Big Digital Energy

0:00 Welcome digital oddcatters to another episode of BDE. We're so fortunate we were able to trade Colin for Mark. Or do we trade Colin for Eric? We traded days is what we did. We traded days. Yes,

0:12 I've spent the better part of the last 10 days traversing nine states. So. So we got you. I thought I would miss yesterday. So we moved it to today and we we traded Colin for Eric Nielsen. Eric,

0:27 welcome on there. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. That a lot of time to prepare for the last two minutes. Oh, it's it's it's easy. The. Okay, so Laura and I were chatting the other day. She goes,

0:41 please explain to me why oil is at 70 some odd dollars a barrel, even though we got up a little bump yesterday. Did we do we go above 80 yesterday? We did. I don't believe so. I don't I don't

0:54 think we did either. I was practicing safe driving. I wasn't looking at my phone. Oh, good. So make it make sense, Mark. So where does Laura think it should be? I don't know. That's a good

1:07 question. It was higher or lower. Yeah. You know, I think in the context of something you had on your own version of Run of Show was this notion that US oil production is predicted to be up 600,

1:23 000 barrels a day in 2025 over 2024, which is I think a lot stronger than

1:31 most of the prognosticators. In the last couple of years, we've certainly been wrong as we've seen Rig Count do nothing but go down in the main drivers of that growth. But, you know, I think Eric

1:44 and I were talking about before we hit record, you know, I think back over a long history of at least being ancillary to watch it go out markets as an equity analyst

1:56 You still have a physical situation, global inventories that are. Pretty low, oil, crude oil is below five year lows and products are approaching that. You've got this ebb and flow, certainly,

2:09 of what's going on in the Middle East or Israel and Hamas going to come to a truce, or a ceasefire, are we going to have an escalation? Are we, you know, the other, I think element, there's

2:25 been a bit of headlines that I've seen around Libya about shutting in and resumption of production. I did see an interesting graph the other day that had Libyan long-term wall production broken down

2:37 into two time periods. One was pre-Kadafi and one was post-Kadafi, which was a smooth, mostly smooth up into the right, slightly up into the right line pre-Kadafi, and since then it's been all

2:51 over the map, you know, going from highest to zero And so we have these disruptive things going on in the. on the supply side of the equation that I think the governor to all this is what reads on

3:09 demand have been, but I look at another thing we were talking about is we're continuing or extending the string of low reinvestment rate and global supply base. Yeah, I would say it maybe slightly

3:24 differently in the sense that when I heard that number, I put a question mark by it principally because I think we've developed such better capital discipline over the last, I don't know what period

3:36 of time you want to use, but I would say the last decade, I think that has really shown itself in the industry and has in the various businesses, whether they be large integrated to the smallest

3:48 private companies tend to be much more cautious with their capital and what they're doing day to day as you move down that stack to your.

3:59 know, the opportunity set just isn't the same as it once was. So the resource tends to be a little difficult, more difficult to access and the resulting production is not what it once was. So I

4:09 always hated when management teams would walk in and say, this time it's different. You know, 'cause it's never that different, right? But are we potentially at a spot where the market is just

4:22 truly thinking US production can be turned on, you know, almost like a spigot. And that's why we're hanging out at, like you said, less than five year lows on inventory, 70 a barrel, not that

4:37 many rigs running. I mean, do they think we can just turn it on if we need oil, if Israel starts dropping bombs on Iranian oil infrastructure? Well, the chief argument of the IA. in Bloomberg

4:51 and EF. behind that 600 000, barrel a day, growth number is efficiencies in in in shale. primarily the Permian. And so we've, you know, we've had a, think a growing gap between those who

5:07 remain bullish, ie. plateaus, eminent and fairly steep declines in the Permian or right around the corner, yet the numbers keep coming in. Last year, if you remember, there was a prediction, I

5:20 think in the

5:22 350, 000 to 500, 000 barrel-a-day growth range 2023 over 2022, it ended up being, call it a million barrels a day. So how did that happen when contemporary rig count peaked 2022 of September,

5:35 know don't I, at?

