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Welcome to Big Digital Energy with Chuck Yates, Mark Meyer and Kirk Coburn. Weekly news in energy covering oil and gas and cleantech.
0:00 I mean, welcome back, guys, to another episode of BDE. Chuckles? That's right.
0:10 Mark, how are you, man? What a week for Chuck to be taking a much-needed and well-deserved break, right? I mean, no doubt. It's been, I mean,
0:25 I think, you know, I've been - it's been a really humbling week And just let's just - we're going to jump in to the Charlie Kirk assassination because I think it's for all of us in the podcast world,
0:39 you know, we use words versus fists. And
0:46 what is your reaction, Mark? Let's talk about just, you know, we're worrying what we're thinking when you heard the news. What does it mean to you? What does it mean to our listeners? How was
0:59 it home? home right now is coincidentally Phoenix area, which is where Charlie lived. And I didn't know that until last night. I'm not there right now.
1:13 And I was just walking past. It was almost like one of those moments where, I remember I was at the Houstonian after a physical standing in the men's locker room, tying my tie when I learned about
1:29 911.
1:32 And it was one of those just double take moments of just slowly kind of
1:42 realizing what was happening. And it took a minute. And so, of course, the era today where we've got recordings and video in the moment in real time of everything. makes that different, but it
2:04 felt to me like one of those moments that kind of took me back to something as, I
2:11 don't know, transformational or impactful as just that moment for me personally when I first learned of what was going on in New York on 911, which was yesterday, the 24th anniversary. Yeah, I
2:26 mean,
2:28 where were you? I don't know, I don't know of timing. I mean, I was on, I was at home in Nantucket and it was kind of just like, holy crap, everything has changed possibly. And I was thinking
2:44 it in context of 911 because our own fearless leader, Colin McClellan, I saw his tweet about Charlie Kirk He's like, I'm standing up against this no longer. And I was thinking, and I think I
3:03 replied to his ex-post, I guess I can't say tweet anymore, but his ex-post saying, can I say that? You can. But it really impacted him like 911 was 24 years ago.
3:20 And in that short period, we're now electing the same people that have the same beliefs that want to destroy this country. And now these same people that hate us and want to destroy this very fabric
3:38 of this country are now being elected as our leaders across the country. So that's 24 years. And conservatives by nature are not people that are easily radicalized. And usually that's because, and
3:56 going to Charlie Kirk himself, Like most of us have some fundamental. religious beliefs, we believe in a God, someone better, something that we're a part of that is bigger than ourselves.
4:08 Politics is not religion. It's not that important, it's important, but it's not the fabric of how we see and be alive. We believe in the human soul. And the soul is something that's bigger than
4:22 these things. And so we're not easily radicalized. So I'm like, is it really a turning point because we as conservatives don't rise up with violence. We rise up with words. And it's gonna be
4:35 interesting to see what happens and of all people, Charlie represented the best of humanity where he would go into places using words trying to convince people. And he saw people as humans, not as
4:50 objects. I mean, it reminds me of CS. Lewis We talked about the abolition of man.
4:58 When we stop treating our opponents as humans, where they debate and start treating them as enemies to be eliminated, Charlie Kirk actually spoke about this, about he looked at people, and if you,
5:10 I went back and I've been spending the last few days hoping we'd talk about it in mourning in some ways, reviewing Charlie's work, and I mean, what a great human being where he told the crowd like
5:23 less respect these people and people that hated Charlie, he would debate them, he'd look them in the eyes, he'd treat them as a human being and try to convince them otherwise, but. Well, and it
5:34 was always, you know, I want people in the crowd who disagree with me to go to the front of the line because I want to engage in this debate. And I think one of the more powerful tenets or
5:47 principles was, or messages was, look, bad things happen often when we stop talking.
5:57 in a marriage divorce happens, and global conflict wars happen. And so the notion that you engage and talk, I think is foundational to certainly what the First
6:18 Amendment is the First Amendment, not by coincidence. The founders saw that as the cornerstone in bedrock to our society, civilization, and system of government backed up by the Second Amendment.
