Big Digital Energy

0:00 What's up, everyone? We're back this week with BDE. We're out last week 'cause everyone was out on vacation. I was spring-breaking. You're spring-breaking, you're in Amsterdam. So yeah, I call

0:10 it five days in London, three days in Amsterdam. Crazy thing, you know, you're here in America, right? You're about to cross the street and you look to your left and then you don't see a car

0:20 coming so you step out in the street, right? If you do that in England, you get run over 'cause all those people drive on the wrong side of the road, right? So you gotta learn to look right So I

0:30 finally kind of after a couple of days, get back in the habit, okay, look right and all that. Then I get an Amsterdam, bikes everywhere. That's all these people do is ride bikes around. So you

0:40 step out in the street and they're like, bikes coming from every direction. And what's crazy about it is I'm sitting there going, you know, if bikes, like my form of transportation I'm right

0:50 around, I'm gonna have some swag, right? I'm gonna have a cool ass looking bike pimped out. They're all pieces ship bikes. I thought you put us a picture on Twitter of all the bikes. Yeah, I'll

1:00 send that to Jacob. Jacob, pull it up, but you were trashing the bikes. You know why? 'Cause your bikes get stolen. Oh, they steal them. So yeah, and what happens is, somebody steals them,

1:11 they ride around, and then they throw them into the canal. And they dredge the canal about every six months and drag out like 2, 000 old pieces of ship bikes. So that's what you did. But it was

1:21 cool. I'd never been to Amsterdam. You said it was fun. You said it was a good place, but yeah, it's like stuff like that. It's like, I don't know if I could ever live in Europe, like you had

1:29 to travel by bike and then you don't even get a nice bike 'cause everyone steals it. It's like, dude, fuck this place. Well, it was interesting. We took the train from, instead of a plane from

1:37 London to Amsterdam and wind turbines, solar, everywhere. Really? Driving through the countryside of France. We went through Brussels and then up into Holland. And yeah, so the renewable

1:49 thing's real Yeah, solar in.

1:55 Europe is wild, not the best place for solar.

2:02 So, it's interesting to see it though.

2:05 We got, it's funny, we're joking before we got on here because Mark and Saw and Kirk are not with us today. It's just me and you, this is old school. You know, last week, not last week, but

2:17 the week before last was our 100th episode of BDE. That's kind of crazy, I like to think about it. It used to just be me and you In front of a green screen with a blimp. I mean, we need the blimp

2:30 back. Let's get the blimp back, sure. We should order like a blimp to sit on the table. Shh. Just as a road. As a road, we float back and forth. I'd be down, but you know, every time we come

2:39 in here without Mark, we're like, Oh shit, man. What are we gonna say? Yeah, we're not gonna sound smart. Makeups are just, we don't have our numbers instead, it's a guy. So it's funny, one

2:48 of the last episodes that we didn't have Mark on, you and I, We stop recording in Kirk. You know, man, that should have just really didn't have any substance to it. And then someone called us

2:56 out on the YouTube comments. There's like too much fluff, not enough numbers. And like, damn, then we got them back. We brought in Josh.

3:04 We'll give you numbers. Josh knows this stuff. Someone to give you numbers. So yeah, this one of preface this by apologizing that if we don't check and I don't deliver this week on numbers, I

3:14 don't know. You may just have to find another show numbers for like 20 some idea. I'm trying to find numbers of numbers. Exactly But big week in Houston this week, Sarah Week is here. Um, so

3:26 lots of people in and out of Houston attending Sarah Week or talking at Sarah Week, but sounds like, uh, it's getting kicked off with a bang because Saudi Ramco CEO, a mean nest here, uh, had a

3:39 quote, I saw this on, on the news this morning that we should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in adequately, and invest in them, adequately reflecting realistic

3:50 demand assumptions. Saudi Aramco CEO comes out swinging at Sarah Week saying that we need to abandon this transition, fantasy and invest more in an oil and gas. Do you think he's saying that just

4:04 'cause he's got a home field advantage here. Talking his own book. Being here in Houston, you know, talking his own book or what do you take on

