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Pete Snell is a disciple of Jesus. Husband. Father. Growth Fixer. Mountain Bike Crash Magnet! In collaboration with King’s CEO Jay Young, Peter focuses on prioritizing the lens of the partner and scaling the business. Peter’s role centers on the disciplines of Partner Relations, Strategy, Marketing, and Sales.
He founded and led a company through 2.3X average annual growth for 3 consecutive years, served as Co-creator and Lead Fundraiser of the Robert W. Campbell Award. Personally closed $339M new business revenue in a 5-year span, led 2 different sales teams to above-annual-quota performance.
Pete takes us through the ins-and outs of investing in a King’s fund that specializes in Oil & Gas funds – that provide depreciation against active (W2) income, monthly passive income, and significant upside potential.
Investing in oil and gas is a smart move for savvy investors. With the ever-increasing global demand, this is a huge opportunity to be on the right side of capitalizing on energy production and will create multiples on your money at exit and also produce strong passive income. What’s even better? Pete and Dave review the complete business model and assess risks so you can invest in this unique opportunity alongside Pantheon & King Oil.
You won’t want to miss this episode! Pete uncovers the lucrative upside investing in Oil and Gas as well as the most significant risks. The information in this episode is sure to help you navigate through all the aspects of a successful investment in this space.
In This Episode
- How Pete got into the space of investing
- How to offset your active (W2) by investing in oil and gas
- The ideal O&G business model with tax efficiency, passive income, & lucrative upside
- The biggest risks to this asset class
- Pete’s perspective on personal development & the King Oil values
If you are interested in investing in this opportunity and are an accredited investor please be sure you have signed up to our investor club at: https://pantheoninvest.com/investor-signup/ to receive all the details.
Hey everyone, and welcome to today’s show on Wealth Strategy Secrets. Today, we’re joined by Pete Snell, Chief Growth Officer at King Operating. Pete is a disciple of Jesus, a husband, father, growth fixer, and mountain bike crash magnet. In collaboration with King’s CEO Jay Young, Pete focuses on prioritizing the lens of the partner in scaling the business. Pete’s role centers on the disciplines of partner relations, strategy, marketing, and sales.
His past performance highlights include founding and leading a company through almost two and a half times average annual growth for three years. He also served as co-creator and lead fundraiser of the Robert Campbell Award, and he personally closed over $339 million of new business revenue in a five-year span leading sales teams. Pete, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Dave. Glad to be here, man.
Yeah, awesome to have you on the show. Really looking forward to this discussion, Pete. I know our investors are going to get a ton of value out of this and really learn about a new asset class that I think a lot of people haven’t really been exposed to outside of mainstream media type things. Really excited for this opportunity.
I appreciate the time today, Pete. But I guess to kick things off, why don’t we just talk about your background a little bit? It sounds pretty diverse. I love that mountain bike crash magnet. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this whole space of investing and getting into oil.
Yeah, I appreciate it, Dave. I like the mountain bike. I’ve done about 10 years of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, so I like to test myself physically and mentally together. That probably plays into how I like to invest, I think. I’m excited to be here today, and I love my family, and I love Jesus. Those are the things that drive me and make my mind work.
As it relates to my background, I’ve always been a relationship guy. I like to look at people and opportunities, and also solve problems. When I look at what interests me, it’s difficult things and creating good things out of difficult things. Usually, you can find other good people in situations like that who see things the same way. I spent a lot of time in sales and marketing coming up through most of my career, a lot in healthcare, which is interesting given what I’m in now. I also spent a lot of time in technology.
But I’m in oil and gas now, and I absolutely love it. It is awesome to be in oil and gas—it’s tangible, you can get your hands on it. Being on the production side has been a really exciting treat for me. I don’t know if that’s enough of a background, but that brings it all together from my lens today.
Yeah, I know that’s great, Pete. For our listeners in our community, we kind of talk about our investment thesis, our strike zone, and what got me so excited about this opportunity that we’ve been talking about for quite some time. We’re really looking at opportunities that are what I would consider multi-dimensional in nature. Everyone’s kind of attuned to Wall Street conventional wisdom around getting a particular ROI on a particular investment, but in this case, we’re looking for these multi-dimensions where you can have predictable cash flow, tax efficiency—which is huge in and of itself to an investment—downside protection, where you have some non-correlation to markets, especially as it relates to the stock market, and then you have upside potential with these things as well.
