Big Digital Energy

0:00 It's going on boys, another week of. BDE, big digital energy. Word, you guys, we're on a streak. I went back to the ray of sunshine t-shirt. Hadn't worn it. That's a classic. I broke it out.

0:16 We should actually put that up in the merch store. Exactly. Like eight, which I think we should actually. Yeah, no, we're going to do it. People have been hounding us to get more merch. So

0:26 well, dude, well, first of all, how was Midland, man? It is great One love every time we go to Midland. Every time I go there, I'm just like, I fucking love there. I actually get a little

0:35 bit homesick. And so, uh, energy tech night was amazing. Had probably a little under 300 people there, great crowd, great, great room. That's what makes energy tech. I, what it is, um,

0:48 tons of great feedback from everyone. So kind of an ambassador, a better trip is kind of crazy. The, the weather, the day we're driving there was 80 degrees. And by that evening, it was 30

0:59 freaking cold. Cold front just blowing in and boss was riding with me. He's like, is it always this dusty? Like, it was like no visibility. You couldn't see anything. And so it was actually

1:10 super cold. And then the day we left, it was getting back up to 80 degrees. So typical West Texas weather. Do you see the smoke fire smoke? No, not there too far down south. But I don't think

1:23 you had to go up that much further north to see the smoke. And so it's crazy I've seen a lot of videos on Twitter, friend Oscar on Twitter posted a video

1:35 of losing all his oil leases to the fires, full, really bad form, everything that he's worked for, and all of his surface equipment burning down. So I don't know what the update is on that. Were

1:46 they contained? I mean, yeah, with that - I think they got some snowfall. Yeah, probably. Yeah, because I mean, it was even sprinkling snow a little bit up around Midland. And so you're

1:56 probably right but John sent me a video. of someone's game camera or trail camera at their feeder and I cannot believe how fast the fire moved across the screen. I'm talking like seconds. It took

2:11 seconds to go 20 yards and so that wind from that cold front coming in just made that thing spread like crazy. So I don't know if they got it fully contained or not. But yeah, I think I saw a

2:23 picture of a snow blanket and there was comments about, you know, this is a godsend. Yeah, what's going on with the fires? You did have a room with a view in in Midland, didn't you? Yeah, in

2:34 the county courthouse or jail right outside my window. Made a post about it. It's like been locked up there four times. So it's like, I don't know if this is like symbolic. So I'm looking down

2:44 from the hood. Somebody didn't heed the ear. Yeah. Well, and I did not know this because in neither place would I function very well, but supposedly you'd rather get arrested in a decid versus

2:57 midline. You get processed faster and That's always just to clear the air. I've never been arrested on like any serious charges It's always like petty stuff like at a house party. Oh, please

3:07 define

3:13 Say I'm not a hardened criminal, but that's the problem with Midland is like I'd be detained Sometimes just in a holding tank for like 48 hours like not even checked in to the system And so I could

3:24 see that I don't know about Odessa's jail, but yeah, Midland They'll just hold you there for a long time without even checking you in. So kind of sucks But yeah, no, it was a good time. Well,

3:34 uh, we need to go make a road show some time and do a BDE in Midland Yeah, we definitely did we can Austin and then yeah

3:43 Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, Alan Gilmer at the drilling info Pad what's he call it The man cave man cave. Yeah, dude at the man cave and then do one in midland I'm going to cap on. Then we go down

3:56 to Turlingua. Let's just make it all right. Yes, right, right, right, right, right, right. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Oh,

4:02 and let's just vlog it the whole time, the four of us. In an EV, we'll see what it's like, try one. I need a Prevo with a DW wrap. Yeah, exactly. Let's see what it's like traveling around in

4:13 Texas. But anyway, so yeah, I was, I was all tied up in Midland, so I'm kind of out of the loop on what was going on in energy, but I got good old Mark and Saul over here to get us. Let me

4:25 make a motion to change that My original nickname was sidetrack, so let's - You want to go back to sidetrack? This is kind of like George, George just stands on Seinfeld. No, no, no, no,

4:36 you're not Tebow, no, I'm Tebow. I think that we established - I did, I did pick your own nickname. I did, and I wouldn't have mentioned it if Jake hadn't come in this morning and smacked us

4:46 down, but he tweeted about being in a carnival with his kid. Oh yeah. Had a few tickets left and had to make free throws. to win the prize. To win the prize and lost his tickets. So I, I coined

5:02 a new Jake nickname. It's Shaq Slap. Shaq Slap. I like that. Good one. Mark and saw.

5:11 Sidetrack. Sidetrack. Yeah. I

5:16 love it. Something I'm going to keep going in the native of South Texas and

5:21 Arkansas is about as un-South Texas as it gets.

5:26 All right. Let's get the show kicked off with some news. What do we got? OPEC.