6:35 And so the
6:39 other thing is, I'm paraphrasing. I don't remember it precisely.
6:48 Killing me doesn't prove me wrong.
6:52 It only adds more weight to my opinion. And I do think that's true. Did I agree with everything that came out of Charlie Kirk's mouth? No, do I agree with everything that comes out of President
7:05 Trump's mouth? No, we're going to talk about a few things as it relates to our own direct experience with attempts at shouting down points of view and
7:25 silencing debate Energy and climate are certainly two of the most politically charged and intertwined issues and topics of debate and discussion where there has been signs of
7:36 violent type rebuttals to an argument being made or silencing, right? We've experienced de facto some level of that, like
7:50 it seemed like every other week, a few years ago, we were getting footnoted.
7:56 maybe shadow banned by
7:59 YouTube, whenever we talked about climate. Yeah. I mean, I have 100 mark. I mean, since
8:07 COVID and then the Black Lives Matter movement and all these riots and these things where people were afraid to speak up.
8:19 I mean, think about us like and hate to say it, that we're middle-aged white guys. But we have been the most oppressed lately, afraid to speak up because, you know, anybody in our age range is
8:33 not getting a job. People don't want to hire us. We're seeing around the world as the most privileged and not worthy of much. But Charlie defended man in general. It's interesting to see. And
8:49 It's entering to see what has happened with social media and the fact that.
8:55 All these people that have been celebrating as assassination are being called out and they're getting fired. I mean, that's a great thing about free speech is that free speech still has consequences.
9:08 Like I can say something horrific, but if my employer doesn't like it and it's not part of their code of conduct or their standards, they have every right to hold me accountable to that. Amen,
9:20 right? That's the greatest thing about it It's like, hey, free
9:25 speech does come with consequences, but at least you're still alive and breathing. And that's the one thing I think Charlie said very eloquently about the power of free speech. And I'm actually
9:39 curious, and I've been watching this, take place on social media as all these people celebrating assassination, which tells you a lot about the depravity of man in general But it's ghoulish.
9:52 That's for sure. Look, I think
9:55 Back to your original point, you know, if you're involved in podcast type media, that's opinion oriented, I've always approached it and I just have an analyst DNA, that's that's how I'm wired.
10:11 That's how you're wired and I've never approached it as I'm going to tell you what to think
10:22 I'm going to from a position of interest curiosity and analysis show you how I think about something based on hopefully
10:33 a chain of critical thinking and a synthesis and understanding of objective data to the extent that you have the insight and the expertise which I would argue that both of us do and Chuck as well. to
10:55 speak from, you know, a credible position of expertise in the subject matter that we typically find ourselves discussing, which is the subject matter of energy and specifically oil and gas, which
11:08 has been kind of the pariah politically over the last five to 10 years for a lot of reasons. And wanting to rebut in the debate, some of the sometimes not well supported arguments to the whole
11:29 subject matter of energy and oil and gas. But to have things like I'll use an example from this past week.
11:40 Chris Wright assembled the Climate Assessment Working Group and they spent a couple of months who were five PhD level scientists working on that.
11:57 They're immediately upon publishing their findings. There was a vast body of, quote unquote, mainstream opinion scientists, many of whom participated in the latest IPCC. You know, I saw in this
12:12 article that I sent around with a run a show, which said, you know, and there's all kinds of qualifiers handpicked by DOE Secretary Chris Wright, a fossil fuel entrepreneur, authors are well
12:27 known to climate scientists. And then
12:32 it says they hold contrarian views on climate and sciences that are science that are out of step with the mainstream. And there's there's a lot more in that article and we'll send that around But the
12:44 notion that, you know, this is it all decided and the attempts to immediately tamp down. any type of debate and, you know, rebuttal
12:59 is still alive and well.