While we’re primarily focused on real estate, it’s really interesting as I learned about oil and gas how well that fits into our thesis. So why don’t we start things off there and really talk about your view on the need for oil and gas and your perspective on that?
Yeah, for sure. One thing I wanted to add, and you sort of alluded to this, is that a couple of those key things, like not paying taxes or avoiding paying taxes—I mean, I hate taxes. I don’t know anybody who likes taxes, but I love passive income. Also, something that’s interesting about any investment, and you get to talk about this in real estate, is having an exit strategy and getting a multiple on the investment. That is a huge hook for me in anything I would invest in.
When you think about oil and gas, we can start with a bigger sense—what’s going on geopolitically? I get a lot of questions about how much the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as an example, is affecting the price of oil and natural gas. It is affecting it, let’s be honest, but I’m not an economist. You’re looking at maybe five to ten dollars a barrel for something like that. The bigger issue is that global demand is outpacing supply, not just in our ability as a globe to produce oil and gas, but also in our ability to scale infrastructure to meet the growing demand.
If you think about it as a scale, you’ve got demand growing faster than you can even set up infrastructure to increase supply. That equals higher prices because your commodity becomes more valuable. It also becomes more valuable not just because of the supply and demand problem, but because we have more people on the planet than ever before. Historically, we had this turn away from capitalization into the oil and gas industry. The petroleum needs that we all have—my glasses, your glasses, the product in my hair, the shirt I’m wearing, your microphone—there’s petroleum in all of that in various forms.
As you continue to produce more and more products, you’re going to have more and more demand. If you’re not capitalizing the supply infrastructure, that gap is going to grow. That’s been brewing for years. Ukraine and Russia amplified it. Now there’s talk of China and Taiwan; will that have an impact? Absolutely, even the threat of that will hold prices higher. You’ve got Europe fatally dependent on Russia for natural gas, and if they were to tell Russia, “We don’t want your natural gas anymore,” they would slip into a depression. They’re already heading towards bear territory when you look at the markets.
It’s a tough dichotomy, but that creates opportunity. Those kinds of things create opportunity. When you look at oil and gas, you’ve got the supply and demand dynamic. Some people are calling this a super cycle. Jay, my partner, my CEO, talked about it in his blog a couple of blogs ago, about this possibly being a super cycle, which is an amplified version of what you see in oil and gas with high prices. Then you’ve got economic inflation, which is another interesting impact on something like this.
You’ve got all these factors going on. Everybody wanted to go green, so a bunch of money for the better part of a decade went towards capitalizing on going green. It’s not that we don’t want lower emissions and multiple forms of energy, but for anyone to think that’s going to replace petroleum, they don’t understand the supply and demand. You’ve got all these things brewing together, higher prices for a longer span. That creates opportunity for oil and gas drilling, something we at King Operating love from a production standpoint.
Yeah, for sure, and I learned something that was quite interesting as well. I think as a society, we’re all trying to shift to moving into a greener environment, right? And we’re always thinking green first. So, as you think about energy sources, there are solar and wind and battery power and everything, but it is interesting when you look under the covers how little that actually produces.
One wind turbine, for example, how much energy it takes to actually create that and then what you get out of that is very small. Proportionately, I think it is kind of interesting. Do you want to comment on that as well, those sources?
Yeah, so look, green is good. We need greener approaches to energy. We need more energy because the demand simply demands it, right? Petroleum isn’t the only way we’re going to get there, but to ignore it or try to suppress it because of certain sensibilities—there are arguments on both sides about all that kind of stuff. But you think about electricity and battery power. One of the great misnomers in energy is that battery power is an energy source. It’s just a storage unit, like a battery tank for oil.
The amount of effort—and by the way, petroleum required to actually produce and mine the elements necessary to make all these batteries going into our cars—your emissions aren’t going out the back of your tailpipe, but they are going into the atmosphere no matter what. You just don’t see it; it’s basically sweeping things under the rug. By the way, electric utility providers—guess what powers them? Natural gas. Where does that come from? Drilling. Coal as well comes from mining.
