Big Digital Energy

0:00 Go. Hello, collide. And in another colossal technological achievement, we're back on the air live. Hey, Jacob, one time, can we just like have this ready to go 15 minutes beforehand? The

0:13 stress is getting to me. It's Halloween. It was the nerd trick instead of tree. See, there you go. Fair enough. Fair enough. That squared away. Kirk, how's Halloween on the East Coast? You

0:26 know, I haven't gotten out of my house yet, but I am going to a government building straight after this to get a Massachusetts

0:36 driver's license. So I'll let you know. I bet everyone sounds like a real haunted house. I have never been, I have never been more disappointed in you in my entire life, a Massachusetts driver's

0:50 license. I know. I haven't even changed mind So any seticle to everything that we know and who I am, but we're doing it.

1:01 All right, right. Well, hold on, will you actually take a picture of Holly taking her picture to get the mass to since driver's license and send that to me because he's not doing it. I'm not

1:15 going to be expired and I can't get back to Texas. So I'm like,

1:20 I'm just sort of trying to play the game. I need it. Okay, there's a chooses driver's license to get a renewed Texas license. So what? Okay, I feel much better about the world knowing Holly is

1:34 not part of this fucking shut down again. If she had to take that picture would be an epic scale. Oh, yeah. It would be Tom delay getting arrested Donald Trump getting arrested level photos. I

1:47 need to get her on this. I need to get her on watching us live and she'd calm it in. But absolutely. Does everyone have the link?

1:58 Wow, there's like

2:00 28, 000 people listening, that's amazing.

2:04 Exactly, now in a moment I never thought would happen and we'll rank this as number one,

2:18 Tuesday and 10 being never in my life, me going out with like Demi Moore or something, something that will never happen. This is an 11, this is an 11.

2:36 I do like the fact the way you said that is you thought I have a shot to go out with Demi Moore. But Trump, Trump rated his talks with she is a 12 out of 10. I think this is an 11, are you gonna

2:47 go with 12? I'm gonna go with 13. 13, yeah. Okay, do you know that Sally Yates, my dear sweet mother. It's Halloween. There you go my dear sweet mother. went into labor with me on Friday,

2:59 September 13th. She was in labor for exactly 13 hours. And do you know what room in the hospital she was in? 1333. No, she was in room 13. Like the O'Baleard College of Medicine. Do you

3:12 remember the monsters old address? No, I don't. 1313 mockingbird land. Oh, I love it. All right, Mark, kick us off with this monumental moment. And I'm gonna try not to cry. I'm so happy.

3:24 We're talking about Billy Boomerang Oh, of course. So I was reading through or rereading Bill Gates's blog post from earlier this week, where he's basically said emissions are no longer the

3:38 priority and we need to shift funding to other things that are human centric. In fact, I think he used the term improving human lives. Maybe he didn't want copyright violation of Liberty Energy's

3:52 bettering human lives but at least at the summary level that. it sounded like there are a lot of parallels and maybe he's been talking to the secretary, but this one kind of dropped like a bomb on

4:12 the landscape ahead of COP 30, which is shortly to take place in Brazil. I know, by the way, he's not going to be in attendance. So basically saying that, you know, all the stuff we told you

4:25 about catastrophic and cataclysmic effects of climate change and the relative near to mid-term, that's not as important right now is making sure that we do the things that help people get more

4:40 resilient and improve their standard of living, healthcare, vaccinations, et cetera. Wow. Yeah, Billy Boomerang. Or as I used to call it when we were talking about, You know, the restarts of

4:54 coal and nuclear, uh, the 180s. He's now the chairman of the 180 Club. Well, Alex Epstein-Gates. When he finally realized that you can't make money off the poor, he pivoted. I mean, I'm not

5:13 to make fun of the poor because it says in our great Bible, the poor will always be among us. And I might be one of those some days. I'm not counting myself out of that, but no one cares about the

5:26 poor if they can't profit from them.

5:30 So there I go, Bill. The cynic would say, Follow the money. And there has been a lot of money in 2015, since 2015 in the Paris Accords. But now, as we've seen the real inflection and the

5:46 projections of where AI goes and hand in hand with that is, I need all the reliable abundance. an affordable energy that I can get to win this race. And so I might characterize it as a pivot of

6:05 opportunity.

6:07 And you know, there's something - Let me give you another way to look at this though.

