What The Funk?

0:00 And we're back with what I believe is our second ever Boulder gal on the podcast. Second. Marshall. Oh, of course, there's some debate on whether that counts as Boulder or not. It's not. Is gun

0:15 barrel Boulder? Maybe not. Laura Palmer joins us today. So so fun story. Laura actually hit my radar when I was at a company called PetroDE, very briefly, 2017, 2018, and Laura was the person

0:32 who came in who knew all of the different systems, like what is drilling info have? What does RS Energy have? What does well database look like? And then what is this kind of IHS plus PetroDE

0:43 solution? What does it offer? And was just, I mean, Tim, you have some of these, just the raving fan, like the reference, the person who brought the company into everywhere she went and just

0:52 becomes like your favorite ally in the process. It's good to have that referenceable.

0:60 referenceable person to take you in, it's great. Yeah,

1:07 like she would come in and like educate the team. Like, yeah, see, this is good, but some other applications might do is this. You may want to consider doing that. So super knowledgeable in the

1:16 technology side, but also I believe by training a geologist or an engineer,

1:32 what is your background by training, Lauren? And then tell us about yourself. How dare you conflate those two? I am a like, I'm a die-hard geologist. I'm not just a geologist, I'm actually my

1:38 whole family are geologists also, so. All right, let me just put that to the test. Yeah. How many rocks have you licked to identify what they were? Well, I mean, do you eat salt every day?

1:51 Well, okay.

1:54 Is it a silt stone? Let me run in my room. That technical show. We go. I've liked a fair number of rocks in my day. Let's be honest. Yeah. No, I am a geologist. I'm from Boulder, Colorado,

2:06 which these guys have already referenced. I grew up, you know, at the foot of the flat irons, hiking and fishing and hunting. And we were a third generation Boulder family. So my family's been

2:17 there for a really long time. My uncle is an oil and gas geologist And when I went to college, I was pre-med, actually. I started as pre-med. And

2:29 a year in or something, my uncle said, you should just try a geology class. I think you'd really like it. They're pretty fun. You get to go hiking. So I took geology, and I got to go hiking.

2:40 And I actually got a B in rocks for jocks, which is just horrifically embarrassing. I never tell anybody that.

2:49 because it was at 8 am. and it was in this room and they would turn all the lights off and give the PowerPoint presence. I just couldn't stay awake. You know, as college I was like, Oh my gosh,

2:56 what are we doing in here? So I went to see Boulder for my undergraduate degree. There were four or five years I did have to have a victory lap and then I started at WPX right out of undergrad. My

3:10 brother ended up being a geologist. I actually just had lunch with him He is a post doctorate degree from the School of Mines, PhD from School of Mines. Her PhD in geology from School of Mines.

3:22 Her brother, my really good friends, is also a geologist. We were UT masters together. I mean, we're talking everybody. My cousin, his wife, it's

3:39 a whole thing. And literally everybody, I know. I'm trying really hard to diversify, but that's really hard Like, geologists are just a different, we're just a different breed of people. Like,

3:44 we think very differently. We think very creatively, generally. Some of us are more on the engineering side, those engineering geologists we never really talk to. We only talk to the fun ones.

3:52 So, what did you do in the field camp? You know, what's interesting about CU Boulder is you don't actually have to do field camp to graduate. Yeah, so I actually instead had field courses which

4:03 were whole semester long field camps, which was amazing because instead of going out for six weeks at a time, you would do three day trips every, I don't know, couple weeks or something like that.

4:15 So, slightly different experience I do feel like, I also don't tell very many people that because that's just embarrassing. Geology field camp is like, that's the whole thing. That's like,

4:25 everybody has some field camp stories and I'm like, well, I went to Moab and I did all this other stuff but I didn't like have that six weeks in the wilderness kind of an experience. So, I guess

4:36 I'm just sort of a half geologist then.

4:40 This is a really good segue into the Bitcoin conversation So I mean, connecting geologists. with Bitcoin. To me, it seems a little bit of a stretch, but you obviously have sort of a business

4:53 mindset. This past Friday, I was in Golden because Colin and the Davises from Digital Wildcatters came to town. I think Colin presented to like a senior level course of engineers at school of mines.

5:08 And then a few of us met afterwards for a happy hour. And what struck me is very interesting is every one of them is super interested in how natural gas can play into Bitcoin mining, which is

5:21 different, right? I mean, 10 years ago, people were coming out and it's just your traditional path as a reservoir engineer and work your way up the ranks. And you know, Tim's familiar with that.

5:29 He's a reservoir engineer himself.

5:32 Yeah, watch out. But I thought it was fascinating the way that people are thinking about how they're going to apply those degrees and just the curiosity around Bitcoin cryptocurrency and how this

5:44 all plays together. So, like, I'm super curious about it, Tim. You probably are, too. There's some buzz going on around this. And I'm curious. There's a lot of buzz. Yeah, what's Energy

5:55 Funders doing? And I want to offer some of my thoughts and insights, but just give us the damn well. Sure, yeah. So actually, what's interesting is that I was just asked to join the Friends and

6:05 Alumni Network at UT, where I got my master's degree in geology. And they have asked me to help educate the students on - basically, alternative roles that a geologist can have in the industry And

6:16 of course, it's because I've just been blabbering about Bitcoin for months on my social media. Like, I did trip over the Bitcoin into this situation. I had been running a company - I love how you

6:29 got that in. You're welcome. Thank you for the Bitcoin. I've learned a lot about

6:34 marketing recently.