5:32 Javier Bloss tweeted out this morning, Bloomberg story. OPEC is well known, has decided to extend the two million barrels a day. OPEC Plus has decided to extend the two million barrels a day

5:47 through June Q2. So they've got their next ministerial meeting in Vienna on June 1st. There are some I guess, agitations within the cartel in a couple of places. The UAE apparently has a new 15

6:04 million barrels a day of capacity, I guess, ready to bring on the line in, in the quota accounting, uh, they're clamoring for having that recognized is my understanding. And then the other, the

6:17 other agitation, I guess, is that, you know, Iraq's economy is in, in a pretty bad spot. So, um, Russia on the other hand has said that they will focus more on restrictions of production

6:35 versus exports. And as we've talked about in the past, Russia has benefited from the unintended consequence of sanctions really providing, you know, in an era of scarcity prior to this more recent

6:51 concern about abundance or surplus in the market. Russia's economy is in a nutshell has been booming. And so they are, I think, very

7:03 focused on defending price rather than letting the cartel discipline unravel. And we'll see how the performance versus the quotas and the two million barrels a day goes before the ministerial meeting.

7:17 I think another important dynamic, and we've talked about this as well, in our price predictions for 2024 is that we're ramping into an accelerating the presidential campaign headed into the summer

7:29 conventions. And translation into headline gasoline prices is, I think, creating a behind-the-scenes dynamic. I'm wondering if the arm twisting is already underway. I mean, US oil stock went up

7:43 42 million barrels last week. So it's interesting to see this global dynamic play out And as you have, our election is what's really important to us, or at least to one side. of the equation.

7:58 What's the logic on the other side? I mean, I know Russia needs high prices, of course, keep their booming. What's going on over at Saudi? Because they're the ones that take them the biggest hit.

8:08 Well, let's revisit Chuck's thesis on Saudi. What was my thesis? Ring count. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They remind me what my thesis is. Yeah, exactly. Let's go back. We're not we're

8:19 not going to talk about charging your Tesla today Yeah, there we go. Perfect. No, but I said fundraising kind of energy fund seven energy fund eight. So think kind of

8:36 2015 16 to 2018 19. I kept saying, look, if the Saudis really have all this excess capacity that they can turn on, why do they have so many rigs running in the kingdom? And we know all the

8:49 information you get, it's false, but just trendology, it was up kind of two and three at. the number of rigs, reported rigs running, and you don't feel like you need to be running more rigs if

9:02 you actually have excess capacity. So I always thought they didn't have it, but now UAE's reporting have more Saudis throttled back a bunch. So you got to think they can get back up if need be. So

9:18 there might be some real excess capacity in the world today that I didn't think there was back then. I mean, I know that the Prince Crown Prince has an economic reform program and supposedly they

9:31 need a hundred dollar oil for that to actually make sense. We'll unpack that maybe in another show, but I think there's something there that I continue to read about this economic reform, which

9:42 means they need to be able to pay for it somehow. And remember a few shows together, the rollback by the Saudi ministry that took down, I think, um, One of the big OFS names, don't forget which

9:55 one got smacked around pretty hard on that day after the announcement, they reversed their target for maximum capacity to, back to 12 million barrels a day, they were targeting 13. Well. How much

10:09 of that is can they deliver on it physically versus let's slow the role here and not create this perception in the market that there's a lot more surplus coming. I need to have two corrections Number

10:22 one, you said do you remember the show two weeks ago? The answer is absolutely not 'cause we're the gray hairs according to Jake. Fuck Jake, by the way. Gifts, secondly - Gives some context.

10:32 Y'all said at a pot of desk in the middle of the room and Jake said it was sicker-guish. It seemed to be - I wanna tie shit to Jake 'cause Jake has a lot of gray hair too so you should have told him

10:43 to pull up a seat. It seemed to me precisely timed with the moment that I sat down. Oh my God and secondly i've collided tell me what was talked about two weeks ago. Yeah, so you don't have to

10:54 remember. I don't have to. You know, it's an old Einstein quote, which I don't think Einstein actually said it, but he said it. A buckled. It's not worth indexing information that you can look

11:01 up in an encyclopedia, so same concept. The one other thing I always come back to when we start talking about oil, OPEC, any of this stuff, when I had Roy Johnson on the podcast, gosh, three or

11:15 four months ago, he said, don't realize or don't forget that like post-COVID, we don't really know what normal is anymore. I mean, because we shut in a bunch of production, what that did to

11:31 pressure build and we wound up with more reserves, whatever, what is demand doing. We all keep going back to 2019, but we truly don't know what is

11:43 quote unquote normal. And so a lot of what we think about certain metrics, like how much was production up or how much did demand grow, could kind of be different in the new world, because we

11:57 whacked, what, at least 18 months, two years out of our economy, and we showed in a bunch of oil, et cetera. So to some degree, it's like, until we get more on stable footing and have more

12:08 years to compare year to year instead of compared to 2019 pre-COVID, we may just be scratching our heads a bunch on this stuff

12:21 I don't agree with that. I don't think that that's the case. Like, I remember all these traders calling me back in 2020, like, hey, what does this mean that they're having to shut in Wells? Are

