Oil Rig Manager Reveals What Working in Canada's Oil Patch Is Really Like

Guest [00:00:00] I've done nothing differently. I haven't learned anything new in the past few months. I haven't adjusted to anything at all. You're getting the exact same work from me now as you did two and a half years ago. What are we talking about here?

Vance Crowe [00:00:12] I'm Jeremy Osh, a retirement community, CEO, living in Eureka, Illinois, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we have Steve from 222 minutes. Steve works out in the oil patch and is also a podcaster that does a Tuesday show with Sean Newman, who a longtime listeners of the podcast know is a close friend of mine and been a guest multiple times over. Steve has a really deep and interesting background into Canadian politics and news, and I get to hear him talk about that every week. But what I decided I would have him do is to come on the podcast and talk about his real expertise, which is about how do you keep oil rigs up and running? How does fracking actually work? What is going on in Canada? Why do you mine for oil out there as opposed to other places? So we have a deep conversation about what it's like to live on those O oil fields and kind of what that work is like. And then at the end we talk a little bit about his show, 222 minutes and, and a little bit about what's going on in Canadian politics. We're gonna get to that in just a moment, but before we do, mother's Day is right around the corner. And Legacy Interviews could be a really deep way to show your mother how much you care about her by presenting her with a gift, the opportunity to record family history and to know that it can be passed on to future generations so that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and many generations in the future will know just where they came from and hear those stories that make a difference in how you think about the world and where you fit in it.

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] So if you're interested in having me interview your mother as a gift for Mother's Day, go to Legacy Interviews dot com and on the film, make sure you mark out Mother's Day to make sure you tell me that you got, you heard it here on the podcast. Alright, without further ado, let's head to my interview with Steve. Steve, welcome to the podcast.

Guest [00:02:18] Thanks for having me Vance.

Vance Crowe [00:02:21] So to start off, what is the oil patch?

Guest [00:02:24] Well, I don't even know where the name patch came from to be honest, but it is the oil and gas industry. So all the way from the exploration where people go looking to find likely sources where, where they think there's going to be oil deposits, and then the drilling and then the completion of that. So the drilling rig puts the hole in the ground and cases it. So just like drilling a water well where you've got just a big tube, I guess, going down into the ground that water can get into. Same idea with an oil well, and then it gets completed. So you'll put another tube, they call it tubing in this case, which is just sections of pipe that connect down to a pump at the bottom. And then usually there's some rods that go inside that that work, the pump down hole, sometimes it's electronic and then it gets to surface. And then somehow, depending on the quality of the oil, there's, there's a few different methods, but they'll get it to some type of an upgrade or, or refinery. And then from there they will send it down a pipeline or on a train or however else to another facility that'll actually refine it into things like gasoline, diesel, they'll get propane out of it. All those different wonderful things. There's so many different lubricants and, and plastics and stuff like that.

Vance Crowe [00:03:52] So when you start thinking about drilling and oil and getting it all the way to the refinery, the very first question is, how hard is it to get out of the ground?

Guest [00:04:02] That depends greatly. So there's parts of the world where you pretty much just knock a stick into the ground and and stuff comes out. And actually, so the Athabasca oil sands, which is what you might hear known as like the Alberta oil sands, sometimes it's called the tar sands, although that's an incorrect name. Tar is actually something that doesn't exist in nature like the La Brea Tar Pit, for example. It's just a, a sexy name. Somebody gave it, but there's no actual tar there. Tar is a product of something called destructive distillation. And so you can't just, unless somebody put it there physically, it doesn't exist in nature. But the Athabasca oil sands, there's a long and storied First Nations history of them just scooping it up as it seeps out of the ground. Benjamin Franklin, when he came over to, you know what later became the United States of America, I think it's called, he was hanging around in New Jersey and this guy showed him a pond where you could literally just take a stick and poke the ground and bubbles would come up and you could light them on fire after they breached the surface of the pond. And then it gets all the way from that into things. Probably some of the more intensive stuff are things like SAG D, which is steam assisted gravity drainage. So the Athabasca oil sands, because it's so thick, the oil there, they actually, they drill two wells right over top of each other.

Guest [00:05:38] And in the top one they put in a whole bunch of steam and then it just heats up everything around it. And oil is like any other liquid where the warmer it gets the more, the less viscous it gets. And so as it becomes less viscous, it's easier to extract out. And it's, it's kind of funny though, like when you're working up there in the wintertime, if there's some just oil, I don't know, in a, in a drip tray or something like that, you can ball it up and throw it at somebody like a snowball, but it's oil.

Vance Crowe [00:06:12] Yeah. So maybe that's a good spot for us to start. You're talking about being up in Canada and doing all this oil drilling. What's your experience in, in the oil fields?

Guest [00:06:21] Well, I, I've worked alongside drilling rigs a fair bit, but I've never worked on them specifically. Most of my experience is on the completion side, which is you would say more service rigs. So that's when the well's already been drilled and then you go in and you work it over, you change out the pieces that are in it. 'cause everything wears out after time or even just when you're putting it on for the first time. Sometimes abandonments fall under that. So when the, when the when has kind of reached critical mass in terms of it's not getting much or any production out of it anymore, you know, they, they dried out the hole, right. And then, and then they've gotta close it off and basically get the entire well site back to nature so that a year or two later somebody walks through and they can't even tell that there used to be an oil well there. But the first thing you have to do is get everything out of it and close it all off down hole.

Vance Crowe [00:07:21] And so when you say you're working on that, are you the guy showing up with khakis in a hard hat, pointing in different directions and telling people what to do? I'm

Guest [00:07:28] The guy lifting, turning, so you kind of work your way up. So I'm a rig manager, so I'm the guy who does the paperwork and makes sure that everybody knows what they're doing and helps out fixes stuff that breaks because stuff just loves to break in the oil field, especially when it gets cold out. But I've spent a lot of time being the guy turning wrenches, running tongs, throwing joints in the derrick, running the brake handle, all of that stuff. I spent a bit of time in wireline too. So that's kind of just the, the catchall side of it.

Vance Crowe [00:08:03] You know, the oil work is, is gotta be hard work in particular, if you're doing it up in Canada, it's gotta be just cold as hell in the wintertime. What draws a person to going in and doing this kind of work?

Guest [00:08:14] Masochism, aside from that, it's a decent chance to make a good, honest living. The whole kind of dirty hands, clean money idea. Canada has the, the most ethical oil in the world. You look at other places in, you know, some war torn countries where people just, you know, work at gunpoint or you know, if there's any issues, okay, well that's fine, you can just leave and go into the desert or the jungle or whatever else. And there's a lot more environmental concerns that go into Canada. I would say that the only place in the world that I know of that has a more responsible way of looking at it all the way from extraction to abandonment. The only place that's more stringent I would say is Alaska, who is just absolutely insane. I was up there once and it was just a bit of a gong show to get me out there. Like it was very much like, you need to get out here immediately. And so flew into Seattle and then up from Seattle to Anchorage and then there was a private plane that took me down to Kenai. And then I got off that plane and then drove out to location. And by the time we got to location, I was like, I haven't taken a leak in unbelievably long. And so we get out and I go to just take a leak on the ground and some dude's like, what are you doing? I'm like, dude, I'm taking a piss. What does it look like I'm doing? He's like, don't, and I'm like, man, I have been holding this for so long, you don't even know.

Guest [00:09:46] He's like, I will tackle you. And I'm like, okay, you got five seconds. What? And he said, basically if you piss on the ground right there, it's a stack of paperwork. So there's porta-potties over there, go nuts, but do not under any circumstances take a leak on the ground.