6:12 Now that the Epstein Island thing is kind of done with, he was hiding amongst

6:20 the client, the climate people because no one wants to rat out another climate person I mean, he was protected. Now that that thing's over, he's like, let's move on to profit. That's, he's not

6:32 a boomerang. He's just, what does it see us Lewis said and mere Christianity? Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. I mean, Bill Gates has neither integrity

6:48 and clearly he's not gonna apologize or admit wrong, but he knew it, that that's what happened when billionaires. you know, try to be the central planner. They, the next, you know, shiny,

7:00 bright object comes around and they pivot quicker than, you know, Chuck Yates' girlfriend.

7:10 The one thing I think is very underappreciated about Bill Gates and it's a little ironic that I'm using the term appreciated. If you look at the rise of Microsoft, particularly the early days when

7:27 he was in charge, it was not brilliant technology. I mean, say what you want about Elon Musk, shooting rockets into space, Tesla, it's brilliant technology. I mean, and the engineering is

7:44 amazing. Microsoft was always the shittiest operating system. It was a ruthless, set of contracts he negotiated, I wrote a paper back in business school saying that Bill Gates was not a

8:00 technologist, he was the world's greatest lawyer because it was the hooking IBM into being the exclusive operating system and more thinking through those business terms. And I mean, he was ruthless

8:16 with Paul Allen, that was his 5050 partner. And at some point, he renegotiated at 6139. I mean, and this makes sense because his dad was the biggest corporate lawyer in Seattle. So he learned

8:31 that at the dining room table. And that is what's core to Bill Gates. There's a great podcast called Acquired and they break down Microsoft. Basically, these guys are amazing. I don't know if

8:45 they're Silicon Valley guys and they break down companies like Hermes was an amazing one, but they break down Microsoft and they go through all the sort of key moments, but if you have nothing

8:56 better to do, download a acquired podcast. But hey, guys, we have our first question. All right. Well, nominal oil is up 37 since 2015. But after adjusting for inflation, using CPI through

9:14 September 2025, the real price is slightly lower than 2015. Is this from, quote, general inflation, in quote, or market movement?

9:27 That was definitely a mark question.

9:31 Well, I would first say that, and maybe it's dated from my last reference point is too dated, but that holds true for 20 years ago And I guess the context of this question is

9:48 General inflation or market movement?

9:52 Market movement in terms of what? Help me interpret that, Chuck. I'm not sure the, at the end of the day, I think general inflation plays into the oil field in terms of cost of goods like you

10:10 need. Yeah, input costs, you need steel for pipe and all the wages and et cetera But ultimately, the price of oil is supply and demand on any given day. And we have just been so good on the

10:25 supply side. This was interesting. We did a mini AI conference, Friday, Wednesday afternoon here. And one of the speakers actually showed the projections. He joined the industry in 2003, and I

10:44 think we're at 55. 4 million barrels a day in the United States. He showed the forecast for 2025, and I think it was like 41 million barrels a day or 45 something like that. And we're actually at

10:58 13 seven or wherever we are today. And one, he was pointing out just how wrong and we've always been talking about peak oil, et cetera. But two, the magnitude of that, I'm amazed that we're even

11:13 at50 oil, given the supply side

11:18 we've added. Yeah, and it's somewhat similar to what happened in the mid '80s, where you had technological underpinnings. Nevermind, the fact that I think world demand in 1986 was

11:33 66 million barrels a day and OPEC spare capacity was at 14 million barrels a day I still marvel at a world that is. well north of 100 million barrels a day. And once we get the cuts restored,

11:51 organic spare capacity, if you will, is measured in the low single digit millions. And that margin, I think, speaks to the markets' confidence in how nimble it's been, particularly from the

12:07 supply side. And you have, I saw someone, somewhat critical of Ryan Lance's comments that energy intelligence about, we're gonna see plateauing and declining, just look at inventories. And it

12:25 was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek, well, you're applying a 1990 framework. No one cares about inventories. And if you look at where inventories are still, there's still this raging, where's the

12:37 glut, where's the glut, where's the glut? Well, it's on the water, it's gonna show up soon. Well, here we are almost in November, November tomorrow.

