Episode Details

Gasoline creeps past four bucks and everyone reaches for the same villain, but the real story lives in the refining margin, not the gas station down the street. Arjun Murti of Veriten joins Mark Meyer for a holiday-weekend conversation on why big oil doesn't set your pump price, how refining flipped from the worst business in energy to the best, what California's shrinking refinery count really signals, and the Lee Raymond mindset that still shapes how smart operators ride the cycle.

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00:00 Welcome and Arjun's background
02:55 Remembering Lee Raymond
10:09 Trump, gas prices, and the price gouging myth
18:17 When energy policy actually got it right
24:09 How refining went from worst business to best
28:21 Barriers to entry and the safety tightrope
32:47 California's refining wall
36:01 The Jones Act and shipbuilding
38:09 Environmental policy vs climate crisis
43:22 Ethanol, RINs, and ag politics
46:35 Capitalism, shale, and the LNG boom
49:45 What comes next for the upstream
53:40 Oil prices and the Big Tech double standard
57:48 Adapting to 2026 and the road ahead

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