6:36 So I ran a company called Century Natural Resources, which was a private equity backed exploration company that we were exploring for the Turner in the Powder River Basin. And we had a flaring issue.

6:49 We needed to mitigate our flair. A buddy of mine who has subsequently left and started his own Bitcoin mining company. And I had this conversation about, well, why don't we build a mine? And we

6:59 tried to kind of figure out how to do it ourselves. And, you know, it was just gonna be operationally more challenging than we really had the bandwidth to do. We were gonna do a theory of mining,

7:08 actually. I have a buddy who's really big in a theory of mining. So we're talking to people about it. And then we eventually landed on using from Crusoe, who has been doing a lot of flair

7:16 mitigation work and rockers. Yeah, I think we had one of the first units, our sister company that was also backed by the same private equity group had this unit and they were not using it. So they

7:28 kind of lent it to us. We took it up to the PRB. I think we were one of the first people up there, if not the first to be mining Bitcoin on our well site. However, the revenue model for it was

7:38 not favorable for us. We wanted to do a revenue share. And at that time, Cruz I, really had a walk on that, that whole area So it wasn't - Awesome, it was cool what they were doing, but I

7:49 really recognized the value of Bitcoin and had been listening to my former business partner, Justin, who started J Energy. We've been talking about it a ton, and so I kind of like locked in on the

7:60 Bitcoin thing, and it became a whole, you know, a side focus for me. I just sort of paid attention to it.

8:08 Knew it was really important. Knew I wanted to do the revenue sharing thing, but didn't quite understand how to connect my oil and gas experience with that, unless I had access to gas, because the

8:20 best way to make superior economics is to verticalize the entire thing. And no verticalize is not a word, but you need to own the fuel in order to make it as like accessible as possible. So let me

8:33 just go back. I wanna hear the whole, let's talk to the layman thing. Sure. When we go back over what is Bitcoin mining as it relates to the oil and gas will physically what's happening. And

8:48 why is it on the hype curve right now? Why are some people talking about it right now? Yeah, yeah, let's go backwards. I call it a digital pipeline. You know, like I said, the whole marketing

8:60 thing, at Energy Funders, we are actively, we have a fund that we have open where any accredited investor can invest in our natural gas powered off-grid Bitcoin mines. The thing that's interesting

9:11 about it is that right now, you know, we're focused mostly on stranded gas You can focus on flare gas and have an ESG component. You can focus on stranded gas, which is just a value component, or

9:23 you can add them to oil wells where you need to do things. It's very interesting, but the point is, right now, if you are mining Bitcoin using, you know, the economics, I'll have to check out,

9:33 but you can make about four to 10 times more on your natural gas than you could from putting direct into pipeline. Depends on your cost to service model and all that, you know, takeaway capacity,

9:42 et cetera, et cetera. But for example, on one of our wells, if we were to hook it to pipeline, we would be getting Henry Hub pricing. But instead, if you run the numbers and do the calculations,

9:52 and of course, there's a lot of assumptions on what Bitcoin price is going to do, but see exact same as predicting what oil price is gonna do. So if you run that, you can go through it and see

10:02 that the value is closer to 10x, what you'd be getting from selling your gas at Hub. So, what's happening in that field? We have gas being produced, and instead of putting in a pipeline, letting

10:14 someone else burn it down the line, I guess you're using it to generate electricity to run computers to do mining. Solve the algorithm that finds you Bitcoin, exactly. And so, I mean, apparently

10:27 there's a higher margin in, rather than sticking it in the pipeline and sending it, now in some cases, higher margin in putting it in the line and sending it, sending it away, then you're using

10:37 it, higher margin in keeping it and using it to mine Bitcoin Yeah, so our length. let's call it the time, the dollar value for net gas, where we would turn the Bitcoin mine off and turn the gas

10:49 pipeline on. It's about15 an MCF. So up until15 an MCF will continue to mine, at least as long as prices hold in on the Bitcoin side. Once we hit 15 an MCF, we would consider, you know, we

11:02 would rerun those models and consider like flipping the switch over to another, you know, whichever one we're not using. It's really, really interesting. There's a couple people, you know, in

11:13 oil and gas, this is becoming more of a thing. I've been attending these Houston Bitcoin meetups for several months now, and it's been really interesting watching them. I missed the first one.

11:23 There were like 25 people. I went to the second one. There were like 100 people. Most recent one, there were like 200 people. This next one's going to be 500, you know, it's like exponentially

11:32 growing. And the interest level is fascinating. You know, I know that there's a lot of majors who are actually starting to play in the space as well You know, it's. It's turning into a whole

11:43 thing. What's problematic about that is that it's caused a lot of, you know, the supply chain was already totally theft, but now you have a supply chain issue and a demand issue and everybody

11:52 wants these computers and all this stuff. So you're having to figure out ways of navigating this whole world, which is very complicated and very international, which is why most oil and gas people

12:01 are pretty comfortable with it. We're only used to huge infrastructure projects. We're used to having to work with international, you know, compatriots, things like that So it's a really good fit

12:11 for oil and gas. And effectively, Bitcoin is a. Yeah, I kind of think of it as like a way to trade energy, right? It's just a store of energy. It's just like if you made a, let's say, a piece

12:25 of currency that was backed by the US dollar for, or sorry, the gold standard, for example. And then you, you know, delink those things. You still have to ascribe value to something. Right now,

12:35 what we're ascribing value to is energy, which I really like And that's a perfect fit for the oil and gas industry as well. There's a lot of really beneficial things about what's happening in oil

12:46 and gas in Bitcoin. And I'm personally extremely excited to be a part of it. I buy into the Bitcoin thing. I'm a hobbler. So.