Vance Crowe [00:10:07] I had no idea where you were going that. And that's fascinating. So when you think about all these regulations that are going on both for Canada and we can put aside Alaska, are they actually helping or is it a lot of it, you know, just the, the kind of regulatory bias that makes people feel better but doesn't actually do much? It's

Guest [00:10:28] A very mixed bag. So there's, there's some things that are there for good reasons. There's some things where it's a rule, but it would make sense to do it anyway. So why make it a rule? And there's some that are a little bit over the top, I would argue, you know, kind of frivolous. And then there's, there's also some that open the industry up to being misinterpreted in some ways sometimes as well. So it's, yeah, all over the place. And it's very specific to certain ones. Like Canada for example, has this incredibly onerous process that has since been scrapped, but they used to fall under section 52 of the NEB Act, any kilometer over 40 kilometers or that went across a provincial line, had to go through a billion dollar application process. And then at the end of it, it was given veto power by the prime minister. So if it didn't get approved, if it didn't meet all of the regulations. So this was a whole process to make sure that it could be done safely and responsibly and took literal truckloads of paperwork because they didn't accept electronic documents. So when all the filing finally got done in Calgary, it had to get put on semis pallets of paperwork, got put on semis and trucked over to Ottawa. And so you talk about like pallets, yes, pallets of paperwork get put on semi's and trucked to Ottawa offer this because they wouldn't, because it had to be the originals, it couldn't be electronic.

Guest [00:12:04] And you're like, okay, well we care about the environment, but not enough to throw common sense at anything. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:12:09] That kind of paperwork is the absurdity because nobody's gonna read it, right? It's just put somewhere, it was just like energy burned. It's like proof of work for you to be able to get through the regulatory body, but just a total waste of time,

Guest [00:12:23] I imagine. And

Vance Crowe [00:12:23] So,

Guest [00:12:24] Oh, I was just gonna say, imagine that most of it, if not all of it did get read and that we paid our public service employees a staggering sum to just go through it and just be like, is there anything worrisome here?

Vance Crowe [00:12:37] So tell me a little bit more about like, who are the type of people that go out and work on these oil rigs, whether they're drilling or they're out there, what, what are their lives like? How do they do with money once, you know, I presume they're making a good living.

Guest [00:12:52] Yes, they make a good living and they piss it all away. So generally speaking, so there's, I mean it's, it's all the way from the 18-year-old roughneck right outta high school who gets into it to, you know, sometimes there's, there's farmers who in the winter, if they're pure grain and they don't have livestock to, to tend in, in the winter, they'll, they'll sometimes just do remote jobs and things like that. And then sometimes you'll see guys, like teachers, for example, working in the summer, although that's kind of gone away a little bit, I'd say over the past maybe 20 years because they, they make a good enough living that they don't need to worry about working in the summer anyway. And then you'll get into more on the corporate side where downtown Calgary is the oil and gas hub of Canada and you've got all kinds of engineers, business people, all sorts of fancy suits and, and spreadsheets and all that fun stuff, right? And so it's, it's a mix. There's, there's opportunities for all kinds of people, but the biggest money to be made in, in oil and gas is when you're the actual guy doing the work. And so there's, it's, it's interesting right now Calgary is the unemployment capital of Canada, roughly. I I think it is. But just, just say it's roughly, and it's, it's funny because there's all kinds of job postings for people who, there's all kinds of job postings for some type of a manual job where you gotta get your hands dirty and, and lift things and, and move them around and whatnot.

Guest [00:14:35] And there's a lot of people who want to sit in an office that are having trouble finding work. And so yeah, there's the, the people who end up in the field side of things, typically they, they get in there when they're younger and they aren't specifically tied down to one location because there's a lot more opportunity for them if they can move around to say Grand Prairie for a little bit up to Fort McMurray, oh, there's a little bit going on in Medicine Hat and just kind of follow the work around. And so they, you know, don't have families and they've got the mobility to just, you know, live wherever they need to and can pack up and go at, at a moment's notice.

Vance Crowe [00:15:21] And if you're doing that work, you know, you wake up what time, what kind of like, gimme, gimme an idea for what is their day actually like, if you're working in the oil fields,

Guest [00:15:30] It varies a bit. So you'll have sometimes, like if you're up in a camp job where they, they fly you in, 'cause lots of this is fairly remote, but there's still communities that have grown up around these places. So if you're going up to one of the oil sands places around Fort McMurray, you'll fly into Fort McMurray and then get taken out to location where you'll stay at a camp and then it's just 12 hour shifts. And then typically wherever you're working is probably within ballpark an hour of, of that camp. And then so you'll be, you know, leaving at say like five 30 or something like that. And then on location for a safety meeting at six 30 and then, and then handing everything over officially at seven so that the work goes continuously and then, you know, at seven o'clock, maybe a quick handover somewhere, you know, right around there. And then you're, you're back at camp and having a later supper. And then if, if it's someplace where, for example, Lloydminster, where Sean Newman lives, there's a lot of stuff locally. So it might be anywhere from half a mile outside of town to maybe driving an hour and a half each way to work that day.

Vance Crowe [00:16:50] And you get done at, at the end of the day, are you exhausted? So you collapse and don't do anything? Are you going out drinking? What's it like?

Guest [00:16:57] It's changed a lot over the years, but back in the day the answer to both questions was yes. And there's, so there's a big difference between service rigs and drilling rigs, I would say. And so it, again, it depends on what it is that you're doing, right? So the way I've really tended to explain the difference between them over the years is that a guy who works on a drilling, on drilling rigs, everything's way too heavy to lift. And so it's all done mechanically on service rigs. Everything's too heavy to lift, but it's just light enough that if you're crazy you can do it. And so you just end up lifting a lot of things manually. And so if you work service rigs after a hard day, you'll go home and sleep like the dead. And if you work drilling rigs after a long hard day, you'll go to the gym for a couple hours.

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] Do they agree with that? Because

Guest [00:17:54] They, they, they tend to get offended when you point that out and you just say, well, tell me I'm wrong. Like,

Vance Crowe [00:18:00] Oh no, it's,

Guest [00:18:02] You know, I, y you know, yeah. I like man, I've, I've worked around 'em fair enough. I, or well, for long enough I, I know fairly well what it entails, right.

Vance Crowe [00:18:15] You know, I'm imagining that it's really similar to the shipping industry or like the fishing industry, right? Where it's a lot because of the work is so physically demanding that it's mostly men and you're going out for long hitches and the life ends up becoming difficult. Not just because the work is hard. Like if you just got done at the end of the day and went home and went to bed, you know, no big deal. But I remember you'd be done and you'd have the, the day was so difficult when you're working in the shipping world that you're like, ah, I wanna relax or I wanna do something that's gonna, you know, enliven my, my evening. And so you end up drinking, which then gets you into this horrible circle of like, now I'm hungover now I can't wait for the day to be done because I'm hungover and I want to have another drink so I don't feel so bad. And you just keep going around and around in that circle.

Guest [00:19:07] It was like that when I first started, it was, it's changed a lot. I mean, I got into oil and gas in 2004, older than I look, which doesn't make a lick of sense to me because I don't know why, but, but I haven't seemed to age despite my best efforts. But in 2004 it was basically like every second day 'cause you just end up drinking more or less all night. And then you'd be way too hung over to even think about it the next day. And then the day after that you're like, oh yeah, we could go for a beer. Yeah, do you wanna go for one beer? And then it ends up being all of them. And so it was just like on this two day rotation, more or less.

Vance Crowe [00:19:51] And I mean, I'm guessing like, you know, you just put a bunch of guys up there, there's not a lot of family around, so you don't have those kind of anchoring things like anymore. I don't, I don't drink much 'cause I'm, I just feel so terrible the next day. But I also have family and responsibilities. So those kinds of things. But if you're out in a remote place, the, the lack of family creates it. So you don't have the anchors that get you down on the, to keep you down and grounded.

Guest [00:20:15] Well there's that, and then there's kind of just the lack of doing anything else. The camps have come a long way in the past few years. It used to just be that there might be a Bowflex in a corner somewhere or you know, if you wanted to, you could go for a run outside, but watch out for Bears, right? And that was the extent of, you know, and then there'd be a TV in your room that got basic cable, like basic satellite cable and maybe like a rec room where you could all sit together and someone will usually have a PlayStation or something like that. But that's about it, right? And then now they've expanded to where there's like huge fitness facilities, basketball courts, you've got, there's, there's some that have Starbucks in them or Tim Horton's. And so it's actually not that Tim Hortons is like, oh, we can go to Tim Hortons. So our life is awesome now. But the point is, is that there's these little kind of things that feel a little bit more like being in civilization as opposed to being in the middle of God damn nowhere.

