Graham Taylor - Imperial Standard

33:53Imperial was in a deadlock of negotiations with, I think it was Colonial, was the company trying to buy them out. And they were at an impasse. And so what ended up happening was Standard came in and effectively acquired 75 % of Imperial at that time. And I found another theme that comes up starting with this and also later transactions is this worked out very well for Imperial shareholders. Absolutely. That was the whole point was when they were, as I said, you know, essentially the Imperial Oil, which had been a, it started as a cartel, it became a partnership. They were sort of emulating the organization of Standard Oil.

34:37But, of course, each member of what had been the cartel had their own interests and wanted to make as much money as they could out of the investments that they had made in the consolidated company. So when Imperial was reaching the crisis point where they had, they literally they were the oil was running out in petrolia sure it was only a matter of time before it'd be over with so they're trying to sell sell their company uh off to the best best bidder and the thing is that uh colonial which was a a big english company uh they drove you know they hemmed and hawed. They said, yeah, we'll think about it.

35:27And so many of the investors in imperial oil were getting antsy. How much longer do we have to wait? And there were a couple of things that I guess needed to be mentioned. By that time, the 1890s, Rockefeller had moved into the Canadian market. He had bought into a number of companies in Ontario. And in effect, it was, it was almost like a military exercise. He had outflanked and surrounded Imperial. Sure. With these other companies, they weren't, they weren't as big as Imperial. They didn't have as big a market share, but all collectively under the direction of Rockefeller, they were able to, to put imperial on the spot and it was at that point that rockefeller could go to people like engelhardt for example and say okay uh you can wait for colonial to buy uh your company or you can take the offer that i'm going to make to you which is uh you vote to uh to sell uh imperial to standard you get not only the money but you get a position on uh on the board of standard oil and uh you know a management position and and you have all kinds of other opportunities opening up to you in a much more larger uh you know organization and that was enough of them bought into that, that they basically undercut the imperial oil leaders and took the, you know, got the benefits of the merger.

37:13Yeah. It was just, it was, it was a takeover, but it was an early version of a very, was a very consequential takeover for Canada. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, But we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management. At Smead, we believe in disciplined investing, which is why the Smead funds have a proven track record of long-term outperformance. If you're an investor who plays the long game and want to invest in wonderful companies to build wealth, we invite you to visit SmeadCap.com. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

37:50Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. And you credit, in your book, as others have, you credit Ida Tarbell, who wrote a lot about standard, William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Teddy Roosevelt, and kind of changing the view of standard oil from a political media perspective. 1911 obviously changed everything. And I'm going to show a picture here because throughout the book, you talk a lot about the tentacles of Standard Oil.

38:34And here's the image of obviously, this was the personification of Standard Oil in the media for a very long time. And so you keep coming back to the tentacles. And after 1911, Imperial really becomes the foreign ownership tentacle of Standard, don't they? Yes and no. It was sort of a curious event. And one of the things you have to understand about when Standard Oil was, it was attacked by, and as you say, people like Tarbell wrote about it. Her father had been run out of business by Rockefeller, so she sort of axed to grind. And people like Hearst made money by, you know, attacking Standard Oil.

39:25When Standard Oil was broken up into 30, I think it was 34 companies, there was no rhyme, no reason to it. Sure. Some of the companies that came out of this breakup, this dissolution, were actually integrated companies. They had refining capacity, crude oil sources, marketing organization. Some of them had only the marketing. Some of them had only the oil. as it happened standard of new jersey which is actually one of the largest of them had a huge refining capacity but no sources of oil sure are very limited sources well whereas something like a standard what became standard of california had lots of sources of oil but limited refining capacity and so forth.

40:20And so what happened was, in particular for Standard of New Jersey, they believed that they needed to expand their search for crude oil abroad. and they had already set up a company in the 1890s called Anglo-American Oil. Yep. And Anglo-American Oil had been the company to which Imperial had been assigned back in 1899, although, in fact, it's so complicated because Standard Oil of New York was the logical place to take over Imperial Oil because it was right across the border. New York was market. And in fact, for many, many years, Imperial Oil was literally run by a guy named Chamberlain from his office in Buffalo, New York.

41:22It was just a sort of a side investment for him. But when the dissolution came, and this is where you get Walter Teagle playing a role, He said, well, we want Anglo-American oil to come into Standard of New Jersey. And the reason for that was Anglo-American oil was the part of the Standard Oil empire that had foreign investments. And not only foreign investments, but also access to foreign markets. A known quantity, for example, the British knew about imperial oil from its British Empire connections. And so Tegel was able to use that when he became head of Standard of New Jersey to get access, for example, to some of the oil in Latin America.