12:56 One of the things I was, when I first heard about the Bitcoin mining was thinking about, okay, you've got stranded gas, maybe up in the Bakken or somewhere like that, that's it's either gonna be

13:07 flared or re-injected or basically has no value because there's no way to kind of take it away. Correct. And so, okay, well, if we're gonna flare it anyway, which is burning it on site

13:18 effectively, why don't we just make electricity and use it to mine Bitcoin? That's the way it was kind of introduced to me, but I guess what I'm hearing from you is, okay, there is a, when do we

13:28 want to mine and when do we want to sell the gas? Yeah, there's a guy who I've talked to quite a bit, Max Gagliardi, he works over at ANCOVA, and he and I had a conversation a number of months

13:38 ago, maybe like six months ago now at this point. where we talked about the value of turning the pipeline on and off. And so I think that he's walked down that path quite a bit more than I have.

13:48 I've been really singularly focused on this energy funders goal, which is basically democratizing primarily oil and gas investing. But now, secondarily, since I've come in investing in Bitcoin

14:00 mines. Because the cost to mine a Bitcoin at our well sites is about10,

14:09 000 to12, 000 per Bitcoin That's literally a sixth of what we hit at our all-time mine. So if you can directly invest in these mines, which almost no one can, you can make a significant amount of

14:19 money. And so the whole point of Bitcoin is to be for the people, right? Like eventually, the whole point of it is to decrease inflationary risk and all those sorts of things. But also for

14:30 anybody to be able to participate in, the problem is that's not a reality until there's another group called Compass Mining. that's offering mining hosting so you can buy a miner and they'll plug it

14:40 into one of their sites. But those miners are, you know, I guess spot price yesterday was probably close to15, 000 for the highest end mines. So at Energy Funders, my whole pitch has been, look,

14:52 we own the fuel source. We can do this very, very cheaply. I can offer it to a creds for a5, 000 minimum buy-in. And so anybody realistically can be a part of a Bitcoin mine and has that

15:03 opportunity to provide value in long-term,

15:08 ostensibly, it's going to continue to rise and rise and rise. You get that value for yourself and your family. I mean, I was already enthusiastic about the energy funders kind of plan. But when I

15:18 came in and said, we need to do this also, it's just been a total game changer. I'm trying to start a regulatory A fund next year, which is no, you don't have to be an accredited investor to

15:28 invest with us, which means we could literally democratize Bitcoin mine ownership. That would be amazing. Imagine that like. I don't know, I think it's a really important thing, what we're doing.

15:39 I think it was important with the oil and gas part, but now that we've added this additional store of value, I just, I think it's huge for people. Yeah, this is just stuff. So I wanna, you

15:50 mentioned Ethereum very briefly, and I guess just to go back to my own cryptocurrency, blockchain, coin experience. I started getting FOMO, I think, in 2016 or 2017, and was hoping it wasn't

16:04 too late, which it looked like it was for a little bit, right? It kind of sat for a few years, even to the point where I forgot my Coinbase login and had to go through, like, a very painful

16:13 process, like resubmitting my license, instead it was a headache. If you have it, keep logging into it. That's my suggestion. So anyways, I got back in in, like, November and just, like,

16:23 bought a few more things, and it's, like, totally skyrocketed since. But early on, it was, like, I had some Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum. I didn't know the difference between any of them,

16:32 other than, sort of, like, the market cap I just wanted some exposure spread out, but you said you have a friend who's mining for Ethereum, ostensibly using the same practices that you are to

16:44 mine for Bitcoin. What's the difference? How do you make that decision? Is it less expensive to mine Ethereum because it's a lower cost coin? Like, can you just give me some sense into like why

16:54 Bitcoin versus anything else? Yeah, so for me, on a personal level, it's because I believe in the proof of work model, but on a business level, it's because Bitcoin is being adopted at a much

17:08 faster pace. And so for marketing purposes, people see the word Bitcoin and they're driven toward it, right? And I also want to provide my investors the highest value. The easiest thing to get

17:18 your hand on, I mean, they're not that easy to get your hands on right now, but the basics that mine Bitcoin. I thought, okay, here are my options. We do have one major investor who is very,

17:28 very ethereum excited, right? Right now, we're really focused on the Bitcoin thing, just getting off the ground, getting hash-rayed on before the end of the year. I keep telling people all I

17:38 want for Christmas is hash-rayed. And I'm pretty sure my family's gonna murder me.

17:44 They're like, what the, what are you talking about? So, but it was really a marketing thing for energy funders. And, you know, Bitcoin and the oil patch makes so much sense, because again, it

17:56 is this store of energy. It's a store of value in the form of energy coin You could basically call it. That's my big excitement about Bitcoin for the business, at least. And I think - OK, I'm

18:07 trying to get them

18:12 again. Hash rate? Oh, what the fuck is that? Yeah, hash rate. Hash rate is the speed at which, effectively, the speed at which your computer can solve the algorithm.

