Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to BDE First Ever Live. Well, no, we haven't done it live before. We did it live at Fuse. Yeah. There were more people at Fuse than there are here. That's right. I mean,

0:13 we don't love our fans.

0:18 We are competing with a few things. Yeah, we threw this together last second. We wanted to do it live though, and we'll do it live bigger kegabear and all that at some point in the past We asked

0:29 one past guest host, if he could join us, and he said, Sorry, I can't, I need to be home, but I could join you in three Tuesdays from nowwhen we have results. We actually know what it is.

0:44 Somebody else told us, I'm getting out of town. I don't want to be a bear out. So,

0:51 we're live 630 central time. Election results are coming in If anything gets for a portable. We'll say it, but it kind of looks like Trump's winning Florida. And that's really all we know. He's

1:05 one in - He's one in Kentucky. And he's one in Kentucky. So other than that, I think one of the really cool things that they're able to do is go back

1:14 with certain stages of reporting they can compare where the Democrat and Republican candidates were back to 2016. Right. So there have been some interesting - It looks like Trump's running ahead in

1:31 those instances that they've done that. Yeah, there's some demographic comparisons from Georgia, for example, where she's lost relative to Biden's results and 20 she's lost anywhere from eight to

1:44 14 points in early returns with key demographics. But again, it's really early. So be it. So what did the fuck do with Talon? 'Cause this is like. getting close to defeating my thesis of Laid

2:03 Out. So Talon is the provider at Susquehanna in Pennsylvania that is what is part of the agreement that Amazon struck for the data center for, I believe,

2:21 350

2:24 going to 480 megawatts And basically, the FERC rejection was, as we had discussed when this first came out, there were complaints being brought to FERC by competitors of Talon's that said, this is

2:42 going to spill over into the grid. And really, what I read of the rejection rationale was related to they're going to be cost incurred for the off-grid part of this that potentially spill over into.

3:00 ratepayers on the grid. And so that was really

3:06 the nexus of the rebuttal or the rejection the way I read it. So I read a little, I read about it too. And did you pick up on this or was this just me? There seemed to be kind of the grid

3:19 stability argument too that potentially the power coming off this, being connected to the grid was potentially an issue 'Cause that's always the default for the regulated utility to say is, oh my

3:35 gosh, right, it'll bring down the grid. Yeah, and I think it's a larger macro issue in terms of

3:43 this wave or this series of waves of expected or forecast. Data center demand is how do you

3:54 sort out those priorities, particularly in in in periods where that The grid gets stressed, right? And so grid stability is certainly a macro issue. I read more into, look, this is potentially

4:10 going to impose costs for the rate pairs on the grid to bear unfairly with those costs are related to you. I can't really enumerate, but that was all part of the original complaint too, or a series

4:25 of complaints that were that were lodged against Talon with the FERC. So several people have talked about this on Twitter, and including the FERC chairman, who is the dissenting vote. And I pinged

4:42 all of them like I do. Hey, come on the podcast and talk about it. So we'll see if we can get anybody that actually knows the insider politics there to come on and talk about it I do think it

4:54 points out something we talked about last week in the whole -

5:01 backdrop of the election is I think the immediate implications of which administration or which candidate prevails. What does it mean for really the administrative and regulatory aspect of what we're

5:18 trying to get done in things like pushing nuclear forward, for example. And so we're seeing examples of administrative and regulatory agencies step in and do things that are, at least in this case,

5:31 going to push the timeline out to the right, right? So things take longer and cost more. Which I must admit, I thought the regulatory agencies would crater for big tech. You know, that that was

5:47 there, they were just going to come in and let them roll over. So interesting to watch, interesting to watch. So I I love this, meta has a problem with nuclear bees. Yeah, lay it on me. So

6:02 Metas nuclear AI site that was

6:10 designed or proposed has got a rare bee species issue which essentially prevents the project from

6:23 moving forward and becoming a reality So along the whole spectrum of myriad environmental and other advocacy groups, this is another point of friction in the whole process of trying to get this

6:39 really rapid build out of super powered hyperscale AI and high performance computing data centers put together. So back in the day, we had an asset in California and the project came to a grinding

6:55 halt because of the blunt nose leopard blizzard.

