accept bad information about that at home,

well, that's why we all need to grow up now. And not like, hey, aren't there, you know, companies just dumping oil into the river right now? Like, aren't there? You know, aren't there just like unrestricted emissions going on that are orders of magnitude larger than any individual citizens can create or probably even imagine? And I feel like that happened five times.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that approach was just never talked to. And luckily and unlikely,

it's now at the point. I've said this in other episodes. You used to have to be like, it's the right thing to do. And now you're like, hey, you greedy assholes. It's less expensive. You're like, we solar costs less money. Get solar panels in your state. But I mean, it sucks that we got there, but I think you're right that like a pragmatic approach should always have been the approach. The thing I'm disagreeing with a little bit is that like, I think that the, it wasn't that it was wrong

to mention global warming because I do, I think it's a similar, like, I think it's like the threat's not going away. We do have to have a way of talking about it. But I also think that the, they didn't name the real problem or the real culprit. It was, it just became like another, you know, electoral,

electoral training issue, yeah. Yeah, it came first, signaling where you were shaming others,

“essentially, and I think it self-destructed, unfortunately, a really, really important issue that”

and it's unfortunate because we could have, unfortunately, we're all humans. And so we should have us versus, versus them, not us versus us. Like, my, I'm not, I'm, people were, it started evolving into people judging my neighbors. Not it didn't put his recycling bin out and stuff and it became, when we, yeah, you're right, Nat, the culprit was, yeah, my recycling matters, but I just watched the, the CEO of Amazon fly to seven different countries. Yeah. And I'm

saying, you're trying to, you're recycling my stuff. Your employer doesn't recycle it. Yeah, you're helping them destroy the air. You know, it's up in our face now, though. I mean, I was just talking to Nat, but not talking to Matt about this before, not that we have a green room, but before the, the show revealed everything on fire. We've a beauty. We've a virtual war, it's got an aims chair. We're in there all the time. There was everything's on fire. So yeah.

Oh, yeah, things on fire right now. So we've been on flood watch a quarter of this year already. I've been home for a week with wildfire smoke. Like, this year did not use to happen in New York. We had coastal issues, but now we've, we've got wildfire smoke. We've got forest fires. We're

“getting, you know, I think it's getting harder and harder to ignore, but I do agree that, you know,”

as, as we luckily things are aligned now, right? Like our national security, our cost of living, all of these things are focusing in the need to reform our energy industry. And so at least people are seeing that. Is it too late, though? I think, you know, for me, one of the big problems was that I'll just, I'll go or turned out to be the American Garland of Climate Change. Like, you don't look in a different light bulb. No, I just mean, you know, we're, we're, when you,

I'm not a scientist, right? But I do know that when you're predicting cataclysmic things that happen to the Earth, like, you don't put a date on it. You don't say, this is going to happen in 10 years. This is going to happen in 20 years. Like, that was so absolute. And when Chad was talking about the shaming and stuff, it felt like there was no compromise with anybody on anything related to climate change. It was all or nothing. I was, I spent a

period of my time promoting new refineries in the United States. And I was constantly getting canceled by the left. And I'm trying to tell them, do you understand that a new refinery, you know, a new refinery built in 2023 can run almost 100% on renewable energy, be, have 99.5% less efficient emissions than the refinery that we're using down the road that was built in 1920. Like, you're living on this planet where you think we're just going to stop using oil in natural gas.

Just wake up to the fact that it's going to be here for a long time. How do we produce it

“and refine it as responsibly as possible? That's why I wanted a new refinery. It's 99.5%”

cleaner than the old one. To me, that is progress in the climate change argument. When you recognize that just like with natural gas, we need fertilizer to grow food. We need natural gas to

fertilize. There's some things that are just, and also a lot of people who never really

read the climate change studies. Like, I did. I read them like a lot. And so, if we can reduce our dependency global on fossil fuels down to like 20 to 30% of what it is right now, we're basically

that the earth can't handle. So, there's never been a day where we were going to be 100% off fossil

fuels. That's not a thing. And people believed that because they didn't understand what they were talking about. They were going off Al Gore and headlines and the shaming that Chad's talking about the virtue signaling. All of that. And of course, hindsight's 2020, right? I can sit here today and, of course, judge. And that's easy. But if you're really trying to sell something, sell the thing, you can sell. And then, let's just be honest about it, right? And I don't know,

Matt, you're pretty big in a climate change. You probably won't actually guess this.