Vance Crowe [00:21:21] How long are people out on these hitches for?

Guest [00:21:24] It varies a little bit and it, it changes depending on who you're working. Like who the site manager, you call 'em consultants, sometimes company men in offshore terms, sometimes they get to set roughly their own schedules and so they'll kind of prefer to work one way or another. But quite often you'll see something like two weeks on, one week off, four, three weeks on, one week off. Sometimes it'll be 21 days on and four days off. And so yeah, it's, it's mixed. It's all kind of just what you're willing to do and what the various companies up there can twist your arm into agreeing to.

Vance Crowe [00:22:05] And when you're saying like on and off, are these like you're staying still on the compound or people go back home for those times?

Guest [00:22:11] No, people will go back home for those times.

Vance Crowe [00:22:13] And so what's the, like what's the pay like out there? I mean, it's certainly if you're gonna make people work for 14 days in a row or something, like that's, that's, you gotta pay 'em pretty well.

Guest [00:22:23] So rig work is hourly. I think roughnecks, it, it changes a little bit from company to company, but ballpark, you'll start off in the low thirties with paid overtime by the way. So after 40 hours and after eight hours on the day, you'll get paid overtime time and a half. And then up to a rig manager is somewhere 50 to low fifties. And then, yeah, like I said, it varies a little bit. And then there's competency bonuses that you can get once you've established your, your street credit and you're given position. And then it, it's a little bit higher I think on drilling rigs. I never really understood that because they do half the work, but for some reason they get paid more. And so, and then they tend to get a little bit better deals for, for subs. So you'll just, the company will give you a certain amount of dollars a day tax free just to cover your, your living expenses or whatever else, right?

Vance Crowe [00:23:20] Because like when people are going up there, they're, they're getting their housing taken care of, their meals taken care of.

Guest [00:23:26] So if it's a camp, then they give you a room to stay in a bunch of connected trailers and then there's just a big mess hall in the middle where they'll, they'll feed you all the food. Sometimes you're staying in a hotel and then quite often you're bunking up with another guy and then you're, you know, getting supper at Boston Pizza and getting your lunches in the morning at seven 11 'cause you're working out well. 'cause none of the grocery stores are open by the time you leave. And none of them are open when you get back. There's, there's a few places in a few towns where they've got 24 hour grocery stores. But that's more the exception,

Vance Crowe [00:24:08] Man. That is a hard way to live for if you're doing hard work and eating crap food. Like it just, it wears on you. How about family life? How do people do having to be away from their families like this?

Guest [00:24:19] That's probably one of the toughest things is that, you know, if, if you can move your family to a place like Bonneville or Cold Lake or, or Lloyd Minster or Medicine Hat or something like that, then that works out okay. 'cause usually you're home at the end of the night. But if you're gone long term on a regular basis, that's where it, it gets pretty difficult. Although I have worked with some guys who, you know, putting words in their mouths, but they're, you know, married to total battle es and the only thing keeping

Vance Crowe [00:24:51] Their,

Guest [00:24:51] The only thing keeping their marriage together is the fact that they're gone for two or three weeks at a time.

Vance Crowe [00:24:56] Yeah, I mean that reminds me of the shipping industry. Like sometimes marriages just work out better when, when you've got a couple where they're happy when they're together and they're happy when they're apart and, and they just figure out a way to make it work. And the fact that the, the husband's able to provide for the family in ways that he couldn't if he were back home. I mean, sometimes it just works out that way.

Guest [00:25:18] Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's kind of the big thing is that you can, 'cause the wages aren't incredibly high, like they're kind of high, but you keep in mind the fact that you're working outside all the time. You're so, you're, you're exposed to the elements. You're working remotely. Like you're not, not working remotely from home, but you're working in remote areas and then just the sheer amount of hours you put in, right? Like it's, it's not uncommon at all for, I would say it's pretty normal for guys to work three to 4,000 hours a year.

Vance Crowe [00:25:50] And so let's talk a little bit about like the, what people know about the oil industry, right? When people hear about fracking, right, they get the sense you're like, all right, you pump a bunch of water down and then out comes the oil up at the top and we didn't know how to do this before because we didn't know that the oil was stuck down there. And now we can, but it's really bad for the environment. I think that's most people's take on fracking. How would you respond to that?

Guest [00:26:18] Well, you're gonna have to give me a couple minutes, but so fracking or fracturing, the name comes from, so when you've got the reservoirs that the oil is in isn't just, well typically it isn't just a cavern that you just find this pocket of oil and, and then when you have your casing, which is the outside of the, well, you perforate holes in it at a specified depth and then that allows the oil to come out of the formation into the well bore and then you can pull it out of the well, right? It isn't just this, this magic little pocket, like you just kind of hit a balloon and everything just kind of flies up from it. What you're typically going into is some type of, you know, varying porosity, but different formations. Sometimes it's sand, sometimes it's it's shale, which is kind of loose aggregate that's tightly packed together, different things like that. So there's, there's lots of different formations, but typically just the tighter the formation is, which is the more packed everything is, the harder it is for oil to get through it. I mean, you think about it like if you, if you're gonna make a cup of coffee with 50 filters in it, in in the coffee machine, you'd be waiting a long time to get the coffee out of it, right? And so the idea of fracturing is, is that if you pressurize the formation, you'll get these kind of just micro cracks that just spread outwards and then it gives the oil better channels to go into the wellbore.

Guest [00:27:51] And so you can get more extraction with a lesser footprint on surface because rather than drilling a well here, here, here, here, here, here, here, you can just have one and then, and then fracture it out in a bunch of different places at different depths so that you've got maximal opportunity to get as much oil out from as bigger range as possible. Because these formations, like if you, if you look at maps of formations in North America, they are covering vast areas, right? And so it just, it allows you to do it with, with a much smaller footprint, its surface and it allows you to do it with less intensive power usage for, for powering the things that run down whole, right? And so then that reduces your, your carbon footprint. And so when people talk about dirty oil, what they're talking about is the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions they use to get one juul of energy out of the ground. And so, you know, the less power you have to put into it, the more clean and less dirty, which is, yeah, not a great nomenclature, but, but it's kind of the accepted one. And so what they'll do is, and like I said, like it's, it's not always just water that you, you could fracture with tons of different things. You use sand a lot. And so what, when the well gets first drilled, it's just a hole in the ground, right?

Guest [00:29:23] And then they'll, but, but they're continuously flowing fluid through it and then they'll run casing. So they'll just connect the sections of pipe all the way down until it gets to the right depth they want. And then they circulate a bunch of cement through to the backside. So they, they run cement down the casing and then follow it with probably water, and then it comes all the way up the backside and just cements it in place so that that pipe doesn't just fall down in the hole they dug. And then the other thing it does is it isolates everything so that like your, your water formations, like your, your groundwater, the, the water that we use to drink, you're looking in the first say 50 meters down vertically, right? And then, so you've got surface casing that goes maybe call it 80 meters, probably depends a little bit on the company. And then, and then so that gets cemented and then you've got the rest of the casing that's, that's also cemented in. And so once that's set you'll run A-C-B-L-A casing bond log or cement bond log, pardon me. And so what it does is it sends audio signals out from a tool that you, you run down on a, a tough electrical cord, it's called wire line. So you run it down and it sends out electronic pings and then if there's a gap between the casing and the cement, the sound will bounce back and the machine will hear it. But if it goes through, it means that there's, 'cause there'll be a vacuum there and sound can't travel through a vacuum, so it'll actually bounce back.