6:59 blunt nose leopard lizard is almost extinct is because it's the single dumbest animal that has ever got us put on this planet. Used to run and jump into the side of a truck. And it was crazy because

7:13 we had to have a biologist on staff to go out and do an autopsy on any of these lizards when they die to make sure that we didn't cause their death and that it was natural causes. And so what would

7:27 happen is the birds would come and pick these blunt nose leopard lizards up and drop them from high up to kill 'em before they would eat 'em. And so it was a huge problem. I mean, we couldn't get a

7:39 rig out there. The loophole in California is because of the predominance of the industry, agriculture could get a waiver for a lot of these endangered species stuff. So mysteriously the farmer who

7:56 or the rancher out there 200 cows and the cows like the trample on the blunt-nosed leopard lizards kind of cleared them all out

8:08 Was not our cows, but it is amazing that Like they didn't find this and you know endangered be before they chose the site. I Mean this is kind of like welcome to energy meta. Yeah, I mean, you

8:27 know the the the Influence with regulatory and administrative agencies is one thing, but there are myriad Things that crop up Certainly as we've seen on any kind of development as we think about

8:47 energy addition and energy transition

8:52 Some of the higher profile issues around you know the the infrastructure pipeline projects that we've we've witnessed in the past few years. So I think the point is, is that it's not a clean and

9:04 simple solution as to getting aligned on both the political legislative and regulatory fronts. You still have a tremendous amount of unpredictable advocacy and opposition that really tends to slow

9:21 things down. Yeah, that comes back to what we talked about last week that I'm not sure Vance and Trump can truly just order drill, baby drill, and all of a sudden we have more oil, but they can

9:34 do things on the regulatory front so that we can get pipelines places, we can get power lines places so that we can actually have the energy with the structure to do this stuff. We don't need more

9:48 production right now. Yeah, we're good. I mean, Diamondback was out, I guess yesterday, talking about, like, we've, you know, we've we've got to be very cognizant of an oversupply situation

10:05 'cause we continue to creep up organically with US production in particular. And so, indicating a bit of capital discipline and flexibility, which I think is certainly leadership for the industry,

10:20 but projecting what 135 million barrels a day up from 133 currently by the end of the year Wrong direction. Well, the rig rate keeps going down. Keeps going down. So, I wanted to ask you guys,

10:36 50 years from now, what type of energy do you see being in the forefront? So, 50 years from now. Oh, I go first. Now, I'm like 50 years from now, what type of energy do we see at the forefront?

10:53 So, I'm gonna go ahead and go with, with, you know, the mix today is what, you know, 30 coal, 40 natural gas and 25 oil or whatever, you know, that's that's the hydrocarbon mix and the

11:13 renewables or what 10, something like that. Am I close enough? I'm going to say renewables will double and it'll steal equally from coal, natural gas and oil, but we're going to look a lot like

11:27 we look today. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think on the fossil fuel side, maybe the mix changes a little bit as we

11:36 realize that, you know, over a multi-decade gap that we've got to allow more natural gas into the mix and what form that takes.

11:51 I don't know, but I think overall proportions of primary energy are

11:57 what they look like today. You've got a 50 years from now, we'll have at least another two billion human beings on the planet. Most of those are in a few key countries in Africa and the rest are in

12:12 Asia. You don't think nuclear will get in there?

12:19 I think it will. I think the notion that we're going to see a kind of a meaningful displacement relative to nuclear within five to 10 years is for some of the reasons we just discussed is the

12:33 timelines just get protracted because of a lot of political

12:41 crosswinds and resolving that. I think the technology has certainly proven viable. I think that we're going to continue to be on more of an evolutionary timeline in terms of not having to have

12:56 duplicative. dispatchable power in the form of baseload natural gas, for example, or pico natural gas for insufficient battery storage capacity. I think those things are going to take you know

13:11 quite a bit of time and in the meantime the absolute pie of energy demand continues to go up certainly commensurate with population and relative to the proportions of primary energy demand from the

