american people. on your salaries do any of you have trouble affording the gas to get to your job? it s troubling that you put profits over people and profits over our planet. bryan: frank, you have answered the question a lot this week. can you explain to people how gas prices work and whether or not the oil companies are, in fact, the reason why they are so high? sure. thanks for having me on. the way that gas prices work is fundamentally function of supply and demand. the price of crude oil is the major component that goes into the price of gasoline but there are other factors as well including labor shortage right now, a supply chain constrains, policies also matter. the biden administration has taken a restrictive policy toward the production of domestic oil and gas so that has an impact as well. bribe brian frank, the price of crude oil is the main driver of
inflation, you got the supply chain constrains and the price of gas is high. there are definitely some negatives too. i think and have thought from the beginning that the most critical aspect of this is you got to get control of the virus. and if the omicron variant is going to explode the way it seems to be exploding, then we have to absolutely have a keep our fingers crossed it is going to be mild and that this could turn more like into a flu or the cold, et cetera. if we re going to have a mass ramp up of hospitalizations, regardless of whether you have legal lockdowns or not, you re going to see people withdraw from the economy. we have seen that every time there has been a resurgence of the virus, and that could happen again now. so the recovery is tenuous. and, still, as we have battled through the past year with covid waves, we have seen something extraordinary, and there is a chart that blew my