Guest [00:31:00] But if there's a good connection between the cement and the casing, then it'll continue through until it bounces back when it hits some type of a void. And so then you can tell you, you get this like long printout that looks like a vertical version of like a heartbeat monitor almost kind of, it's just a whole bunch of squiggles. And then you can look at it and tell, okay, well you know what, the cement's good here, the cement isn't as good there. And then if they need to, they'll actually go in and fix it spot by spot. And then what that does is it ensures that none of the fluid from the formation can make its way up to contaminate the groundwater. And so yes, you are running, you, you run right through the groundwater, but it's isolated and then at a much lower depth is where you do the fracturing. And I'm not a huge expert on it, I suppose on some conceptual level, on an infinite timeline, there's chances that, and I don't know specifically what they do, for example, in the states, right, you know, what, what depths they do and don't do it at, but there's such a huge, like you're talking this little bit up here is where the groundwater is, and then you've got this huge gap down here where there's nothing. And then you've got this little bit here where the oil is and there's so much, there's so much room that it's just not reasonable to think that, that it would make its way up. That, that anything you fractured could make its way up that far to the groundwater formation and then give the oil reservoir an opportunity to channel its way up into and contaminate, right?

Vance Crowe [00:32:41] So I'm picturing from what you're describing is like a straw and that straw goes all the way down and it's extra strong at the top 80 meters to be able to make sure, hey, there's nothing that can go wrong here with our drinking water. And then underneath that straw is where it's trying to, all the way down further is where it's gonna collect that oil that, that has been collected because you've been fracturing out, you've been putting either sand or water or some combination of both into the little cracks and it all flows down to that bottom pooling area. Is that correct?

Guest [00:33:15] Yeah, that's, that's a pretty good way to put it. So

Vance Crowe [00:33:18] How do you inject that water and that sand into, into those cracks and crevices?

Guest [00:33:24] Okay, so there's two basic ways. So you'll have either just straight casing that doesn't have any perforations in it at all, so there's just no holes in it. So it's just a contained unit. And then you'll look at the pity of the formation around it and some fancy geologist will look at a different type of squiggles printout and say, okay, well you know what, there's oil here, here and here. And so then you'll run in with perforation. So it's just this long tube with a bunch of jets that fire out, they'll, they'll call it a gun quite often, but it'll just shoot out a certain number of jets depending on what they want. Sometimes there'll be deep penetration ones or shallow penetration ones. Someone will open it up more and less, like there's this entire gamut of different charges depending on what specifically they want to what, what specifically they think will best facilitate the, the extraction of the oil there, right? And so then they'll just poke a whole bunch of holes all at once in the well and then that opens it up to the formation and then you'll get some combination of oil, water, sand and gas coming from it. And then the other way is that they'll run a pres slotted liner. So just like it's, you could tell if you look at it correctly in the right, in the light if you see it on the racks, but it'll just have a whole bunch of just very, very like maybe an inch long or a couple inches, whatever it is.

Guest [00:34:57] And then like just thousands of an inch slots cut in in this casing all the way along. And then that's where the oil comes in. We touched on the how dirty and clean relative oil is and we missed a really cool thing that you guys might find interesting anyway. Pretty much the highest, the dirtiest oil more or less in the world. If you had to guess, where would you say it is? Just, just going

Vance Crowe [00:35:31] Off what you know, I have no idea of PI Philadelphia. Okay. Like Pennsylvania, I mean,

Guest [00:35:37] Alright. Yeah, no, so where I'm going with this is that quite often Alberta gets labeled as being really dirty oil. And you know, on some level it makes sense because you've gotta have things like camps in the middle of nowhere. You've gotta have all this transportation costs, you've gotta build all this infrastructure that covers vast areas and it's, excuse me, cold as hell and cap in Canada. But then also you've got things like HR departments and and whatnot that, you know, third world countries don't have. But even with all that taken into account, California, if you go to like San Ardo for example, theirs is like 25% higher than like their, their costs per per juul for like their, their carbon dioxide equip equivalent per megajoule is like 20, 25% higher than even the highest stuff in Canada. And it's funny because you see all these, you know, celebrities, guys like Leonardo DiCaprio who, who never cared about climate change or emissions until he borrowed a yacht like the fifth biggest yacht in the world from some Saudi prince for the summer and went to Kahan with it in France, and then all of a sudden he comes back off this boat and starts talking about Alberta oil sands. I'm like, well that's kind of weird. I I don't think the two are related. I mean, what could possibly be suspicious about that? But, but carry on, you know, guys like Neil Young or or Jane Fonda who go right past the oil sands in California on their way to the airport to fly up here and shit, talk everything.

Guest [00:37:12] And it's funny because California has done a lot to try and hide the oil. If you just look up just hidden oil wells, California, you'll see ones like next to basketball courts where they, they just do them up in, in fancy shrouds or, or where there's actual like bus, like it looks like an office or you know, like, you know, like a an eight story office building. But no, it's actually just, if you were to just go look inside, it's an oil well in there. Or they've got, there's an island off the coast that has this fake frontage in front of it and on the back of it it's all just a bunch of oil wells. And so, you know, there's this stuff just, I mean first off it's disingenuous to, to pick one over the other based purely on ideology. But secondly, this stuff lives in and all around you. And, and if you don't have any issues with it, it's probably because it's not an issue and it is safe and it is ethical and, and it's not a hazard to anybody. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:38:19] Well there's something funny about the difficulty there is to get something like oil out of the ground, you know, I've talked about this before in the podcast, a thing called the resource curse. And it turns out that the easier your resources are to get out, extract like diamonds or if your gold is easy to get access to, then the higher likelihood you have of having tyrannical governments and the higher likelihood you have of corruption. Because in those scenarios you can just use force to get people to go out and mine these things for you. It's not very complicated, but the more complex it is to get something extracted, the more it requires cooperation and the more something like capitalism really thrives in. And so I'm imagining that the harder it is to get oil out of the ground in a place like Alberta or Saskatchewan has some benefits because, you know, you is, it's gonna be hard to get people to go out at gunpoint and keep, you know, complicated oil rigs going because you need their intellectual capital. You need them to be inventing things. And so when you think about like, the idea of how hard it is, is how dirty it is, it's like, well let's look at the larger human cost of this thing because if it's too easy then you have places like, you know, the Saudi government is, is largely empowered because they're just drilling down and finding, you know, a big pocket of oil. It's, it's

Guest [00:39:45] A slightly bigger stick, but it's the same thing Benjamin Franklin did where he just poke it in the ground and oil comes out and then they just let it pile up in a, in a berm in the desert and scoop out what they want and go away with it. Right? I think that's probably absolutely correct and Canada is an interesting mix. So there's been some huge gushers. There's this place called Waterton, which is right on the border. I don't know how much you've spent touring around the mountains, but it's, it's an absolute hidden gem. If anybody lives there locally, they're gonna be mad at me for even mentioning it because while on the one hand they, they thrive on tourism, on the other hand it's still just like this absolute hidden gem. It's actually just down the road from this place called Police Lake, which is cool because there's a hiking path that you can take across the border. And so it's just this barbed wire fence as far as you can see in both directions. That's, that's our border, that's what's protecting us from, from those crazy calm Americans. And, and they've got this little gap, kind of this v gapp so that, you know, cattle can't get through it, but humans can just walk through and then they got a sign saying, you need to stop here and nobody listens. 'cause there's this cool lake a hundred yards down the way. And you can actually, it's right where Chief Mountain is. So I don't know if you've know what Chief Mountain is ever seen pictures of it? I I think it's a typo. I think it's supposed to be Chef Mountain.

Vance Crowe [00:41:13] That's Chief Mountain. Oh wow. That's outta nowhere. All right. Yeah. So for people that are just listening tos goes over to his back wall behind him and pulls down a painting, or not a painting a picture and it's like of a, of a mountain, just like coming straight out of the ground outta nowhere.

Guest [00:41:32] Yeah. Just, just an isolated mountain on its own. And it looks like it just got just flattened right at the top. It it looks like a nineties rap star's haircut. Like kid play Texas.

Vance Crowe [00:41:44] And then why were you bringing up Chef Mountain?