5:38 And it's done nothing but drift down since then. And so there's something going on in kind of offline heard a conversation about hygrating, which I think Eric speaks to your point, is that we saw

5:53 the wave of hygrating take hold the depths of. 2020 and coming out of that. So, you know, is there more to go

6:05 in terms of noticeable efficiency and technology-driven improvements, process improvements that are going to continue to surprise us to the upside when we think, you know, we've drilled up all the

6:18 tier one acreage, for example. So I don't think anybody knows I think, you know, this organically has to play out, particularly post-consolidation of the big players who've gotten together,

6:31 Pioneer Exxon, Oxy and Crown Rock and Diamondback Endeavour. But we seem to keep finding a way to stave off that inevitable plateau turning and pivoting to decline. Well, I think that's right.

6:49 And the Crown Rock Endeavour, I think, are the ones that are most interesting to me, just principally because. They've probably been the most deliberate in terms of how they've gone about

7:02 development. They had such a longer term point of view, and now that may be brought forward in a way that we wouldn't have expected. I know I've said this stat, but I'll say it again. When you

7:14 looked at, and I'm kind of making these numbers up, what's called 2012 to 13, 13 to 14, 14 to 15,

7:24 IPs were up 30 a year. This was technology getting better, blasting things with a bigger hammer, and then you got into 17 and 18, and they were up like 18, and then 20 a year. What was

7:38 interesting though is if you took out Exxon and Chevron drilling from 17 and 18,

7:47 IPs were basically flat What you were seeing is Johnny come lately to the Permian Basin because they all started drilling horizontals. you know, five years after everyone else did. So you were

7:59 getting good land to put in there that was really leading to that IP increase. But I just can't make it make sense, since I think, 'cause I felt like in '17 and '18, we were kind of peaking. And

8:12 when we were sitting there at Cane, we were dialing back fracks. Okay what, if we save 10 on this frack job? What does it do to performance and so - And the economics, right? That's what you're

8:24 - Yeah, the economic too. Yeah, yeah And I just don't know where all this, I can't believe we're at 132 million barrels a day of production right now. And if that, I think the number of the

8:34 target for 2025 into 2025 is 139, if you add that projected growth in, which is pretty stunning. The other kind of Damoclin thing here is

8:49 what does OPEC decide on as an unwind strategy the two and a half, three million barrels a day at school. of production that's off the market. And they've got to watch demand very closely always

9:03 have.

9:06 You kind of generally hear about China weakness, but then you see pockets of at least demand anecdotes of strength that are things like last report of air miles traveled were up in the US and the

9:24 other world. Pretty substantially over 2019 pre-COVID, Europe's shown a little bit of weakness, but it kind of segues into what Exxon has as its chief message and its outlook that was just

9:44 published, its energy outlook to 2050,

9:48 relative to how the pieces and parts of the energy supply and demand. Equation come into play and a lot of that's driven by you know, just this ambient level of population growth. Yeah, so I don't

10:04 know demand has always been EP companies used to in their macro commentary used to basically not talk about demand when gas production wasn't growing if you remember EOG's

10:18 Vintage gas production chart for the US and North America. We thought we would never get out of it. And I remember Aubrey saying back in I believe it was 2012 at the IPAA

10:34 Predicting that because we did our job too well in natural gas which created this This market imbalance problem and thus collapsed prices. He said we're going to do the same thing in oil. None of us

10:46 believed him but, you know, he's pretty much been right that we the have do

10:53 monsterable improvements

11:02 and applied improvements in technology that have, by the numbers, surprised to the upside in terms of how resilient and how efficiently expandable the US production base has been. 'Cause it's wild,

11:09 so Exxon's at 100 million barrels a day

11:14 in 2050, BP's at 75 million barrels a day of demand in 2050. Let's say you, Eric. Now you're gonna be actually on the record and it's searchable by collide video, so it'll be there forever. So I

11:30 would say I'm in a major disadvantage here 'cause you guys are so on top of these issues. What I would just come back to is, everybody is trying to manage their resource to the best of their

11:40 abilities. And I think we've just become so effective and good operationally that whatever anybody thinks they can do, they generally can do it better and they do it better with reps And as some of

11:53 these resources get - you know, in the hands of people that can do them even at larger scale. I think you'll see that incremental growth as a result. But