18:23 Look, we need what is - cryptocurrency for dummies, right? I've tried to explain this. I sound like my dad when he tried to explain, my dad's like, he's a math guy. And when I was in middle

18:37 school and high school, he tried to explain, you know, algebra or whatever to me. And he would be like, you don't know what an integral is. And I'd be like, God, how do you get so deep into

18:47 something that you then can't explain it. So

18:52 every time I

18:58 talk about blockchain, I have to go back and reread. Okay, remind me blockchain. So

19:04 for me, I just don't use it day to day to really understand it. I mean, I functionally understand. Okay, I've got it when I want to trade it and someone's want to pay for this. That part I get

19:14 right blockchain part. I lose. It's tricky. It's tricky. So the way I call my CTO because you guys have listed, you know, explain these things in your pre questionnaire. And I call my CTO,

19:28 Puge Prakash, who his business partner used to work for the people who developed Ethereum. And so he was an original dev on that project. So he's a good person to kind of chat with. If you guys

19:36 want to talk to him, you're more than welcome. He has a great analogy though, which is, you know, blockchain is just a digital ledger. It's just you keeping track of who owns what and it's

19:46 shared by the entire world. And you're rewarded for keeping that ledger on your computer and solving that algorithm with Bitcoin

19:55 That's it. And then there's obviously the secondary component of Bitcoin, which is what is it going to do in the long run? You know, is this something that's going to end up being some sort of

20:03 currency that we use? Is it just a value store? What, you know, what does it look like long term? Which is why then, you know, kind of the secondary trading of it? The blockchain

20:14 cryptocurrency ledger makes makes a lot of sense to me. And then the coins that are involved going back and forth and basically creating a match Where I think it could be a value but both to just

20:25 sort of the average individual as well as longer term

20:30 is it is still really annoying with banks. I have a consultant who does work for me in Calgary and there's no real easy way to pay them, right? Like I could see blockchain being the best way to do

20:40 it 'cause instead it gets sent to their bank and then I get him in his fee and he gets it with a fee and we both have to wait for the thing to, it's really annoying. Like I wish I could have just

20:49 thrown him some cryptocurrency or something to

20:53 take this because I get the idea too that just like the dollar, like the fluctuation's always there, the dollar isn't just worth the same every single second of the day, it's actually always

21:02 changing. So I think people buy into that from the ledger and I think how it applies to oil and gas and some capacity to him, if you think about all of the transactions that happen, right in the

21:13 field, that little invoicing process, I could see that happening through a blockchain, like leveraging coins or currency of some kind. So actually, another energy funders plug here, we partnered

21:26 with a group called T0.

21:28 T0 is a wholly owned subsidiary of overstockcom and they are in the, they tokenize your securities. So one of their examples was the St. Regis in Austin. They had tokenized ownership, the cap

21:42 stack of the St. Regis and, sorry, in Aspen, yeah, they tokenized it and then provided a secondary opportunity, a trading platform for owners to trade in and out of it by tokenizing building a

21:54 blockchain of who owned what. And so it's immediate. You can trade in and out. For us, it's hugely beneficial because as long as there's a market, my investors can jump in and out as they wish.

22:05 They can have liquidity immediately, whereas traditional funds like this, investment funds, you know, REITs and things like that, you typically have your cash held on to for, you know, four

22:14 plus years So our fund life is shorter anyway, because I want to take advantage of the life cycle, you know, oil and gas bull runs, but. We also have this huge opportunity, which is to leverage

22:26 RT zero to create the secondary trading opportunity for our investors. And, you know, there is the potential, especially with the crypto side of things, Bitcoin side of things, where, you know,

22:37 all these public companies are trading at like a 20 to one multiple who are involved in Bitcoin or crypto. So we're very, very optimistic about the future using that. It'll be available to be able

22:46 to trade in and out in 90 days after we close our fund. So that's huge I mean, technically, you could tokenize every well in the United States. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this

22:57 shit. Maybe too much. And you could literally go out and tokenize ownership. I mean, land men could be gone soon. We don't need them anyway. But you know what I mean. Yeah, I know. Don't tell

23:11 any of them, I said that. That's a good land man that I've come out here. But no, you're absolutely right. Because if you think about the fundamentals of an oil well, it is just a ledger, right?

23:20 You've got working interest partners on both sides. You've got lease operating statements where it whittles down, AFEs, where you know how you're impacted with that ownership. If that could be

23:29 streamlined and done digitally, I mean, Tim and I were trying to solve this a dozen years ago with AFE workflow, like your process is the sneaker net. Now we put it on the internet. Okay, now we

23:38 digitize that token outside and someone, you know, that visibility I think would be huge, especially in an industry like this, where your assets are always remote. Absolutely, I totally agree.

23:51 It's a fascinating topic. And there's a lot of people out trying to chase it. And of course, change management is a big deal.

23:59 To get Aunt Sally to sign off on the point 001 working interest is always kind of the challenge off in the distance. It'd be interesting to see how you can move the industry. And what we learned in

24:12 our experience and Jeremy and I are working together about. of course, AFEs, which again, I see the benefit of being able to do it through blockchain methodology.