12:44 So the, I guess the market's predictive and interpretive dynamics as to what's going on fundamentally with supply and demand have changed a little bit at the margin because of technology, because of,

12:58 you know, supply systems, just in time inventory, if there is such a thing. But it all does come back down to, I think, a higher confidence in supply and the responsiveness of supply, if that

13:13 makes sense And I think a big demonstrator of that is what we've done in the US. on shore for the last 15 years. Yeah. You know, one of the interesting things, Kirk, that because Mark had to sit

13:26 through this at the conference, but one of the stories I told is back in 2018, we were raising energy fund eight and that was all the rage Tesla is gonna put. uh, ice vehicles out of a commission

13:44 within 10 years. And so I got up, I was given a speech at various conferences with LPs where I'd get up there and I'd go, Hey, let me read some headlines from the New York Times and I'd go, you

13:57 know, electric vehicles are sexy, electric vehicles, all the rage, you know, blah, blah, blah, all these, you know, fawning headlines about electric vehicles. And then I got up there and I

14:08 did my whole speech and I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's like, we have 300 cars in America right now. Do you know how many of those cars are going to be on the road in 10 years? All of

14:20 them. We build really good cars today. No one gets rid of a car just because you trade your car in to go get a Tesla. Somebody else is driving that car. They even wind up in in Latin America and I

14:34 walked through all that and I also went you know we sell

14:40 I forget what it was, seven million cars a year. Even if half of them go to

14:48 electric vehicles, that's still adding three and a half million cars a year.

14:55 And then I went through what that meant for oil demand. I also went through what, there's a lot of plastic in an electric vehicle. There's a lot of diesel that needs to, there's a lot of diesel

15:09 that

15:13 needs to run the mining equipment to get those rare earth minerals so that you can do it. And I walked through all of that and basically came away and said, if you think oil's going away in 10 years,

15:24 you're just stupid. And I get my kind of like polite applause and I take two steps away from the mic. And then I come back and I say, oh, by the way, I forgot to tell y'all those headlines from

15:35 the New York Times from 1916, 1917, and 1980. This has been around for a hundred years. Yeah, and I'm just tying it back to a little

15:49 comparison here, but

15:53 I've just looked up like I have. I'm doing a video on this. It's since 1899 this golf course on the Antucket. We're doing it. I'm kind of doing a little documentary video It's called Skinner's,

16:07 but Scott's a golf, but back over 100 years ago. It was 75 cents to play around.

16:17 And so I'm like, okay, today it's around75. So if you, if you come, the compounded annual growth rates, a

16:25 little bit under 5.

16:28 But if I look at oil prices from 1925 when they started tracking them to today, they were about160, whatever, a dollar something, 168

16:38 per barrel today. whatever, 60. But that's a compounded annual growth rate of three and a half percent. So it's actually quite, I mean, oil is the most, not, I mean, electricity is number one,

16:53 but oil is not one of the most volatile commodities in the world, but it's interesting if you just look at the fuel that fuels all of our lives, it's not growing in price all that much. It's

17:06 interesting Now, I'm gonna have some experts live right in right now telling me how much I'm an idiot I am, but I equate everything to golf around, so, 'cause I spend a lot of time playing it.

17:18 Just FYI, so what say you guys? The, I always liked Matt Simmons' shtick about how he'd talk about the price of oil compared to a bottle of Evian water. or a Starbucks coffee or a coffee and

17:36 always talked about the utility gained and and I forget with I forget what that math was but you know back then maybe coffee was two dollars to 50 or something and he'd equate it to a barrel and he'd

17:49 say you know which one do you truly want to have

17:54 and you can't have one without the other exactly can't have the coffee without some derivative of oh oh by the way kirk this is big news so we're gonna break this right now on uh on bd it's it's very

18:08 important mark mark knows this but the old man coffee group that uh i have coffee with every morning before i come into work and marx joined multiple times you know we got congressman troy knells joe

18:23 keith allen you know all the all jake up all the all the gang. They were asked. to leave Joseph's coffee because we were too loud and now we meet at Larry's Mexican restaurant every morning. Well,

18:37 I mean, that's absolutely should be at Larry's. I don't know if you're thinking going to a coffee shop. Well, and this is interesting. It's an institution. There's been a little bit of a divide

18:52 because Vlad and Neil and Johanna still go to Joseph's coffee So I'm not seeing Vlad as much as I used to. So hey, Vlad, I miss you. Drop by Larry's. Drop by Larry's.

19:07 But let me give some perspective here. I mean, the coffee shop versus the Mexican food restaurant, like just think about, have you ever thought about starting a coffee shop? I mean, it's

19:20 basically the bohemian former hippie that wants to be paid to sit around and opine about. the virtue of man or woman for that matter. The Mexican restaurant is somebody that's working their ass off

19:37 to feed the family. I just see the culture being so different. I love, you know, pulling out that a coffee shop and wasting time and acting like I'm working, but the Mexican rude restaurant

19:50 represents man, good old oil and gas. We're gonna just make things happen The coffee shop sort of represents Bill Gates' old position on climate. So

20:02 to your point, Kirk, I will say this, I'm way more caffeinated in the morning when I show up at Collide, 'cause the waiter is filling up your coffee cup constantly at Larry's Mexican restaurant.