42:25And what I was going to say, Tegel came from an engineering background, correct? Yes, he did. Which was very much the mold of imperial kind of its history over time. Yeah. The ones, of course, who started it were not, particularly in that field. But certainly by, I would say, the early 1900s, you had to have a technical education and background to keep track of what was happening in the industry. It was becoming much more of a demanding, intellectually demanding operation. You know, back when it was just kerosene, all you had to do was you got the crude oil, you distilled the kerosene out and you sold it.

43:13By the early 1900s, when you had the automobile industry beginning and you were starting to use gasoline and so forth, you had to understand the technology of refining in order to make it maximize the benefit of it. So what you were getting. So that's why you had people like Teagle and others who were trained as chemical engineers and so forth who would be able to see the opportunities and exploit them probably much more than, say, Rockefeller. Rockefeller, he was just a merchant who had a real talent for taking advantage of opportunities, but he was not a trained chemist or anything else. Sure.

44:02So Teagle – and I'm paraphrasing here a little bit. So if you disagree with this, by all means, jump in. But in my opinion, after reading your history, Teagle is the patron saint of imperial for lack of a better term. and he fit the perfect mold of an entrepreneurial engineer who wanted to have their own dominion, but yet fit really well into the standard oil mold in such a way where he was obviously going to end up just running standard oil someday because he understood what was needed in the empire and thus how to run the empire. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, it would. Yes, it was. And you have to remember, much like Ida Tarbell's father had been run out of business by Rockefeller, Walter Teagle's father had been one of the ones who jumped on board and said, I'm going to take advantage of the standard oil expansion.

44:57So he was able to get Wangle, his son, opportunities to rise up in the standard oil organization. Yeah. So let's pivot a little bit. He was obviously highly secretive, right, which kind of fits into the standard mold, which is that like they wouldn't necessarily tell the shareholders much of anything from what you wrote at times. Also, International Petroleum Company is eventually lumped into Imperial. International had their, what, Peruvian assets and their Colombian oil assets. Yes. And during the 20s, I think you said that the International Petroleum Company's dividend was 22 % of Imperial's net income.

45:42So it was a very large producer to them. And during this time, oil explodes in use in the 1920s tied to cars. And I actually have a picture. I love this picture. I just – I think of this being in like an urban setting. Here's a look at like what a gas station looked like. I think this is like a 1914 picture in Vancouver. But that's what a gas station would look like. You got the tanks holding the finished product. You got cars pumping it out. I think the other thing that can be drawn out of this is usually what seemed like great growth times for the industry should be incredible, which the 20s were great pickup and demand.

46:21And yet at the same time, it was a massively terrible environment because you explained there was a big glut of product in the 20s. Yeah, the oil industry has this history, if you will, of moving from dearth to glut and back again. And during the period just around the First World War, it was a period when there was a lot of competition among companies, not just Standard, but its biggest rival, which was Royal Dutch Shell, for example, to get as much of what was seen as a diminishing resource under their control. And so, for example, that's when you get, you know, Royal Dutch Shell trying to get it going into the Middle East to get the Turkish Empire to sign over long term leases for drilling.

47:27You had the first, there was a British, you know, Winston Churchill as the head of the Navy in Britain wanted to get oil so they could convert the British Navy from coal to oil. So he had used influence to set up the Anglo-Persian oil company with the Shah of Persia, of Iran. Which we now know is BP, is predecessor to BP, yeah. Well, all of these things were going on at the same time. And then in the 1920s, all of a sudden, even though there had been this huge boom in demand for gasoline, there was also a huge increase in the supply as well. For example, you had the big oil coming out of the Middle East.

48:22This was not out of Saudi Arabia because they came later, but it was from what was known as Mesopotamia, which was Iraq. And, of course, the Iranian oil and then also – and this, by the way, is part of the story. Rockefeller, even before the standard oil, even before it was broken up by the Supreme Court, It had huge competition from companies in Texas because Texas was one of the big oil fields that was being developed in the early 1900s. By the 1920s, the East Texas oil fields were the largest in the world. They were like what Saudi Arabia is now. And so you went from a sort of situation of desperate competition for what was seen as a diminishing resource to, as you say, a glut.