There has been a movement over the last couple of decades for more wind and solar to actually complement and produce that, but they have their own challenges and capacity issues, particularly when you look at solar. We have a great video that PragerU put together. This is not a political thing; PragerU just put together a really practical view about energy. It’s about a five-minute video, and we posted that on our site near the bottom of one of our pages.
You can check out kingoperating.com if you want to see that video. It tells a really interesting story from somebody who’s done the research and can talk about the fact that we need to move that way, we need to be green, and we need to continue to drill. We need all of it because we have more people on this earth than we’ve ever had at any point in history, demanding more and more energy. It’s got to come from multiple sources. That’s important.
That comes back to, from a small independent like King Operating, we obviously love that because it creates opportunity for us and the accredited investor partners that join us in actually participating in the financial returns that can happen from that. It’s a really good time to be in that space from an investment standpoint, and it’s here to stay for the next at least couple of years, maybe longer with this political environment too. It doesn’t matter your politics—people make choices on policy, and the policy made by this particular administration will continue to have a negative economic impact because that’s what’s happening.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how this administration’s policy is affecting the economics of this country. But that does feed into higher prices and more opportunity for people who are already positioned to take advantage from a production standpoint. You just have to capitalize, and that’s why I have a job.
Right, no, those are some excellent points. And I think, again, we hear a lot of things in mainstream media which aren’t necessarily true, so I appreciate you shedding some light on that. It is a new asset class for a lot of folks. Tell us as well, from a business model perspective, I know there are different levels that you can get involved in oil and gas, right? There’s exploration that could be on the riskier side. So, tell us a little bit more about your business model and approach.
Yeah, so just to get some scope, you can invest in oil stocks, for example. I mean, that’s certainly a strategy, right? If you see how they’re performing, there’s something there, and you know how to participate in the stock market. There are other funds out there, more traditional funds, that you could participate in that are invested in energy. You can invest in mining. There are many different ways to get involved in energy.
The way that it works, where we value it, is getting involved in an independent. So, we’re working and operating as an independent oil and gas production company. There are other independents out there as well, and there are opportunities to invest in the projects that people have out there. Institutions have been doing big projects for years with big companies. The project that we focus on is really quite unique, particularly for independent producers.
What you commonly see in the marketplace is the opportunity to get the tax break—thanks, President Reagan, for creating that. You get a significant tax opportunity. I mean, if you invest enough in any independent project, you could potentially pay zero taxes. That is a real scenario, and it depends on each person’s situation. Almost any independent operator can provide some value there. Then you have monthly passive income. You can cash flow off of production out of the ground, particularly when prices are higher when you have a well or what we call a well bore assignment, or you’re invested particularly in the production of a single or a group of wells.
Then there’s a different model, unlike this in any way with any other independent operator, and that is the idea of scaling for an exit. When you actually invest in a King fund, a King-managed fund, you’re investing in something similar to a real estate model. When you think about real estate, you think about value add. When you come into a real estate deal, you’re investing in a property. If you bring up the value in that commercial property, you’re going to bring up the value of not just that property but maybe properties around it or other properties in the fund. There’s value that you accrete, and kind of the tide raises all boats. In real estate, you have value add opportunities, tax strategy opportunities, and monthly passive income.
When you invest in a King-managed fund, the model we focus on is increasing value by drilling new wells. First, you acquire distressed or undervalued properties. Sometimes it has production. Then you develop that, so that’s when you drill a new well. First, it’s acquired, then you develop, and then the divestiture is what we’ll talk about in a second. The development is the key part here because you’re taking these assets that you’ve acquired in the fund, and investors participate in the fund. They don’t just participate in what we call a well bore assignment, which is just a well and the production associated with that well.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but there’s no scale, no exit, no big opportunity. You will lose production over time if you’re assigned to a particular well. You’re going to get value and passive income out of that as long as it’s able to produce. Again, I’m not saying it’s a bad investment; it just doesn’t have the explosive scalable value that you get that works more like real estate. When you drill a well and prove there’s oil in that particular pay zone, you have more locations around that drilled asset. Now those locations have value. You can go and drill more wells. We call those pods. Those locations around a drilled well have value—they have land value, resource value.