“I mean, no. I have that kind of understanding. Was I not clear to the direction?”

No, I'm actually anti climate change. I think it shouldn't happen. So, when I, when I say, you're not up on something. That's a southern way of saying you understand it. No, I would appreciate that. That's an awful. You said I was a big on it. So, I don't know. I just want to clarify. I mean, understanding it, right? I assume you're someone that has some intimate knowledge of the studies and what they said. And so, I think you've probably

heard when I'm talking about, like, reducing at the 20 to 30%. Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, this is, you know, if you talk to any serious climate, I used to work for, I don't know, longer than that. I saw work for 350.org. And that was there, you know, that, essentially their big goal was to go to the Copenhagen talks and convince the world leaders to cap.

Climate emissions so that we would be able to keep it to 350 parts per million in the atmosphere.

And the point of that was not that that is the perfect amount of carbon, but it is a sustainable and, like, it was a level at which ideally climate change would not gain momentum and accelerate and carbon emissions would, therefore, no longer would not accelerate. And of course, you know, we failed to meet those standards. But the reason I mentioned that is because, for a long time, the global strategy has not been, look, I want to see us reduce an eliminate oil, but the idea

is not to turn the pipeline off tomorrow. The idea is to create a way in which, you know, we can continue to feed and heal people and provide medicine, which are all things that energy does. And of course, we can't say those things to be like, "So you got a burn fossil fuels forever because we need medicine." But we also can't have a interruption in that as we reduce these things. There are amounts of carbon that the atmosphere can automatically, or can naturally

process, however, we are drastically beyond those moments. And the other thing I want to add to that, or drive drastically beyond those levels, add those times I'm talking about are over a decade in the past. One thing I want to add to what you said is, you know, I do say it's not individual responsibility, it's corporations, it's all these things. I want to add a caveat to that, which you've brought this up in a lot of previous episodes, conservation bills, which do

affect individual behavior are massively important, like, and individual supporting these things. But like, those affect our individual behaviors, my air conditioner, things like that that are running. Those are individual actions. I, I, a lot of people took that study, and I'm just being very clear about this. Careful about this because a lot of people took that study that said, "Oh, 70% of

“climate emissions are caused by six corporations." That's the headline that I believe the”

Washington Post ran with, and people have been repeating it for a decade saying, "It's not my fault, it's one of those six corporations fault." And I just, every time I want to be like, "Who's giving them money? You are you? There's only like eight corporations. You think you're shopping at the other two?" Like, no, it's six corporations. I'm blowing out my mic, I'm sure. It's six

corporations, and they're consumers. The problem is not like, "Oh, it's just these guys pumping

oil into the river. They are. Don't get me wrong." But it's like, "No, the problem is that we only have like 10 companies, and they are allowed to do whatever they want. So many people have taken that to be like, "Oh, I'm not the cause of climate change." It's like, unfortunately, you are. It's just that you stopping your personal behavior isn't going to solve the problem. It sucks that we found ourselves in this situation where we are complicit, but we can't individually

solve the problem, but that is, unfortunately, the reality. So like, I want to say like, individual action doesn't matter at all, but you're right. We should have been sold this in a pragmatic way of like, "Here's how we're going to beat this thing. Here's how we're going to save costs." Also, it was like three months ago that Democrats started getting comfortable saying corporations are screwing you over. So it was the 90s. No one was going to be like, "Hey, these corporations,

hey, you know how you love economic prosperity and everything being affordable for the first time in a while?" That's actually bad. So, you know, the consequences were far enough away that they weren't

“going to be challenging global prosperity or American prosperity at the time, and I think that was”

the real, the real weakness. Those companies are just allowed to decrease standards over the years, you know, get away with all sorts of, or you know, you pay a small fee when you realize, "Oh, yeah, they poisoned entire community." Yeah. And in the 90s, no one was telling me how much the