13:03 And so they shut this working group down on threat or actually lawsuits that were filed on, you know, some violation of the Federal Advisory Act. I guess you cross a line in terms of assembling
13:16 things that are advising government agencies. I don't know the technical kind of legalities of all that, but the Trump administration disbanded that. And I think this group is going to continue to
13:28 work independently, which, you know, I think it's needed in
13:35 this particular area. And all this comes on the heels of or in concert with the EPA's notion that they're going to try and repeal the endangerment finding as it relates to CO2. So anyway, good
13:50 points. It's still very much
13:55 alive and well where
14:02 the notion of something as scientifically complex, chaotic, and uncertain as anything in physical energy systems, you multiply that by orders of magnitude when you're talking about understanding
14:22 the atmosphere and climate and yet we pretty much know everything. It's already been
14:30 scientifically agreed upon in the mainstream. Well, predictions that are out decades based on incomplete and flawed modeling taken as fact is, you know, I think for for anyone with a scientific or
14:49 analytical. political background objectively is ludicrous. But there was a period of time, it's becoming easier to voice an opinion on that based on counterfactuals that this thing is subject to
15:04 much more study and debate. And when the stakes are as high as they are, we talked about the endangerment finding essentially catalyzing like a trillion dollars over the decade plus that it's been
15:16 in place and compliance and other costs, those are meaningful things that need to be thoroughly and objectively studied and debated. And that debate shouldn't be truncated by political fear.
15:35 I mean, I felt that directly at Shell. I mean, CS. Lewis going back talked about, quote, you know, what he called the inner ring, that the desire to be part of the approved group leads people
15:50 to abandon their principles. And we're seeing this play out in climate science where dissent equals career suicide. And
16:03 finally, I mean, that's my biggest concern. I mean, remember peak oil demand narrative is the latest orthodoxy. If you question it, you're labeled a denier.
16:20 And we're following, we're still following religious doctrine. And going back to Charlie for a second and coming back over is people are now afraid because violence, like this is, people are
16:33 celebrating violence.
16:37 And someone my wife follows, and I actually think she's actually, I don't know if you know who Blair White is.
16:46 She's a conservative She was a man that trans. transition to a woman, she's against it, she'll tell people,
16:56 but she's a conservative and she just wrote something on Twitter, I thought that was really interesting. And so it says, If you laugh at or celebrate rape, I'm going to assume you're capable of
17:07 rape. If you laugh at or celebrate murder, I'm going to assume you're capable of murder
17:14 The hero originally said, after Charlie Kirk, saying, I'm
17:18 not going
17:22 to college campuses anymore.
17:26 But he's come back saying, I'm going, I've got to. We cannot let this happen. But the fear, this is sort of proven to many of us like, man, it's not safe for us to talk about these things.
17:39 'Cause if we do, 'cause we're just inviting violence against us But I think maybe we, you know. maybe we should speak up. Well, Shapiro said he was actually, and retrospect was going to rev it
17:55 up in terms of doing it in retrospect. I
18:03 took that as more frequently and more pointedly in engaging
18:12 and picking up the mantle of what Charlie was about And it's so ironic that this took place on what you and I both came to know growing up as the bastion of the free exchange of ideas and opinions,
18:35 and that is a college campus. And
18:40 as we've seen in the last few years, it's become the antithesis of that unless it's a certain point of view.
18:50 Yeah, I've sort of stuck my nose in places I shouldn't, but I've been sinking my nose. I've been watching, I watched the two hours that Charlie Kirk was at Oxford.
19:02 And I don't know if you've been following this, but President-elect George Aberoni, I don't know how to say his last name, but he debated Charlie back in May when Charlie was at Oxford. And he's
19:17 the President-elect of what's known as the Oxford Union.
19:22 And so I, of course, stick my nose on it, and I wrote in response, is he basically celebrated Charlie's assassination. And the Oxford Union is this, I mean, it's Harold McMillan, former UK
19:37 prime minister and ex librarian of the Oxford Union, once described it as, quote, the last bastion of free speech in the Western world. So I wrote that, and I said, how embarrassing and far the
19:49 union has fallen from an institution that championed debate and intellectual curiosity to one whose president elect celebrates violence against the opposition. Now, I don't know if you're watching
20:03 this, but I'm seeing a lot of people are challenging George on number one, like this is inappropriate, this is wrong. But secondly, they're going after that he didn't have great grades to get
20:19 into Oxford. And they're challenging the DEI narrative, which is actually one of Charlie's thought speaking he 'cause points DEI was ridiculous 'cause you're just lowering the bar. And meritocracy
20:31 should be how it is, which goes right into climate change. It's like if you at Shell definitely can't say it's, I mean, even within people like, well, Shell's an oil and gas company, it's
20:37 pretty progressive at the
20:45 top and you can't really talk about.