4:13 that? Well, I mean, you think part of it too is, I mean, he runs Saudi Aramco, he is not MBS, right? So MBS talks the broader game of the transition, diversifying Saudi from just being oil

4:31 and gas guys where the Saudi Aramco guy gets saying, no, we're just oil and gas guys. Yeah. And you wonder if there's some political messaging in that as well. 'Cause - That is interesting. I

4:43 wonder like you think that they're on the same page for things. So you and I say different stuff all the time. That's true. And part of it's by design sometimes. That's what I'm saying. That's

4:54 what, you know, you say one thing out of one entity and say one thing out of the other, play it politically. So I did learn something, I did learn something from my London trip. You know, when

5:08 Jared Kushner was in charge of the Middle East under Trump, I mean four agreements were signed between Arab nations and Israel during that period and supposedly it was really close between Saudi and

5:25 Israel signing an agreement. Do you know how MBS and Jared Kushner? I mean, a Jew, a Muslim bonded. How's that? Call of Duty. Call of Duty. Seriously, they supposedly sat there for hours

5:40 playing Call of Duty. Playing video games. Just playing video games with each other. It's funny, the Call of Duty, the online lobbies and chats have been known to bring together people. from all

5:50 different backgrounds and in races and religions and yeah, no, I got this from a good source that the literally literally would know, but that is supposedly they just sent their first set their

6:02 four hours in play. It's pretty funny. You had this actually parley's kind of well into our next story because you said you had some some dirt on this, but saw that ex ex on CEO Darren Woods came

6:15 out saying that they're not trying to buy ex on. I guess there's been all this speculation I'm not trying to buy. Sorry. Sorry. Trying to buy HES. Been all the speculation that maybe they were

6:25 trying to buy HES and block this deal. Anyways, what happens is you've got this block in Guyana and you have different partners in it. You have HES, Chevron, Exxon. And apparently Chevron and

6:40 HES disagree with Exxon's interpretation of the joint operating agreement And Exxon is blocking this deal from happening. You said you had a little bit of a knowledge on that, sir. I talked to an

6:54 old school Exxon employee who's gone now, but has not seen the agreement, but was there when a lot of these things were written, knows the standard operating procedure, said back in the '70s, and

7:08 I forget the number, but just the standard joint operating agreement that would govern these big majors doing business with each other, did not have a preffright clause in it, but because of all

7:23 the merger stuff that happened in the '70s, in

7:28 the '80s that joint operating agreement added a clause in there for preffrites. And

7:33 so he said, I guarantee you, Exxon did not sign the joint operating agreement, particularly since they're the ones that drafted it for Ghana without the preffright language in there. So if Exxon

7:45 says it's in there, Guess what, it's in there. Number one, and number two, his take on how the Preferite agreement worked, he thinks 80, 85 chance that Exxon's gonna win this in arbitration and

8:03 he can't figure out what Chevron was doing by pushing

8:11 this and so. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It says that this is Darren Wood's first public comments since they've been pursuing this arbitration case and Wood said that Exxon would not have

8:24 waited for Chevron to announce its deal with Hess if it wanted to buy Hess. So he's taken away the speculation that they're trying to block this acquisition and then he said, we're basically

8:33 standing up for what we believe is a fundamental right. So sounds like, you know,

8:40 whether it's, you know, this prefrites in the joint operating agreement or whatever it is, It's basically dealing with the asset and the deal itself. as a potential to block the chevron. And it's

8:51 written as a risk factor in

8:56 the S4 for the chevron test deal that us and Exxon disagree on the prep right. So it's a noun. They didn't close it in that. And I think don't the Chinese own, like 30 of that block too. So

9:11 there's another party involved with it as well. And so I think what Exxon's contention is

9:21 even in a merger, because the whole reason the Preferite stuff is, well, I misspoke this. Let me say this again. So in the '70s, there was

9:34 a Preferite, but it didn't deal with corporate mergers. And you had all the mergers happen in the '70s. So they rewrote the language, I think in the '80s that included mergers.