12:06 I think everybody, these are everybody's best guesses and in the end, you know, we're always surprised one way or the other. No, the thing that I used to, until call it like six or seven years

12:21 ago, tell me what the rig rate is and you could always kind of guesstimate what US oil supply was gonna be. You had the back of the envelope type stuff you could kind of do in your head and all,

12:35 I've just been totally wrong the last six or seven years. And I guess it's part of it is we're just drilling so much faster that one rig today is one and a half rig, six or seven years ago, just on

12:50 pure speed I mean, literally just days to complete. ducks and TILs and

12:59 what acreage is being drilled, how aggressively is it being stimulated? It's quality execution. That simple correlation between red count with the lag and what production was going to do in terms

13:12 of response is all but falling apart So like I said, we've been essentially seeing a drift down in US. drilling activities since September of 2022. So I'm still in the

13:30 camp of we're up a million barrels a day, a demand a year for the rest of time. I mean, that's kind of what it always did my career. I think one year in the last take away COVID, but one year

13:43 kind of outside of COVID, we were down 800, 000. I think that was like '09 or something. OPEC's long-term outlook that I recall.

13:55 got my attention back in 2020. So it was a 25 year outlook to 2045. So around out to 2050 had the by kind of the net growth down eight and OECD and up 12 and not only CD or developing world for a

14:16 net increase of a of eight, which baseline going into COVID normal times 100 million barrels a day goes to 108 I'd probably take the over to slide over on that. And that's where I remain. I just

14:30 think that, you know, two billion people between now and 2050. And most of those in really abject energy poverty are going to be on the same path that every human being is has been on, which is

14:47 getting out of poverty or improving standard of living and

14:52 energy goes hand in hand with that. And that's really the foundation or basis of the way I read it, at least reading the executive summary of Exxon's energy outlook is that, you know, that's what

15:04 this is about. And they also said we can essentially do both, which is affect a 25 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2050 while maintaining a mid-50s of the overall global energy

15:22 contribution from oil and gas So I think it goes oil and gas or 56 total today, going down to 54, wind and solar quadruple. And there are forecasts from 3 today, combined wind and solar quadruple

15:36 from 3 to 12. And they're the biggest kind of buoyancy factor in oil and gas is industrial and commercial transportation. They've got to move a lot of stuff around if people are improving their

15:50 standard of living, they want to build bigger houses and buy more stuff. durable goods, you know, there's a lot of, well, I guess, intensity that I think is inherent in all of that. Yeah. And

16:02 I think you also have to think about the developing world that we, I think we tend to always underestimate and while it's not the issue there is not building bigger houses, it may be building a

16:13 single house, you know, for many people. But it's, I think, when you look at the numbers, they're just in terms of people There's so much larger in some respects in the developed world that the

16:24 incremental demand is consistent with that. Even though for us, it appears small on an individual basis, collectively, it's quite large and it gets them to a very basic standard of living. You

16:37 see a lot of work done around that. And to put some, I guess, thresholds between those different categories, you know, the modern standard of living energy minimum. is about 50 million BTUs per

16:54 capita.

16:56 In the developing world, there are four plus billion people below that minimum modern energy living standard. The other part of the developing world averages 110 million BTUs per capita while the

17:12 developed world is at 160. And so climbing that ladder is really the primary objective of those, call it six and a half of eight billion people. Or those in the developed world, which are spending

17:29 a lot of time focused on luxury things, as Arjun calls them the lucky one billion club or us the lucky one billion club. There's just kind of one of my favorite words is ambient. There's just kind

17:42 of an ambient upward pressure that comes from population growth compounding, absolute demand and that. kind of natural human quest for a better standard of living, which absolutely requires energy.