20:15 Oh, I'm sure the coffee shop - Where at the coffee shop, yeah, where at the coffee shop, you gotta walk up, you gotta get another cup of coffee, pay for it, so yeah. You're right, I just

20:25 changed. It's a tough job, but when I'm having Mexican food, there's nothing better than just shitty coffee. And I bet the coffee out on the rigs is shittier. Yeah, and I do, you know, we've

20:38 got good pastry options at Joseph's coffee shop, but I do like the ability to get a breakfast taco if I need it. Yeah, I was gonna say you've traded sausage, gloss cheese, for a lot of Teresa.

20:49 Yeah, Teresa, an egg and cheese taco So, and if I'm feeling no carbs, I can just get scrambled eggs. Well, let's move over to soybeans, boys. Now that we're talking about coffee shops. What's

21:01 going on in the US - China trade talk in South Korea?

21:06 Yeah, this was a first and six year direct meeting between Trump and President Xi of China. Part of,

21:17 call it a sideline event going on around, in and around APAC, Trump's visited. countries on his Asian swing. I think he's been over there for five days, started in Malaysia, Japan, and then he

21:30 flew to Busan, South Korea, where they met in some building on a military base. And the FT piece that I read suggested that it was very different because there weren't the bands, the pomp and

21:46 circumstance, and all of that. But the meeting went on for 90 minutes and really characterized, I think, somewhat differently in terms of enthusiasm, but where I alluded to earlier, Trump rated

21:60 the talks in the progress as a 13 out of 10. 12 out of 10. Go out of 10. You're at 13. I'm at 13. You're out hyping Trump. Never did I think I would see that day. Yeah.

22:15 He held it as a quote unquote, amazing result. I did note that there wasn't a very in front of amazing.

22:24 And she said, you know, his characterization is quote, unquote, steady sailing ahead.

22:31 But the bottom line is, and these things take in the typical timeline, take years to negotiate, you know, kind of a fundamental rework of trade agreements. But what became evident is, you know,

22:44 what I think what we were after primarily was getting the Chinese to

22:55 open the vice on critical minerals. You know, they had the export restrictions and whether raw or processed, we've got huge, intractable dependency on China for components that go into a lot of,

23:09 a lot of things On the flip side,

23:13 China got a relaxation on some precursors to fentanyl in terms of imports. But the big one is, at least the way I read it is, they're now permitted to talk to Jensen Wang, yeah, within video. I

23:30 don't think the national security relevance or criticality of the world's best chips has gone away. And maybe there are, well, you can shop over here and the soon to expire Ben, but we're gonna

23:46 hold back the best of the best 'cause I don't think we've

23:52 conceded our commitment

23:58 all out effort to when, when what has become

24:04 the most important thing in terms of competition between the US and China is the AI race.

24:12 I mean, I think that's a mistake, obviously It's like giving your opponent the keys to your golf cart while you're still playing, I don't, You think, China, and who knows the loyalties of Nvidia,

24:27 but usually the loyalties of big companies is whoever's gonna pay me the most money. That was my experience running commodity trade, or actually curing largest commodities when I was working for

24:40 Michael Dell. I mean, we'd sell to the highest bidder, period into story. I mean, what are

24:44 we doing here?

24:49 And by the way, soybeans are like the participation trophy of

24:56 trade deals. No one cares about soybeans. No one cares. And the fentanyl assertions. I mean, what are we doing? That was, well, we'll just

25:09 keep bombing the worst of it in the cartel boats. Yeah, no, I do think you can say a lot You know, Trump, he's a real estate broker, so he hypes everything, you know, oh, this is the greatest

25:25 schools and this neighborhood has great schools. This is the greatest house on the street, blah, blah, blah. I get all that. I do truly believe, given the experience with his brother, that

25:37 fentanyl matters to Trump. And I really do think he will push there potentially further than I would on things And so, if he

25:50 comes away with China helping on fentanyl,

25:56 he's going to consider that a big huge win, even if maybe others are

26:04 worried about the commercial aspects of the rest of the trade deal. Yeah. I do think that's real You have to have these precursors because fentanyl has obviously a very important application. in