20:49 And, but that's true across energies, like it was a, it's a sitting on a powder keg. You couldn't talk about it. But finally, I think this is the moment in time where people are starting to
21:03 speak up and speak their mind and challenge. Now there might be violence around the corner, but, but I think that's what's interesting is we're seeing George who just a year ago, you couldn't say
21:14 anything about him But now people are like, he shouldn't be, be at Oxford. Like there's people, former Oxford graduates that across the world are saying, this is bullshit. And before I bet you,
21:26 they would never have said that before. Oxford came out with an official statement denouncing it. I've got a, you know, totally condemning those, those statements that George made You know,
21:43 we'll see, we'll see if he remains, we'll see if he remains President-elect of the Union. Yeah, they stood within six feet of each other talking like human beings. I mean, and then this one guy
21:56 is celebrating. Like he said, let's fucking go. I think is what he said. I'm like, what? This is the mindset. Now, let's apply it to oil and gas. I mean, Mark, do you see this being a
22:07 turning point where we can actually be honest about what's really happening? Yeah, with a caveat, and this was as recently as maybe a year, an half ago, I'll
22:22 keep this anonymous, but I have a friend who's fairly prominent in policy commentary circles who's invited to speak at one of the IVs in one of these student forums. And it was more careers and
22:38 energy type oriented. And we had recently seen, remember the exact specifics, but there had been some, you know, some activists and demonstrators get close to the stage where oil and gas
22:57 executives were speaking. And so there was a threat perceived physical threat as a result of those incidents. And this person reached out to me
23:09 and asked kind of the advisability of showing up for this event, ostensibly to talk about mostly finance careers and oil and gas was really that. But it coincided with a lot of what was going on at
23:26 the time across the Ivy League and some other universities as it relates to
23:34 the whole Palestinian protest, for example. And he shared with me one piece of data that there had been an abnormal spike. in the number of registrants for this event.
23:51 And so I asked him questions about, is there, what's the setup, what's the physical setup? And I said, is there
24:02 a screening and a check-in process? And to his knowledge, there wasn't any and a special security considerations. And so I basically said, I wouldn't do it I'd reschedule it if we can answer all
24:18 these questions and make sure that those protections are in place. Because the environment was, there was evidence out there that
24:27 you see these interesting trends, if you will, of this big spike in registration for an ordinary or otherwise mundane topic. And you look at how supercharged the environment was, just politically,
24:45 not just related to energy, You know, one of the most emotional and politically charged dimensions of debate is certainly climate and energy. And so that was very front of mind at the time. And
25:02 then you think more recently what happened to the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. He was attending an investor conference
25:11 and got assassinated So in light of what happened this week and the prominence of it,
25:21 I don't know. I wouldn't blame any certainly corporate executive from either taking extra measures or carefully choosing their place in time at which they want to speak and offer their opinions I
25:39 mean, I've been watching this in real time with the wind farm often in tuck at South Shore.