17:56 I mean, if you're 16 years old and because your dad has a car, you get to go out with the head cheerleader, you're gonna do everything in your power to own a car for the rest of your life. I mean,

18:08 talk about just getting addicted to stuff. Gasoline is one of those things. And I just, and I mean this really seriously, if we're gonna go to the developing world and say, hey guys, you have to

18:23 run on solar and you have to run on wind. And I know sometimes the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't, so that's okay. You just won't have electricity then. If that is our answer to the

18:34 developing world, wars get fought over that. You can't go tell them, hey, let them be cake. I mean, you truly have to allow people to pursue non-energy poverty or non-energy non-poverty. Well,

18:51 I think on this topic, it's kind of interesting. I don't know if you've ever watched any of that switch energy series that's been produced and which is, I think, really interesting and gives you

19:00 some very good insight as far as what we're talking about in terms of what the poorest of the poor actually demand. And that

19:11 is a single refrigerator for a village or a single light at night so you can see something And so these things, from our standpoint, would be object poverty. And for them, there's significant

19:22 steps up, but you start looking at just where the world is light at night. It gives you an indication of how much more there is to do. And by and large, those little incremental steps create some

19:34 pretty significant demand adjustments. And reaching back to what you guys deemed the worst PD ever, there was actually a really interesting correlation if you look at Mark Baylun himself. or was it

19:49 even here, air conditioning and productivity? It's pretty compelling. Yeah, no, that's a real thing. All right, data centers, Mark, what's up there? Well, that was one you had on your

20:03 scratched out run of show, why don't you? I'll jump in. So we've seen a couple of things going on with data centers. One of them has been the issue that FERC's looking at now, where basically if

20:22 you want to co-locate a power center or power plant for your data center, and Eric and I were talking about this earlier, do you connect to the grid? If so, does FERC regulate you? If so, do you

20:42 pay the grid? Because power's gotta be balanced, You

20:47 can't just hook in. to the grid, okay, now you're gonna have to wait eight years to be able to hook into the grid. In this spot, data centers are starting to say things like nevermind, we just

20:58 won't connect. And so the FERC

21:02 is starting to look at that in terms of what are the rules gonna be with that. And it's gonna be interesting to watch that. In this layout, this really started grabbing headlines when Amazon bought

21:17 that data center adjacent to Susquehanna, which I think had a load of 300 megawatts. And that was off-grid talent energy as the provider at the Susquehanna nuclear facility. And

21:37 the big boys have come in and started needling for a protest, don't know what the official term is with FERC that because of something called and interconnection service agreement and ISA, that in

21:53 the case where the primary source, the Coleg located source to this data center trips in the agreement, they get made up for by another generation source on site, the other unit that is actually

22:10 part of the PGM grid. And essentially the contention is that they get to free ride on the rate payers that are part of the PGM grid. You know,

22:26 Talon is accusing AEP and Exelon of being the way I think about it, just being jealous of wanting to monopolize all the rents that are going to come out of these co-located facilities and data

22:38 centers. But we're not talking about this one's 300 going to, I think 480 megawatts.

22:49 a mainstream to be talking about data centers, co-located data centers as being gigawatt type in a situation. So

22:58 this is, you know, the, really the getting the,

23:07 in the case of something we talked about last week, the Grain Belt Express transmission line, it is in the context of streamlining

23:21 through the Energy Permitting and Reform Act, you've got to get cooperation, but not trivially in the middle of all this is the way retail power consumers are impacted because they're the ones, you

23:36 know, providing the infrastructure through the right case and the right base. And so if there is something that disadvantages them in a trip situation at a data center and all of a sudden they're

23:49 pulling power off the grid, does that make them more vulnerable? And is it fair for them, not them being the parties to this interconnection service agreement in that situation, is it fair for

24:01 them to be quote unquote free writing on established infrastructure that in generation that is part of the grid? Well, I think this is what Chuck and I were talking a little bit about earlier and

24:13 maybe not in this exact context, but I mean, we came to a pretty quickly small scale nuclear that's dedicated to these sorts of things with this level of demand. And I don't know the answer to that,

24:26 but I would think that could make a lot of sense if that is the technology that is acceptable. I mean, I think people are still scared of it. I'm hoping my personal view is that nuclear is the

24:40 primary solution to a lot of these issues And I think we've got a lot of basis to be to feel good about that. all you really need to look at is our military to get comfortable with that and what

24:52 we've done in the Navy and elsewhere. Chuck, what do you think about that? Well, and the interesting thing about what you just laid out for me is who actually made that choice? And it was the

25:02 tech company. It was the data center. It was Google. It was Microsoft. And I think energy participants are missing that. We're so used to having a grid that supplies electricity to folks. And we

25:18 just sell them natural gas. And you have folks that have net gas generators. And that's just how it works. I think the world's changed. I think the data centers are going to make those choices.