12:32 they not gonna come back on? Like, guys, it doesn't fucking matter. Like,

12:36 I don't think the physics of or the characteristics of these assets or Wells changes. Just like these Wells geology doesn't know that COVID. Although I will say, well, but I will say this, We

12:48 never before in history had ever taken shale wells. huge fracks and let shut them in for six months. We didn't know. Now you could make the guess that it's a balloon there and so the pressure

13:01 wouldn't dissipate, but there was at least a chance. Pressure was dissipating through the reservoir and they weren't going to come back online like they did. Well, in conventional days, shut-ins

13:14 as damage unless it's an extreme reservoir in geology, exception, shut-in usually helps you resting. Our problems were water and gas coning because you're pulling wells too hard. It depends on the

13:29 drive mechanism, et cetera, but it's rare that you're doing long-term damage when you shut a well in. I mean, it is a rest period. You shut them in to take

13:41 downhole pressure readings. Sometimes you have In shale, like in the Utica Point Pleasant a few years ago, I remember. I think it was Gulfport was dealing with

13:53 under saturated clays where you had water blockage. And so you've got all kinds of reasons to shut in reservoirs to improve, I guess the health of the reservoir. It's like thinking you shut it in

14:08 and that they make a little stream. We say that, but I mean, basically we're taking a piece of concrete, right? And we're blasting it open so that stuff would come out I mean, there is a chance

14:19 that if you shut that all in, that it gums back up. No, I mean, it looks like things came back online as predicted, maybe even better than predicted. And the theory was, but to some of you.

14:32 You know, you changed the relative permeabilities among the phases and micro pours and then a pours and stuff like that, maybe. Who knows, I mean, there's at least, and his other point too was -

14:41 Marshall's slicing that he's smarter. I'm on the engineering then right now. Exactly, I just have a very worthwhile today in the market reservoir engineering background. The worst point two is

14:50 like demand does work from home and stuff change numbers were used to. And so his was kind of all of the above. Yeah, 'cause I didn't mean to hone in on that. Yeah, yeah, but you know, I mean,

15:00 just trendology. So sometimes when you sit around and you talk about stuff, we talk about our whole career. OPEC did X and we go, oh, that should be that. We are, we may be in a little bit of a

15:11 brave new world I guess I just like, I always, you know, from COVID, this thing always stood out in my mind as I hopped in on this webinar from McKinsey. And McKinsey was pushing the new normal

15:21 so hard because why McKinsey stand to gain a shit ton of money from these companies on what does the new normal mean? What does it look like? Well, the new normal actually just kind of looks like

15:30 the fucking old normal before COVID, so. So Don Jacoby, who's, Jack Stevens is right hand man for years and that's all the money you saw.

15:51 Oh hell, investment bank is just the art of state and the obvious of an air discovery. One of my favorites. Exactly. But I would say like one thing I've seen from operating a business is one thing

15:51 that has clearly changed which would affect energy demand is like the amount of sales calls that happen on Zoom instead of having fly somewhere or even drive somewhere. I mean that's something. It

16:02 has become quote unquote normal. It's normal. Yeah. And so there definitely has been some effects. Yeah. The courts actually got faster From my friends and the legal who work in certain courts,

16:14 the Zoom. Oh, 'cause they do it on Zoom. Yeah, it was a lot faster during that time. Yeah. Let's just roll, let's roll from OPEC into Toby. Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, they're, sounds

16:26 like they're shoving the

16:29 most. Let's do this, our guest two weeks ago, Josh Young actually hammered away on this point. So what happened? Why don't you recap Josh's point? So Josh's point, he was trying to be really

16:41 careful about not saying a name, but he made

16:46 illusions to a very large natural gas producer, adding to their rig count, not throttling back production. And I mean, he was heading at EQT, obviously. But anyway, so EQT announced sometimes

17:02 this weekend, I think that they're actually gonna curtail production They're gonna cut back a BCF a day, which I think is about 15 to 20 of their production, 'cause gas prices suck. Yeah, I mean,

17:16 that's meaningful too, so. Yeah, I do think it's, you know, collusion is prohibited in the US. And I think it's good market leadership in terms of what everyone in the peanut gallery has been

17:32 clamoring for as we talk about weeks guest directed Ray Count rises and the volumes continue to march ever higher. And so there was one tweet by War 527 who does really good work, a lot of thought

17:50 for content. He was, I think, poking a little bit characterizing in the press release that EQT put out. The curtailment is being strategic And just pointing out the fact that that is, at least

18:05 from a,

18:08 whether it's strategic or whether it's, I guess, tactical, how does that jibe with a pretty

18:19 loud motto of unleashing American

18:24 LNG, I just thought that was humorous. Yeah. I saw that post Well, but, so, so. Sub two dollar, sub two dollar economics are just not compelling in the market. I think it's interesting, you

18:36 brought up a point about Collusion, hold on Chuck, sorry, I didn't have to do it, but the point about Collusion, it's actually interesting because I've always thought, like American EPs actually

18:45 work together. It, we're a little bit unified in their production, it'd be better for everyone. And what's the term, what happened in 2020 with the Real World Commission? What's the term when

18:58 they

19:00 essentially ration production for the EPs? There's a certain term. Pro-ration? Yes, in pro-ration. Okay.