9:44 And what's supposed to happen is in a merger, You're supposed to say, well, Ghana was this block. was worth20 billion or whatever it was, you have to sign a value to it, and then the PragerFrite

9:56 can be exercised in it even in a corporate merger. So got you. Yeah. No. So this is going to be, get your popcorn out. Get your popcorn out. We'll see what the, uh, what the fallout is from

10:07 that you have it. How long do these things usually take to shake out? I mean, is this something that happens in the next six months, 12 months? Well, I mean, I don't know what the arbitration

10:15 clause says, you know, but, uh, yeah, like most of the time you don't want going, you know, you don't want to be going to court. So you make a pretty strong arbitration case, yeah, uh, or

10:28 arbitration clause so that you're dealing with this in front of an arbitrator. Yeah. Yeah. So that's all, I mean, pretty recent development. So we may be talking about this. The other thing

10:38 would said today is he came out swinging and said, Hey, everybody wants clean energy. Nobody's willing to pay for it. You know, I was to pay for it Yeah, I thought that was a pretty baller.

10:48 Well, we've talked lots of comments on the major oil and gas. See that's like come to Houston. Yeah, just say

10:55 whatever you want down here. Well, you know, because we've talked about it on here, I've always thought that what because they have pricing power or that they have, they show a pricing mechanism

11:06 that gas stations ought to have a pump. This is clean gasoline pay X for it. Yeah, you know, it's going to be more expensive than normal gasoline Give the consumers a choice. Hey, a premium for

11:19 it. Yeah. I mean, airlines have been trying that with having you pay for your carbon credits and the app's like, you want to pay an extra100 and I don't think that's sitting very well, at least

11:29 in the public discourse on Twitter, people think that it's kind of a grift. I'm not sure on the back end of airlines are actually doing that. And you know, airlines probably spend less time

11:39 worrying about that in credit card miles, uh, reverse programs and just figure out how to bolt their planes. properly.

11:50 Did you see that that whistle blower for Boeing? Yeah. It's found dead. And now 100 looks like a murder. He totally said to a friend, I am not suicidal. Yeah. Said if something happens to me,

12:02 I'm not suicidal. And so lots of weird, weird shit going on there. Hey, Colin, I'm here to announce that if I'm found dead, I am not suicidal. Go check out Maynard, hold it fair to any of my

12:16 competitors that are coming, coming after me, I'm not suicidal.

12:21 Well, we're on this track of CEO, oil and gas CEOs. Toby Rice was in the news after this uh, mystery acquisition. He was on CNBC. And I saw he was catching some flack on Twitter for talking

12:34 about their, um, I want to say their AI strategy, but you know, the future of AI, um, power to man, did you get a chance to listen to that? I did. I listened to our good friend Toby, Toby

12:45 speaking.

12:47 I did not, until I heard him speak on this, I had not put this together, but basically what he's saying is, if we buy back in the pipelines and you look at our cost structure, he said, we're

12:60 cashflow positive on a

13:02 molecule below2. And

13:06 he said, at that level of profitability, he said, we can do a lot less hedging And he basically told investors, he said, look, natural gas demand is up 50 over, I think he said the last 20

13:21 years or maybe it was the last 10 years, but he said storage is only up 10. So that's what's made our commodity so much more volatile 'cause you can't store it to meet demand. And so you've kind of

13:33 got to do it through the drill bit, right? Yeah. And he said, if I have really, really low break evens, cashflow positives, I can handle my debt out of cashflow flow at lower prices because I'm

13:45 going to hedge a lot. less, therefore, the volatility of the upside, my shareholders are going to capture, which is really interesting because early in my career, 30 years ago, when I joined,

14:01 energy was your inflation hedge. You played it for commodity exposure period, and then Louis Dreyfus, the trading company, built an oil and gas company, and they came in and said, Hey, we can

14:14 turn this into manufacturing We can go out and hedge and lock in rates of return, and you saw hedging slowly get adopted by the rest of the industry, and people started talking about, Yeah, we

14:26 protect the downside. We do all this sort of stuff. Yeah. You know, Toby's going back to old school and saying, Hey, it's always been like, for me, it's like never been interested in investing