Guest [00:41:46] Oh, so it's, it's just right by Waterton, which is this cool place that's this, this great little kind of mountain town. And if you just go on another hike up there, you can get to this, the remains of a, a town called Oil City where someone went and they found a bunch of oil and they used to huck it out of the mountains on the backs of donkeys or mules or something like that. And, and so they, you know, tried to establish a community, but they basically just hit one pocket and then that was it. And then there's a place called LeDuc outside of Edmonton where they hit a giant well, and then that, that's kind of what brought the big fervor in. And then you've got places, there was another big one at, at a town called Red Earth, which would be more accurately called Mud Earth because if you spit on the ground you need chains to get out for whatever reason. Something about the soil there is just insane. But they've got, I think it's a little bit north of town or maybe a little bit east, I can't remember exactly, but they've just got, you know, on this site and talks about just the absolutely astounding amount of oil that they got out of this one particular well, and so there's, there's some of them that you need a lot of ingenuity and a lot of that, that intelligence to, to get out. But there's been enough ones that just everything kind of falls in line to keep keep people interested too.

Vance Crowe [00:43:11] So speaking of ingenuity, I remember when I was up visiting you 'cause we were doing the Sean Newman presents, I got invited to, to come up and, and give a little talk. I was there with Steve Barber and, and I got to meet you, you told me something over dinner that I thought was a a a amazing, which was you didn't go to college, but you got your MBA. Tell me about that.

Guest [00:43:33] Okay, well it doesn't work with every university or college universities being the Canadian equivalent of what you guys call colleges. But if you have, and it, it varies depending on which institution, but generally speaking it's that if you've got enough management or work experience or combination thereof and you do what's called a GMAT test, which is your general management,

Vance Crowe [00:44:00] We have the gmat. Yeah. Alright.

Guest [00:44:02] So anyway, I did that and I did well enough on the GMAT test that I could have gone to Harvard if I wanted to spend a few hundred thousand dollars. And then I got, I got kind of just accepted into this executive MBA, which is essentially the same thing as, as a regular master's of business, but it's tailored a little bit more people who already know their way around, so they don't have to explain to you what an office looks like to some 20, 23-year-old kid. It's for mature working people who, who know the way around this stuff. So there's a lot of entrepreneurs and, and you know, people who are want to be executives, things like that. And so yeah. Anyway, I, I challenged for acceptance and I had the highest GMAT score in my class, which was cool. I had nowhere near the highest marks in my class by the time it was all done. But there was some people who, who, I mean there was some people that it was their full-time job, right? Like they, they took a leave of absence from work to, to attend and, and there was people who had tutors and some people who were very, very studious and yeah. And so anyway, they did, they did very well. I still did. Yeah. Well enough. I mean, I passed. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:45:19] What's the benefit of getting an MBA in your line of work?

Guest [00:45:23] Well, at the moment it doesn't really fall much into my day-to-day duties. The, the issue I was running into when I, I started looking at it was that I was hitting a bit of a glass ceiling, not because of my gender, but because there's, there's a lot of people in oil and gas who are engineers and engineers are very much of the mindset that if you're not an engineer, you're probably an idiot. And so if we need to hire somebody or promote somebody or whatever else, they need to be an engineer. And so even, you know, when I was working wireline, I, I'd been promoted up to a field supervisor and that was my two managers saying, this is the guy we want for this job. And then their boss saying, but he's not an engineer. And then this went back and forth until basically the guy who was an engineer that, that, that was their boss said, okay, well you know what guys, if you want him to get this promotion, that's fine, but it's on you when it goes sideways, right? And like the two guys that he had handpicked were the only people that had an engineer background in, in a comparable role to me who would've been an absolute disaster. And so anyway, it, it ended up working out really well and you know, much to the surprise of everybody except for my managers who, who had wanted me to, to move up to that role.

Guest [00:46:56] And, and that's where things would've stayed if I'd have not wanted to, you know, pursue getting more formal accolades, I guess you could say. And so that was, it was very much like as soon as I got into more of that space, I found it really interesting and engaging. And then, and then that's as far as I would've been able to go had I not been interested enough in this furthering education. And so, yeah, and then it had a lot of other cool aspects to it, you know, things like, you know, just understanding economies and, and things like that. Like when you take economics or even just thinking your way through entrepreneurial stuff. I quit with that company and decided to hang my own shingle and the timing was laughably bad because I did it about two months before the government reactions to close everything they held down in the whole world. And so, you know, it was, it was a great idea and just the worst timing in a century. But, you know, my, my capstone project for the MBA was, was this entrepreneurial effort. And so, you know, there's, there's things like that. And then even just, you know, how to work with guys, how to manage guys, how to frame, if you want something, you need something for your rig or for your crew and, and you're getting any pushback or you need to explain to somebody why something works some way and not another way.

Guest [00:48:34] You know, you can, you can talk to the people you know, further up the food chain and put it in ways they can understand or, or at least ways that sound like they would make sense to them if they understood it. So, and

Vance Crowe [00:48:45] Is that your specialty? You think that you're, you're good at being able to both manage up and down?

Guest [00:48:51] I wouldn't say that's my specialty at all. I think that I understand, I do, because I've spent enough time on both sides of it that I understand people on both sides a lot more than the people on the other sides do. I'm kind of this day walker and, and so, you know, when someone in the field's like, oh, these idiots in in corporate or these idiots in Calgary or Toronto or whatever, you're like, okay, well I hear what you're saying, but, but here's, here's why they think this is a good idea. And yes, they're idiots, but they're, they're restricted to this, this framework. Or you know, when, when the, the guys in downtown Calgary think, oh, those idiots out in the field, they just don't get this. You're like, well, have you tried to explain it to them?

Vance Crowe [00:49:40] And so if that's not your specialty, what is your specialty out there in the oil fields?

Guest [00:49:44] Well, just, just a personal level. I think that's probably where I fit a pretty good niche is that I, I understand both sides of it, but as far as a specialty, I'd say that I've just spent enough time seeing a lot of it to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. You know, on the, on the well servicing side, you just see so many different things that you're like, okay, I can do this, I can do that. But you don't, sometimes certain crews will, will end up being really focused in one particular area, but generally speaking, there's just a whole lot of following the work. And that means it's very varied and interesting and so you end up being a big

Vance Crowe [00:50:25] Petrol. Yeah. You, you remind me of the, like in the shipping world, there's two ways to become a captain. You can either go to C school and then you like, you know, do two years, go into classes and then you start the apprentice program or you start out as a second mate and all you do is look at the charts and map courses and make sure you're on course. And then you go to first mate. First mate is the guy that's overseeing the crew and he's the guy that does all the kind of day-to-day operations. And then you've got the captain and that's a much faster path to captain as you get your, what they call sea time.

Guest [00:50:58] And

Vance Crowe [00:50:58] Then there's the other way to become captain, which is called coming up the Hoss pipe, which is the pipe, is the pipe where the anchor comes up.

Guest [00:51:07] I know all about

Vance Crowe [00:51:08] Goes down,

Guest [00:51:09] I know all about ships vans. Oh, I actually just read Treasure Island.

Vance Crowe [00:51:14] Ah, that's right. Hey, I didn't know that. Yeah, so I, we'll talk about that. That's great. So you sound more like the guy that comes up the hos pipe. He starts off as either a deckhand or an engineer and you're just down there. An engineer in the shipping terms is like, you're down there fixing engines, you're actually like scrubbing out pipes, things like this. And it always, in my experience, every single time there is a captain that came up the hos pipe that is the guy that you wanna work with because he's the guy that didn't get lorded in on a throne. Mm. He's the one that like knows exactly what you're going through, knows the types of challenges you has, know how to tie all the knots that you know how to tie and has earned his way up there. Now sometimes you could be an educated person and there's nothing wrong with a mate that that came in the, the fast track way, but, but always the person that came up the hos pipe like knows so much more than than the regular officers.

Guest [00:52:09] That's very true. But it is a longer, it's, it's a much longer rockier climb.

Vance Crowe [00:52:15] Yeah. And most people get thrown off it. I think there are a lot of people that imagine that we're gonna get that c time and you know, the, whether it's alcohol or being away from the family or just the hard, hard life of it, they, they don't make it so there's much, much fewer people that make it to captain. Plus somebody has to see something in you, right? They have to just keep pulling you up. And there's a lot of those glass ceilings that you were talking about, you know, if you came in as a deckhand, it's hard to move your way up there.