19:09 That might not technically be it, but that's what it is. Yeah, no, that's what it was. That's what it was referred to. How's that different than colluding? When the government does it, it's

19:18 all okay. I mean, you know what I mean? Maybe that's the answer. No, that's the exact answer is when somebody walks up to you on the street and puts a gun and says, give me your money, that's

19:28 theft. And it's against the law and when the government does it, it's called the IRS. Yeah. But you remember, I don't know if you guys remember, but we had started an initiative. We even made

19:36 hats that was called Bropek man.

19:41 What's funny is a quick side tangent story, but Trump's Department of Energy was talking to me and Jake and said, dude, we're just looking for like any ideas, like do you have any ideas? You have

19:51 people in your network that have ideas and we sent them a picture of a broke. Actually, I made a meme of Trump wearing a Bropek hat and it made it its way all the way through the Department of

19:59 Energy. They thought it was funny as shit.

20:03 And so, Bropek was almost a real thing, but

20:07 sorry, what was the point you're making? So where I was going to go with this is the two reasons historically you hear about not shutting in production when prices are really low is one you have

20:18 debt. And so you screw up coverage ratios. Beginning to show play, that was the why are they continued to pop, but they can't pay their bills. And you might think, gosh, I sat down with a

20:28 commercial banker, I'm like, You're making them hedge 75-80. of their production, just get your cash flow and your repayment back from the financial heads and hedge and just don't produce the gas.

20:42 In effect, you're building an asset.

20:46 There needed to be issues worked through on that that are really tough and I don't think to this day banks have worked through that. The second thing is everybody was always scared that if you cut

20:56 production, the stock market and stock price were so driven by production growth multiples that that would really hurt. Well, EQT is up 3 today on this announcement and I would think ultimately

21:16 investors would be more rational of why produce it. That's what with EQT being up, it seems like the market saying, Hey, this is good prudent asset management So funny about like OPEC2 is that a

21:28 lot of times they don't hold to their commitments oil prices are lower, they need the cash. The country does. They need the cash flow. Yeah. And it's similar to kind of smaller independence that

21:40 don't have the cash to be able, like they're, they have to make debt service. And they're like, I'm continuing to drill because I need to pay my bills. Which I always thought was like interesting.

21:50 Like if he actually thought about the optimal capital structure for upstream oil and gas exploration, like I don't think that EMPs would hold an asset on their balance sheet I think you'd have

22:02 institutions that have longer time preference that can hold it on their balance sheet. I mean, they did this with timber back in the day. And so, yeah, she just had EMPs that are the operator

22:14 that operate the asset, but they don't actually hold the asset on their balance sheet. You have institutions that can take a more 25, 50-year approach to operating an asset, so. Well, I mean,

22:25 what changed in the world is when you had conventional assets. over-simplification here, but generally speaking, your next well was an independent event. You know, it was an offsetting pud. It

22:40 may be a new structure we're gonna drill. With the shale revolution, all your acreage is the same. So if you think about it, you buy all your acreage. That's a sunk cost. The day after you spent

22:50 that sunk cost. So you go, wow, well, you know, prices may have gone down a little bit, but it's still economic to go drill and complete these wells. So you start drilling and you get rigs

22:59 going and you're drilling and lo and behold, you look up and you go, well, maybe all in, that wouldn't have been economic, but it's still economic to go complete. And so it's the Chinese water

23:11 torture drill, if you will. And that's why a lot of activity keeps happening. And if you're the

23:19 equity holder of those companies and you have bank debt, think about it. You know, in the conventional world of things are sort of one-off independent events. and the decline rate of the asset

23:32 base was 15 or so. A bank could go, whoa, we're kind of in trouble. Let's shut this down. Let's get our money back and you could, in effect, unwind the company, get paid back. When you've got

23:45 a rig program going and a completion program going, it can't be stopped just like that. And so anyway, by the time the bank's figure out something's wrong, it's too late to shut it down And you're

23:58 almost, if you're in the bank's position, you kind of just want to keep growing production because that's ultimately your collateral. So I can't believe the 50 to 60 of PDP that a bank would loan

24:10 survived into the shale revolution. It should have been 15 of 2020. And what we saw in late '14 into '15 and '16, with balance sheets and much worse shape than they were when COVID hit and Saudi

24:25 and Russia They're a little skirmish. that took crude negative is you very quickly get into, as you mentioned, it's too late. The banks don't realize you can, if you do shut it down, you get

24:40 into a pretty perilous cash flow death spiral. And having actually lived that in 2009 with a public company that I won't mention. I can

24:56 tell

24:59 you, if your production portfolio is still in the immature phases and you're drilling extremely high decline rate wells, you got to keep going because the treadmill is spinning pretty fast.