14:37 in oil and gas companies because there's so much this different agency risk with that like, you know, these EMPs have their own hedge books. You want to just to say, hey, I'm bullish on oil and

14:49 gas, and I want to invest in that sector. It wasn't as easy as buying a public oil and gas company because they had all of these different just variables that oil could be skyrocketing in your share

15:03 price or your stock price of your, your bag that you're holding isn't going up in a linear fashion because maybe they were hedged, you know, so I think that that's actually more appealing Like if I

15:14 was a public EMP, I'd like, if I'm a shareholder investor, I want more of that volatility and like direct commodity exposure. Well, if you, if you think about it, I mean, energy drives a lot

15:29 of the economy. So if you own this diversified portfolio, you sit there and you own Amazon stock, well, what's their biggest risk is gasoline prices go to12 a gallon So I mean to offset that risk

15:43 you need Exposure to low-price. Yeah, for sure. And same electricity is becoming more and more natural gas based in terms of its correlation. Yeah, if you're building out like a real balance

15:55 portfolio, it's like you don't want to own X amount of energy to account for rising. Yeah, I mean, you could say the stock market run, you 2010 since, know was all the product of the shale

16:06 revolution, both low natural gas prices and low oil prices. Yeah, for sure I should make a whole video on that about how it fueled the biggest boom of American money. So even though we sucked and

16:16 didn't generate any returns, your poor used to pitch that. Your funds did well. I mean, your old pension fund did great. You

16:27 made these investments to fuel the rest of your portfolio. Yeah, that's some mental gymnastics there. It's like, if you've seen all this, if you've seen all this stuff on Twitter, you know, the

16:37 real estate agents used to charge six percent This'll do. This'll do.

16:44 They settled out of court last week. I know, but that happened last week. Yeah. You're talking like this is all news that happened last week. No, but I mean, have you seen the mental gymnastics

16:52 by these real estate going, well, 6 actually made it better because it's like, how did that make it better? Dude, I've always like, we're actually, you and I were just talking about this about

17:02 buying homes and I've always looked at real estate agents and like, no knock on real, I'm sure there's real estate agents out there that are actually like valuable, but like talking about the whole,

17:12 like the collective I'm like, just talk about a no-nothing job where it's like, well, I found these listings, I printed them out for you and you just facilitate, make sure some documents are

17:22 signed. Someone on Twitter did retweet

17:26 that news article

17:30 of the 6 being taken out and it's like land bros everywhere. You can have this and like have the sweating gift. So land bros are like, no, we are valuable in the minerals.

17:45 Well, it already felt like that was in reality. I mean, I would go to my real estate agent and say do it for one person instead of three. You know, when I bought and sold my town home. Yeah,

18:01 most people don't do that. And then it's also like, you know, you can do that on the buyer side, but the seller side, you know, they still have their split. And so I think that, I think that

18:12 what happens is that you still have real estate agents, but it's just you're filtering out the cream of the crop and they're negotiating what their rate is. And the best real estate agents are gonna

18:23 get the best commissions. It's not just gonna be a 6 flat Yeah. across the board. So you're still gonna get paid, but you actually have to work to get paid. I wonder if it's gonna be like

18:33 geologists and Midland during downturns, you know? You drive through, you either drive through Chick-fil-A and there's your former real estate agent Yeah.

18:45 I don't know, it's just interesting with like platforms like, I mean, how long has, you know, these online platforms, whether it's hard or, why am I Zillow,

18:56 you know,

18:58 red fan, like they've been around forever and it's like, you can never ask for more information about listings and like you can sit there from a computer and get all the information that you need,

19:08 you know, Zillow, I'm sure I had a case back in the day, it's like, oh, we're going to replace all real estate agents and yeah, I'm sure there was 20 years later. Yeah, 20 years later still

19:17 here. Well, the way I'd take it is there was a buddy of mine that I went to undergrad with and back in the over periodically, these bonds would show up where a company would

19:31 issue debt and they'd issue it at about 50 basis points cheaper than they should have So if they should have had 7 interest rates, they'd get six and a half. 'cause it would have a feature that if