13:22 population growth wedge there's there's a lot more energy intensity in that kind of quest for improved standard of living and and getting out of energy poverty in poverty in general. I mean what was

13:38 it 50 years ago it was 83 hydrocarbon driven and today it's

13:47 82 hydrocarbon driven and so it'll be interesting. I will say this so my my guy Neil Dykeman. who came on the podcast, he's a VC guy over it. I think his firm's energy transition. He swears that

14:03 he doesn't think it's gonna happen, but it could in the next two to three years, literally the entire US generation fleet could be solar. He said solar prices have become that cheap. And the

14:18 manufacturing capacities out there and so

14:22 We can call it huge and nuclear has had a bad market. So we had a nuclear trade association in here the other day and had a happy hour and there was a panel. And I was on the panel and the opening

14:36 question to me was, Chuck, how do you make nuclear energy more attractive for institutional investors? And I was like, okay, I thought about this all day long. Stick with me Nuclear energy needs

14:50 to impregnate Taylor Swift.

14:54 Let's start with the Swifties. We'll have isotope, Swiftie. It'll be the most stable thing in her life, way more so than any of the relationships she's had, 'cause we need a PR makeover from

15:06 nuclear. You know, we've said it a million times on

15:11 BDE. If we invented nuclear today, we'd be like, Hey guys, we solved it. This is -

15:18 Travis Gelsie's nuclear. Travis Gelsie is nuclear energy, so Yeah, you know, it's wild, this kind of, it's interesting you brought up that question, 'cause this brings up the Domburg piece that

15:28 you wanna talk about. Listen to it. You wanna talk

15:33 about it? Yeah, you go. What did Domburg gave this morning? Basically describe the situation with, you know, wind solar and battery storage as the kind of Nirvana state where you don't need

15:54 dispatchable. So battery storage takes care of

15:58 the periods with no when, no sunshine. And

16:05 the point was there's never been a demonstration scale or a demonstration

16:13 experiment to see that work. We were talking a little bit about it earlier, you know, why can't we just go build a little mini city and, you know, test the thesis on installing a mini grid that

16:28 is made up only of solar wind and battery storage. So basically Domburg took it upon themselves or himself to install. I think it was like a

16:43 11 kw 108 kw series of batteries. They did the research on the on the on the battery devices that they they

16:53 And what they demonstrated with their own, you know, there's no there's no limitation on individuals conducting these kinds of experiments because advocates and governments don't seem really all

17:05 that anxious to, to do it because it's, it really kind of reveals some, some physical and practical realities, which is, I think the,

17:18 the configuration costs like the base configuration for that. 108

17:25 kw was five grand, maybe a little bit more than that, but you needed to kind of stack more of that same onto running an average household from a typical electricity demand standpoint, things like,

17:44 if you had a heat pump at an average consumption, an average size home, you could run that heat pump for

17:55 four and a half hours before you needed a recharge, similar with the air conditioning system. A refrigerator could run for a few days. But then you think of all the parallel things that are going

18:08 on in normal daily life, like drying clothes, watching television, being online, et cetera, and then thermal comfort on top of that. Water heaters draw quite a bit of electricity. And then when

18:21 you drain the storage source, is the timing in sync to allow for a generation recharge from strictly wind and solar. And I think, you know, pointing out the practical limitations or currently the

18:38 infeasibility of doing that, we were talking about back from your day as when you - Yeah, so - When you got refuge in your dad's tussle wall. Yeah, so dad got solar. My dad adopts technology as

18:53 soon as it comes out. and then he never upgrades. Like we still have the first VCR ever made in America at my house, at my parents' house in Richmond. And so anyway, when solar panels came out,

19:07 he bought solar panels and the Tesla batteries for the while and I go, Dad, how much that cost? And he goes, 125, 000 dollars, but I never have to buy electricity again. And I'm like, Well,

19:18 did you do any math? And he goes, Yeah, that's a 124 year payback And I was like, Dude, you're 80. I mean, I hope to God you see payback. I mean, nobody wants you here more than me. And so

19:31 anyway, Winter Storm Yuri, I didn't think my power would ever go out 'cause my house is between the police department, the hospital and the fire department. And of course, boom, out go my lights.