I didn't know that in the 90s, but what I do know is that everyone heard the term net zero,

and they eliminated the word net and just thought zero. Like, I had so many arguments with people who thought net zero meant zero. That's gross. And they're like, "No, there's a reason the word net exists." Right. And that knows what the word net means and Chad knows what the word net means,

“but when you're explaining people to people in society, you have to talk to them on a level”

that they can understand, and I think both parties fail miserably at that. Like, they are terrible at talking to people in a way that they can understand. And if they say something and it's misunderstood, they just keep saying it over and over again, thinking they're going to get it. And they're not. Like, I don't know how many hours I spent explaining net zero to people, because they literally thought it meant zero emissions anywhere in the world. And I'm like, "No,

that's not a thing." And then they would say, "I know what that's not a thing means. Okay, good." Then we have a place to start because this is what net zero means. Well, if you look at it, you're talking about gore. Like, inconvenient truth was the messaging on climate change for why was the pop culture impression up it for a while, and how does he end that movie? Do you remember? He suggests everyone or something.

No, it's he says we have to solve climate change. And then he tells everyone to,

“like, we have 10 years to stop climate change. So you have to go to a high efficiency bulb,”

and all the electrical outlets in your home. I was like, "What? I even read the time. Remember watching that?" I was like, "I'm looking at this guy. I'm like, you have strong thermons home address." And you're telling me to put better bulbs in my shitty little dorm room. Like, that's what you're, that's what's going to do it. Like, you know the names and home addresses of all the people costing this problem and profiting it from it, Al Gore, Ambassador Al Gore.

You're going to tell me it's on me? I don't think that's going to, on the people who paid money to see the climate change movie, speaking of climate activism being thoroughly middle class for too long.

Of course, it's affecting poor people in the global south first, but at the time, it was like a

middle class pursuit in America too much culturally. And it's like, "Yeah, so the people who go see this movie who paid to see a documentary about climate change are rising Saturday.

“They're going to change their bulbs. That was the big takeaway from that movie."”

I just want to point out that Chad is actively living his own inconvenient truth as he's sitting there with his house filling up a smoke because the entire western one-third of the United States is on fire. Hey, I know why I insulted our YouTube viewers earlier and this episode and said, "I don't know why people watch podcasts on YouTube, but if you have, you will notice that the nature of the grid in New York has cost the lights to brown three times during this episode."

So, we're all living through it now. Well, I'll just kind of close out with before we do our

leastware stuff, but I'll say that one of the ways always that we seem to get in gear when it comes

to stuff like this is to feel vulnerable. And so when you look at countries that kind of marketing back to the energy is a weapon thing that are the most vulnerable to the weaponization of energy, you see countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and they're heavily focused on trying to get into this renewable stage. And it's not because they want to help the environment. The other is that aspect. That is probably number three on the list. And they want cheaper power is probably

number two on the list. But number one is the fact that 94% of their energy comes from a boat from somewhere else. And so they need to replace that same thing with South Korea. But a really fascinating stat is one of the countries that is building the fastest renewables as Ukraine. Because, and it's wild because Ukraine is an oil producer through and through. They're on the same level. They do the same things as Russia, former Soviet nation, love oil. But they are one of

the fastest producers of renewable energy builders of renewable energy because they need to be able to, those are more resilient systems than even nuclear. Nuclear is a target. It's not necessarily targeted in the wind, but it's one source of a lot of your kilowatt. Yeah, it would be devastating to do that. And there would be a big backlash internationally if Russia decided to bomb like Zapreysia or something like that. But their oil fired plants. A lot of those older,

Soviet era fossil fuel burning plants are what Russia's targeting. So they're like, we need something that's faster cheaper and can continue to provide heat through these rough Ukrainian winters. And so they are the building out, not only solar, but wind power. And they're also focusing on trying to do something out in the Black Sea because the Black Sea has become somewhat of a neutral zone. When it comes to strikes, because one, the Black Sea fleet, the Russian navy is just not capable

agreements between Ukraine and Russia and other countries that allow the free shipment of things like food. So they're like, well, we can, if that's the free shipment is there, we can maybe build off shore wind. And so Ukraine is at an absolute necessity for their survival going to renewable because they know that that is easier to repair, easier to build out as cheaper. And it gets their people at least some ability to cook food and have heat. So unfortunately, but unfortunately,

the United States isn't going to experience that. We have a lot of energy. We don't necessarily need the renewables other than we really should be for the environmental aspect, the cheapness. And just generally it's a better system for powering our future. The Ukrainians, the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, they have people that are threatening them in their backyard or actively attacking them. And they're moving hard into the renewables for that reason. And if we can explain to the American

people, hey, Hormuz is just a small portion of what could really happen to us if we have a true