49:15And all of a sudden, the problem wasn't how to find oil, but how to control the amount of oil that was being refined and sold so that you could sustain your profits. Because you needed that in order to sustain the organizations that companies like Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell had established. What we now know is the tar sands business going back into, say, 1917 in the Athabasca region. It was known already then that there were these tar sands assets. Standard was involved in this. I think we have our last picture here that we're going to show. It's a picture of Alberta at that time. And you just have these awesome maps throughout the book.

50:03And I kind of gig out at some of these because I just think they're fun to look back on. But here's a look at Alberta at that time and the various, I'll call it oil and gas plays that were noted then. How big was Leduc? You talk a lot and you kind of use it as the primer to kind of get people excited about early part of your book. You talk about this gusher at Leduc. How big was the Leduc number? What was it? Was it one or three? I can't remember the number, but it was like the first. It was the Leduc number one that was the first big. The big gusher. And how big was that relative to the prior oil and gas history in Alberta?

50:41Well, there hadn't been any or not very much oil prior to that. Okay. And let me just go back for a second because you mentioned the oil sands. The fields of where Leduc was found in the Calgary region and so forth, this was just straight oil coming up out of the ground. You didn't have to separate it from oil sands or anything. But nobody knew how to reach it. You know, in the Turner Valley in Calgary, in Alberta, around the time of the First World War, they thought they had found oil. Oh, they said there was a big oil rush, as they always did. But they didn't find much oil. What they did find was a lot of natural gas.

51:29In fact, they couldn't use it all. And so in order to keep the prices high, they literally burned a lot of the natural gas in the fields. Sure. And that was a sour gas, I think you mentioned? Yes, yes. But meanwhile, they were trying to search for standard oil, imperial oil, had kept their eye on, yeah, the gas is great, but we want oil. And so they continued to drill for oil. And they actually went to the trouble of buying up all the little oil and gas producers in the Turner Valley and consolidating them. This was what became Royalite. Well, they actually did find some oil. Around 1936, the first big oil find took place in the Turner Valley.

52:23but by the standards of Leduc and other things that came on stream in the 50s and 60s it was very small and it pretty much had petered out by the end of the 1930s so they had to keep looking and looking and looking and one of the things, one of the things that happened was this and it had to do with the way in which people explored for oil which was, you know, originally, you know, if the oil was near the surface that was easy but if it was down under the ground you had to find ways of how do you know where it is and how far it is sure you literally were drilling you know it was like trying to pan for gold you were drilling all over the place to try to get oil sure and one of the things and this was the problem they had for uh of the albertans in uh the turner valley they went down to what uh we call the Cretaceous period, you know, when the dinosaurs were.

53:26But you had to literally go down even deeper into the ground in what's known as the Devonian era, geologically, paleontologically speaking, in order to really find oil. What you found at the top was the gas, because in a sense the gas was sort of floating on the top of the oil. And so you could drill down enough to get the gas, but you didn't, you had to go much deeper in order to get the oil up. And it wasn't until after the, around the time of the second world war, right afterwards, they said, let's take a chance. Let's take a chance on drilling even more deeply than we have ever before. Sure.

54:07Um, and you, you commented just a second ago, um, but I want to come on this. Um, you talk about how stable the fifties and I think the sixties were in the industry compared to everything that kind of happened prior uh yes yeah because uh well i i it was stable in the sense of what made it stable was that the big oil companies that had emerged out of the 30s and 40s were let's just say they formed a if you want to call the refiners and marketers cartel marketing cartel back in the 1920s and 30s, companies like Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, what became BP, and all, and the smaller ones, the Texas companies, and so forth, they were in furious competition.

55:06Who was going to get to the, who was going to get onto the market first? Who was going to get find new oil and so forth but they learn from the uh experience of course that if you get too much oil all of a sudden the problem is how do you how do you keep the uh you know the output down so you keep the profits up and so that was where you had the oil refiners cartel that was formed at that's Nakari in 1927, was really that experience after the Second World War that made for a stable price regime, a stable oil price regime, because the oil refiners cartel, it had all the problems of cartels because there was always somebody trying to take advantage of it.

55:58But at least up until the 1960s, they were able to keep a kind of control, even though at the time there were all kinds of new oil sources coming on stream. The Saudi Arabian oil, of course, comes out in the 1940s. And in normal circumstances, that might have led to a huge, you know, collapse and, you know, increase in production and collapse in prices. But because the refiner's cartel were able to keep on good terms, I mean, they literally bribed the Shah of Iran and the king of Saudi Arabia. We'll give you lots of money. But we want you to cooperate with us in holding production down so that we can maintain stability in the prices.

