I'm really happy to have you here. Do you remember that there was a gigantic oil spill in our country that happened in 2010?

It was in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Louisiana coast, and it was just apocalyptic.

You will remember these images, right? The explosion, the plumes of fire and smoke, just this massive, massive, completely out-of-control fire on board this drilling rig out there, 40 miles off the coast in Louisiana.

Eleven men died when that rig blew up. And then after it blew up and burned for a solid day, that huge oil rig, that drilling rig,

sunk to the bottom of the sea. But that was only the start of the disaster because they

couldn't stop the oil spewing out of the well that rig had been drilling. Remember,

there was literally a live feed we could all watch from the broken wellhead. You could watch the oil spewing out from this

hole in the seafloor, this hole they had drilled and then they couldn't handle it. And that oil

spewed for three months, millions of barrels of oil spewed out of that well and into the sea.

And they just had no plan for how to stop it.

You might remember they tried something called junk shots, which sounds dirty, and it was,

but different than how you're thinking about it.

The junk shot was where they literally

shot junk into the top of the well to try to clog it up with anything they could find. They used,

I'm not kidding, golf balls and pieces of plastic and pieces of old tires and knotted up hunks of rope.

They just flung them at the spewing oil well, thinking that

might stop it.

When nobody could believe that this was the big idea, that this was the level of technological

prowess, the most profitable industry on earth was bringing to bear on this ongoing disaster

they had caused and couldn't stop.

When people were like, seriously, golf balls is your idea?

Torn up bits of tire?

...