19:43 So I show up over at my parents' house. I've got my cat, my cat carrier, and I got my bag under the other arm, and I walk in and dad's, got the paper like this, and he didn't even move the paper,

19:54 and I'm just here, 124 year payback. Doesn't sound so bad right about now. But what dad's calculations are is he can go about a day to a day and a half without son.

20:09 You know, so long as he's got son, he can keep everything running. I don't have details on what his load amount is or anything like that. And they've got a pretty big house And,

20:22 you know, if a storm hits again, he'll be careful with the air conditioning and the like and all. But, I mean, the brilliance of this Doomburg article to just say, if this shit actually works,

20:35 why can't one of you environmentalist group just go power a city on it? Show us how it works in just a city. Choose a small city.

20:45 Yeah, exactly. We can - I mean, it's a demonstration pilot, right? So you go through all these. technology developments and deployment, you're always doing

20:56 pilots and then a little bit larger scale. And then you've got a tweak and adjust. And then you finally make the decision for FID. And you go full scale. So another question for you guys. What do

21:12 you think in the next 10 to 15 years, like the hottest, greatest commodity, is it data, analytics, AI, energy, time? So the question is, the next 10 to 15 years, what's kind of the hottest

21:28 commodity, if you will? Is it data, AI? What do you think, Mark?

21:37 Energy, time, electricity. Electricity, I would agree with that. Just because of the push, I don't think we reverse course from the electrification push And, you know, it's multiplying with

21:50 the new data centers. AI being pushed on everything, like, you know, your Tesla exists here, but there's also a computer on the back ends running it, you know, like it doesn't exist, so, so,

22:04 yeah, and we've had massive market penetration of things like BYD vehicles in China and starting in Europe. So, you know, I don't think the bow wave of electrification just immediately received So,

22:22 you know, I think ways to produce more electrons, more reliably, more affordably, and how you do that from a generation standpoint, I think, is going to be the, you know, the real debate, and.

22:36 Right. Yeah. Yeah

22:42 Let's, that's the interesting thing, because if you look from, call it, 1950 to 2000,

22:50 The amount of electricity we used in America was up almost 15x. We invented a lot of cool shit to use electricity, air conditioning, lights, computers, all this. From 2002, I call it six months

23:06 ago, maybe a year ago, electricity was flat. The machines all got really efficient. Lighting got amazingly efficient. Computers got efficient Between these data centers, there was 10x, the

23:19 computing power in the cloud, but the electricity powering all those data centers was up only about 10 because they got it using at good really.

23:29 I think we're at game over at this point. We literally can't get the machines that much more efficient. They'll always get a little bit more efficient, but in terms of the big game changers So yeah,

23:43 we're going to have to do it, and our grid just can't handle it.

23:48 So what I think happens is

23:53 AI, the value proposition is like every other technology on the planet will way overestimate it in the short term and way underestimate it in the long term, just like we did with the internet.

24:06 And so 15 years from now, AI will literally be embedded in everything. I mean, you'll drive through Taco Bell at two in the morning after you're at the bar all night Your toilet knows to be warmed

24:18 up when you get home. I mean, that's just going to happen.

24:23 And so I think what's going to wind up happening is all this AI, hopefully if we're smart, we're going to power in the United States and we're just going to build it off grid. I mean, you're going

24:35 to build, you're going to

24:39 reopen old nuke plants, you're going to build natural gas-fired power plants to power all this if we're not smart. they're gonna do that all in Malaysia or any other place that'll do it. 'Cause

24:53 with the ability of telecommunications to move is quick, you can literally put this stuff anywhere in the world. So who's ever gonna be

25:06 constructive on the front end about power and power prices and power infrastructure, they're gonna win the AI game. 'Cause we're all gonna want AI. I think you're gonna have to pivot from the grid

25:18 I think overhauling, refurbishing the grid relative to the ability to do it physically. But as importantly, or more importantly, is cost, and there was some estimate, for example, around barrel,

25:34 about underground distribution and transmission lines. And just for the Houston area, that's, I think it was art that made the - Yeah, it was a requirement, I think That was like a350 billion.