25:47 No one spoke up until a blade fell in the water and that started to get some of the environmentalists talking. But the policy, just think about the policy damage from the fear of being canceled over
26:02 the last five to 10 years has been enormous. I mean, scientists self-sensoring, researchers avoiding certain topics and tire fields of inquiry becoming off limits I mean, as an investor inside of
26:18 this of shell and before shell, so I was way onto my investment days and energy. But
26:26 one of the areas that I have been banging the drum and made investments in is in exploration. And people are like, no, no, I'm like, wait a minute. Good investors can be contrarian and you run
26:40 towards areas that are off limits. But I'm like, think about this. The world, and remember, I don't know if you remember 10 years ago about. that the nine billion people becoming, it was a nine
26:52 or 10 billion on the planet, the amount of energy, like we don't have enough energy, water, food, what are we gonna do, all this stuff? I'm like, if energy truly is growing based purely on
27:08 population growth,
27:11 we need more oil and gas. It's a no-brainer Like there's renewables physically can't be built fast enough that technology is not even close to being there. We're in trouble if we don't find more
27:24 sources of oil and gas. So exploration has been going down this whole time. All the big national oil companies are not even that good at exploration 'cause they don't need to be. So the
27:39 international oil and gas companies have been deprioritizing exploration. So what do you think is. is gonna happen. When you have underinvestment, no one's exploring to that degree. Technology's
27:54 not moving forward. You're gonna have a challenge of supply and demand. So anyway, but that's been an area that's been in many ways way off topic. 'Cause if you look at the budgets of Exxon,
28:07 Shells, I knew internally Shells, it was going like this. People didn't wanna be an expiration.
28:14 I wanna be in wind We're at about run rate, I think it's a third of where we were in 2013. And keep in mind, the vast majority of this exploration expenditure is on long cycle conventional. And so
28:31 the impacts of success or failure, spending or not spending, you know, take about a decade to manifest. And so we're kind of at that point post-contemporary peak of 2013, I believe 2013 was was
28:47 the mile post for. peak and exploration spending and it has come down dramatically over the ensuing dozen years or so. And I think that's why you see, look,
29:01 Exxon and Guyana, oh, and we talked about it either last week or the week before,
29:06 now we've got a big exploration agreement in Trinidad And if I'm thinking, you know, peak demand is somehow going to happen before the end of this decade, I'm not committing billions of dollars in
29:24 long cycle capital to something that is allegedly going to be significantly reduced in demand. And that's just not reality. I think the reality is, and
29:36 we've talked about it, others have talked about it, is that we're adding close to 2 billion people between now and 2050.
29:47 And All of those people are going to be in the developing world and a large concentration are in about five countries in Africa. Check my math on this, but if you take the growth numbers, that's
30:05 equivalent to a city the size of Austin, about a million people popping up once a month
30:15 I mean, the brain doesn't even compute that. Like, how does that happen? But that's if the math is correct. Well, and the point, I think the defining point or
30:27 the anchor point of all that Arjun Murti has been talking about is we have to solve for everyone's right and aspiration to improve their standard of living, full stop before. before we have a
30:48 climate priority. What's number one rule of doing that? Cheap, affordable, reliable energy. Yep. And we would love it to be clean, but if I'm starving to death, I'm burning wood. I don't care
31:03 what it does to my lawn. So like I just don't care. Like I'm gonna freeze to death or I'm not gonna be able to eat. So like, you throw your standards out the window when
31:14 you're surviving I had a, I'll just,
31:20 I'll just recap this anecdote again anonymously, but a very prominent global political figure who in their post-political life was spending a lot of time in Africa. And in a private conversation,
31:37 we were talking about, you know, climate change
31:43 this person's views. And he said, you know, I spent a lot of time on the ground there. And the average person I encountered is more
31:54 absorbed and consumed with on a daily basis, surviving,
32:01 not only for him or herself, but for their family, and improving their quality of life and standard of living And the kind of
32:14 the punchline was, that guy doesn't give a shit about climate change.