Guest [00:52:42] Well, and then it, it's funny because it's, it's based so much on perception too, right? I mean, yeah, there's definitely like, you've gotta have that guy above you who thinks, oh, you know what, this is, this guy's awesome. Right? And then, you know, the interesting thing I've had, I've had a couple really good managers.

Vance Crowe [00:53:01] I've

Guest [00:53:01] Had a lot of middle of the road and I've had a couple that I would argue are, are really poor managers. And your perception, like your, your brand within the company varies greatly depending on who, who is actually looking at your day-to-day work and, and telling everybody about it. Like I, I had this one guy that he wasn't a great fit for, for much of anything. Then he ended up kind of getting exiled to some backwater base in Louisiana and then ended up getting fired a little while later. But, but to hear him say it, you know, I was just, you know, the, the worst guy you could ever possibly imagine. I mean, I was, I was the guy he always set up with, with the weakest people because I could carry the whole team. But, but yeah, to, to hear him say it, I was just a, just a hang ashore. And so anyway, he ended up leaving, another guy came in and took over that I basically didn't know at all. And, and then I've got like HR wanting to talk to me and just be like, well, you know what, we're really impressed with the way you've turned things around and, and you're, you're changing ethic and, and attitude and, and your outputs have just really improved. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Well, well just in the past few months you've really turned a corner. I haven't, what, what corner? I, I haven't, I haven't been doing anything differently. I've, I've been doing literally the exact same day-to-day job for the past like three years.

Guest [00:54:35] I, I've done nothing differently. I haven't learned anything new in the past few months. I haven't adjusted anything at all. This is, this is the same. You're getting the exact same work from me now as you did two and a half years ago. What are we talking about here? And then, and then everybody's, you know, we're just kind of sitting around like, oh, I don't know, what are you talking about? Well, what are you talk and yeah. So it's, it's kind of fun and interesting how, I mean, not at the time, but, but it's, it's interesting to look back and just realize that that very much how you're perceived in the company depends on, you know, a very

Vance Crowe [00:55:09] Small group of people. Oh man, I have a story so similar to that. Okay. Tell me. So I have a good, I have a good buddy named court who was a ship's engineer. He was like a second, and he was trying to move his way up to being chief engineer. And, and he had this guy that was overseeing him that when I would talk to my buddy court, he'd be like, oh man, I just love the guy's name was Mark. I love Mark. He's so supportive of me. He's always like, he's talking about helping me get moved up in the company. And I was like, okay, that's great. And one time court leaves the ship, right? He's, he's gone on leave And I'm still there as a deckhand and I had to come into the chief's office to be able to give him reports on things like, you know, you're doing these checks of all the engines and stuff. And so I come in, I'm supposed to be there, right? I'm, I'm not, like, Eves dropping on him and he's on the phone and I can hear him talking to the, the, the people back home and the home office. And he's like, yeah, you know, court is really working hard. He's, he's working every day. I, I have to stay on top of him to make sure he gets his, his work done. And he, and he doesn't mess around too much, but I really think in like three or four years he might be ready for a promotion. And I, I think if we just really keep going hard with him, and this is like the opposite of what he's telling court. And it was like one of those things where you saw that this, that court was a big threat to Mark. Ah. And so he

Guest [00:56:29] Was like

Vance Crowe [00:56:29] Using his power to like keep him pushed down. And you see this and you imagine how many people's lives have been completely corrupted by, by trusting a guy that's over, over top of them that's that's shooting them in the foot.

Guest [00:56:44] Yeah. Well it's something actually you talked about in, in the NBA course a little bit, you need a heat shield if you're, if you're doing well, if you're an up and comer. You know, in 2015 things went pretty darn sideways in the oil field. And the company I was with just clean house, they went to just an absolute skeleton crew. And, and then I ended up working as a project manager in, in, in an AV company. And then, you know, even they were having a tough time and so it was just like, you know, I was project manager and I was warehouse manager and I was helping out over here and I was helping out over there. And then there was a division in Toronto that, that was having trouble keeping people. And so they were like, okay, well can you help out with this a little bit? And it was just a lot of the data entry and the admin stuff. And so I, I'm going and I'm looking at it and I'm like, this is, you know, it, it had always baffled me before like how long anything took when you had to get it from that department. And then I'm looking and I'm helping out for like in, in a few weeks, I had set up a system that had cut down the input time by about three quarters and gone from, you know, they wanted to be about 90% accurate with what they put in. And I was like, no, no, no, if you do this, it'll be a hundred percent every time. And then the, the manager didn't want to adopt it. And then I, I got a lot of pushback on everything from that manager afterwards, you know, because, you

Vance Crowe [00:58:14] Know,

Guest [00:58:15] That's how they'd been running it for, for however long. And then some random guy shows up and within a few weeks has completely, you know, upended the whole apple cart, right? And so yeah, that, that ended up being a poor decision career wise. Not that it ended poorly or anything like that, but, but it ended up just being to the point where I was looking for my first exit outta that company and that was kind of the first domino that, that that fell was me vastly improving somebody else's department.

Vance Crowe [00:58:52] Yeah, there's something, there's some lesson in there about how you present things and how you let people that are above you to, to take the wins that, that I think my ego definitely got in my way when I, and when I was working in corporate America where there were a lot of times when I knew the, the, a good way to do something and I knew how to be successful, but because I needed my name on it,

Guest [00:59:14] Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:59:14] I just completely obliterated the the cooperation that is needed in, in a large organization.

Guest [00:59:22] See, I'm the exact opposite. I'm just like, look, if this works, just go with it. I don't really care. You know, and there's, I'm, I'm sure the, the optimal way to do it is somewhere in between you and I because I'm the exact opposite where I'm, yeah. I'm not just, just let me do my work. Let me do a good job and I'll help out where I can and I'll improve things where I can and I don't really care if I get the accolades and career-wise it, it would be better if I did a little bit more grandstanding for myself.

Vance Crowe [00:59:54] Yeah. So an interesting thing about you is not only are you working in the oil fields, but the way that I came to know you is because you do a podcast with my man Sean Newman. Yeah, Sean and I have become really good friends and every Tuesday you guys come up with the Tuesday mashup where you and him kind of go through the headlines and news of what's going on in Canada. And this has grown to be like a deep part of my weekly routine. I know it's Tuesday 'cause when I work out in the morning, I'm listening to you guys do your podcast together. But what is a guy that's working out in the oil patch? How do you get involved in podcasting? What took you down this path?

Guest [01:00:33] That's it. It was not a straight line by any means. It was definitely, it was definitely climbing up the whatchamacallit pipe. But I just, when I was looking at doing my MBA, I'd been a little bit ranty and critical of, of some government things in Canada on Facebook. And then I thought, well, you know what? I should just purge this whole thing and just walk away from it and, 'cause I don't want them to look at it or some future perspective employer to look at it and be like, well, you know what? I'm not sure they'd be a good culture fit. I'd rather them have decide on, on the merits of what I can do. And so, so I just completely closed down my Facebook and then I had this dormant Twitter account that I started looking at a little bit more. You know, after a while you're like, oh, well maybe I should see what's going on on social media. And then I'd followed this hour's 22 minutes, which is like this Canadian government funded comedy sketch program kind of thing. Think maybe roughly like the Daily Show with a 10th of the talent. And so, but, but they actually used to be fairly funny when I was a kid, but I'm not sure if that's just 'cause I was 10 years old, right? But, but I had these fond memories of them and so I'd followed their Twitter account and I'm like, this sucks. These guys suck. This is horrible.