25:31 And if they choose nukes, natural gas, all this demand that we are forecasting, we're going to see is never going to materialize. I asked natural gas companies us all the time. When's the last

25:44 time you sat down with Google and tried to solve natural gas? and they kind of stare at me. But I think the dynamic's changed. Yeah, I mean - Because what you just said was that we'll be

25:57 acceptable to them. It's acceptable to the tech companies, and they like nuclear. Tech is going to be the most influential, and they already are, in terms of defining the direction of power, in

26:13 particular, and just the clout from a financial and influence standpoint, from a power standpoint, is, I think, Bloomberg predicted not too long ago this log jam on nuclear is going to be broken,

26:29 or the steamroller, in effect, is going to be big tech. And I think this is the first salvo in that. We've talked quite a bit about nuclear and off-grid-type solutions

26:46 along with. the Energy Permitting Reform Act, it would be nice to see something that addresses the just absurd inertia and kind of overhead monster that the NRC permitting process has created over

27:03 the last 50 years in this country. Whether that is part and parcel of it, it's probably going to have to come out of that force that is tech causing a change and streamlining the rules of the game

27:18 as it relates to more innovated things, innovated things like off-grid nuclear micro reactors for things like data center use. I think Bill Gates views that as like a bump in the road, the

27:35 regulatory environment. He'll walk into DC and say, Here's what I need. Yeah, well, I think if it's delivered by somebody coming from that perspective, that's received in a way that it's just

27:46 not. from the industry for whatever reason. Well, and even at the consumer level, ultimately, at least in this country, everybody wants it. As consumers, we want more of this stuff. Yeah. We

27:57 don't want our power to go out in kind of normal, hot summer time and cold winter time situation. So I think

28:07 pragmatism and need are going to drive it with a pretty, pretty strong shove from big tech, at least leading the way on this stuff to change some of the rules. So meanwhile the 24 campaigns still

28:23 seems to be bogged down and I know you are, but what am I?

28:28 All right, tell the story about deep visions. Speaking of nuclear. Yeah, this is really cool. We've got a text thread that we're all on and Mark sends articles around and this one was cool Yeah,

28:43 this is a startup in Berkeley. Not surprisingly, a father-daughter team, Elizabeth and Richard Mueller, just received four million in pre-seed funding from something called 8VC, I've never heard

28:59 of 8VC, but that doesn't really mean anything that I haven't heard of it. It's basically moving the reactor and steam generator, the thermal activity that goes behind the nuclear power generation

29:16 setup, down hole. Down hole. About a mile. Yeah. 30 inch casing. And

29:26 it proposes to eliminate what you and I were talking about earlier today was just the massive costs of conventional above the ground nuclear, of all the materials and really over design need to go

29:43 into things like pressure containment and radioactive meltdown containment in terms of steel and cement, et cetera. Because you're using the substrate a mile plus down to serve as your containment.

30:01 Oh, by the way, if we get into a situation, we can just basically fill the hole with cement. If we've got a plug that, you know, seal off that

30:14 problem reactor, I don't know, 30 inch well bore. I was doing some searching

30:22 on what kind of the depth limits or the depth records were of large diameter well borers. And I really couldn't find anything, even stumped Clyde GPT on, you know, what's the deepest we've ever

30:34 set that large diameter of casing And, you know, 30 inches, do you have? the hydraulics figured out to be able to circulate your fluid when you're drilling the hole. I don't know what's been the

30:49 maximum casing while drilling record, for instance. But it's an interesting concept that

30:59 we put these, I would assume they would be following the micro category in subsurface. And I'm probably

31:09 at fault for thinking, well, this has got to be in porous and permeable rock. Does it necessarily have to be? Or could you drill something in, I don't know, granite? How long would that take

31:21 you and what kind of containment would that provide? Could you physically do it to create the mile plus depth that you need to ensure safety from things like subsurface flow into aquifers, et cetera,

31:37 in other contamination? Right, just found it to be an innovative way

31:44 you know, housing problematic nuclear on the surface where you have to have a lot of containment, you know,

31:51 conceptually it makes sense. It's just a question of, can you do it and what does it cost? I want to run them down and have them on the podcast get them to explain it to us. That'd be a lot of fun.