32:20 And that's reality. But you couldn't say that. You couldn't say it certainly at the prominence of the
32:30 level this individual held in the political stratosphere And so,
32:36 one of the other points, getting back to the whole free speech and expression of opinion and debate. I think there's been a significant amount of policy damage done over the last five to ten years
32:53 because there has been such aggression to silence points of view and debate and ill informed policy decisions I think one of the worst things that an institution that
33:12 should be about objective policy leadership and advisory, and I've talked about it a lot in the CIA, published that absurd report in May of 2021,
33:23 you know, net zero by 2050, which to the uninitiated, said, well, we can just stop investing to the point we were talking about earlier, we can just stop investing in new resources and oil and
33:36 gas, exploration and future development. Well, here we are, and, you know, if OPEC is right, that it's 123 million barrels a day, or if the IEA, which has now said, we have a scenario that's
33:49 based on prevailing policy. I think they came out this week or last week, Javier Bloss tweeted about it, I'll go look that up. But basically suggesting that we're gonna land somewhere around 115
34:06 million barrels a day. Well, that,
34:09 we're at 105 today
34:13 Doesn't sound like we're gonna get there in terms of peak or certainly a rollover in demand globally and inside
34:22 of 2030. So Mark, we have, I mean, taking this back to oil and gas and drill baby drill versus the layoff reality. What's happening, what's happening in the US? This is interesting Well, I
34:40 think about this as a point of, you know, We're not just mindlessly in lockstep with one political point of view. And we talked about this before the election, when the campaign was hot on the
34:55 topic of drill baby drill, and I've commented on it and written about it, there is a short-term political motivation to be able to show the American consumer, which is by far more important
35:12 constituent and the electorate, that we're gonna, by whatever means necessary, get gasoline prices down, for example. And so, but the reality is, you're doing structural damage to the domestic
35:30 oil and gas industry.
35:32 And
35:35 that is most pronounced in the area of generational succession. But we've attached an article, I think it was in Reuters, and it just tallies up all of the numbers in the last, call it, 9, 12
35:53 months of all the players and to the extent that they've published data or released data on how many layoffs have occurred, the numbers are in the thousands. And this is on top of what has occurred
36:09 over the course of the past five to 10 years. And, you know,
36:15 what does that do to the generational succession of being an oil and gas professional? And then ultimately taking over leadership with some of the best and the brightest that we have. Well, taking
36:32 this personally, first of all, I went to the University of Texas, Go Horns, I was there. when the petroleum engineering department was merging with another engineering department. It was like,
36:48 it was becoming like, it's not even important in, 'cause I went to school in 1990. And that's when oil and gas was in the shitter. But guys, my age, some of them are billionaires 'cause they
37:02 decided to go in when no one else wanted to go in. So let's, this means opportunity But I love West Texas and I went to school with quiet and muted to over day now with quite a few people from West
37:15 Texas in the oil business. And what's interesting is they don't care about campaign slogans. All they care about is supply to man and return on investment. Amen, what is, is that the American
37:27 dream or what? As a capitalist, no one says it. If you just watch what happens in Midland, that will tell you what happens in the rest of the world They will not invest if oil prices are in the
37:39 shitter. it doesn't make economic sense for them to do it. So that's what's so interesting. So what's the solution here, Mark? Well, physics is the solution.
37:53 As it always is. You know, if the predictions of, we're gonna see a meaningful effect show up
38:05 from our lack of exploration spending, here we go again So, and same goes for as we talk about the great generational crew change, which seems to never happen, but young people have been told for
38:18 a decade that fossil fuels are evil. So they don't wanna go into the industry. So while, I mean, it's been a DEI reverse, like people are not the best and brightest don't wanna go into energy
38:32 because they've been told it's bad. So they're going to other places So that's a reverse challenge. how are we gonna recruit the best and brightest? Opportunity, hey, young people, if you're
38:45 listening, great time. It's a great time to get into energy. I would agree. And there are so many
38:55 other dimensions and extensions of a career and energy as we think about the thing that we've been talking about. I'm sure there are a number of upstream professionals who have parlayed their careers
39:09 and to, hey, what about this power demand? And a lot of it's gonna be gas-fired. I wanna get more capability and expertise in that or like we're doing it collide, which is you've got to have the
39:23 subject matter expertise alongside the analytics and data science and architecture to really make an impact
39:36 like Enterprise AI in a very deep and technically sophisticated and complex domain like well and gas. And that's not going to end in my or your lifetime. We're just getting started. And probably