Guest [01:02:03] This is. And so I was just saying like, I could do a better job than this. And then one day I was like, you know what, I will do a better job than this. And so I started this Twitter account called 222 minutes and then I hadn't done much with it, but then about nine days later, the government stepped in and got Twitter to shut down a parody account of one of the Canadian ministers, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, who was this just vacuous imbecile of a woman that there was this parody account that just said all these outlandish things and everybody was believing them because she was just kind of that stupid. And so the government got Twitter to shut down the parody account even though it was following Twitter's terms of agreement and everything like that. And then there's, there's a bit of a rebellious streak in a lot of Canadians. And so within like the next couple weeks after that, there was probably like a hundred different parody accounts of like every possible public figure and politician and anybody in Canada, if, if you were noteworthy at all, had a parody account. And so all of a sudden I had, I had already just started this thing and it just kind of rode, rode this ground swell and then I had some untapped creative energy with it. It had been, it had been fun, you know, lots of people were looking at it. And I reached out to a few people and asked about like ghost writing, ghost writing some of their YouTube stuff because nobody had seen my face. Nobody knew a damn thing about me. It was the perfect shield from, from cancel culture and, and you know, just met with non-answers.

Guest [01:03:37] And then somebody said, well, why don't you just start a, a podcast? I was like, well obviously I don't know why you didn't think of that sooner. And so that's what I did. And then within a couple episodes of that, Sean was like, dude, you need to come on my show and talk about your podcast. I'm like, no, I don't. This is a stupid idea. Who are you? And 'cause like we'd followed each other on Twitter, but hadn't really interacted or anything like that. I knew, you know, because his name was Sean Newman podcast that he had a podcast, but I didn't know anything about him or anything about the podcast. I'm like, I've done a handful of episodes, what can we possibly talk about? Like, but he was, he was bugging me about it. So I said, you know what, just ask me again in like six months when I've been doing this for a little bit longer and I can't just, 'cause what can I possibly talk about? Like, oh yeah, I did a couple episodes, I I learned about audio editing. Cool, thanks for having me on your show. Right? And so anyway, three months later he asked me to come on and then we ended up talking about all kinds of current events stuff and he got a lot of feedback from his listeners that, oh, you need to have this guy on again. And then I became a regular guest, I would say kind of the same thing like you or Quick Dick mcd Dick. And then I'm not sure if someone had told him that this would be a good idea or if he thought about it on his own, but he was like, Hey, do you wanna do like a weekly show? And then the Tuesday mashup was born, we decided to do five episodes and put them out on Rumble and we didn't care if anybody watched them or not.

Guest [01:05:12] We just, the, the litmus test was entirely are we enjoying this and do we want to keep doing it?

Vance Crowe [01:05:18] And, and it wasn't on YouTube because Sean had already at that point been banned from YouTube. That's correct. So you were going on with a guy that had already been knocked out of the, the mainstream.

Guest [01:05:29] Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like I said, like we were, I, if you went on Rumble you could probably still track down those videos, but it was just, we didn't even release them on either one of our podcasts. It was just, let's just put this off to the side and if anybody wants to track it down, they can find it. But we just wanted to see if, if we were enjoying it and if we were getting fulfillment from it. And so we, we said we were gonna do five episodes and after the fourth one we were both like, yeah, we, we, we need to keep doing this every week. And so then we took the fifth week off to figure out what exactly we wanted it to look like. We wanted to tune it a little bit. I'm sure I haven't gone back and looked at them, but I imagine if you looked at what the first couple episodes were compared to where we are now, there's been so much iterative improvements and just, just progressive refinement that it's, it's come a long way even though we just did episode 52 the other day. So we took a week off for Christmas, then we took that one week off to figure out what exactly we wanted to look like. So it's been a year and two weeks that we've been doing it and it's, it's met with a lot of positive feedback.

Vance Crowe [01:06:38] And how do you describe what you guys talk about and you do the headline writing, so talk a little bit about that.

Guest [01:06:44] Well, I just try and make it funny, so bear with me a sec here. I'll just, you know, it's funny, the document's still called Weekly News because we hadn't even come up with a name for it At, at any point, but, or at, at the early point. And then I never bothered renaming it mashup or anything like that. We came up with that maybe about five, six weeks out. Sean's brother actually had the idea of calling it the mashup. We're like, okay, yeah, that works, we'll go with it. But you know, you just kinda look at what's being said or what the generic theme about, you know, you know, whatever is going on in current events, try and tie them together if it, if it works a little bit. But you know, like we talked about Bud Light a little bit over the past few weeks, and so we had the headline this week of This Bud's Not for You because, you know, this bud's for you has been their thing, you know, I'm sure if we talked about it next week we could probably say Queen of Beers or something, right? But, but you just, you just kind of take what's what's already there and, and put a little fun twist on it. And sometimes I'll give him, what do you call it? Those, those things that are hard to say, you know, like she sells seashells by the seashore. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:07:57] Tongue twisters. Yeah, tongue

Guest [01:07:58] Twisters. Thank you. I'll, I'll try and, you know, give him a tongue twister. Like we had Ottawa strives to shake shoddy stigma because known fairly well in Canada as being a bunch of uptight, you know, stick up the ass boring fuddy duddies. And so they're really going outta their way to try and establish Ottawa as a place that people would actually want to go to and people would actually want to try and have fun at. And they're going about it by having a bunch of committees and appointed commissioners and doing a bunch of, of surveys and adding a bunch of bureaucracy to it, which is just the perfect classic. It's exactly what you would think Ottawa would come up with as a solution to how can we be more fun? Well, what if we just issued some permits?

Vance Crowe [01:08:48] I love it. The, the show. It's so funny because I don't, there's only one local show I listen to, it's called the Mark Rearden Show here in St. Louis. But outside of that, I listen to you guys every week and there's something really powerful about having a weekend week out, you and Sean talking together. And I, I always say like, this medium

Guest [01:09:09] That

Vance Crowe [01:09:09] We're doing right now is really powerful because unlike television where you can watch it sitting next to somebody and you and that other person have this perception that you're watching a play together, you're, you're somehow separate from what you're watching on that television when you're listening to something, it is really powerful because it's like touch from a distance, you know, you're speaking into somebody's ear if they're listening to head buds right now, or they're driving down the road and you're hearing this conversation. And the way that you participate in that conversation is by like, I hear you talk, I hear Sean talk, I have my own dialogue in my head, and so I'm participating in that three-way dialogue as though you two were talking directly with me. And you build a strong relationship that happens in the same way with just this interview, the podcast, right? Like people get that sensation, but what you guys have created there is really powerful, so powerful in fact that you're talking about news that has virtually nothing at all to do with me, but I tune in because I like that comradery and the jokes and I like how you guys are arguing over the format and you know, should we number the, the episodes or hey, we, we came up with this new audio clip and let's talk about that. Or hey, one of our sponsors got harangued in in social media this week. Like what can we do to, to help our sponsor out? It's just a really cool format where you guys are doing something that no one else is doing.

Guest [01:10:36] Well, I I think that it's, it's a good take on like, it's lots of people that cover the news, but there's nobody that really makes it fun and interesting. And, and that's where I, I kind of got sidelined here, but the cool thing about Sean and I is that, you know, we went from being just total strangers to, you know, having a few kind of podcasts sit downs together. And then we just, we clicked like he's from a small town in Saskatchewan. I'm from a small town in Saskatchewan and, and you know, just similar upbringings, similar focus on sports. He went a lot further than I did, but, but same kind of idea. And then you get to a point where, you know, we just, we developed that tight rapport really quickly and it allowed us to have some very natural, interesting, fun conversations where, you know, like he'll throw in little things where he tries to fuck with me into the show. Like, he asked me when we had his brother on to talk about that fundraiser they were doing in his community. So this clunker dunker, yeah, clunky dunker. They've got this, they've got this van on a slew and you, everybody takes bets on when it's gonna fall through the ice and the closest one wins. And so Sean texts me and he is like, Hey, so you know, we got, we got dust on tonight, you know, I think it'd be really good if we had our, our times picked out so that we can talk about it on, on the show. And I said, okay, perfect. And so then I, I bought a time and then we, we ended up talking about it and he is like, yeah, so two, what time did you pick? And so I, I told him, I was like, April 11th, like five 30 I think or something like that.