24:21 You have to have someone on both sides agree. And that was always the trouble was you could get the vision built here, but the person who's receiving on the other end also has to participate. So

24:34 it's kind of like, you know, natural gas cars or, you know, plug in, uh, electrics. You know, I'm, I'm not buying a natural gas, a CNG car until I know I can get from here to Boulder. If

24:45 I'm driving, I'm from Richmond, Texas. I can drive and be able to fill up along the way. I'm, I'm just not going to get a CNG car. But if there's not enough CNG cars, there's not enough filling

24:55 stations along the way. And, you know, and same thing with like trying to get these industry moves, like moving a blockchain for AFE management or invoice, be kind of, it's, it's, it's an

25:05 interesting problem to have. But maybe, you know, maybe we're all going to have

25:11 Yeah. The comment I have on that is two-fold. The first one is an observation about Bitcoin people versus oil and gas people. The second one is a comment about how oil and gas is a bimodal

25:23 distribution of ages. And so the more older people, more experienced people, we should say, retire and leave the industry as I see your white beard.

25:35 The more young people, less experienced people like myself who are really enthusiastic and understand these things, and for example, those kids you were talking to as cool of minds, everything is

25:46 going to shift a lot faster because of that rate of that bimodal distribution changing to a unimobile distribution. I think that we're going to see an acceleration of technology that is unprecedented.

25:52 Oil and gas has always been really good about adopting new technologies as long as they're not, shall we say ESG related.

26:04 Uh,

26:07 that is, it's fine. I was, I was just about to transition to that because to me, and we, we've had a lash of, of ESG related guests lately. And you really do like to bring up the energy

26:19 transition or ESG. To me, your biggest pitch beyond if you're into cryptocurrency is getting closer to net zero emissions, right? You're basically taking flared gas that was going to go into the

26:34 ways to get energy and making better use of it. To me, this is actually one of the most glaring examples. So do you think that that like a battery? Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. It's really

26:52 interesting to me because it is a very ESG pitch. Despite the fact that it is very much. just taking your oil and gas and doing something with it. But it's such a good example. And of course, the

27:02 majors want to get into it, especially if Bitcoin's 65K, which I think the last time I checked, it was. This morning. So talk about that. Like from, you're talking to various different

27:12 investors, I'm guessing some of those investors are on the coast. Does the ESG piece create a similar amount of interest to Bitcoin or is it just not as sexy? You know what's interesting is that

27:22 there has been a lot of

27:26 press about Bitcoin actually being really bad for ESG, right? That's true. Using energy for reasons, it's not, I mean, I won't get on my high horse about ERCOT and about how mining on grid in

27:41 Texas is probably not awesome but also it helps stabilize the grid because as long as you can turn it, anyway, complicated, that's a total sidebar but ESG has been, it has been helpful for me

27:53 being an oil and gas to be able to talk about the ESG component of Bitcoin. I, you know, personally, I always say, wouldn't you rather have a big ol' hippie from Boulder drilling your wells and

28:04 understanding that and actually making an effort to fix it than somebody who doesn't care about the environment. And it's like, I'm just out here dumping, you know, oil on the ground, which

28:14 doesn't happen anymore. But, you know, there's a component of like, I've been thinking about ESG and the oil patch for, I don't know, my entire career and probably before that. And the Bitcoin

28:24 thing does help It helps a lot. What I am a little bit more concerned about is the lack of

28:32 gender representation in Bitcoin. It's worse than it is in oil and gas, which is saying something because, yeah, it's bad. So, but it's also hard. I mean, it's like, I have friends who,

28:45 Boulder Girls, who I talk to all the time, they're my best friends. They don't understand what Bitcoin is. And they're just starting to figure out how, you know, Economics work for example and

28:55 when they call me they asked me what I do one of them my very best friend was like I just don't know what to tell people when they ask me what you do anymore, and I'm like

29:05 Welcome to the club I'm

29:14 an investor. I'm an investor in our future so it is interesting though the ESG thing is huge I You know as a as a female in oiling gas and now Bitcoin I think it's really important for us to have

29:26 representation to and the more people that I can orange pill so to speak the better Because that means that we have more people thinking about it and coming up with more creative better answers for

29:35 the future So one of the issues the ESG thing is great to get use out of what have been would have been useless gas Mm-hmm. I kind of also like the idea of being able to generate electricity closer

29:50 to the source of the battery, which is our reservoir. And then being able to distribute it as, I have control. If I'm, you mentioned WPX, your first, your first place. If I'm a WPX, if

30:01 they're around, and I've got my own electricity generation. I could decide, well, you know what, today, it makes more sense for me to actually use it in my field or put it onto the grid. A lot

30:13 of mines are hooked up to the grid. Right. And then the other part that I find, you know, potentially interesting is actually having off-grid like shushy generation, that you're putting it out,

30:24 you're mining somewhere. And if you could tie it in with satellite connection, which I know you mentioned Cruz already, they're trying to do that, get some lowering satellites and actually have

30:32 internet connections out there. Yeah. It's just interesting to be able to have, and once you've got these local places to do the capture of the emissions that are coming off of those generators in

30:45 small centralized locations, And you're in the field where you can put the emissions right back in the ground.

30:54 capabilities in there. I think two additional things, maybe three additional things are important here. The first one is the use of potentially putting things like solar panels on top of your minds,

31:05 right? We should be using solar a lot more in the oil patch, frankly, secondly, we need better batteries. Like I don't care how many Bitcoin you produce, that's great, but like we produce all

31:14 this freakin' energy and it just

31:18 goes away. Somebody needs to come up with a better battery that we can pop out there and I can either charge my battery up for winter or whatever or, you know, go mine Bitcoin. I had the battery

31:29 thing, I just really get on the problem with batteries though. And here we go, Laura's thinking down the geology path, rare earth mining.

