When you have 10 hours in a car with someone, with a 4 hour round of golf inserted in the middle to break up the drive, it’s a lot of together time. To me, time has always been the measure of the strength of a relationship.
At work, after our team had interviewed a potential new member I would ask them not “Should we hire them” but rather “if we were all stuck in an elevator for 2 hours together, how would that go?” There are very few I could spend 14 hours with seemlessly. My son Ben is certainly one of them.
As we drove through Kansas, we listened to the new Joe Rogan podcast with Aaron Rodgers. If you want to remember the insanity of the last 2.5 years through the words of one of the top athletes on the planet who, alongside Novak Djokavic has remained unvaccinated, this is the episode. I wore my Aaron Rodgers shirt to dinner last night. I might wear it for my speech today in Tulsa.
When we turned “the corner” and headed to Oklahoma, we listened to the Alex Berenson episode post his being restored to Twitter following his lawsuit. Up next? He’s suing the White House. Why? In discovery, he found that the White House directed Twitter to ban him which is a pesky fact for all those who said “Twitter and LinkedIn are private companies. They can ban you if they want!!” True. But the government requesting it would seem to be a violation of the pesky first amendment. Especially as everything he has said has turned out to be more or less right on COVID, it’s hard to remember that HE was considered a misinformation spreader and Deborah Birx wasn’t. There was even a time when the following phrase would have got me banned (again). “Vaccinated or not, you can catch and spread COVID so discriminating against the unvaxxed makes no sense.” Unvaccinated lives matter…
When we entered Oklahoma, past the thousands of windmills, we saw a massive coal power plant 5 miles north of the toll road. We took the exit and drove for a look. Ben read about all the power stats, compared to the wind and observed the complete visual absence of the “CO2 pollutant of death…”. He laughed at me while I recorded my animated video hottake for LinkedIn.
We got back on the toll road, paid the whole $1.50 extra for getting off, and listened to a podcast about serial killers (Jeffrey Dahmer). If your kids start cleaning bones at 6… might be time for some therapy… just saying. We checked into the Hard Rock, went upstairs to the steakhouse where Ben refused to order steak because “inflation is making meat prices insane!” and we shared a chicken pasta plate and a side of Mac n’cheese for $40 while choosing 4 more colleges to reach out to.
I’m excited about the Natural Gas & Energy Association of Oklahoma speech today as it’s a brand new one. Ben is headed to play golf with some oilfield folk that I don’t know but who knew I was in town and they offered to take him. Our industry is truly the best. They might not enjoy him as much as I do, but in their 4 hours, hopefully they will see why my 14 was so great.
Next time buy Ben the steak. It may quickly become just a memory for his generation.