25:12 So, punchline, kudos to Josh and kudos to Toby, did the right thing, marketing seems. I just want to be clear that this is market leadership. The word collusion has no connection to what's going

25:24 on here. It's actually EQT's dollar, period Right. You know? Yeah.

25:29 They're deciding to not sell it. They are sending a signal to market which other companies can choose or not choose. It's like a congressman wouldn't show up for that kind of campaign contribution,

25:40 but make it a little bigger and they'll show up. Yeah. I like the way like Diamondback thinks about it too. It's like, hey, we're just gonna run flat rig program. It doesn't matter prices are

25:49 going up, going down. Like this is our plan just to stay flat with drilling activities So I think some of these larger independent companies, I mean, you have the way to swing it around. I mean,

26:04 EQTs doing what, five BCF a day? I mean, cutting down one BCF and that's a shit time, I guess. Like, you know, you can make those decisions and lead the market. How's Elizabeth Warren gonna

26:17 cook her sweet potatoes over Thanksgiving this year, 100?

26:23 We added a couple big funding announcements in tech that aren't on the Runner Show, fire away to fit now, but some exciting news. So our friends over at Fervo Energy, leading geothermal company,

26:37 close to 244,

26:40 yeah, led by Devin energy. So John Arnold was in on it. John Arnold was in on it. I had a quote from John Arnold. Let's see what John Arnold said. He said, the energy trilema is one of the

26:56 defining global challenges of our time. How can we generate power that is affordable, reliable, and clean? Fervo has transformed geothermal into a scalable carbon-free resource ready to meet the

27:06 moment. And then Devin said that they look forward to deepening the partnership of Fervo to capture the full value of Fervo's first mover advantage in geothermal and the adjacencies to

27:19 Devin's core business, which I also think is interesting that Devin, you know, mentions that Fervo is a first mover because, I mean, Geothermal has been around for 30 years. 40 years long time,

27:29 but the approach that Fervo is taking is an actual commercially viable approach. And, you know, if you don't know Tim Latimer over at Fervo as a co-founder and CEO, he was a completions engineer

27:42 and oil and gas for BHP prior to going to Stanford and getting in a geothermal. And I remember the first time I met him, we're having breakfast and he's telling me just about, you know, using

27:53 casing designs and hydraulic fracturing and it's all things that we perfected over an oil and gas during the shell revolution and applying that to geothermal. So congrats to Tim and the rest of the

28:07 Fervot team for getting that done. They're just crushing it over there. So really proud of them. Tim's a great guy. We should talk about geothermal at some point. Yeah, we should get Tim on the

28:17 show. Be great. All right, Tim. Come on. Open invite to Tim. And don't hold against me. I didn't invest in the previous round either because I wanted to.

28:28 We don't claim Kirk Brown here. You didn't invest in Digital Wildcatters either.

28:34 We're on here. I'm here, aren't I? You give us your time and that's what we really, that's what we really care about. We're so keen. We're always cares about time. We're so blessed. I shut the

28:44 fuck up. And can you bring me another Digital Wildcatters paid for Coca-Cola please? 'Cause that's all. I

28:52 actually meant what I said. We love having you around here Second one is Brett Adcock over at Figure. Figure is a humanoid robot startup building robotics

29:11 and

29:17 mashing that with AI. Just raised a675 million round at a26 billion valuation. Open AI and Microsoft invested in video basis expeditions So pretty stacked investor base in this round. And what

29:29 they're doing is they're going head-to-head. Actually, Elon Musk replied to this tweet, said, Bring it on. Them and Tesla are competing on humanoid robots and combining that with AI. And so what

29:45 I find interesting about this from - there's this video. I'll have Jacob throw up

29:52 this video, figure and post this video of one of their robots watching how to make a pot of coffee and then replicating that process of using a curig to make a pot of coffee. But I'm really

30:03 interested in, like, Brett and Elon are sold on the idea that humanoids will replace humans and manufacturing plants and things of this nature. And I'm so curious about the energy consumption of

30:16 these humanoids because10, 15 an hour for a human is pretty cheap energy I mean, I always said like humans were the first, you know, slaves where the cheapest form of energy and pretty expendable,

30:36 you know, you look at what it took to build the pyramids, however the pyramids were built, but all throughout these civilizations, of course. Bring this to energy specifically. I saw something

30:45 today. I got to go find the source where.

30:49 Four years of human labor goes in to a barrel of oil and we sell it for 80 bucks Yeah, that seems like a good ratio. No, that's what they're. Yeah, that's what I'm saying is I wish I actually go

31:04 run the numbers and like deduct. You know, what, how much energy is produced from a human? And I just, I because I haven't taken this into account, like you look at all the energy demand

31:16 projections and hey, look, obviously high performance computing is coming online way faster than anyone anticipated space travel. It's going to be up there, but what about humanoids? All of a

31:28 sudden, we have all these robots running around. What's the energy demand that's needed for those? What's needed and on the battery side from a mining perspective? I was just thinking about

31:40 essentially the headline about the player at the NFL combine

31:45 asked about, I guess it's on their

31:49 sit down interviews and test was asked about space and other planets. He said, I don't believe in any of that Oh yeah.