32:03 Well, they just raised their pre-seed around. You probably don't need to wear a collared shirt for that one. Hey, dude Anything

32:14 on the political front? God, this is still amazing to me that we tried to assassinate a presidential candidate, former president, what, five weeks ago? And we don't even talk about it anymore.

32:29 It's like the 12th weirdest thing that's happened in the campaign in the last five weeks. This is just crazy. I guess the most recent is Zuckerberg's letter coming out and saying that. Oh yeah,

32:44 they pressured me to downplay COVID. So I did, they pressured me to downplay the Hunter laptop story. So I did, sorry. Won't happen again. Won't happen again. I won't do it.

33:01 Eric, give us your political take on all this. We've talked, Mark and I've talked about it. Talk politics a lot, yeah. I mean, I think it's the weirdest cycle of my lifetime I mean, I think

33:14 neither candidate has really been through the ringer. Like they tend to be, and obviously, President Trump has a long history and people love him or hate him. There's really no middle ground there.

33:27 I'm just shocked that even on the left, that

33:32 there's relatively little interest in really testing Kamala. Yeah. And I don't think that's a good thing because ultimately if she is elected, she's going to be tested.

33:44 Yeah. And I think it actually even leads to Putin, G, various folks wanting to test her. Maduro. Yeah. We seem to leave Venezuela or the conversation. Yeah, they're pretty close. Yeah. Yeah.

33:59 No, it's not being the test. The other thing that we've talked a little bit about on the podcast is just, it really does seem like we've got this bifurcated media that's literally an advocate for

34:14 one side or the other as opposed to reporting. And if they're gonna do that, if they're gonna gaslight on various issues, they're gonna do that about energy too, you know? It'll fit that

34:27 political narrative. Well, exactly. But this seemingly well thought out response, look, we did it, it was wrong to do it. It was a mistake and it won't happen again.

34:41 I contrast that with or compare that to something certainly more recently, and I just happened to pick this up and listening to Dennis Quaid on Rogan, who is the star of a movie coming out Friday

34:57 called Reagan, so he's playing Ronald Reagan. It goes from his childhood up until the time Reagan announced that he was leaving the public scene, because he had Alzheimer's, but Facebook had

35:11 censored the promotions for the Reagan movie because of an interpretation, I guess, of election interference, while the defense to that was that was some type of algorithmic or automatic thing that

35:31 was, again, a mistake So I guess we're now seeing the path that's been chosen to

35:42 not ask for permission, but yet ask for forgiveness after the horse is already out of the barn. It's just gonna be interesting to see

35:53 through the next few weeks leading up to the election what kind of things that are going to be symptoms and signals of whether or not this has changed and whether or not Big Tech is living by it's,

36:09 at least in the form of CEO of one of the biggest companies saying we're not gonna do this. Yeah, I'm skeptical on that.

36:18 Well, even Musk talks about, you know, hey, I own this thing and I can kind of do whatever I want and just

36:27 stripping things out of the algorithms that have been built in, even he's acknowledged it's difficult to do

36:36 So, somebody responded, I think it was only done. to you and said, you know, podcast is great, a lot of interesting important stuff, but how about recommendations for, you know, improving or

36:53 changing things? And I think, particularly in this election cycle, what we've seen over the last three or four at least, is the policy aspect of an informed voter policy education, of an informed

37:10 voter is dissipating, because it is so much turned into really gotcha in reality TV type of dynamic. And, you know, that in my mind exacerbates the problem as opposed to spending time as an

37:29 individual being informed on some really important policy things. Like, I know there's been a lot of discussion about proposal, I think, that originated with President Biden

37:42 instituting a tax on unrealized gain, or what does that mean? You know, if there's a high chance of that happening, and you're a young person who's going to be around for another 50 years or so,

37:53 and you're voting for the first time, and you're trying to kind of build into your future, what does that mean for my ability to invest and grow my own wealth? So I just think that the first step

38:08 people can take is being interested in one, self-interest is fine, but also doing some research before you get caught up in the kind of celebrity or emotional reality TV aspect that, unfortunately,

38:25 is really all over the airwaves every day on both sides, on both sides Well, I mean, I think that, I mean, to your point, I think most people don't really even think of that issue, at least

38:37 younger people. It's so far removed from most at this point that they're not. thinking of any wealth that they have or may have that would be taxed before they, you know, before they transacted.