“energy crisis because we rely so much on fossil fuels. And I think going forward, that might be as”

Matt was saying, that might be another good avenue to sell to the American people. Vulnerability

is powerful. And as we have discussed earlier in this episode and in other ones, we as Americans,

it is changing in the past 20, 25 years, especially the past 10 years. We are used to an exceptionally high standard of comfort. And effectively, that is why it was hard to do a distant harbinger of doom in the 1990s is that culturally, it takes a lot of pain for the American people to move on something. And we don't want to make things harder for ourselves. We'll just endure, there's we'll just endure what increased prices or we don't, or we'll endure the fear of a threat

immediate comforts almost all of the time. And that's a larger question as to how do we prepare a country, assuming we survive the current rise of autocracy and we manage to survive or stem the tide of climate change that we don't lose every species on the planet and only about half of them.

“At that point, how does America see problems coming 30 or 40 years around the bend in the future?”

Is a question we'll have to ask ourselves because I think ultimately as a consumer culture, if it's not bothering us personally right now, we're not dealing with it. And like, you know, like I said, luckily in huge air quotes, people now know that climate change is real. And that's the, you know, we lost some opportunities in previous decades, but now at least we can build on the fact that people are feeling it. Yeah, for sure. How does Ukraine have time to build more

infrastructure? You think they'd be pretty busy right now? They're incredibly resilient and brilliant. The, they just sort of very, I mean, these are the sarcastic. I was like, even though you're like, the, where is the, where is the manpower coming for the war effort and rebuilding their energy infrastructure? They are very good at prioritizing. And there's a similar way of understanding up and filling those gaps, much like what we saw in like the rosy, the riveter era of more

or two, but also they're good at having a national idea. I mean, this is a situation where these people

have a existential threat, if they either do it or they die. And so that's a very powerful

situation for the elderly to come out of retirement for a 16 year old to start doing things like plowing the field while his father's fighting, stuff like that. And there's an entire episode that's really could be great because just focusing on the fact that the United States, like our company's like, Lockheed doesn't necessarily want to provide patriot missiles to the patriot missile plans on how to build them to Ukraine because they're worried that they will make them better than the

U.S. And that's a problem for Lockheed's profit margins. And so they, there's this concern that the Ukrainians are so smart and resilient right now that they're doing things that we would have

never thought of had this war not happened. And as I said, vulnerability and, and the existential

threat is a very powerful tool. And so that's their finding ways to build out the wounded. You can't fight anymore. They're still going to work. And so it's quite impressive and incredible. So thank God for Lockheed protecting our American right to be lazy and stupid though, you know. God forbid, let anyone else take a crack at it, who might be willing to work hard.

“I want to go, this has been a really interesting episode. And I think, you know,”

like you said, Chad, we could go to a whole other episode on that. But we have talked for a while, and I want to go to our final segment of the episode in which we highlight something from the past seven days that was, if not a positive story, a less negative story than usual and leave you on

What are other of you guys like to start out? I don't know. Go ahead, Matt. Take it away.

“This is a great story that I was known about for all of seven minutes. And so there's”

a gentleman joining out last talking earlier. I know why now. He was a dreamer. Okay. And so that lens credibility to the story to me. Anyway, his name's Thalus disus and he is currently attending

his first year pre-law at Yale University via being a shift manager at Wendy's who could not

afford to go to college and approached his boss and said, I am going, this is when he was in high school. He said, I'm going to have to go find me a job like in construction or something, you know, once I graduate because I can't make enough money to support myself. I can't go to school. And his boss said, no sir, you're not going to do that. We're going to help you go to college. So his boss and his business partner set aside some money every week for Thalus disus and got him

into a community college where he then made straight days and eventually earned a scholarship to go to Yale. So this guy who was working at Wendy's, he was a dreamer, his parents brought him over as a young teenager, working at Wendy's, really had no prospects. But was obviously a standout employee, obviously a very bright individual. His bosses stood up and said, no, we're going to help you out. You're not going to quit. We're going to set aside some money. They ended up paying

for most of his, he went to a little nothing community college that no one ever heard of. Straight days went to a bigger community college straight days and then got a scholarship to go to Yale.

