PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Our Industry Isn’t the “Bad Guy” Billie Eilish is the youngest person ever to win multiple Oscars. The first was for the theme song to the James Bond movie “No Time to Die” in 2022, and the second was this year for the song “What Was I Made For?” from the “Barbie” soundtrack. She has a caseload of Grammys to her name, which means she’s halfway to the EGOT (an EGOT is someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award, one of the most impressive feats one can achieve in the performing arts). Yet only one of her songs has ever climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song? “Bad Guy.” The track takes the point of view of someone who sees through the phony toughness of some chump who’s never named and playfully asserts her own bona fides in her ability to ruin this guy’s life. Her tone never changes, her register never rises, and her confidence feels unshakeable. The chorus, such as it is, is punctuated by a petulant “Duh,” which I learned in reading about this song, was chosen from 34 different takes of that one word. It’s a great song, and indicative of Billie Eilish’s unique style and superlative talent. I thought about Billie Eilish and “Bad Guy” for a couple of reasons. The first is that over the last several months, we have had a multitude of events where I’ve gotten to engage with our member companies and their employees, not just professionally but on a personal level as well. I’m particularly struck by the young talent entering the oil and gas industry, which bodes well for our future. Oil and gas is perpetually reinventing itself, which you can see any time you visit a drill pad or a frac site. If you had a time machine and could talk with engineers 20 years ago about how many wells you can drill from one location, how much quicker each well can be drilled, the fact that those wells are all horizontal, and the lengths of the laterals that are now so common as to be unremarkable, the jaws of those engineers would likely hit the floor. But it’s a lot like what you hear from athletes about breakthroughs — once someone finally smashes a barrier, others inevitably follow. By Rikki Hrenko-Browning President, UPA 6 UPDATE
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