25:48 ticket just for the Houston metropolitan area to put all the local distribution lines underground. I think usually more like what meta does have microgrids for large consumption of power. We already

26:03 see it in West Texas. There's microgrids, things outside of Pecos and areas out there. I mean, we've been really safely operating what I characterize in the experts and maybe take exception to

26:18 this as SMR type technology in the Navy for, you know, since the 50s with zero nuclear related incidents. And so it can be done. Now that's highly enriched uranium. It's

26:37 about the tightest ship from a process and safeguard standpoint, which implies that, you know,

26:46 in the private sector would imply a lot of over design, which means it costs a lot more. But if you could put a 350 megawatt

26:56 power plant on a Los Angeles class, a tax sub, and have that run for

27:02 very reliable and very safely for however long that class of submarine has been around with zero incidents that there is So I've got a stationary SMR that's serving an off-grid, mini-grid, if you

27:19 will, or an alternate grid. And not the easiest environment in the world to operate in. The sea can be a little bumpy. Yeah, and they're all kinds of, both natural and - Don't have to worry

27:30 about cooling that. Other kinds of stuff. Don't have to worry about the cooling, yeah. The interesting thing, so

27:37 did the nuclear panel here the other night, And I forget who said this. But one of the points made is maybe the most important thing nuclear needs is a protagonist, a superhero. I mean, kind of

27:53 like what Musk has been with space. I mean, we all saw the two arms clap and grab the rocket. The rocket, the Taylor Swift here, maybe so. But that if we had kind of that superhero that could

28:08 charge people up and get their arms around nuclear in a positive way, that's kind of what we needed. And one of the things that was pointed out, let's go get one of these Navy sub commanders. I

28:21 mean, those are badass people. Yeah, listen, one of these badass sub commanders, Marco Remus, that's been out there fighting communism and, you know, all the bad guys out there. And speaking

28:33 of military, I have a question. Yes. Military stuff, you guys, what is your opinion? Should we kind of keep up with the Joneses and kind of increase the new count, you know, based on other

28:45 countries or are you in favor of being neutralizing the whole world? So the question is basically what do we think about nuclear weapons? Should we be keeping up with the Jones, as I say, the

28:58 Ruskies, the Chinese? Should we try to de-escalate this? The one thing I've found really interesting about Trump being on Rogan, and I don't know if you saw this, you can hate Trump That's fine

29:14 with me, I don't want to defend him. But the one thing I did take away is he is definitely afraid of nuclear war. I mean, he is very scared of nuclear war, and probably rightfully so. I do think

29:29 we've been pretty cavalier kind of since Reagan and the Cold War. The Russians still have as many nukes pointed at us as back when they were the USSR, right? I mean, basically. You know, and so,

29:47 are they gonna work? Yeah, that's another thing. But, you know, you wonder what a getting up there in age past his prime Putin might be willing to do if backed into a corner, you know? Or what?

30:01 Or North Korea. Or North Korea, yeah, that guy shoots missiles off like there's no tomorrow.

30:08 They did a celebratory test on election day. Oh, did he? Yeah, yeah. Way to go Yeah, I think we're seeing the Russians, the Chinese and North Koreans, I read somewhere just talking about what

30:23 their naval trajectory and capability looks like. The North Koreans are becoming more about an offensive posture as opposed to a defensive posture. They're building up nuclear capability. So I

30:38 think more of the rogue element is, is an argument for certainly maintaining sufficient,

30:49 what did we used to call it? Mutual assured destruction? Yeah. Well, I will say this, the one thing we've seen in the Middle East with Iran targeting Israel, having a

31:04 defensive capability seems like it's really important. I mean, people used to make fun of Reagan when he called it Star Wars and

31:14 to make light of it, but I wouldn't mind having a missile defense system that we had some comfort in. Yeah, you know the - Because of the rogue element. And this is something I've paid a little

31:27 bit of attention to over the past dozen years or so because of an investment in a security technology which was originally designed to detect in shipping containers, radioactive material, dirty