26:20 the medical community, and if this reduces the illicit flow of the precursors or fentanyl that have been contaminating all kinds of other illicit drugs, and it's a first-order impact of maybe

26:37 lessening some of that threat, that's a win, but it seems to me that the biggest threat, I think, they had an extreme amount of leverage in the rare earths, for sure, just given the timelines

26:56 required for us to find andor build our own complete supply chain capability. We're going to be leaning heavy on Australia. It's

27:08 not just digital technology, it's a lot of important military applications, too, that you've got to have this stuff, yeah. I mean, I'll give it to you here, boys. I have to go and I will

27:20 report back on my driver's license fiasco. This is my second attempt. They did not. You shoot some video. Shoot some video of this. Remember a camera landscape so that fits with the 16 by nine?

27:38 Yeah, maybe Holly could come along and record for us. To support Holly and as Milton Friedman would say the tariffs are taxes on your own people. But in my perspective, if you look at this, we

27:52 got soybeans. The Chinese got Nvidia access. It's like trading a sandwich for Ferrari because you were hungry. I mean, we are again, man, it's not 40 chess 'cause I hate that. But the Chinese

28:08 are playing chess and we're playing checkers, boys. I'll see you in neither prison or I'll take some video. Thank you, boys. Thanks, man. Peace out. I got a few more minutes if you do, Mark.

28:24 Yeah, let's touch on the other item we skipped, which is - The Rasky's. We just announced, we,

28:31 the US just announced a fresh round of oil sanctions that targeted specifically to companies, Rosneft and Luke Oil. Luke Oil is private. Rosneft is a government influencer controlled entity And

28:46 this is just kind of more of the endless parade of sanctions either coming out of the EU or the US. But, you know, this was a pretty dramatic step.

28:59 Immediately following the cancellation of what was going to be the next face-to-face meeting between Trump and Putin and Budapest. And so, one thing I looked at and going through all this that

29:14 Russian exports of petroleum. essentially account for 25 of their budget and the ability to fund it. That's dropped by 35 billion estimated year over year from 24 to 25. And we all know that that's

29:34 primarily price related. And we've long been talking about, you know, Doomburg really started it, but basically what's the best way to really put a dent in the Russian's ability to fund the war

29:48 machine. And that isn't sanctions, which don't work. That is, you know, principally don't work. And that is to flood the market, because the last thing the Russians want is lower prices. And

30:03 that's what they've gotten. And potentially lower from here for an untenable period of time relative to their ability to continue to, you know, to push aggressively on the Ukraine offensive. So

30:19 three things here on this point. One, we in the West sit there and view Putin as this autocrat who just rules with an iron fist. He's going into a back alley having a fight every day to keep his

30:37 job. That's something that I think is underappreciated by the West, that he's got forces within Russia that he has to deal with on a daily basis to remain in that seat. So that's kind of one.

30:53 Number two, I underestimated my entire career, particularly in the Shell Revolution, underestimated Russia's ability to produce oil. I mean, they were just always surprisingly resilient in their

31:09 ability to grow oil production And I think kind of likewise. I am under appreciating their ability to have an economy in

31:24 the face of all these sanctions. I saw an expert one time on Fox News, and I wish I remember her name 'cause she sounded very smart and thoughtful. She said, Putin is prepared for this day, and

31:36 he has

31:39 in effect sanctioned proofed his economy so that he has more run room than we appreciate that he has.

31:47 And then the third thing I was gonna say that we need to be thinking about, I've totally blanked

31:59 on it. So it was Russians, I always underestimated them. Putin's in a, oh, the third thing that I think bears saying here is Marco Rubio has been on a. Babe Ruth like run as Secretary of State

32:20 for all the, you know, dismissive little Marco talk and back when he ran for president previously, they kind of said he was lazy and wasn't out. He has done a hell of a job as Secretary of State.

32:33 You can dislike him and dislike his policies, but in terms of the conflicts being shut down, yeah, we haven't stopped Russia and Ukraine yet, but he has done a really good job. And it was

32:45 supposedly his call to say, we're not going to boot a pest. So yeah, trust in Marco on this one. Yeah, and related to this sequence of events, it was announced yesterday, late, I believe,

33:00 that luke oil sold its international assets to gun board. This was trading shop. Terms weren't announced, but

33:12 there was one source that claimed that Those assets generally were worth around12 billion. And if you think about kind of this, hurry up and sell it

33:23 framework, then maybe there was a 20 to 30 discount. Whether that was ordered by the Kremlin or something unique to luke oil, don't know, but there is an interesting coincidence here that luke oil

33:40 has decided to shed, you know, a pretty meaningful part of its portfolio. Swiss trading firms rarely buy things without a discount has been my experience. And they rarely tell you anything about

33:57 it. Exactly, exactly. So

34:02 let's, we let Kirk off the hook since he's got to go get his driver's license, but with the stories today, So Bill Gates capitulating. to some degree. I mean, he still said it's a problem. We

34:15 need to focus on it, but getting rid of the doom and grim.