56:50Sure. Bitumen, or what we now know as heavy oil, really got going with Sincrude. And you tell a lot about the history. I thought like the little interesting tidbit was when they're like, hey, how do we mine this stuff? They're like, let's put a nuclear bomb down there. I mean, that was just like crazy to me. But again, they wanted to loosen up this to mine it. So, you know, on some level, they wanted to be able to do that as big as they could. Obviously, we had nuclear warheads at the time. Obviously, mining is a small business, you know, nowadays in Canada. And it's really the SAG-D process, which also you talk about steam cyclicality, which was another process used prior to SAG-D.

57:30And SAG-D was obviously started by Imperial Oil. But let me – I need to correct you a little bit there. the the first tar sands oil as you say the bitumen which had which was kind of mined out by Sun Oil which is now Sun Core and then by the Syncrude Consortium of which Imperial was probably the largest part they were mining operations what made them different was the way they went about it Sun Oil So, you know, the bitumen is below the surface. So it has a huge overburden of earth. Sure. You have to get to the bitumen. You have to get the earth off. And that was actually why some idiot decided an atomic bomb would be great because he would blow all the topsoil off and all the bitumen would be left.

58:34It's the ultimate frack, if you will. In those days, who cared or who knew? But anyway, the mining part was both Sun Oil and Sincru did use large-scale mining. And yes, Imperial went a different route in the 1970s, I guess, and 80s when they used the Sag-D process. And they literally was sort of like the fracking in the gas business. You would pump water down into one level in order to force the oil, the tar sands oil, bitumen, to the surface. And then you could scrape it off and take it away. And that way it wasn't successful. I mean, there's no question about it. And in many ways it was much less, what shall I say, abusive of the environment.

59:33Sure. Though I don't think all the birds that would drown in the toxic ponds would agree with that. But the thing is that when the imperial went back into the tar sands in the early 2000s and they set up the curl mine, And that was the mining technique they're using. It's very similar to the one that Syncrude was using back in the 70s. Yes, they could have done the underground process, but I think, well, you might say they were in a hurry because the price of oil was high and they wanted to exploit that. But they did do something interesting, and I was just actually reading about this recently.

1:00:18It wasn't in my book because at the time the Curl mine hadn't really gotten underway. they've they have used a huge amount of automation they literally have robots mining mining the tar sands at the curl mine the things that people had to do you know be are there big those big huge shovels they had and the huge trucks they had carrying the uh you know the the bitumen to processing that it's all being done by robots literally in the Curl mine. And I think that that's a, to me, that's a really interesting thing because one of the big criticisms that people make of Canadian businesses, they're not very, what's the word, technologically, they don't take advantage of the technology to reduce their costs, their production costs, which is one of the reasons why they're less competitive.

1:01:20of other companies. But Imperial is an example of a company that said, all right, we're going to open a mind. We're going to do it the conventional way, but we're going to use a lot more AI, a lot more mechanization than they had in the past. No, they couldn't have done it back in the 70s. Sure. Hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on this show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 in investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management.

1:01:56Smead Capital Management understands how frustrating and illogical the stock market can be. If you're searching for funds with a proven track record, give the Smead funds a look. Or better yet, reach out at SmeadCap.com. And don't forget to mention, you're a fan of the podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risks, including loss of principle. Please refer to the prospectus for important information about the investment company including objectives risks charges and expenses read and consider it carefully before investing smeed funds distributed by smeed funds distributors llc not affiliated do you think it's cantankerous obviously you got this border that it seems to be a recurring issue throughout the tariff discussion of the last i don't know say 80 years let's just call it And then you have Canadian politics standalone.

1:02:47I think there's two big areas that you talk about in your book, the depreciation expense, which ends up being coming, this like recurring issue. Depreciation expense used to be the primary dialogue. Now it's like emission standards are kind of lumped in together as the political football, if you will, right? But they're ultimately the same thing. They're a cost or a burden depending on the tax or the fine or whatever. And then the second part is the government saying, hey, we don't like how consolidated you're becoming. So we're going to compete. So like in the 1970s, the Canadian government sets up Petro Canada as this way of like, hey, we're going to sell cheaper gasoline to Canadians.