19:45 you co-owned the bonds and one of the person dies, they would just pay it out at par. And so the reason these bonds were cheaper is you'd go sell it to old folks and the pitch was a husband and wife

19:59 in your 70s. If one of y'all's dies, you can then get the bonds to pay out at par and that way you can pay for the funeral and stuff. So it was kind of this retail product So anyway, he picked up

20:13 on this and he started buying it with terminally ill patients. And so he'd go find a bond that was trading at, you know, 85 cents on the dollar, buy it with a terminal patient. They'd die in

20:25 three to six months and he'd get paid out 100 cents on the dollar. And he was doing all this and he raised a little fund and it was making like 20 rate of return payouts each year. The SEC finally

20:38 steps in and says, No, you can't do that. He went to court with him. He wound up ultimately winning, but at the end of the day, he just couldn't afford to fight it anymore. And he was calling

20:49 and telling me about how outrageous it was and all this. I said, Dude, you had a good run. Yeah. It's kinda like I say that to the real estate agents. Yeah. You had a good run. You had a good

20:58 run. You know what, I thought it was funny going back to Toby talking on CNBC is literally the week before we recorded a podcast. And remember all that podcast? I was like, if I was Toby Rice,

21:09 this is what I'd be doing And we're talking about how they curtailed a billion cubic feet of gas. And we're talking about how they should have their own gas turbines and sell electricity to data

21:21 centers and miners. And then a week later, they announced this acquisition and Toby's on CNBC talking about power demand for AI and GPUs. And it's like, I convinced Toby, listen to our podcast

21:34 and took that many times. How many times have we talked about meta and then putting John Arnold on the board and then Tony's talking about you. Yeah. Yeah. Tony's a, yeah, he needs to throw out

21:44 some, uh, some kudos to the digital walk adders while he's on CNBC. But speaking of, uh, that was incredibly arrogant of us. I like

21:54 that, right? They're vaping right now. Who are these two? And I'm not sitting here talking about me down in Houston. Speaking of, uh, speaking of data centers and miners, uh, had some MMA

22:07 activity in the Bitcoin mining space. So marathon digital is buying a Bitcoin mining facility that's owned by Applied Digital for87 million and cold hard cash. Uh, the Bitcoin mining centers, uh,

22:22 co-located with the wind farm, uh, has a capacity of 200 megawatts trying to see where this, uh, where this is based at, but, um, Yeah, so marathon digital, who will be at Empower next week,

22:37 they've been on Empower every year. So if you don't have an Empower ticket, come to Empower. But yeah, interesting to see some more consolidation. We just saw Amazon buy that data center that was

22:50 co-located with that nuclear facility, talked about it on that on that podcast last week. So starting to see some of these centers get bought up. I guess the economies of scale there are cheaper to

23:08 probably operate more computers on a per computer basis than less. And then you do have some capacity to negotiate your energy contract. Yeah, I also think it's kind of like, you know, kind of

23:22 think about like oil and gas shield days where there's a lot of upfront work that goes into securing a lease and, you know, proving out the asset. And so it's probably easier for someone like

23:35 Marathon Digital to go in and say, Hey, Applied Digital already did all of this work. Getting the facility set up, getting the power purchase agreements with the wind farm and they can go in there

23:45 and acquire it. And yeah, I don't know what these companies look for when they're acquiring, but yeah, I'm sure that there's some economies of skill there in terms of maintenance and objects. And

23:57 there's probably best practices If you built a facility of some sort, somebody's

24:07 been operating longer and does it more, probably has better ability to cool and

24:13 stuff like that, that's better purchasing power with suppliers and things of that nature. So yeah, it makes sense. But interesting to see that. And then, man, the only thing that I have left

24:26 today is Don Jr. wanted us to talk about this because it's pretty important. It's not energy related, but it is important. Oh, I would do my best. Don Jr. post

24:37 on Twitter, he said, Has anyone else noticed that Twitter search functionschange and objectively sucks now? And I replied, I said, It's been like this for a year, pretty much ever since Elon