39:50 our kids are green kids. I think I read Omnivores dilemma. I think it was that book 15 years ago. But
39:59 basically,
40:01 I'm thinking about the agriculture. We're being told that entire generation believes that farming is immoral. And then wondering why food gets expensive. I read this cool book. I think it's
40:14 Omnivores dilemma. Maybe not. But I talked about this one farmer that realized that if you farm old school, you treat the land
40:28 and he calls him like a grass farmer like you take care of the grass, you bring the chickens in to. pick the worms, they poop and then you spread the poop around and you bring the pigs in and all,
40:40 whatever. But he created an ecosystem on one farm and he moved,
40:49 he didn't farm the same plot. He would let the land rest and he kept trees for oxygen. But the nutrients in the land and everything just become became better and better and better. I think the
41:00 farms in Virginia or whatever But he showed people a pathway of how to do sustainable farming correctly. And it's harder and you can't mass produce. But if everyone was doing that, it would change
41:17 life. Everyone could farm locally and create highly dense nutrient food. It works. I think how much healthier would we be? Look at it If you could just change systematically the process, I think
41:34 will change a lot. Now, that takes a lot of courage, and there's people out there showing demonstrating, but same with oil and gas. People have to demonstrate success, and we have that. We just
41:45 have to, you know, the challenges people, we just need to continue speaking up. Speaking of, I do want to talk about what's going on at AM, man. There's some great, I love watching this
41:58 shitshow, especially even, I mean, being at Longhorn, which is the greatest university in Texas, let's just be honest. Sorry Chuck, but I mean, we're, we have too many progressives and
42:11 Austin's weird and like, you know, when I think
42:16 of AM and I love AM, I love to beat them, but I like the Aggies. They're conservative, they're good people, but man, there's a shitshow brewing over in college station. What's happening? Give
42:26 us a load out. We'll see. Well, uh, State Representative, I believe, his name is Brian Harrison, got wind of a controversy in one of the colleges,
42:44 forget the specific name of the college under which education is housed. And in a children's literature discussion or course in this degree program, a professor was apparently veering off course
43:04 into gender ideology. And a student challenged this professor in class and it's on videotape. And then elevated her
43:18 opposition to this deviation from what was advertised in the course material to the president of the university And there was an investigation, apparently the. Chancellor got involved and ultimately
43:38 I believe the professor was fired and maybe the department had, and I haven't kept current over the last couple of days, but the state representative is not letting it go, you know, General Welsh
43:50 who's the, Mark Welsh who's the president of Texas AM is in a bit of a sticky wicket because there's some audio tape of conversations between he and the student that don't seem to sync up on the
44:05 timeline of how this went down. And so
44:13 Lieutenant Governor, I saw it got involved yesterday and tweeted about it. It's really up to you guys as the
44:22 Board of Regents and the leadership at the University to make a decision on the president's future. I think we can all kind of read between the lines here that they're out for blood as it relates to
44:37 the whole scandal here. And about time, don't you think? Yeah, look, and
44:46 I know that there has been an order to review the entirety of course descriptions and a curriculum across the university because it's
45:03 dishonest to deviate from what's in a
45:08 course description. When a student looks at the course catalog, this is what I'm going to take, this is my degree program, this is what I fundamentally expect. And if there's a significant
45:18 deviation from that based on whatever the political agenda is, in this case it was transgender ideology,
45:28 you know, that needs to be addressed and not allowed.
45:32 But cynical reality is that this is alive and well in the academic community.
45:44 So this is not going on in the AM's prestigious petroleum engineering department. You know, somehow I don't think so And I spent time with a group of students back in May in a capstone course
46:01 judging some projects. And in a lot of ways it felt very similar culturally and ideologically to when I was there many, many years ago.
46:13 So, you know,
46:16 look, I think we need to try and avoid the temptation to, ramp up the gotcha scoring in political points on both sides. And let's honor the spirit and memory of Charlie Kurt by thoughtfully and
46:34 dispassionately engaging in
46:38 objective debate without threats. Well said. Like I said at the outset, again, paraphrasing or borrowing when people stop talking bad things often happen. As Charlie said, we're not just
46:56 economic units or political pawns. We are souls created in the image of God with a merit, dignity and worth that no government can grant nor take away.
47:09 And I think that's a good one to close on.
47:13 Great seeing you, Mark. Great seeing you. Have your hearts. Chuck, we missed you, have a good weekend. Thanks for watching, give us a like. Appreciate you spending the time with us and we'll
47:23 talk to you next week.