Now they have value because you’ve proven with a well drill. By the way, we’re improving areas anyway. It’s not like there’s no other drilling around. The geology that gets done to understand where we should be drilling isn’t like wildcatting, which is exploring in unknown areas. These are known basins with known pay zones where a lot of work has been done before we got there. It’s really a de-risked approach to getting value. Once you drill that well, you get value with the locations around it. You build that up at scale, with multiple wells drilled and multiple PUD locations. You package them all together, and a larger company with more capital will find that asset attractive. That’s when you divest it for a multiple. It’s really that simple, and that’s what’s unique to the King fund.
Yeah, no, that’s excellent, Pete. And I think that was one of the things that attracted me so much to you guys and this opportunity and thought it would be ideal for our investor community. It was interesting as we learned about Jay and one of his friends who was a real estate investor himself, and Jay learned about this model. It’s so parallel to doing a value-add property, right?
Yeah, and I’m glad you brought that up because I totally forgot—I should have led with that. Good job; I’m glad you remembered the research. That’s really critical. How this all started was because Jay was doing that, and investors would get value on some wells, and some were better than others. In 2015, he was on a chairlift with a good friend of his out in Beaver Creek. He was going up there, and his friend asked, “How do you do this?” The whole idea had come to him from a real estate guy. They were on the chairlift, and his friend said, “This is how I increase value—we do value add.”
This guy owned, like your investors would probably appreciate, 33,000 doors. Jay didn’t even know what that meant at the time until his friend explained it to him. The whole idea of increasing value through the land and this value-add approach came from real estate. It really is a real estate hybrid type of play. That’s why we like real estate. We believe that people who understand real estate will understand this model. It’s unlike any other opportunity that an accredited individual investor can have in oil and gas—it just doesn’t exist.
Yeah, exactly. The fundamentals are very similar. Let’s talk about that for a second. We talk about having downside protection as one of our dimensions. When I look at that, you’re not just doing exploratory work hoping, which would be much more on the speculative side of investing. We would see that more at the top of the pyramid. But you have these multi-dimensions where you’re automatically getting passive income from day one from oil that’s actually producing. You’re bringing out passive income that starts to de-risk you right away. You also get that tax benefit, which is just massive.
I think we should pause here for a little bit so investors can really grasp how big this is. We’re always looking for phenomenal opportunities for investors, and this really is one because, in real estate, you can take your passive losses to offset your passive gains. However, with oil and gas, you can actually take these losses and completely offset active income.
Yeah, yeah, so that means…
Yeah, you can take…
No, I’m sorry. I mean, you did better at explaining the contrast to the real estate opportunity with taxes. This is like you take it against your AGI, your adjusted gross income—sorry, I went acronym on you there. You take it against your adjusted gross income. For example, people in the current fund that’s operating at King last year got an 81% deduction of the total capital they invested. So, for example, let’s say someone invested $200,000—they would get approximately $160,000, $164,000. If you have a $400,000 income, you can take $160,000 against that. Now, it’s not like you don’t have other tax strategies, but that’s where the zero comes in. If you have $400,000 and other tax strategies that already reduce your adjusted gross income down to a certain level, if you invest enough, you could essentially wipe out your taxable income depending on how much you wanted to invest.
Yeah, I mean, that is massive, right? I’ve invested in things like land easements where you’re actually getting a multiple off of what you put in, but it’s not even an investment—it’s all about reducing your active income. In this case, you still have the investment, but if you’re able to knock down your taxes, even a couple of tax brackets or down to zero, what does that do to your IRR on this investment? You get a massive bump on it.
You do. The funny thing is, you think about it, you could pay Uncle Sam, or you could invest back. You’re going to write a check one way or the other, so you write a check to put money to work back for you, or you write a check to Uncle Sam. I don’t think he’s my uncle or anybody’s. I don’t like them; I don’t like that.
Well, look, we’ve learned a lot. We talk a lot about taxes. I think once you start to look at them in a different way, the tax code is actually a roadmap of incentives for business owners and investors. You just need to know where to look, and this is one of those places where you should be looking. The government is really incentivizing you to invest in oil and gas because we need these energy sources, just like we need real estate.
You’re right, and that is the absolute correct way to look at it despite my emotional reaction to everything on tax. But you are right, it is actually a roadmap to value creation for you as an individual, and it supports the country, which I love. There’s nothing more patriotic than investing in oil and gas. Having an opportunity to do that is something you can benefit from as an individual investor, so it’s real important to see that.