31:39 It's not good. And so, you know, my PR now, for example, she drives a Tesla and I gave her unending shit about it. I felt really bad 'cause she thought she was being all like, you know, virtue

31:49 signaling and all this shit I was just like. You realize how bad this is from a number one carbon footprint perspective and number two human perspective? You know who goes and minds wear earth

32:03 minerals? Like this is not good and people lack awareness. I always say oil and gas has had a PR problem for a long time. We have to continue to produce oil and gas. It's not gonna go away.

32:14 That's right. Well, there's

32:18 always a buyer, right? So it's the only industry in the world where you say marketing, and to them, it's actually sales. No, marketing everywhere else is not sales, right? It's creating a

32:28 brand, it's making the PR look good, it's the smiley, pretty executives that are fully thinking and green. It's, you know, that is not what oil and gas is done, which is unfortunate. To me,

32:41 it's the worst branded industry in the history of the world. But there's always gonna be a demand for the product, or at least that's how it's been So why do we need to change that image? like, I

32:51 know the social and fundamental reasons why and now there's financial pressures to do so. But it's just that's part of what oil and gas is. And you said something that was really, really

33:01 interesting. First of all, oil and gas is mostly men. But you want to go back to the crew of sort of cryptocurrency Bitcoin blockchain people. I think that it's the same people that went from

33:14 online poker to daily fantasy sports to then cryptocurrency and staying a little bit ahead of the curve right before all the fish come in and lose all their money. Totally. Those are all men.

33:24 That's 100 men. What I just. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that is very true. I mean, I let's go a little social on this. What is that a commentary on? Is that a commentary on risk taking? Is

33:37 there some? Is it just the people who are willing to stand on the cliff and just jump off of it? Is that just 25 year old men are more willing to do that than other people? Or why do you think that

33:48 is, as Laura ask you Bye. My experience, so, you know, I'm from Boulder. All my besties are real hardcore feminists. I work in potentially the

34:02 shittiest industry for feminism that there is.

34:06 And they always ask, they're like, why didn't you hire, when you worked a century, why didn't you hire more women? And why did you leave Anadarko to go private equity? Well, I am an idiot and

34:20 will jump off a cliff, right? Like, I am a geologist, my risk tolerance is stupid high. Like, I'm not, it's, I'm an anomaly. Most female geoscientists are not as risk tolerant as I am. It's

34:34 probably why I'm a halfway decent exploration geologist, but like, I can tolerate a lot of risk in my life and I've built it such that I can continue to tolerate that risk, most females, are more

34:45 risk-averse, I think, in general. And some of that comes from like when you have a baby, you want to continue to take care of the baby, it's just a little harder to make a big jump like I've done.

34:53 And then a second bigger jump into basically the startup world. It's hard to recruit people who are - a lot of these women are super, super smart, super high performing, but they need that level

35:06 of stability that a larger company tends to provide, not necessarily all the time. But I think that then in general, too, every time there's a big downturn and you lose, like look at the '80s,

35:15 we lost however many percent of females in the oil and gas industry. The same thing's happening right now. Like I talked to my other lady friends who are at major oil companies and stuff like that.

35:25 The numbers are dwindling, and they won't come back after price recovers. They just go away, and they don't come back, because it's kind of a crappy industry to work in. One of my roommates from

35:35 Cott grad school, she is a petroleum engineer, and she worked in the industry for a long time very, very well respected, really. wonderful human, worked for a couple major oil companies and

35:49 right before, well, I guess right after 2017, she bailed. She went back to med school at the age of 37 because she couldn't handle the oil and gas industry anymore. She said, I hate feeling like

36:02 this every day. I hate that nobody listens to me. I hate that I'm always worried about my job. She said, I want something that's more stable and that I know I have more control over So, yeah, I

36:12 think it's a, and then you add the crypto thing and yes, it's just a bunch of young guys. I mean, I talked to a guy the other day, he's working in a restaurant making, you know, minimum wage,

36:21 but he's worth six, you know, he's, he makes six fingers a year because he's swing trading fucking, you know, doge and Ethereum and Chiba. And I like, what an interesting thing to have

36:34 happening in the world where these people, and he was probably a 28-year-old guy, right? Okay and nothing come that he can go and make. 100, 000 a year just by messing around on whatever coinbase

36:49 or Robinhood or whatever. Isn't that fascinating? It's such an interesting world we're living in, but yeah, it's all about risk and what your personal tolerance for risk is. Man, if I'm not bad,

36:58 I'm choosing a different minimum paying job than working in a restaurant. Then he has all days free, so you can trade all day, and the beauty of the crypto market too is that it's always happening

37:11 So I always check it on holiday weekends when the stock exchange is closed, and it always goes up. Because I just think you've got bored day traders who are like, All right, well, let's jack this

37:21 thing up a little bit and see where it can go, and we get people like Elon Musk talking about it. No, I mean, there's this whole, it's a little bit cultish, but you've got the dogecoin thing. I

37:32 mean, it went from 000001 to 27

37:36 cents, and that type of 1, 000, million percent growth is on her dog.