24:45 took over, it's like terrible, you can't find any postsor people that you want. And Don Jr. That's a hard thing, tagging people, that's what I'm about to get to here 'cause Don said, I've

24:56 really noticed it lately, I'll try to search someone based on their nameand it's virtually impossibleif you don't have their exact handlehonestly, search functionality is to climb more than

25:05 Googleand y'all should bring this aspect up on BDE. That's what I'm talking about 'cause Don wanted us to talk about it on BDE, but yeah, like, when I'm typing up a post and I go to tag people,

25:15 sometimes I'm having to back out of the post and go look up their handle and then like get it right down their handle. And I go to Google search, yeah, or Google search. That's like, no, it's

25:25 bad. Like, LinkedIn's always had that problem. Like, you could go to Google and find what you want on LinkedIn on Google on the LinkedIn platform and this is actually, for those of you that are

25:36 on our collide app or getting ready to get on collide as we launch the new app next month, this was part of the thesis was that it's always been so hard to find things through search. And so like

25:46 you'd see this good post on Twitter, like from a production engineer like, Hey, why do I have iron carbonate built up in my saltwater disposal? Well, and then you know, engineers would come in

25:55 and answer and it's like really technical valuable information. And then two days later, it's no less into the ether. And so ultimately, what I want to do is be able to index that information

26:03 using AI. That way, the next time someone has that question, boom, you can ask AI and it'll pull up someone's posts that was talking about that. But search isn't a trivial thing. Like search is

26:13 really hard. And that's what, you know, these horizontal platforms, there's just so much content and information that, you know, even if you had a good search, like when Twitter search was good,

26:24 you still had to go on advanced search and you had to remember someone's handle exactly the words that were used in the the post and things about what date. Yeah, but yeah, ever since Elon's taken

26:33 over Twitter and I want to bash on Elon because I like, I love, you know, the what I love the mission of what he has with X, but search is almost unusable at this point. Was it was that by design?

26:46 Do you think it long did that on purpose? No, I don't. I just think that it's a byproduct. Feverishly writing code every day. I think it's a byproduct of, I mean, they just cut their

26:56 engineering resources dramatically I mean, you remember a lot of people were like, oh, my gosh, they're cutting all these engineers. Like people didn't even think X was going to stay running,

27:06 right? And it stayed running. It works really well, but just like it's a byproduct of maybe no one's putting any time and attention into search and it's degrading and falling and, you know,

27:18 they're busy with a million other things. But I think like search is like a core feature of a platform because especially like something Like something as simple as looking at people's handles and

27:28 names like you need to be able to to do that, and yeah, it's almost unusable from that perspective, so. I mean, I'm gonna use this in quotes instead of the actual definition, but the AI of the

27:41 search has always been bad too. It's like, I'll type in frack. Will you and I interact all the time? You should be number one popping up on my Twitter search, and a lot of times you're like way

27:51 at the end. That's what LinkedIn really sucks with that too, because it's like, actually, this is a broader conversation, 'cause you know, it really sucks that search now is Apple in my phone.

28:02 Oh, it's the worst. Like, it and messages. Like, I'll go into messages, and I'll type in, you know, Chuck, and it won't, it works for you, 'cause you're the only Chuck in my phone funny

28:16 enough. But like, if I was to do someone else like Jake, like, I talk to Jake all the time. Right. And I search Jake, and it doesn't bring up Jake in my top results or my contacts, it'll bring

28:25 up like some Jake I haven't talked to in years. Apple did not used to be like that. Like I could search through all my messages and find whatever I found. And so this isn't just a Twitter thing.

