Nick Fountain

But – and this is more evidence of how intricate the answers to simple questions can be –

It turns out doing anything collectively is very, very hard, especially when it has to do with money.

To hear about that, about how hard it is to keep the gang together and control how much money they get for their oil, we called up the ultimate OPEC insider, Ibrahim Almohana.

How many OPEC meetings have you been to?

Ibrahim's job for nearly four decades was advising Saudi Arabia's oil ministers.

He's been called the Saudi oil whisperer.

And part of his work was to try to move the oil market kind of on vibes by convincing oil traders and journalists to see the market the way he saw it or the way he wanted them to see it.

So if you want the price to go up, what do you do?

How do you message that?

If you want the price to go down, how do you say that?

Ibrahim keeps his tricks close to the chest.

But talking to him, I got a better understanding of why OPEC would want to control the price of oil, which listener Valerie had asked.

Now, OPEC doesn't necessarily want to keep prices high.

Too high, people might switch to more efficient cars or electric cars.

What they want to do is maximize their profits, of course, though they never really say this out loud.

What they do say is that they want to manage supply, smooth the market.

Ibrahim told me that oil, like many commodities, has these huge boom-bust cycles where the price of oil rises, companies drill more, explore more, and pump more.

And then there's too much oil and the price plummets.

And OPEC, according to Ibrahim, just wants to smooth this cycle out, make it less painful for producers and consumers.

But, of course, they want to control the price too.