31:41 bombs

31:43 speed and precision and accuracy. And I think at the time, I forget how many kilos worldwide enriched material was unaccounted for. But then it was then it was talked about in the context of a 25

32:03 kilo dirty bomb in a shipping container is

32:08 in the kind of immediate damage that that can do in the right or the wrong place is pretty catastrophic and has a really daisy chain. So I worry, like I said, I worry more about the rogue element

32:23 than

32:25 the re-emergence of the old definition of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the United States. From wins versus criminal wins, all the different little conflicts that are building up China,

32:39 Taiwan, Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela. if it goes red or it

32:47 goes

32:51 blue, what do you think happens to some of those in your opinion? So the question is basically Trump administration versus a Harris administration. What happens to the various conflicts going on in

33:01 the world right now and potential future conflicts? You gonna go first? Well, I think the suggestion

33:12 that the suggestion that there are immediate simple resolutions with a Trump administration are a little bit difficult to see because there's the issues are so intractable. Maybe it does happen,

33:33 does a switch flip and we've resolved Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia. I don't know, it's just like the notion that, you know, we're gonna flip the switch and go to drill, baby drill. Well,

33:52 the facts are the US. industry is a bunch of private actors operating in their self-interest and have priorities

34:02 well beyond and well above, shooting themselves in the foot again, based on some altruistic motivation Now, there may be incremental incentives to get more active. I just think the unraveling of

34:19 all of these conflicts and issues is a lot more complex diplomatically because the positions are, in my view, have gotten a lot more entrenched. We talked about Israel, Iran and this whole

34:36 speculation a few weeks ago when Israel did strike back So they're going to go after

34:43 oil infrastructure. Refineries and I think Marc Rosano had a pretty good take on that. I think Marc Steak was that basically if you look at Iran and take away the regime, they're very westernized.

34:58 There's more plastic surgery in Iran than any other country in the planet, supposedly, and they would tend to gravitate towards a relationship with the West if the regime's gone. So do you really

35:13 want to handcuff their ability to have a functioning economy in the future if that takeover happens. And so that was Israel's dilemma and definitely the United States sitting there whispering in

35:28 their ear of, Hey, these guys have to have revenue when the regime's gone.

35:35 You know, I mean, I don't know what to make of all this. All I can tell you is what I saw. I mean, when Trump was president, we had four Arab countries sign agreements with Israel. We were

35:51 really close

35:55 to Saudi Arabia and Israel signing a deal, which my dude I went to eat dinner with last night, a really sharp guy who says, that's what kicked Iran into gear in terms of causing all the trouble

36:08 that agreement I still think we did a

36:13 better job of keeping money out of the coffers in Iran under Trump that we did under Biden. We just let them sell oil and they made so much. And supposedly what happened is Trump's son-in-law,

36:28 Jared Kushner actually bonded with NBS and they bonded over Call of Duty. They literally sat there and played Call of Duty for hours on end with each other. and built a relationship. And so that's

36:44 what led to a lot of it. I doubt you're gonna get Jared Kushner to come back and serve in the next administration. So I think Mark Trite, it's gonna be hard to unweave kind of all the stuff that's

36:57 happened. I do think there's at least a commitment and he's always been this way. You can hate him, but literally in the 80s when he's onHeraldo Show or he's on Phil Donahue or he went on Oprah,

37:12 Trump always talked about hate and war. He's always been an anti-war guy. I think he was the only real prominent American that stood up against the Iraq war that wasn't part of the political

37:27 establishment and stuff. And I'll just say this, right wrong or indifferent, Putin took land under George Bush, right? He took Georgia And then, under Obama, he took Crimea. And then, and

37:42 then under Biden, and then Biden, under Biden, he obviously invaded Ukraine. He didn't take any land under Trump. And that's just a fact. And maybe, you know, correlation is not causation,

37:57 but something happened, 'cause it's

38:01 not like Biden got elected in Putin. I got a great idea. I should go into Ukraine. I never thought of that. Something caused him I think legislatively just given

38:14 the huge shifts that we've seen in very high-profile personalities on both sides.