31:59 I mean, I haven't been up there.

32:03 So, here's the question you used to talk about in video. So it just made me think Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO put an NVIDIA tattoo on his arm. I love that dude. And I'm wondering, do you

32:15 have a digital wildcatters tattoo on your body? I don't, I don't have any tattoos, but I'm about to get, it's frack slap. Oh my quads, frack on one slap on the other. So maybe I'll put a

32:24 digital wildcat tattoo on it That means you're all in, dude. I love that dude, if you watch videos from him. He's awesome. He's awesome, man. I love his mindset towards everything.

32:34 You know, and I love, like, NVIDIA man just makes fucking stellar products. He formed the company with some colleagues that they're at a Denny's diner. I mean, most,

32:48 maybe the most valuable company in the world's third over took a Ramco, but he started it in the diner. Well, someone tweeted the other day, and I think it was Sequoia that originally invested him.

32:59 It was like a six million dollar round for like third of the company. And whoever tweeted it says, That has to be the highest performing investmentof all time. And someone replied, You're not

33:10 taking into account all of the dilution. And then that person came back like, Wait, this looks like the only round they ever raised. It was. And I think there may be a little bit more to that

33:21 because back in the 90s, I mean, companies IPO'd earlier and so you got access to capital markets, but regardless, still a hell of an investment for that original investment group.

33:35 But Jake and I were talking about it while we're driving the other day, because we're like, man, the company literally started off like we've bought those GPUs forever for our computers. That's

33:43 what it was. It was like a gaming GPU company. I think this happens to some of the best companies in the world. You start off like, look at Amazon, started off as book store. And now it's 30 of

33:56 the Internet's hosted on their servers. DW started off as a podcast. Now, you know, we're pushing the edge of AI applications. And so I love seeing companies like NVIDIA. I think it's, I wanted

34:07 to invest in NVIDIA last year, but like I just have such a heart like it. It's priced. It's rich, but it's also like if the demand for GPUs is just insatiable and they keep crushing earnings.

34:20 It's like, I mean, if you went on the best shit, you have to pay for it. And so I don't know when they'll ever but it's just been incredible to watch them. Just hope Taiwanese, TSMC can continue

34:33 to build their chips. Yeah, that's, that's it. That's probably, yeah, the biggest risk is just supply chain. And there was a lot of traffic of stuff we've talked about here. A lot is we're not

34:43 gonna have the electricity in 2025 to power all this, much less 2045, which is what we talked about. I forget whose quote it was, it might have been Musk quote, but somebody said that this week

34:55 Yeah, and I don't know if we talked about it on the show, but Facebook are now meta added John Arnold to their board and Mark Zuckerberg had a quote about, hey, we need to increase our energy

35:07 intelligence over here because it's gonna require so much for our AI computing. And so I thought that was cool because we've been talking about this for what, two or three years now, especially

35:17 with our empower event, it's like connecting. My big podcast reaching out to Mark Andreessen for a big summer. It's just a matter of time more mark and recent gets. and gets back to you. I think

35:26 it was your spam. He did, he I'm sure he reached out. So for everyone listening, Chuckdigitalwildcatterscom. Everyone listening, Chuck has this running DM with Mark and Driessen where Chuck's

35:26 kind of like

35:29 the desperate guy trying to chase down a

35:38 girl in the DMs.

35:42 He just sends Mark and Driessen, Hey Mark, I have this great idea, we should do this. And he talks to Mark, like Mark's responding. He's like, Yeah, another idea that we can add on here.

35:52 It's even worse than that, 'cause I'm like treating him like he's a peer You know, I'll get my people together with your people.

35:59 So. Oh, man, it's hilarious. We'll get Mark and Jason. Relentlessly awkward. Exactly. I love it. Gotta be relentless. All right, close this out on Emissions and ESG fun stuff and then we'll

36:11 talk I ran. Me? Not me. That was not me. No, we'll take our hand. I'll let any of y'all go. I EA came out last week.

36:23 with the emissions report, energy related emissions, rose in 2023,

36:30 11 year over year versus 13 in

36:35 2022. A lot of

36:38 featuring in the commentary of the mitigation power of renewables. And

36:44 if you look at the breakdown, you still have China and India

36:49 ramping pretty hard One of the biggest, I think, factors in the middle of all this is the fact that, you know, developed nations are still showing the clear benefit and CO2 emissions decline of

37:05 cold to gas substitution. But there's 98 emphasis on the renewables mitigation versus things like deindustrialization, which is happening in Germany And the fact that, and I sent this around

37:21 earlier, you've got the, In the UK, there's a

37:27 number of these facilities where you've converted coal-fired generation into burning wood pellets. And this particular story was on pellets source from extremely old growth Canadian forests, which

37:42 are offset by planting new trees to replace those that were harvested. But if you look at the carbon sink capacity, I believe of what has been harvested versus the timeline probably defined as

37:56 centuries at which the carbon sink capacity of those new trees when it finally, when they finally reach that equivalent stage of maturity