38:51 But yeah, I mean, yeah, but I agree with all that. I mean, I think the most disappointing thing to me is just how shallow the process has been through this cycle. I mean, really, everybody's

39:03 been protected. The talking points are pretty well defined And I can't see even if you are a real fan of Kamala Harris, I just can't believe how you think it's favorable to her if she were to win to

39:18 have not gone through the kind of the dauntless, you know, that most politicians go through and they are considered for these roles. I mean, it's a crazy process that this has been. Yeah, no,

39:31 I've found interesting. I think Jonathan Carl from ABC was interviewing Senator Cotton, Tom Cotton, and Tom Cotton said, Well, she's against fracking. And Jonathan Carl, who's a member of the

39:45 media, said, Well, no, she's not, that's not her position. She said, Otherwise. And Senator Cotton was like, No, she hasn't. Maybe an unnamed staffer at midnight on Friday put out a press

39:58 release saying she's okay with fracking now, but she hasn't said it. I mean, that's the whole reason we have a primary process is that you can go to your base and say, Am I your person? Am I your

40:14 leader? And you tell them certain things that you then gotta go defend and argue with on the other side. And so not being able to hear that and understand that, it can be bad. The other dynamics

40:27 that you recently moderated a discussion or did a podcast, no, I think it was a moderated discussion with Mary Madeleine, James Carville, is that in. in a more recent kind of similar

40:43 divide in a married couple, you've got RFK Junior who has basically, I think I

40:52 saw it characterizes, when the Democrats lose a Kennedy, they've lost the plot. Well, as you probably know, RFK Junior is married to Cheryl Hines, who was one of the

41:06 primary stars of Curbier Enthusiasm as Larry David's wife. She's getting absolutely destroyed on social media, like I said, and I thought about it. Well, it's, you know, this politically

41:18 divided couple in their personal lives have managed to stick around together for a long period of time, thinking about Carvalen and Madeline. Yeah. But it's, you know, it's a really, that this

41:35 kind of politics of personal destruction, again, on both sides. is really an unfortunate kind of symptom of the way things have gone and hopefully we can pull out of that.

41:50 Exactly.

41:53 Wanna close the show? Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of James Broach, passing away who I hired out of school when I was at Stevens, and then he went to Credit Suisse for a year and a half and

41:56 then joined us at Kane Anderson. So I think he worked 13 out of his 16 professional years with me and just simply the greatest guy on the planet.

42:22 Had three

42:25 boys that were all basically a year apart. We used to say, James, we can tell you what's causing that. Just in case you need to know, but one of the best people on the planet, a real superstar

42:37 of the energy business taken way too early because of brain cancer. And as I do every year, fuck brain cancer. That's just a horrible, nasty disease. And so, rest in peace, James. And you had

42:49 dinner with the boys last night. Yeah, and so, it's cool because you see James in each one, but you also see three very distinct individuals. And so, Parker's gonna try to go to the Naval

43:03 Academy, Harry wants to go play lacrosse in college and Oliver might be the best athlete of all three of them. And James had won the NCAA Division III tennis tournament when he was at Trinity, both

43:19 in singles and doubles. So, he was an amazing athlete. Anyway, it was good to see them. His widow, Jamie, has remarried great story To a guy named Jeff, Jeff's. awesome guy who had married

43:36 his high school sweetheart who had cystic fibrosis. So they knew she was gonna pass away in her twenties. They wound up through a surrogate having twins. And so it's a true Brady bunch situation.

43:49 And so the, after dinner, the boys took off and Jamie and I got to visit a little more and she and Jeff are doing great. So it's, it's awesome, but yeah. Anyway, rest in peace, James Bunch If

44:04 you like the show, appreciate you joining us. Feel free to subscribe, share it with a friend and leave lots of comments about Eric. So maybe we can get him to come back and join us again.