So he's now in his first year, pre-law at Yale because someone saw his potential working at Wendy's

an immigrant of a different skin color working at Wendy's saw his potential invested in him.

“And now he's pre-law at Yale. So congratulations to Mr. disus. I think it's a fantastic story.”

I love stories like that where people help lift someone up from the lower rungs of society so to speak and put them on a rocket ship. And so being a lost student at Yale is obviously going to change disman's life coming from Brazil as a dreamer to the United States. It's a nice pre-law at Yale. And I'm super happy for that gentleman. Yeah. And it is, you know, I hate that it became a culture war thing but it's nice to hear any good news about recipients of the dream act just because

it became a target for Trump and the whole conservative apparatus. Absolutely. Truly because it was an Obama project. I think not just because it was immigrants because it was a, I think it was a spiteful move against it. So it's a nice, it's nice to hear successes for those people who, you know, came here under a program that was supposed to give them a better life and then people who really didn't deserve to be the political focus of a huge attack. Some of them like they're even

“their own names got exposed. You know, people got exposed as recipients of the dream. So it's”

great to hear good things happening for them. And I also say that like the guys at Wendy's putting away a little bit of money from each of their paychecks, just pay for someone's college gives me this really a great idea of like what if everyone in this country, a little bit of our paychecks, went to like a big fund and then we could all go to college. It's just an idea I have. And we could also do it for like healthcare or something. I don't know. It's just, it's just coming out spitballing right now.

Just a thought. We've heard another episode, but if anyone wants to try their places. So has anyone done that? Has anyone done that? Has anyone done? You know, yeah, education to your own her fees different over there. That doesn't mean it's probably totally different. Yeah, it's probably like hilly or something. They have more hills than we do. They have more fewer, more fewer hills. And so it's, there's no way it can ever work here. You're right. I should

do it in the morning. I should, I should die uneducated of a curable disease because of the

different terrain here, you're right. I feel like I always make you're from least worse,

more negative. My room is getting darker. The energy is going out in my neighborhood. Chad, what's the least worst part of your week? This one's pretty cool. So before I get into the least worst part of it, I'm going to give you the, the bad part of it. So one of the things that's a byproduct of every war, the worst part of this whole thing. And there's a byproduct of nearly every major war that is fought. And that is minds that are left behind. And the reality for minds

is about 2,000 people worldwide are killed by unexploded ordinance that has just been left behind by previous wars. And it's the, the propensity of it is children because they're out there playing and fields and stuff. Another 4,300 ended up getting injured from these with wounds that clearly are life-haul terrain blowing off their limbs and things like that. But after so one of the major wars that had a massive problem with minds was Bosnia, the Bosnia and Herzegovina War. So

all of the partners in that region who previously were at war, they're not partners. They

animosity are starting to come together and creating joint budgetary measures to fund mind-clearing efforts. So right now there's about, in left in Bosnia there's about 775

“square kilometers of of minds that need to be cleared. Granted you have to, they've been trying to”

clear minds. Third party countries usually have been doing it. But one of them being the US and

USAID being shut off by Trump has removed a lot of this mind-clearing effort by the US, which is unfortunate because there's actually a great training event for us too. But regardless, these countries are now, again, filling the vacuum left by the United States and they're creating joint budgets to address minds. And it's not just necessarily Bosnia, these are old wars that across the world. Because these minds, they just continue to pop up. I mean, I think Great Britain just a few

days ago, ended up having to blow up and unexplored warrants because they're ever receded to such a level that it exposed one. So this is constantly fascinating story. So I'm going to do a side bar. Go ahead. Talking about fires up in the foothills of Boise, here where I live, because the

climate change of fires are just really bad here. Firefighters had to stop fighting the fires because