37:44 It's uncharacterized, that's been like that anymore. Right, it's super interesting. So, I don't know, I think we live in a totally different world than we did even last year at this time. You

37:53 know, I now follow, I've gotten into Twitter, which is terrible, it's like crack. I really need to get off of it, but I really like it. The worst, it's So. so bad. So I follow Elon, of

38:04 course, on Twitter and man, that guy. Wow, y'all see what he tweeted this weekend I was just like, So, I take down the entire stock exchange myself. Oh. Oh.

38:18 Because he has billions of dollars in options that he has to make a decision on, right? And it's going to trigger some level of tax event that he's not happy about, and it could really cause some

38:26 damage. So he's like kind of threatening the SEC a little bit. Oh, very interesting. He's also making the market move by not doing anything other than just saying, Should I make the market move?

38:36 Oh, yeah And that's the thing about the power that that. singular human has. It's really interesting. Are you going to choose to do good or evil with it?

38:45 Yeah, no, decide what good and evil even is anymore. I mean, that's the part that I'm like, maybe I don't know. Who knows? That's why if you're Jeff Bezos, you're just like, forget it. I'm

38:54 done. I'm just going to get in fights with Leonardo DiCaprio or whatever. Because of course, because you're on Twitter, you're hooked. It's like crap. Give me more. I want to go. I want to go

39:05 into energy funders a little bit. So they hit my radar when Jake Corley, one of our last guys, his little brother was at Energy Funders maybe three years ago. Gary, and I remember him telling me

39:15 sort of what the concept was. I'm like, this makes sense, right? Like you said, sort of democratize the ability to invest in something that you couldn't invest in before. So how did you find

39:24 them? How did they find you and how did you end up as the CEO? I don't know. Just kidding. I just clearly tricked someone. I'm not sure who it was in my life that I tricked, but I've definitely

39:39 tricked some people. No, that's joke, obviously.

39:44 Energy funders was purchased last year by a group called

39:49 Paleo Resources. It's publicly owned and traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Those guys, the two primary stock owners in that company have been my friends for probably three or four years. They

40:02 have a private oil company as well. They tried to sell us some stuff. We tried to buy some stuff from them in the chalk. I've kind of known loosely about them for quite some time. And then what's

40:15 the best part of this story is it's a pretty funny story, so I'll take the time to tell you. One of my best friends from Colorado, her little brother is a a land man, and her little brother is

40:24 really good friends with our principal's son. And so everybody was in town for a nape one year when I was running Sentry. And

40:33 I get this text from Michael, who's my best friend's little brother. And he says, Hey, I met these guys. They, I know these guys. I told them about what you just did 'cause I have raised some,

40:44 you know, quite a bit of capital from a private equity backer and was doing this exploration thing. And he was like, Hey, they want to meet you. And I said, Okay, I mean, it's nape. Whatever

40:53 you want to do, we can get together. That's fine So there's all these texts late in the night. They come over to the office on Friday morning, after nape. And being who I am, they walked in and

41:04 I said, Who wants a Dose at Keys? I can tell you're hungover already. The Friday after nape is never the easiest way to go. Friday after nape. What? So they come in, we start to shoot the shit.

41:16 They were very curious about me as a lot of people are. I'm a young female geologist who I've run an oil company now And now I'm running Energy Funders. they were just curious, like, how did you

41:27 get here? Who are you? Why are you here? Also, how are you from Boulder? Like, what is this? So it's pretty interesting. So I got to know them pretty well at that point. And then, yeah, we

41:35 just started this relationship. And last year, when they were purchased, we had a couple of conversations about, you know, what would it take to get me over there? And eventually, what happened

41:45 at century was, you know, we had a lot of federal acreage. So with the administration change, there were some problems, et cetera, et cetera And the timing just felt right, two of my former

41:57 business partners from century again, left to go start J Energy. And so there were five of us total. And I just was like, you know, this just doesn't feel right to stay here anymore. They were

42:05 going to have to go into more of a development mode, too. And like I said, I'm a builder. I'm an explorationist. I like to go do things that, you know, or some people might stay crazy and risky.

42:15 So they called in, I guess, February or March of this year and said, hey, we need somebody to come over You know, we've wanted you to come over for a while, are you ready? And I said, yeah,

42:26 now seems like a better time. So I made the jump, I think my first week was May, yeah, I think I started on May 1st. So I've been at Energy Funders for about six months now. I was brought in

42:37 because of my experience in oil and gas and the fact that I've evaluated tons and tons of deals at this point in my career. And so instead of the company used to be more wildcat well-focused and they

42:50 would raise the company to go by working interest in one well at a time But wildcats are inherently risky, especially if you don't necessarily have anyone on staff who is an engineer or a geologist

42:60 to evaluate them. So we've done two things. One, we've staffed up with very experienced oil and gas people. And two, we're doing things in more of a mutual fund type of style where instead of

43:10 buying into one well at a time, we're buying into a cadre of wells. So you're decreasing your downside risk effectively. You may not have as much upside potential because you're not drilling these

43:20 potentially three-to-one wild capitals, but possibly if you have a geologist and an engineer on staff who are pretty good, I don't want to brag, but halfway decent at our jobs, then you should be

43:31 able to see some of that upside in addition to protecting your downside. So the models changed a little bit, and now we're changing again, I brought the idea of bringing the Bitcoin mines in,

43:41 doing the off-grid thing. So we've got that as a component of it too, and it works the same way We're just basically buying working interests in these Bitcoin mines. So I'm kind of straddling roles

43:51 right now too, 'cause I'm hoping on the operations side for the private company building out the Bitcoin mines, and also organizing all this stuff in house to make sure that energy funders gets to

44:01 get little pieces of what we want to get pieces of. So it's been fun. I've met a lot of people. It's a crazy world. I would say that geologists, if they're good, are halfway decent at sales.