The other part we didn’t talk about is that you’re not paying taxes on your monthly passive income that’s returned to you while you’re still getting the return of original capital. For example, an investor comes into a deal and starts receiving that monthly passive income the next month—they’re not paying taxes on that income as it accretes until they get to their originally invested capital, and then it becomes something that can be taxable. Again, I just wanted to point this out—I’m not a tax expert; I just know what I need to know for the oil and gas production business. Always consult your tax professional for advice based on your circumstances. But yeah, it’s a great opportunity.
No, absolutely. And again, let’s go back because there’s still so much to unpack about this, right? So, you go in, and you’ve got all of these well locations that are producing passive income right out of the gate. You’re going to get this tax efficiency—huge deduction in your taxes in the year that you actually invest. The passive income has tax efficiency to it. Talk to us a little bit more about the upside potential in addition to that and the hold period.
Yeah, that’s a good—that’s my favorite part. And it’s really the single most unique component to being an accredited investor, an individual accredited investor, to be able to participate in this kind of thing. It’s the only… I was even doing it, Dave. I was doing a search. I just wanted to see if anybody had been playing catch-up to King on this because it’s one of the reasons that brought me on board. That’s one of the things I was attracted to about Jay—this vision for this kind of thing. It’s not like the large players haven’t been doing this for their stockholders or their institutional-level investors, which is a much larger play. But that’s in that upper-echelon space. The individual accredited investor has great difficulty in participating—we just haven’t been able to.
But that whole idea of taking this and making sure it’s de-risked, but also having the operational fortitude and excellence to operate in different geographic locations, is part of the de-risk strategy. You have to make sure you have a product mix of both oil and gas at a balanced level so that you can get… it’s a de-risk flag because even though they’re related in pricing, they’re not the same. I would say they’re more loosely connected in how they react to market conditions globally.
You’ve got to have a balance in both of those, and there are different strategies for different companies that play into this. All that comes into play where you acquire these multiple assets in different geographic locations, prove them up, develop them through the PUD model with the locations to get a larger value, and a multiple is created. Then there are larger companies with more capital that want to acquire those properties. They come in to do that, and that’s when you can divest the properties for a multiple—sometimes as much as 3x, 4x, or even 5x after everything’s done, after you’ve paid off all your debt and all those components that are part of it.
By the way, debt is a great thing for this kind of project because it creates leverage. It’s a lot cheaper to pay than saying more mouths to feed with more accredited investors. Debt gives you leverage and helps you scale more quickly so that you can get to that exit. These are the kinds of things that play into this particular strategy and why this is so exciting.
Me personally, Dave, you and I were talking about this in our prep calls. Monthly passive income is great—I like to work, so I don’t think about things that way. I’m not saying it’s bad; it’s great—we all like it. I like not paying taxes, or more importantly, as you corrected me earlier, using tax strategies that will help all of us, which is absolutely the right way to look at it. We can gain value, the country can gain value, and all people can—we can raise all tides.
But I love the opportunity to get a 3x or 4x multiple. That’s why I’m a guy who’s invested in my friends’ tech startups that are basically vaporware when they come and ask me to write a check and help them get a client. I’ll do that, and I’ve had some victories out of that because I love the idea of a multiple. I love the idea of 3, 4, maybe max 5 years, there’s an exit, and then I can move on to the next project. I’ve done that before in tech companies, and now I’m doing it in oil and gas. I know it works if you get with the right people who understand the right strategy and have a unique edge in the marketplace that their competitors don’t. That’s why I came to work with Jay. That’s why I love King because it’s already delivering to the investors.
Yeah, no, it’s a great point, Pete. Mindset is everything. When you can start thinking in multiples, you can think, “How can I double my money? How can I triple my money? How can I shorten that amount of time? How can I reduce my taxes by 2x?” All of those kinds of things, right? Thinking in multiples is really going to become exponential versus a linear type growth model, which is very incremental and just takes too much time.
So, Pete, I’d like to also talk to you about risks as well, right? This sounds very exciting, but as part of my role, I spend a lot of time doing due diligence and really trying to look under the hood and understand the operating team behind these things. Are they going to be able to deliver on the business model? What are the incumbent risks out there? Can you share with us a little bit about the team and the biggest risks that you see?