1:03:22And it seems to be like I have this weird sound in my ears going on all the time where I hear this Trudeau name being thrown around and they've tended to do some pretty perverse stuff in the industry. Yeah, well, it's, yeah, I would say that I, you know, I would tell you, say to you, and And I know Albertans in general would probably agree. I'm not from Alberta, but they would say that Trudeau father and son were the worst. I never had. And the thing is that it comes partly out of the fact that I now insult the people in Quebec, too, because they come from a kind of French mercantilist philosophy in which government should always play a role directly in creation of wealth, not leave it to private enterprise.

1:04:18Sure. And so the idea that you have these big private companies that are foreign-owned, many of them in Canada, but, you know, yes, it's all very well. oh, they're creating the wealth and they're paying the taxes and all the rest. But we think that that's not enough control. I mean, if they chose to pick up and leave or if they chose to threaten to, you know, raise prices, and what are you going to do about it kind of thing? So that's where Petro-Canada sort of came from. Although, you see, when Petro-Canada was set up, it was right after in the 1960s, And there was this great excitement about the oil off the Alaska coast and so forth.

1:05:07Yeah, Prudhoe Bay. Yeah, Prudhoe Bay and how this was going to be so great. And so what Trudeau and the liberals came up with was this idea, well, we don't want to just let the, you know, the old companies, Imperial Oil and Gulf and Texaco and so forth, come in and expropriate that and, you know, get all the wealth. And it's going to cost a lot. So we as the government will go in there and do the original work, and then eventually when it's become profitable enough, then we'll sell it to the private companies. But in fact, what they did from the beginning was try to set up an integrated oil company with Petro Canada to compete with the majors.

1:05:58And that just enraged, of course, companies like Imperial Oil and Shell and so forth. They said, you know, you said you were going to do frontier, frontier exploration and all this sort of thing. But in fact, what you're doing is you're buying up companies. They brought up a French company. I can't remember the name now, which had a chain of gas stations and stuff. And they integrated that into Petro Canada. Yeah. A whole nother corporate history that could go alongside that is we're a shareholder in alimentation coups tard. And what we've learned in the history of distribution is that obviously people like that run distribution locations a lot better than the oil companies do or the refineries do for that matter.

1:06:43So I was going to ask you – so this is kind of – I have two kind of bigger picture questions, and these aren't necessarily in your book, but I think you'd have a particular take on these. The paradigm I use for kind of giving a framework around the oil industry in the long run – you touched on this somewhat earlier. you mentioned the Canadian railways. There's two Canadian railways that dominate the market up there. That is actually my framework and paradigm, my economic paradigm, if you will, for thinking about where we're going in the oil business. So I tell people that I think there's gonna be three Canadian oil companies that dominate the oil and gas business in say 15 or 20 years, okay?

1:07:21Just like we're watching Union Pacific possibly go after CSX in America right now, which would leave us with two, major railways here in America. And so if I think that those paradigms, capital intensive industry has cyclicality, needs major investment, those kind of fall in line with the oil business. So I think that's where we're going. Would you say that the railroad business is a good model to think about? Because again, you need rationality on pricing, or is that a bad economic paradigm to frame the oil business with in Canada, let's just say? Well, that's a good question. let's put it this way railways have a an established role of transportation you know once you've got the royal bed in place and the rolling stock and all the rest it just becomes a kind of well who's going to be better and more efficient at running it sure in the oil business it's it's sort of uh it's kind of depends depends on how whether you're lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time and you know be able to exploit opportunities and and this has been true in the oil business all along you will have entrepreneurs i mean j paul getty would be an example back in the 60s sure that that would go out and you know this was in the time when the big refiners cartel the the seven sisters ran everything yeah but he was able to come in and he you know broke into that uh that big car he didn't actually break into the cartel he just defied them and it's that kind of thing that you know it's serendipity if you will the the ability to take advantage of an opportunity uh that i think makes it uh a much more potentially dynamic kind of situation railways you you know what they're going to do you if they're better at the than the other side or eventually or it makes more sense for them to you know to consolidate in order to cut costs yeah that makes sense and in a way the big oil companies have tried to do that that's why they formed the refiners cartel sure sure i agree there's always going to be somebody and in a company well another example mining is another one you know you have uh you I was actually looking at the gold industry, gold mining.