38:24 I mean, get Dick Cheney endorsing Harris. You've got a former Democrat, Congresswoman, and Tulsi Gabbard not only leaving the Democrat party and becoming an independent now officially joining

38:37 Republican Party. And then there's a lot of lesser lights or the old guard. It's just that the profile of the parties has undergone a pretty significant transformation. And I don't think from an

38:52 ability to work on a

38:56 more bipartisan way and the legislative aspect of this is not trivial in terms of getting things done from a foreign policy standpoint. I think it gets more fractured, at least in the near term,

39:10 regardless of the outcome, because

39:15 the parties, as they're defined today, have kind of drawn their line in the sand. And if you don't have a

39:22 clear majority in Congress

39:26 you've got in either house, you've got gridlock. Yeah. I think like, don't you think we're still, but it's a little bit, I wanna ask you, is it not a little bit overplayed that like, oh,

39:38 everything's going downhill and we're like, we're still the United States. We still are on the roll, so it's still the greatest. So the question is basically, are we too doom and groom because of

39:49 the campaign? We're still the United States. Our economy by most metrics is way out performing the rest of the world. We came through COVID.

40:01 I agree with that. The one thing I will slightly push back on is in the last 60 days, we added500 billion to the national debt So

40:14 I mean, we're having a good party, but we're doing it on an overdrawing credit card right now. Yeah, service on the debt is now equal to or exceeds what annual defense budget is. And so if you

40:28 think about fiat currencies, they all wind up going kaboom at some point and they go kaboom really quickly. You know, the Weimar Republic went to literally one of the greatest economies that

40:44 history had ever seen to wheelbarrows of money running around in a period of years. And so, where is that tipping point? There's some research out there that it's 120 of debt to GDP that's kind of

41:00 where you go, Kaboom, and we're above that. So,

41:05 that's the worry Yeah, I think, I do think it's not insignificant in terms of what this means for the direction either administration takes on energy policy. So, if you look at what's going on

41:21 with Germany and the UK and Europe, they're essentially doubling down. We've seen, we talked about it a little bit last week about VW plant closures in layoffs for the first time in what 87 years,

41:36 and well, over their entire history. because of the increasingly

41:44 uncompetitive cost structures, whether that's labor related or, you know, what they're

41:52 really fast-paced energy, what they call their energy vendor policy, where they've shut down nuclear and in times of

42:00 energy crisis or pinch points, they've had to scramble and pay a lot more for things like emergency, colon, LNG supplies And so losing your industrial base and then what that means for the citizens

42:14 at large, I think has way more to do with, you know, where we go politically and continuing down that path. And so, you know, Vice President Harris did cast the Deciding Vote for the Inflation

42:32 Reduction Act, which is at least to me always been somewhat ironically named. And as we talked about in the Doomburg example, ideals have a bit outrun physics and

42:44 feasibility. So

42:50 are we going to double down in the same fashion with a Harris administration, whereas Trump is probably going to roll back some of that

43:04 accelerated spending on things that have yet to be synced up like renewables with grid scale storage and smoothing out the intermittency and the reliability problem. Those are big deals. What do you

43:20 think the pulling gas pipeline shutdowns that have happened as Biden, Harris came to office, what do you think that has done to the energy grid of the world? Let's say in Russia, Ukraine, Germany,

43:34 US So the question is basically. What is the Biden administration and the certain shutdowns of pipelines, shut the pause in LNG? What is kind of that done to the energy grid? You know, we've

43:50 talked a lot about this on BDE, and it really worries me, particularly when it comes to LNG because that's such an amazing asset that we've got We did the energy policy draft two years ago, and I

44:10 was the moderator, and the question was, your energies are the world. You get to pick one thing. What do you want to pick? Mark went first, and Mark took natural gas, and Mark made the point

44:22 that we have a lot of natural gas. It could be a strategic weapon, not just a defense asset. I mean, if we were to free up LNG, I mean, imagine geopolitically what that does, and potentially

44:37 Europe doesn't have to look back. towards Russian natural gas. Maybe we don't have to buy Russian