38:05 is something to consider because burning wood pellets is at least equal to, if not greater, from a CO2 emission standpoint than coal. You know, I've looked at it. But the accounting rules don't

38:18 require - I've looked at a matter to record those emissions in this space like guys that throw like, we're gonna throw rocks out into your field that are gonna, everything. And I've always asked

38:30 about, give me the math that shows me how wood pellets is better from an emissions perspective than gas. And I never get a, no one actually has an answer because it's really difficult to track. So

38:47 what's, and that's one of the challenges in investing in the space, but also one of the challenges is accounting for it. And everyone has math fueled by their emotions versus like, just show me

38:60 the science and then let's all agree on it. If the science has been proven, then we can all agree. Yeah. But it's done, it hasn't been proven. But what I think you don't need math for is to know

39:09 that shipping wood pellets over to Europe is the biggest script in the world. I mean, just thinking about it conceptually, it's like, hey, we're gonna chop down trees in the Southeast United

39:18 States, which are a carbon sink. Then we're gonna put them on a diesel truck. Ship 'em to Woodmill that has a ton of CO2 emissions, then we're gonna put it on a ship. Ship it across the sea,

39:28 which has a ton of CO2 emissions. Well, once it's in the mill, I mean, all that processing. Yeah. Into pellets, which is - That's what I'm saying. Yeah, a ton of CO2 emissions from that. And

39:38 then you get it on a big ship, send it across the ocean, and then you throw it in coal-fired plants to burn with coal, and then mark it as green renewable energy and all of the energy reports.

39:51 That's what chaps my ass is like, how is that green energy? You're just burning infant coal. What's the

39:59 density of a wood pellet versus coal? I have no idea. We should look that up. A lot less, it's

40:07 gotta be. Well, if you think about the formation of coal, and I'm not a coal guy, but

40:13 tens of millions of years, and you segregate the carbon that it's captured, or the CO2 that it's captured when it was a live plant. tree, you know, there is subsurface segregation, I would

40:28 imagine, and de facto sequestration of that CO2. You've just got very CO2 rich material, very immature, processing it in pellets and burning it and releasing the CO2. The irony are these same

40:41 people that are promoting this also want to get rid of gas stoves because gas

40:55 that burning is dangerous in your house as similar to your fireplace burning wood in your house because of these two, yeah, these, like, it's crazy. None of them makes sense. Yes. Like there's

41:02 so many oxymorons and this is talking to mom and dad when you wake him up at 1 30 in the morning and your curfew was midnight, you know, well, this, this, this, this, this, this, no, I don't

41:16 care what you say. That sounds great. No, my parents had a great trick on, uh, not me because I wasn't, I was a good relatively good kid. My older brother is like, if your past curfew one more

41:27 time, my parents just threw his shit out on the front porch. It was close and locked the door and he knocked and no one would let him in. It was great. It's my type of parenting. Yeah. But the,

41:39 uh, I don't think a lot of people are aware of how wood pellets are classified as green renewable energy. Absolutely I've seen pitches for this show. Yeah. And I take that picture every time I got

41:54 a Heathrow about how they're powering it off pellets. Yeah. And so when you tell people that you add that logic, people are like, what the fuck is going on? Pretty good to barbecue though. I'm

42:02 not going to, like, I know some people will fight me for it. I love a wood pellet smoker. Like just with your chuck. Chuck's got a couple of check, check bags every time he heads back from

42:13 Heathrow, 50 pound limit A little wood pellet for his trigger. I mean, I'm a post soak. I like post oak, but when I don't have that and I. Just want to be lazy, wood pellets. No, we should do.

42:24 We should start up a wood pellet brand that's imported from your cage, just as a joke. And so we're sending all the wood pellets over there and then we're actually writing them. This is imported

42:36 from England. Nice. Oh, I bet the flavorings better. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, man, British food sucks. This is very much - This is - Yeah, if I get offended British tea flavored.

42:52 That was one of the greatest things ever on TV when John Cleese was asked, why does British food suck so bad? He said, we had an empire to run. Hey, I want to bring up something real quick. Yeah.

43:04 Have y'all seen the movieDune? LoveDune. No. Love it. I just started watching the first one last night. Dude, I told you about it. We talked about it when I was really - Did you tell me about

43:13 it? Yeah, I see he's - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We were talking about mining. I did. I'm not indexing this shit, man. I got KlightPro just go and there we go. Anyways. So I started watching

43:22 it. I haven't finished it. It already seems like a badass movie. I love it, but within the first two minutes, it talks about spice, and this whole war is over spice, and it's like, spice is

43:32 critical for space travel. I'm like, all right, this thesis for this movie is kind of fucking dog shit. There's science fiction, dude. You just gotta roll with them, bro. You need to spice for

43:42 space travel? What the fuck does that mean? They fold space, bro, by using the spice. It's a hallucinogenic But somehow, it actually physically works. That's what I'm saying. So it's hard to,

43:53 there's a massive hole in this story here that I identified in the first two minutes. Don't get me wrong, the movie still seems badass. The sleeper, I'm gonna watch - Is this Sting, like, 1984?