34:20 Russian oil sanctions, and then what else did we talk about? China trade. China trade. Give me some predictions out of that that maybe we're not thinking about today. Well, I think a year from

34:29 now, two years from now I think the most interesting one is the first thing we talked about. What is the cascade effect of Gates's massive truth bomb here? In fact, he

34:53 frames it with three tough truths about climate. Climate change is serious, but won't end civilization as number one. Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate. I think

35:05 that's the most shocking one, because what have we been talking about for the last 50 years? Right. Global warming. Degree and a half. And health and prosperity are the best defense against

35:16 climate change. And those of us on the pragmatist side don't deny that we've had some level of warming, but none of this matters until we solve for primarily prosperity. And so the kind of extreme

35:34 part of that faction that he used to be in step with, who are the key players, both political leaders, business leaders, and others, NGOs, who's going to fall a suit and over what time frame. I

35:54 had a special edition recording yesterday with Mike Umbro talking about all the things around California, particularly the offshore stuff was stable, and we talked a little bit about, you know,

36:08 Newsom's got a shortening runway. position himself for 28. And so is he going to say, okay, I'm going to quit kind of mixing,

36:23 speaking in code or being ambiguous about this, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to fall in line and become a pragmatist as, you know, the most viable candidate for 28 in the Democrat party So

36:39 that's, I think, I think the aftermath and how quickly conversions occur. I think we'll see, I actually, think we'll see quite

36:52 a few because it's a pretty good opportunity to get on the right side if you believe he's now on the right side

37:02 The

37:05 thing, I think, that we're going to be thinking about this.

37:12 in the future and the ramifications is I'm going to go ahead and say this was Prince Reneer and Grace Kelly getting married, big tech and energy. I think big tech, obviously Prince Reneer, they're

37:33 seeing the beauty of Grace Kelly, the energy and it's going to be love and it's going to last forever and it's going to be great and if you think about it like that and the ramifications of what are

37:48 going to happen, you know, John Arnold joining the meta board, things like that, I think that's what we're going to see over the future. I don't believe this is a shotgun marriage. I truly feel

38:00 like there is an appreciation in Silicon Valley for actually now what energy does and they think we're hot, now maybe I'm being Pollyanna. Well, and I think they've come to the realization that it

38:15 is an all of the above, not either or yeah, transition and that the notion of changing out the entire global energy system is misguided. Just given the

38:30 technology and the physics of how technology successfully operates, we've got to have all of the above And, you know, it became a bit of a windmill chase, no pun intended to cast this as emissions

38:51 reduction primacy net zero when you're hamstringing a lot of other things. And

38:58 I, you know, I thankfully, Bill Gates has finally made human flourishing the seeming top priority You know, the problem today. is more acute and stop trying to solve for a problem that we can

39:15 adapt to is basically what he's saying, to improve technology and resilience and all that. And we've proven that over the 150 years of plus of this industry,

39:26 that that is taken on kind of primary urgency. This is not enough money to go around to try and do this kind of radical transformation of the global energy system over what I've always characterized

39:38 as a revolutionary timescale When you think about 2030, 2035 and 2050 between where we started in 2015 with Paris. And so, you know, physics over platitudes. And it's good to have that acceptance

39:54 and acknowledgement in a more constructive alignment between the parties on either side of this whole climate debate. Well, and I think what's embedded and what Bill Gates. said whether he means it

40:11 or not. And one of the things I should have said, as I was saying, Bill's not a technologist. He was a lawyer. I mean, no smarter group of technologists on the planet than those folks at

40:25 Microsoft today. Clearly, they're building great technology. Silicon Valley in general. Yeah, Silicon Valley in general and all that

40:34 The biggest thing about the climate movement from my side was always the rules for the, but not for me. I get to have a 10, 000 square foot house and air conditioning and all that, but hey, you

40:50 folks in Africa, you need to have a solar panel that doesn't work. You can't have an electricity at night. He