28:35 This is kind of like broad spectrum of search just degrading and sucks on these apps. And so that's something that we're gonna put a lot of time and attention to on collide because being able to find

28:46 information quickly is important. And so being able to use AI to do that to kind of augments it. But yeah, it's like, it's not just like searching for things, you know, specific search, but

28:57 like contextual things of like, oh, Holland and Chuck talk a lot. So he's probably looking for Chuck, and not Chuck that he talked to you five years ago. So you know what's interesting? I've

29:05 read a Wall Street Journal article, gosh, 15 years ago, and I wish I had saved it. But one of the things that talked about was that when you lose a significant relationship, like you go through a

29:18 divorce or you and your best friend getting to fight and don't talk anymore, they talk about how you feel like you've lost a piece of yourself Well, you actually have because. The knowledge I have

29:30 in this world is not just the stuff in my head, it's part of your network. And I kind of thought that was bullshit when I read it, but then literally that day I walked into my kind's office three

29:44 times, he's my business partner at Kane. Hey, who's that dude we had dinner with in Dallas? Oh yeah, thanks. You don't realize how often you're actually accessing your memory back too. We do it

29:56 all the time around here They call it in tech, they're called relational databases. Yeah. And so, it's literally what it is and it's like, and it's search. It's like, you know how many times I

30:06 go ask Jake, I'm

30:11 like, Hey, who's that person? Was that that event? And like, Jake has that information index, but I don't. And I know Jake has it index, so I don't ever get it. Yeah. But I mean, that's

30:17 search right there. So it's just so important to our lives. Yeah. I mean, it's a good point when you talk about it on a very like analog or biological basis. humans are databases and we index

30:31 information. And yeah, you have your little close network that other people have information index that you tapped into. So it's interesting to hear about that. And that's actually like kind of

30:40 what leads into like AI overtaking humanity in the future is that it can just compete those things much faster than we can. So anyways.

30:53 One last thing real quick So each week we've been talking about an election.

30:60 Obviously, what do we need to talk about the Russian election for surprise, surprise, Putin won. Yeah. There was some talk about him using his vote total to kind of justify Ukraine. He won 85 of

31:16 the vote. Now, he killed off the number one opponent arguably. And so. AP Associated Press headline is Putin Extendral and pre-ordained Russian election that. harshest crackdowns in Soviet area.

31:30 But it says right here, a Russian election, Putin declared winter a race that was never in doubt. Yeah, exactly. But also there was another election. It was for parliament in Portugal. And

31:45 here's what I kind of found interesting about this. So in 2022, the socialist party had an outright majority, 120 of the 230 seats Their prime minister was Antonio Costa. He'd been prime minister

32:00 since 2015. So he was rolling into his third term here, scandals of plenty. So 11 secretaries, states resigned, two ministers resigned. There's a big scandal with the airline. He, Costa,

32:16 actually got accused of rigging contracts for lithium and hydrogen businesses. So we've got our energy tied And, supposedly, they went into his house and, like, found money in his bookshelf in

32:30 between pages of books, and it was like100, 000 or something.

32:35 But what was interesting, so through all this, Ruhaha, they called for new elections, and the outcomes were this, actually the center right party, the Democratic Alliance won 79 seats,

32:47 socialist party won 77 seats, and the Chaga party, which is a far right populist type party that literally started five years ago, kind of

33:01 out of nowhere wins 48 seats of this. And so the reason I bring this election up is just some themes that are coming out of it. You know, these far right populist type candidates like in Argentina,

33:16 et cetera, Trump, this may not just be a US Trump thing. It feels like anti-government, And I know, I know liberals say it's an authoritarian type.

33:29 draw. It's not really that. It seems to be an anti, you know, kind of drain the swamp type thing. So it's happening everywhere. In Portugal, it actually had a pretty good run. I mean, they,

33:41 the, the socialist party had reduced the debt. Unemployment was less than 7. They'd had economic growth. Inflation was under control there. Pretty good run. So, but anyway, so kind of the,

33:56 the anti-government stuff, establishing hold in Portugal. And then the other thing that is kind of a pet peeve of mine,

34:05 but it's something we've seen on all these elections, just the amount of corruption that goes on in all these governments. And the reason I bring that up is one of the things we've noticed on on all

34:19 of these is the government, the power of the government are being used to investigate the corruption. And the one thing our founding fathers did is they said in the Constitution, if we have

34:34 corruption, we're gonna handle it in a political process. So you actually impeach the president. That's the House of Representatives who are democratically elected and then the Senate tries it.