44:45 LNG up in Massachusetts. Like we historically have done periodically. And so it's definitely something we need to think through last week or two weeks ago on BD. We actually talked about how Taiwan

45:03 is shutting in all its nuclear plants So they're literally gonna have to, they're gonna be dependent on importing LNG and coal. And I think they need about three BCF a day of LNG to run all that

45:18 stuff. China didn't have to invade. They just have to circle it and not let it ship through. You know? And so we really gotta get back to thinking of energy as a driver of our foreign policy and

45:32 protecting our allies when we go up against forces of evil. I want to go back to, you know, one thing that we could do if the industry was motivated and OPEC plus was, and the plus is important

45:48 here because I'm talking about Russia primarily, you know, the litany of sanctions that have been brought to bear since the invasion of Ukraine have really had the opposite effect. And so a

46:04 producer-based economy like Russia a raw material producer, which is the biggest driver of their GDP, their economy has been very strong, so they've been able to fund an ongoing massive military

46:22 campaign. And if OPEC in the US were inclined to take the

46:31 governor off and really add a lot of barrels to the market and push prices down, considerably from here, that is immediately negatively impactful in Russia. But the other dynamic in the middle of

46:44 that is, and I've talked about this before, I believe that part of OPEC, OPEC's core OPEC's decision-making is with Russia in the fold, because you go back to, believe it was 2020 when the

46:58 Russians and Saudis had a bit of a dust-up at the worst possible time in COVID, et cetera, more importantly than that, I was to execute a term sheet for a secondary for two large institutional

47:14 investors to buy out significant stakes of energy fund five, six, and seven. Needless to say, on the announcement of the price war, they didn't sign the term sheet. What do you think Russia and

47:29 US. is like, that's wrong from originally I was born

47:35 there Isn't that like a good, if those. who were aligned, isn't that good for the world? If they can make it happen? Yeah, so the question is, if Russia and the US are aligned, would that be

47:47 good for the world? '90s. I think it would. I also think it might be like my youngest daughter, Kelly, whose two older sisters have now left the house. And Kelly's fear is that both parents'

48:02 full attention is turned on her these days And so to the extent Russia and the United States are colluding on stuff, the rest of the world may not be happy, but at And weapons. nuclear have that

48:14 superpowers other with along get to love you'd obviously

48:21 the end of the day, I think potentially when we get to a Russian world without Putin, we'll see what can happen So we've been at this 45 minutes.

48:38 Here's what we're going to do. We're going to go around the room. We need one thought idea, anything. I'll throw out, I'll even start this. I think what we ought to do to make the world a better

48:52 place, let Chick-fil-A handle all the voting going forward in the United States. I'll expand on that and extend that. I think Chick-fil-A should handle logistics operations for certainly every fast

49:05 food provider in the world. It's a completely different experience. One of my favorite stores, private equity taken over Waterburger, was not a good thing. I agree with that, particularly a

49:18 Chicago private equity firm. But one of my favorite Chick-fil-A stories is during COVID, a Chick-fil-A manager on his day off went down to the testing place and you had the cars all lined up and

49:31 they were running about an hour and 14 minutes to get through the line. And he's hung out there all morning, made some suggestions. By the afternoon, 14 minutes was the wait. He just improved it.

49:45 And I always thought that, you know, great on Chick-fil-A, great about America that somebody would do that on their day off. Give me an idea to make the world a better place. More drill, drill

49:56 baby drill. There we go. I love it. All right, better place. What do we do?

50:03 Crypto-famerable Bitcoin, all of them, all in the above. All righty, close this out. Make the world a better place. I would say focus on family, love, and your own household. There we go.

50:19 Little Ringo star, peace and love. Peace and love. Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us. This was a lot of fun. We have to do it again at some point. We'll watch the elections tonight and see

50:33 what's up I don't think we have anything meaningful to report at this point. But I didn't see that Cruz had a four point lead over all road with 25 of the vote. Oh, there we go. And in Texas. And

50:46 Bernie Sanders at age, whatever he is, 81 or 82, just four, four Senate term, fourth Senate term. Peace out, everybody. We'll be back in three weeks when Yes, we've got it counted.