“they were coming across unexploded warrants that the back in like the the 20s and 30s, the”

Fort Boise military installation would use the foothills to fire artillery into just for training because Boise was so small that the foothills were just there. So fire into it. And this created these fires cleared out the brush and the firefighters had to leave because there was unexploded ordinance there and the National Guard had to go out and detonate them and blow them up to make it safe again. Not every country has that capability. So children in places like Bosnia or you

even talk about the the Middle East and Syria and things like that were Russia's deployed mines. A lot of efforts are being made to to limit to to shrink those footprints. And unfortunately, the minefields and Ukraine are currently still growing and that's going to be a generational problem. They're going to have to deal with eventually. But for now, old war or old battlefields are getting additional funding from both sides of the conflict. Interestingly, to come together to

clear these mines, so children are safer. So that's a great news. I hate hearing how much damage we've done to the world, or they've done to the world by discontinuing USAID. But it is nice to know that that's not the, you know, we're not the global superpower for aid. I mean, we are in many ways, but we're not the only source of aid globally. And it's nice to know that that America is not the world's babysitter and all of these issues.

Yeah. What's your gunna? What do I got? I actually have a least worst that I'll probably talk about again when it actually happens. But I want to promote this because it's going to come up in September here in New York on September 20th here in New York. I'm going to be working with a CU Boulder, which is, you know, Colorado University Boulder. I work with them in Colorado as well. But you're doing an event for New York. It's like the New York and it's like the New York

“and it's a New York. Well, the truth is I work for them, and I just teach classes remotely,”

because I work with their students remotely on art related to the climate crisis. So, you know, sketch comedy videos, stand up, monologues, animation, things like that, and they have this really great program called Inside the Greenhouse. Essentially, the idea is to create art, to create media entertainment that deals with the climate crisis in a way that's actually accessible and entertaining. And, you know, I love to rail on inconvenient truth because, like I said,

the people who would pay money to go see a climate science documentary were already on board

and you gave them bad advice at the end. But people who would never watch a documentary about

climate change will definitely watch a 90-second stand-up clip on their phone. They'll watch a funny sketch video. They'll, you know, they'll engage with the media that they already engage with. So, they do a lot of really great work in training students to do stuff like that. And then they just put on a really fun comedy show every year and we've done them in New York and LA. But for the first time, here in New York, we are going to be running a climate comedy workshop for, for young

comedians for climate week. And I'll have more details on that coming soon, but I'm going to be working with some local comedians, and we're going to have like a free, all-day workshop at Fordham, and we are going to work with a group of like local students and comedians and help them develop their own material about not necessarily about the climate crisis. When people ask me about this, I say, well, you know, I do five minutes on hybrid cars. I do, I got my bit about solar panels.

I got my bit about being a vegan, which I'm, you'll learn in the bit. I'm not a vegan. I tried, but I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best, but I mean, I still eat meat. The point being,

on the daily show every day. And climate crisis is just one of those tough topics that you got to figure

“out the right way to talk about. So I'm very happy to say that yeah, in climate week this year,”

I am going to be leading a workshop for young comedians on how to do comedy about the climate crisis,

that doesn't suck. They didn't call it that, but I'm going to ask them to put that in description.

And that is the least worst part of my week, and hopefully also the least worst part of the week of September 20th. And that's going to be cool. Yeah, I'm psyched for it. We've done it before,

and I've worked with students from Boulder, but it was like, you had to be enrolled. And we're going

to have a program for people who are in New York and who aren't necessarily in the university system. So, well, also, you know, working with actual young comedians who already have some momentum. So,

“it'll be cool. And I think, at that, we are at the end of our episode. Thank you so much, everyone,”

for listening. This has been American Power from Findout Media. Follow us on every social media platform that's legal. And if not, I hope that that lawyer who was also a dreamer will represent me as I direct you to Mr. Globel's illegal deep fake only fans. Again, I've been your host, Natsun. I'm really trying to thread the needle there. I tied it all together. Pretty neatly there. I'm your host, Natsun, professional podcast host for Mr. Globel and Chad Scott.

“This has been American Power from Findout Media. Remember, power corrupts, but American Power”

corrupts, American League.