Yeah, and I always think of it—and this is just a philosophical thing, take it or leave it—but I’m a danger guy. Risk is kind of nebulous; people get to define that. Danger is a much more tangible, easy-to-quantify kind of thing. That’s how I look at it: What are your dangers in doing this?
Dangers come from things like poor operations, meaning you don’t have the right people in place who haven’t just done it before, but look forward. Do they understand how to use leading-edge, not bleeding-edge, technology to advance the ball? Are they using the right operational approaches to execute this? Does the operational approach meet the strategy? The danger is when you have a disconnect in those kinds of things.
There’s also danger in prices retreating. One of the challenges you can face in oil and gas is that we don’t control pricing. That’s why operational excellence is even more important. First of all, Jay, but you look at Rex—he hates when I say this, but he’s a former IRS guy in another life. Rex is our CFO, and he is an economic genius when it comes to oil and gas. Just understanding how to create value out of the resources that come out of the ground—there are a lot of moving parts to turning oil and gas into money and getting returns out of that. If you can imagine, like any business, there’s a lot that has to go right. He’s a genius at understanding the tax implications and the relationships between that.
Having guys like Chandler Knox, an SMU graduate from their petroleum school—he’s brilliant. He’s been in the field for a good 15 years now, working as a roughneck all the way to running rigs and now running multiple operations for us. He’s amazing. Then there’s Paul Jerome, our geoscientist, making sure you have the right kind of people like Paul who can give you objective analysis about opportunities. They’re not Pollyanna, and they’re not paid critics. What does the data tell me? What is the data not telling me? How can I provide that information to people so they can make the most informed decision?
At the end of the day, one of the risks is you’re still drilling really far down into the earth, which is really dark. Your hole is about this big, depending on your actual wellbore, and you’re doing a lot to get to a particular pay zone. There’s great technology these days to do it, but you need the right people who’ve done it before. Having really good frac partners and a good rig partner is crucial. Making sure you’re using the latest practices in fracking—most frac operators do it now—but ensuring you’re using frack practices from post-2018, which is a whole different ball game. Horizontal fracking in 2016 was a lot different than 2019.
Our team matters, and it matters for any independent operator. You have to have good people that know how to work together within the context of that strategy to deliver returns to your investor. All that’s important, but that’s just sausage making. The real important thing is, can you make sausages that taste good? In oil and gas, it tastes really good right now.
That’s great. So what would you say is the actual biggest risk? Is it price sensitivity in the market?
Yeah, pricing is the greatest risk. It will deplete your monthly passive income because your margins get squeezed when prices are lower. While inflation does impact, it’s not at the rate of price increase. So prices coming down can squeeze your margins. We like higher prices. Things above $75 are good. You start getting into the $50 range, and we get uncomfortable.
The other part is when you have a pricing squeeze, if there’s not an infrastructure ramp globally to get more supply produced, that’s why the assets King is developing are attractive to larger players. They can get to market quicker with proven areas where they can just put their capital to work. They don’t have to figure stuff out—they take the roadmap we created, take the land they’ve acquired from us, and just drill and put a bunch of rigs up at the same time to make a lot of money. Wall Street loves that.
If price goes down, those assets become less attractive. You’re still de-risked or de-dangered, as I like to say, but you have smaller passive income amounts over a longer period. If the cycle comes back up, you could look for a divestiture further down the road. There’s still a backup plan, but pricing is the greatest risk.
And just to level set, I mean, we’re trading around $108 or so. Where are we today?
Let’s look this morning, but we’ve been running $110 pretty consistently. And natural gas, man, eight dollars per MCF—that’s extremely good.
Yeah, that’s really good. So it’s interesting because here’s another parallel to real estate. In real estate, we do what’s called a sensitivity analysis, where you have a 300-unit building, and we can know that we can run an asset down to, let’s say, 63% occupancy before you start going negative on the asset. So when you talk about going from a price of $110 to around $50, if you’re saying in the $50s it starts getting uncomfortable, in my mind, that’s kind of where you break even. It would take a lot to get there, right? I know you can’t forecast this, but from your perspective, what would you say about oil getting to $50 a barrel again?