40:59 talked about flourishing, but human flourishing, but also hopefully there's a recognition of it's kind of our moral. duty. I mean, to serve humanity so that we're not having people with energy

41:15 poverty. I mean, that's a shitty thing to do to people. I do think it's an ulterior, which is. It's all about his data. There's not enough money to go around to keep pushing this at full steam

41:27 ahead with net zero by 2050 and some of these technologies being pushed too far and too fast It was what you're trying to get to is commercial scale or grid scale. The only thing in Origin tweeted

41:45 about it when Zero Hedge put out a piece on this,

41:50 he alluded to the fact over his

41:54 sell side career as an equity analyst. I made a lot of well-documented wrong calls but always owned them and really the disappointment for me and this is hugely naive. is that there's not an

42:11 accountability or an acknowledgement

42:15 that this path that we've been on certainly since Paris, we've gone off on a lot of distractions that have done a lot of damage, you could argue.

42:27 Restricting finance to oil and gas finance or fossil fuel finance to African countries that sorely need it, when they're tethered to things like IMF loans, et cetera, you kind of not done as much

42:47 as you could by a pretty significant number in terms of solving problems with proven energy solutions. There are no energy poor rich countries, right, right? What's the correlation with rich

43:05 countries? I mean, we use what, 23?

43:09 barrels per capita in the US. and the poorest countries in the world use far less than a barrel. So we could have been accelerating things in that regard and funding those more immediate solutions.

43:23 And

43:25 we've done a good job in pollution mitigation globally and raising people up out of poverty, but we could have done a lot more. Plus, we could have not spent trillions on things that ultimately

43:36 were kind of a bridge to nowhere. Well,

43:40 and I want to do this. I want to pat our industry on the back because let's just be blunt. We took a lot of shit for this, a lot of a lot of jabs, and we didn't do things petty like, Hey, let's

43:54 just shut off all energy today to see what happens. Right. You know, and that would have been a very effective tool for our side. We did not do that because we were responsible enough to know that

44:05 people would die if we did that. So number Kudos to us for fighting the fight on facts, figures, and reason. I'm not saying the fight's over. Number two, I don't want to be this petty, but I'm

44:20 going to go ahead and be this petty. Remember for years it was Exxon knew about climate change and hit it? Is this admission by Bill Gates covering that the other side has figured out that human

44:36 emissions truly aren't leading to the one and a half percent degree temperature rise. Are they covering that up? Are you? Are you? I hate to be petty, but I think it's a fair question. It is a

44:51 fair question. Yeah. What have you guys figured out that you're hiding from us?

44:58 Yeah, I mean, what was the principled, the truly principled reason for the shift? was the altruistic region. Reason for the shift. I happen to believe it was opportunistic

45:12 and followed the money, granted. Maybe that wasn't the dominant factor. And I'll even go with the romantic Grace Kelly. They fell in love with Grace Kelly. Took them a while to find Grace Kelly,

45:24 but. I just think in the arms race, it is AI and chips and technology that they realize that we don't have time to wait on the scale and reliability of quote unquote clean solutions, which clean

45:39 energy and other dirty energy, I hope that distinction goes away because as we've often said, there's trade offs with every form of energy, production, transportation, transmission, so, you

45:54 know, I predict we're gonna see some, you know, some quick follow ons. I mean, our president and the current administration there, so. Spike the football He already spiked the football on, you

46:07 know, Gates admitting he was wrong. Um, and I, I have to give attribution to, uh, to my cumbro. He did, he did coin the term billy boomerang, billy boomerang. I like that. All right. Hey,

46:23 Jacob. And a first on BDE, we're going to go to a live remote. Although I don't think it's live cause we just got a video. Did we actually get a video from Kirk and can you play it? And I haven't,

46:38 you got it queued up So hold on, Kirk had to surrender his Texas driver's license. That's so fucking Massachusetts to do, by the way. He had to surrender that and we have this live report and I

46:51 have not seen this. So no two words have got me in more trouble in my life, but here goes. I'm in. Play it.

47:16 Not exactly Steven Spielberg on the cinematography, but not bad

47:23 All right. I guess he lost his Wi-Fi or was that the end of the tape? I think that's the end of the tape. I enjoyed you embedding the landman promo or preview. That was all jankton into the

47:37 landman

47:40 live yesterday, which was quite good. Absolutely Mark, what are the final thoughts? Anything good? Yeah, I

47:52 mean, it feels like any progress on

48:01 the China trade question is good news.