34:44 And that's the way we deal with corruption as opposed to using the force of the state, if you will. I just bring that up 'cause every one of these is highlighting just corruption and it's - And also

34:58 the prime ministers run from jail. I also think how much of this is a byproduct of the internet and access to information. Like, you bring up this kind of mentality of like anti-government. Well,

35:12 you know, these people in these countries are getting access to content from the United States and you know, how much does the United States influence the rest of the world and kind of our freedom

35:25 and liberty

35:28 I've always had this thesis about the internet for the last few decades that over time, war trends down, which it was and still is, but obviously, we've had some volatility here in the last couple

35:40 of years. And you also see things like

35:45 shifting in religious beliefs and political beliefs and what's happening is more people around the world are getting connected to each other and being exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking And,

35:59 you know, I think this also kind of plays into the TikTok ban that just happened this week. Like, I'm really surprised like seeing some of my friends on Twitter that are very pro American and

36:10 Liberty types of people, all of a sudden bootlicking on the government banning TikTok. Like I get it, like, you know, there's concern around it being spyware for China. I don't think that that's

36:22 like actually a viable

36:25 complaint but putting that aside. Everyone's like, oh, China bans these American apps, Google, Facebook, it's like, cool, you wanna be China? Is that what we're aiming for? Is blocking

36:37 access to the internet and information and ideas? I use TikTok a lot and my kids use TikTok. My daughter came up to me, my 10 year old daughter came up to me and was like, hey, look at this video

36:45 about extracting oil from this type of wood, from this bark. I had no idea that was even a thing. And this guy's out in the wilderness showing how you can extract hydrocarbons from this wood

36:56 There's a ton of interesting and engineering type content on there. And to be honest, there's a lot of base content on there, too, that the overlords that the United States federal level wouldn't

37:08 allow to be on Twitter and Facebook. And so I think it's a little bit concerning this path that we're going down of passing these Patriot Act level types of bills to shut down internet platforms and

37:23 not allow Americans to access parts of the internet I think that that access to information is what is driving some of these things around the world, is just exposure to new ideas and beliefs and,

37:37 you know, I've always seen this. Like I used to have a worker in Beijing and China that would come over here and help me with jobs in the Western Hemisphere. And we talk about these things. He's

37:46 like, people never, the issues are never with people. It's always governments versus governments And I think that the internet is a very important development and the timeline of human history to

37:60 allow us to understand each other better and be inspired by ideas and information. So always wonder how much of that plays into some of these political shifts that you see in some of these countries.

38:13 Yeah, because I mean, there's no doubt that the Cold War, I mean, we sat there with Nuke's pointed at the Soviet Union forever, the Cold War was won by MTV, Levi's and Coca-Cola.

38:27 When they finally, when basically the Soviet Union figured out we had all that stuff, the people did there, it was the pressure on the government to actually liberalize - Yeah, that's cultural.

38:35 Yeah, that's interesting. Very much so. Well, we made a show out of - You

38:43 did? Can I come into this and know if we were gonna have a show? This was like old school, but we performed. We did it.

38:49 No, we just get raked over the golds on all the comments If you have any

38:55 negative comments, send them directly to Mark and Saab, but hope you enjoyed the show this week. Couple of pieces of news, we do have our Empower event. Next week, March 26th, 27th, I believe

39:06 are the exact dates. We'd love to see if your energy would love to have you there. If you're listening to BDE and you wanna go, hit me up. And I will give you a discount for being a BDE listener.

39:16 Way more energy folks there, learning about the future of infrastructure and high performance computing And then following that, we are launching our new version And that's coming out at the

39:26 beginning of April. Super excited about that. We're already bringing on new jobs into the Clyde Jobs platform. So if you're looking for your next gig, we have jobs from Diamondback Energy,

39:36 Verteasoll Tools, Nine Energy. Go out and check that out. I'm gonna be making a lot of progress and updates on Clyde over the next few weeks. So hope to have you all on that platform. So here's

39:47 what I'll say to BD listeners. If you're gonna go apply for your next job and you reach out and you convince me that you actually listened to BD, happy to coach you on it. Dang. So long as we can

39:59 record it and potentially use in support of Clyde jobs. All right, we will catch y'all next week.