Yeah, I mean, it’s not happening during the next couple of years. There’s no market condition, even if the Russia-Ukraine thing gets solved, where it goes back to that. As I said at the very beginning of this podcast, we’re still in the ramp phase on infrastructure just to make production. We happen to be out in front of that because that’s all we do is production. But the bottom line is we’re a long way from $50, and there are other factors like lease operating expenses and royalties. There’s a sensitivity quotient to those things as well.
Bottom line, prices—there’s not a scenario, particularly with this administration and the policy in place, that will make a change to that. The midterm election might give you temporary relief, like a quick shot of adrenaline or something that might give you some price relief for a couple of days, but you’re not going to see a change. Even with the red wave they’re talking about politically that could come in November, that’s not going to change the supply and demand problem. It just won’t.
Yeah, no, excellent, Pete. This has been a phenomenal overview. I’m sure people are drinking from the fire hose right now—it’s kind of a lot. Anytime you have a new asset class, there are a lot of things to assimilate. But let’s just transition for a second. It sounds like between mountain bike crashing and jujitsu practice, you have a lot going on personally as well. If you could give just one piece of advice to our listeners from a personal development perspective, what would it be?
Well, look, the most important thing I could say, and this is my personal experience, but I would say investigate the validity of scripture and who Jesus Christ is. If you want to look at it, I know that could be polarizing, and it’s okay if you’re not interested in that. I hope that’s not the case, but I would say that the most important thing that’s ever happened in my life, ahead of my kids being born (whom I love greatly) and my wife, is that I became a born-again believer in Christ Jesus.
That was a choice I made after learning some information about who Jesus is and the fact that he claimed to rise from the grave. In doing so, 500 people witnessed that. If that seems unbelievable to someone, I say go do the research.
It’s probably been the most important personal development I’ve done—doing the research and then testing my faith over time to really understand if I have merit in other ways to believe what I believe. It has eternal implications about life beyond just this body and this earth. Again, I would invite anybody, regardless of your religious background or challenges you had as a kid, to consider that truth and really find out if there’s something behind it.
That is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me, and Jesus makes me better. Hopefully, that can be something that others in your audience would value as well. Thanks for giving me an opportunity.
Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate you sharing and being transparent about that. It’s kind of interesting, as we talk about building wealth a lot, we really try to unpack the psychology of building wealth. In my experience, it’s been interesting going through the military and being trained as a Marine officer. The values and principles that we uphold are so strong and ingrained in you, similar to a faith, whatever your faith is.
Now, as we look forward into investing in opportunities like this, I think it’s important for investors to understand the teams behind these things and to know that they have these types of values. They’re being good stewards of your capital. It’s not just some kind of transactional deal. Everyone is incentivized and has the morals to look out for your capital as best as possible.
No, I think that’s a great callout, and absolutely. Scripture is very clear about stewardship and the importance of that. Our investors get a weekly update, and one of the things that we do to hold ourselves accountable is to share an inspiration at the bottom of their weekly update. People can take it or leave it, but we want them to know that we have a standard by which we operate. We’re not perfect, but we aspire to what scripture describes as good stewardship.
The word steward means manager—actually managing someone else’s property. If you look at how scripture talks about it, it’s very clear about the importance of being a good steward. You’ve heard that in pop culture and common culture as well. Stewardship is really important. I think you hit it right on the head; it’s important to know and make the connection. While we can’t control everything, our aspiration is to take good, honorable care of the funds stewarded to us because they’re not ours.
They’re still yours, and they’re still mine as I look at what I invest. Jay is the single largest investor, so he has a dog in the hunt as well. We need to be good stewards and actual partners. I appreciate you bringing that forward because it’s really important—we need to be accountable to that.
Yeah, awesome, Pete. Really appreciate it. Folks, I hope you enjoyed the show with Pete. We are pleased to present you with a limited opportunity to invest in one of the latest oil and gas investments. This investment is open to accredited investors only. If you’d like to learn more, please go to our website, pantheoninvest.com, and apply to become part of our exclusive investor community where you’ll receive access to this opportunity.
Hey Dave, thanks for having me, man. It’s good seeing your face again. Looking forward to our next conversation, my man.
Awesome, thank you.