48:07 The devil's in

48:10 the details. Are we sacrificing our competitive advantages and what worries me most is primarily this concession that, yeah, you guys can talk to Nvidia. Although, I'm not so worried about that,

48:20 'cause if we

48:23 don't think China can get a hold of as many NVIDIA chips as they want, we're well and - Well, and way underestimate the Chinese. That and they're ultimately going to produce technology, I think

48:35 that either through copying or innovation that is - Yeah. You know, they're very laser focused on things like economic competitiveness and technology competitiveness and not so distracted by kind of

48:47 the culture work issues, climate among them that we in the West are. Yeah. And so, I kind of think too, this is finance bro, who's, you know, stayed at a holiday end last night, so I'm

49:03 playing AI guy these days. I do think that AI has gotten so good at such a level that it might be like the iPhone, that, you know, the iPhone 12. can do a lot of really, really cool stuff, and

49:23 China's gonna have the iPhone 12, even though, what are we, on 17 or 18 now? 17 now, yeah. You know, and so at the end of the day, thinking through the uses for AI and what you can do with it,

49:40 there is a subject matter expert-type level of figuring out these tools that China will be really good at. How do we go wage war? We released a virus and we did this. They're gonna be thinking that

49:58 with their iPhone 12 and be able to execute on it. So I think we're gonna have to remain vigilant on that front. But anyway, we'll get to see you, dude. Whoa, what's the Halloween plan? I got

50:14 no Halloween plan I've been traveling so much with work. I have not worked out. So when I get home tonight, I'm gonna go work out. I haven't lifted in a long time. So I'm gonna go lift, go do

50:28 stretch tomorrow. Probably a long walk in the gritty streets of Richmond tomorrow morning. I might have to try and find a time to pop into Larry's before the end of the year. There you go.

50:40 Although that's a long way from where I am right now. Anyway. Southwest has flights. Well, I'm talking about I'm on the North side of Houston now in downtown, so I was joking that you had to take

50:52 Southwest to get to Ray's. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, it was good having you in the office this week. Yeah, it's been fun. A lot. Thanks for joining. If you like this, please tell a

51:03 friend. Join us next time. We're going to try to do more of these live. I think they're fun. And if you haven't caught theLandman episode, has it been posted? Jacob, we postedLandman, right?

51:12 I'm

51:14 sure it did Yeah, so on collide in the video library, Wednesday. got on with Gates Muler, Boar on the

51:24 floor, Shale floor, and then Matt Chewy, and we kind of talked the state of being landmen today. So a lot of talk about technology, staffing. I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought the

51:36 AI thoughts, insights.

51:41 The applicability from the experts was very interesting Gates, Matt, and Boer are all really sharp dudes. And be on the lookout here, hopefully Monday. Oh, cool. We dropped the special edition.

51:57 With Umbro. With Umbro, and this whole California battle is the lightning rod issues, obviously, what we've talked about. And I've written about going on with Sable and the SYU restart. That's a,

52:12 I think, a pretty important thing to focus on outside of the Permian where we spend a lot of our time. It's got - It's not on the Permian, but it was refreshing to talk about something I think that

52:25 is maybe it hasn't flown under the radar, but it's an important story, especially with the

52:34 eminent refinery closures. I mean, they're gonna close 18 of their refining capacity. It's got an atlas shrugged vibe of, you know, shocking, John Gulp. Fix the economy, you know And as much

52:46 as we like to, you know, parody California, it is obviously still a very, very important economy in state. Largest population. Largest population. Biggest economy. The one thing that

53:05 Mike was very good at talking about was this whole kind of historical scientific perspective and related to natural seeps and the VOCs you know, he grew up there and has lived there his whole life.

53:18 And so he's got, he's got anecdotal data points from when he was a kid to now and visiting some of the coastal areas. And so this, you know, Well, I've told you that we owned part of the

53:30 La Brea tar pit field with one of our portfolio companies. And the first thing, when we bought it, first thing the CEO wanted to do was send a vacuum truck out to just pick up all the seepage on

53:43 the ground And the lawyers had a fit. You cannot vacuum that up. And he goes, why not, you know, one, we can sell it, but two, it's just good for the environment. And he goes, no, the

53:52 second you vacuum it up, people walk in and say, you caused it. This is natural seepage, we leave it alone. And that's just ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Anyway, so look forward to that here

54:04 in the next few days. Sounds good. All right, Clyde. All right, thanks everybody for joining us. Peace out.

54:11 Good luck, Kirk.