Guest [01:12:07] I was only off by, you know, maybe about a week or something. So that was pretty good considering how far back we had to get it to, to have it for, for that. But anyway, he's like, okay, that's perfect. I'm gonna buy the two times around it. I was like, you son of a bitch. But then, yeah, like I'll, I'll purposely write a headline that's almost impossible to pronounce so that he screws it up when he's delivering it, you know, or, or little things like that. We'll throw in like the Oilers are in the playoffs right now, NHL so the, the Canadian equivalent of your blues, right? And you know, I assume everybody knows who I know

Vance Crowe [01:12:49] What the hockey teams are. I just don't, you know, my audience doesn't care about this pointless game you call hockey, but go on.

Guest [01:12:55] Alright, well anyway, so he's a huge Oilers fan and you know, because they were pretty good back in the eighties, but so we're high tops. So what? And so anyway, you know, he's, and then I've been a Calgary fan fan my whole life. And so there's this Alberta rivalry, it's kind of fallen by the wayside over the past few years because for Calgary to beat Edmonton, it's kind of like fighting it, it's like getting in a fistfight with Stephen Hawking, right? And so, you know, now the Oilers are in the playoffs and the flames are not. And so he's just been gloating about it. And then we've got this, this political leader that neither of us particularly care for and she was wearing Oilers stuff, you know, and posting it on Twitter. And so anyway, when he goes on and he starts, 'cause he's got control of the audio and stuff, and so he starts playing clips of people chanting about the Oilers and you know, he's gloating and whatever else, but he hasn't realized that I can just share my screen at any time and I've been keeping this in my back pocket, you know, so that I could fuck with him later on. And so while he's just doing all this

Vance Crowe [01:14:04] Rah rah rah, let's go Oilers,

Guest [01:14:06] I just share my screen and I got this picture of Rachel Knotley wearing an Oilers jersey all please this punch, right? And so yeah, we just, you know, we have this this fun little thing where like I'll, I'll give him the headline and then some related articles and then he doesn't know what I want to talk about specifically within the articles and I don't know what he's gotten as, as interesting. And so it makes for a really fun dynamic. But then also, you know, it's, it's fun because, you know, you can just find little, little areas to, to screw around with people, right? When, when it's, it's all live. There's, there's a lot of background that goes into it, but all our analysis and our thoughts and everything like that, it just, it just comes out as we're recording. And so we end up being able to have way more fun with it than some stuffy dude in a suit. You,

Vance Crowe [01:14:58] You guys have an election episode coming up here pretty soon, don't

Guest [01:15:00] You? Yes, actually that's, so May 29th is probably when the election is going to be. And so, but whatever day it is, we're gonna do a livestream coverage of the election and livestream coverages of elections in Canada are the same as they are in the states. They suck, they're boring, they're dry. You've got a bunch of people standing in front of a map that slowly fills in and they desperately try to fill as much dead airtime with saying ridiculously obvious things as possible. And so our thought was, well, what if we did one that doesn't suck? What if we just did the exact same thing that live election coverage, but it didn't suck. And so that's, that's what we're working on right now. And that'll be the night of the election actually. Are you free that night?

Vance Crowe [01:15:50] I, we'll we'll have to see. I'd be honored to be on there. I'm already picturing what I would be able to add to your election night considering I will know nothing about the I

Guest [01:16:00] Think that's great. I think, I think it's wonderful and yeah, if, if we could have you who's just completely, you know, has, has no horse in the race and then, I don't know, maybe we could find somebody in Australia or Antarctica or something like that and then, and then have them be on it too. I think that'd be kind of fun.

Vance Crowe [01:16:20] So the other day I was, I don't know if you know about the news commentator named Tucker Carlson. Yeah, but he's a big, so he was just like, go from Fox News. And so I was like, all right, let's go see what he was saying in the, in the weeks leading up to it that he got, got separated from, from Fox. And I found, I found an episode he did with the Full Send podcast. I don't know if you've heard of this, but these are like young guys that are getting some of the biggest interviews in the world. They've had Donald Trump on. Okay. They've had, you know, the Dana White from the UFC, they've had Mike Tyson, you know, they, they get everybody. Yep. And they did an episode with Tucker Carlson, and the first eight minutes is the most blistering attack on Canadian men that I have ever heard in my life. Nice. And I wish I would've played this for you beforehand so we could talk about it, but I would be very interested in having my Canadian listeners, which every time I, every time you guys mention me on your podcast, a whole bunch of Canadians, you know, write me emails and talk me. I love it. There's a guy named Jay that I, I get great emails from, but others too. Anyway, I am very interested in hearing what you Canadian men think of this blistering attack. He basically is saying that, you know, the, the Canadian men are filled with estrogen. They have no, they have no masculinity left.

Vance Crowe [01:17:51] They, they so deeply want to be men again, but they are like, basically your country's been overrun by feminism and then he actually does have a caveat that this is not necessarily true out west in the Alberta area. But

Guest [01:18:06] Yeah, I think that there's, there's quite a lot to that. It's, it's interesting. I lived in Calgary for a long time and now I live in a small town that doesn't even have a four way stop, and I love it. And I didn't realize how much I was not liking Calgary until I, about a month after I moved away and I was like, oh, this is so much better. It's, it's like if you had like a sore tooth pulled or something like that. And so yeah, there's, there's quite a bit. So in Canada, the election gets decided. They call the election because of the time zones. They, they close at say nine o'clock, but it, it staggers across the whole country. And the election gets called before the Manitoba polls close, which is northeast of the Dakotas, I can't remember specific, I think Minnesota's right above, or Manitoba's right above Minnesota. But think, think roughly there where, you know, the presidential election is decided before anything west of that has even been counted. And, and more specifically, it's, it's this very southern tip that backwards queue part of Ontario and then going a little bit into Quebec that decides the election for everybody across Canada. And then they, they elect somebody like Justin Trudeau based on him being the, the, the just perfect model of, of whatever it is that, that they feel would best represent them. And then you've got nobody else in the country feeling that way, but because that's where the vast majority of the population is, that's where the most votes are, that's where the most seats come from, and that's who decides our elections.

Guest [01:19:46] And then you've got a bunch of people in Western Canada feeling really left out. Although I will say that, you know, you were, you were talking about the urban world divide and, and how, you know, testosterone just decreases with men in, in large urban centers, and you're

Vance Crowe [01:20:00] Really

Guest [01:20:01] Starting

Vance Crowe [01:20:01] To see that Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Yeah, you're

Guest [01:20:03] Really starting to see more of that in, in Edmonton and Calgary and, and some of the other cities in, in western Canada where they're just, it's, it's not a different species, but it almost feels, it's definitely a completely different culture. But you're, you're just thinking like, you know, what's this gonna look like in a hundred years? Like people can't even relate to each other. They've got completely different thoughts, goals, aspirations, perspectives. There's, there's almost no thread of commonality between them. There's very much, there's one group that just says, look, I, I just want to do what works for me, and if I'm not getting in anybody's way and I'm not hurting anybody, I feel like that should be enough. And then there's another group that feel like I, I just wanna live a certain way. And I think everybody else needs to live that way too. And, and it's, it's reaching an interesting state where it's becoming less and less compatible every day.

Vance Crowe [01:21:03] You know, I, when you and I talked about doing this podcast, I had said, Hey man, I, I know how much you know about politics and about what's going on in the news of Canada, but I want this first one to be about your real expertise, which is being out in the oil patch. Like

Guest [01:21:19] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:21:19] Sorry, how that all works. And I'm, I'm just grateful that we had this chance to talk because I'm gonna invite you to come back on and let's do an overview of what's going on in Canadian politics and have a great conversation. I'm sorry to have to cut this off quick. I actually have an something coming up right after this. So if people wanted to learn more about you, watch what you're doing, where would they go?

Guest [01:21:42] Well, they could find me on Twitter at 2, 2 2 minutes. They can go to, they can find my 222 cents on any podcast platform. Sean and I just started a YouTube channel for the mashup. I think it's probably called something like the Tuesday Mashup, I can't remember off the top of my head. And then also, so the, the mashup that I do with Sean, it's on his podcast every week, the Sean Newman podcast.

Vance Crowe [01:22:09] And everybody should listen to that on the Fountain app, which is where I get it. All

Guest [01:22:13] Right. Yes

Vance Crowe [01:22:14] Man, this has been great Steve. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks

Guest [01:22:17] For having me Vance.