44:15 Because you're selling something that people literally cannot see and you're having to explain it and it's it's pretty hard But you know, it's a little easier for me to explain geology and dumb that

44:27 down Then it is to explain Bitcoin and dumb that down just because everybody's new in Bitcoin right now, right? So it's it's been really fun and interesting and I think that the company we've

44:37 actually had quite a bit of success this fall I'm really excited for us and I'm really really happy with my team I mean, I can't speak more highly of the team that we've built. It's a really

44:46 incredible group of individuals very

44:50 Ash like Island of misfit toys kind of a situation over here But everybody's great. We're all sort of have alternative career paths and we all get along really well and it's been it's been really

45:01 good And I think you said earlier in this conversation one of the kind of one of the future steps is to go So normal every day layman with the ability to invest in energy funders as opposed to the

45:14 incredibly investor that's the next one of the next steps for you, then? We have a couple next steps. The next big step that we're taking, and I believe, I mean, what is today? It's November.

45:23 We aren't going to start a Bitcoin-only fund really soon, potentially in the next couple of days. So that's a big deal for us. So yeah, we're gonna have our rolling gas fund. We're gonna have our

45:33 rolling gas fund either. Yeah. We're gonna have our oil and gas fund, and then we're gonna have a Bitcoin fund. And we are gonna start a wildcat fund again, which I love. Of course, I'm like

45:44 all about that I'm a riverboat gambler, but we've had a lot of demand for it. I've been really surprised, you know. I think that there's all this tax advantage stuff to intangible drilling costs

45:55 and all that in-oiling gas that I never really understood until I got here. And we've had a lot of people say, I just want the IDCs, and I want you to go drill wildcat wells, because if I could

46:04 hit a forex, I want that also. So it's been interesting. So we've got several projects, like on the very near horizon, we're about to roll out, we'll do a reggae fund next year. And I'm hopeful

46:17 that we'll eventually do not necessarily an alternative, not a green fund, but more of an alternative energies fund where we, my whole goal is to support like oilfield cleanup and hydrogen stuff

46:29 and other things besides like wind and solar, but still relating to oil and gas, but like helping us be a little bit more ESG focused. So it's fun The whole point is to kind of remove the middleman,

46:44 make our investors as much money as possible, and I've had a really good time doing it so far. So, man, I feel lucky too. I've got a really good support system. Our parent company is, they let

46:57 me kind of be me, which is to say kind of all over the place. And I've never had a group of people support my like random crazy ideas as much as these guys do. So being able to come in and say, I

47:09 want to put Bitcoin mines on these gas wells. It took me a couple of months to convince our principles that this was a good idea, but once I got these models over to them, they said, Oh my God,

47:18 this is total no-brainer. We had to bet everything. And what's special about it is that I find a lot of at these meetups and all these events that we're going to, there's a lot of people who are on

47:31 the Bitcoin side, for example, that a lot of the Chinese miners who have left China because China shut down Bitcoin lining checks it So there's a lot of Chinese people who think that Bitcoin is the

47:41 most important thing. And all our oil and gas people think that oil and gas is the most important thing. And what it ultimately comes down to is who owns the fuel source? Because if you don't know

47:50 a place to go put your Bitcoin mine, then what are you doing? You need oil and gas. And so there's been this sort of like standoff between the two groups and there's a lot of people talking about

48:01 it. Like you said, there's a ton of buzz around it right now, but very few people are actually executing and I feel so lucky to have this group of people who was just like, all right. we're

48:11 putting all our efforts into it go. I thought it was going to be done a little sooner than I ended up being, but it takes times to do all these things. Yeah. Start up life, start up life. Well,

48:20 this is fascinating, and I think there's a lot more we could dive into, but we're at about 48 minutes, and I know you've got investors beating down your door. It's hard to push this call, which

48:31 heads up to anybody else coming on this podcast. Don't you, you tell your investors to wait. You do podcast, podcast, priority investors can get pushed No, but seriously, Laura, you're doing

48:41 awesome stuff. When I met you, I think you just left in a darco, but it was very obvious to me that you're a geologist with entrepreneurial chops. So seeing you put this all together and increase

48:50 your LinkedIn and online presence is fantastic. And you left my Twitter, huh? Yeah, I see it, I see it. I see it

48:57 up there. Okay, good. Where can people find you and find your company? Sure. And sort of like what's your lasting thought? Yeah, yeah, I first of all really appreciate you guys taking the time

49:08 to chat with me today.

49:10 It's been fun and it's fun to kind of watch how you've been doing. I love this industry. I love all the people in it, even though there's always challenges. But you can find me at, I'm Laura

49:20 Palmer on LinkedIn. I'm, I can't remember my Twitter is Laura Plumpfid, probably. Um, and then yeah, Lauraenergyfunderscom. And then energyfunders is just energyfunderscom. We've done a whole

49:32 rebrand, the website's gorgeous now. I'm all about it. So we went green for money and oil.

49:42 So guys can you find us, check out the yield fund that we're raising now, and then keep your eyes peeled for a couple new funds coming out real soon. Energy funders, we

49:49 have big things, Laura. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks for coming on.