1:09:46Companies like Barrick Gold, for example, are huge. They have investments all over the world, although sometimes they make a mistake. I think they had a big investment in some African country, and they just had a revolution, and the new president just said, I'm going to close down all the gold mines that belong to foreigners. so uh but uh there's another one it's just i think it's called new gold or something like that and these guys i don't know i they've got a very few uh mines spare compared to a company like barrack or you know el dorado or whatever but their their stock has taken off because it's almost like going back to the good old days the you know the gold rush they're the guys who got there first, you know, on Panda Gold.

1:10:38Sure. The other kind of bigger picture question I wanted to ask you was, and I'll give you my two cents on this, and I'll probably look more foolish than you will, but can you ever see a point in the future where Imperial is not controlled or majority owned by ExxonMobil? What's your opinion? Well, so here's, I'll give be my opinion. I think I can see where it's not. And if I use your book as my key to understand how that could come to pass, it will only transpire through Canadian politics. That's it. That's the only way it happens. And I could see where a, you know, a very charismatic politician comes about and says, you know, in the scale business of oil, like if we get down to fewer players like we will continually, I think, will do, they will say, why does it make sense to have an American business so onerously controlling such a Canadian history and Canadian industry?

1:11:42And I could see that being, but where it would come about is through the lobbying of a Canadian owner who says, hey, I might want to be the controlling shareholder there. I well I would say maybe I mean in a sense that's what Trudeau was trying to do in the 70s was create Petro Canada as a company that would displace not just imperial oil but all the big oil companies in Canada sure and I mean well look at Russia there's an example for you the The, you know, Putin comes along and he rounds up all the oligarchs who took over the oil industry there and some of them get thrown in jail and some of them been sent into exile.

1:12:32And now it all belongs to Putin. Yeah. By the way, there's some oil executives that I could send off into exile. The companies would do a lot better, to be honest. So maybe there's some truth to that rumor. let's see I want to hit a couple topics that we didn't talk about but I just got to throw out there's breadcrumbs for our listeners Graham so we didn't we didn't you know we touched quickly at Prudhoe Bay other things we didn't talk about the greater Canadian oil sands which ends up becoming part of Suncor Suncor being part of the old Sun Oil we didn't talk about interprovincial pipeline now what we know is Enbridge which was in your book we also don't talk about Esso which was a great.

1:13:12You talked about the SO brand coming across. You talked about a tiger in your tank, which I remember as a kid here in the United States of America. You talked about sponsoring hockey night in Canada. I mean, there was just so many good pieces to this book. So I kind of want to open it up to you since we're late. Is there something in this history that you found so peculiar or fun that you'd really want to share with our listeners or something that's outside the book that you never did talk about? Well, I don't, I can't think of things right off the bat. I, Jesus, I sound like that woman who ran for president last year.

1:13:48I can't think of a thing. Yeah. Well, because there's just so many good things. I mean, like when you're explaining hockey night in Canada, I just thought, this is incredible that Imperial was the brand of hockey night. And given growing up in the United States, I would never know that. But the tiger in your tank, for example, like I remember as a kid, you would get, they They would give you to put around the opening of the gas can. You could put a tiger tail and cars would have tiger tails hanging out of their gas cap. Yeah. I, that was interesting because those were, those were the American company.

1:14:23It was the standard people that invented the tiger, of course. No, I didn't come to think of it. They got it from some British company. There was some British oil company that came up with the tiger. But the tiger, this is the thing that's interesting. I forget which one it was. It wasn't BP, but it was one of them. The tiger that they featured in their ads was a big, scary tiger. And it wasn't a big hit. When it got to the U.S., they said, oh, we're going to make a friendly tiger. You know, he's a cartoon character. And that was very successful. So it all matters. It all depends on how you design your brand.

1:15:08My guess is as we're in the Trump era, people would much rather have a fierce, dangerous tiger than a tiger. Yep. Yep. I agree. Graham, your book reminds me that Imperial is obviously controlled by Exxon Mobile as it has been throughout its history, including today. But I will say this, the asset base that is more focused than any other point looking back, as I think about this very broad aperture of history that they dealt with, the politics may be the ultimate decider of whether this will stay the status quo. The esprit de corps of Canada may be different as the fortunes the oil business moves forward.

1:15:48If you enjoy this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to a book with legs, give us a review, tell others about the authors like Graham Taylor that we get the opportunity to share the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send your suggestions to us on X. Our handle is at SmeadCap. Thank you for joining us for A Book With Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode. Thank you for listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast brought to you by Smead Capital Management.

1:16:23The material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice. You can learn more about Smead Capital Management and its products at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.