44:04 Yeah, he hasn't seen Sting yet 'cause he hasn't finished, but he doesn't. Oh, yeah, 'cause I'm - Oh, he stings in it, he's seen something. So I'm gonna watch it, I'm gonna watch it, and I'll

44:12 watch the second one in theaters, but I was just - Oh, you're watching the - I was watching the first one Not the old dune, but the dune. Yeah. The recent Dune One. Yeah. Yeah. Now there's a

44:23 recent Dune One. Yeah, it came out. Yeah, no, it's that brand new. They basically took the old movie, and they're redoing it in two parts. Okay. You got it. I didn't know that there was an

44:32 old one. Maybe we could put up whatever picture you have of you with Sting as part of the graphic for this. I actually, yeah, I never met Sting. Dude, you know he's the guy that says he makes

44:42 love for like 12 hours and one guy. Tantric sex. He's amazing. Yes. All right, let's close real quick

44:51 with Irene As we've been doing closing the show, BDE each week, this is the year of the election, two billion people on the planet are gonna vote this year. These elections will have important

45:00 ramifications in the energy world. So March 1st, 2024, the Iran parliament elections happened, along with the assembly of experts, which is the assembly of experts is 88 clerics who advise the

45:17 Supreme Leader.

45:20 290 seats, 285 of them are directly elected. Here's the deal. Record low turnout, which was seen as kind of a screw you type thing in 2022. Masha Amini, a lady who didn't want to wear a burqa

45:42 was taken into custody, died in custody with the security police A lot of protests around this, so the low turnout was sort of the protest against that by not voting. Hardliners dominated. And so

46:00 what does that mean? Mark and I were talking this morning and I said, well, this just means kind of more of the same from Iran. Terrorist attacks, et cetera. And Mark made the great comment of.

46:14 More of more of the same Yeah, well, yeah, you said there'd even be more.

46:19 So I think, I think when we roll into our elections, I think Biden's even given up hopes of having the, the, the agreement with Iran anymore. Everyone's put that on the back burner. So you're

46:31 going to get some degree of continued antagonism towards Iran and them firing back at us. Well, they're, they're up to no good in the Red Sea, as we've seen. So if, you know, they were trying

46:46 to turn to a more progressive political stance, maybe that would be happening. Yeah, 'cause I mean, when you think about Iran, I said this about 15 years ago, I was on a panel and they said make

46:59 a prediction and I said, there will be a violent overthrow of the Iranian government and the resulting country will be young, very pro-Western, might even be our best ally in the, in the Middle

47:12 East. 'Cause if you look at outside the government, Iranians, they're young. They're very pro-Western. They have more plastic surgery than any other country on the planet, I mean, they are

47:24 definitely not there. Well, Pre-79 Iran was a picture of modern society and culture, you remember when the revolution happened and we had American hostages there for over 400 days and that was

47:39 right in the middle of Carter losing to Reagan, but of course we lost a number of servicemen and helicopter crashes due to the failed rescue attempt. So it's been going on, this is not kind of

47:55 recent sanctions related, this

47:59 is solidifying the hardline Iranian regime. We have the second largest Persian population here in Houston, next to you is number one, who? I'm gonna say LA. It is, LA, okay. You know that just

48:14 sidebar for EP, Scott Sheffield spent some of his youth growing up in Tehran.

48:20 Oh, wow, that's just a pre pre pre revolution for sure. But you know, something I realized we stopped doing finger of the week. Yeah, no, we haven't why do we stop? We just get tired of

48:32 getting to Elizabeth. Yeah, exactly. So I had too many baseball targets, but oh, we'll come back next week with a finger of the week. I'm going to say we get finger of the week to Google. What

48:44 better for their, um, have you seen their image generator on Jim?

48:51 I, you haven't seen this. I love you. Not seen this. So anyways, I've heard of all the great things about Jim and I, so, you know, they have their image generator and it's extremely bias

49:03 against white people. And so you would put in like, no wonder I haven't seen that. Yeah, you'd put in a prompt for like, Hey, show me these people in the family fathers. Yeah, the founding

49:13 fathers and it would make them like black women or just people that weren't, weren't founding fathers, but the New York I think it was the New York Times, of course, took it and like didn't report

49:23 on any of those ones, but then it wrote this story. It's like Jim and I makes, you know, minorities Nazis and they typed in like show me like German Nazis and the bot would spit out, you know,

49:36 people of color as German Nazis and so of course, New York Times took it and like Jim and I's making everyone look like Nazis, but anyways, you could not get it to generate any historical accurate

49:51 depictions of people and even it was like, hey, show me, you know, generate image

49:58 of current NFL players and then make them all women.

50:02 And so anyways. And I love it, I love the, from the company, it was basically, oops, we're working on this. We'll fix it. Yeah, and so like, and everyone who's just bashing on them is like,

50:11 Google's showing you their true colors. Like, you think that they're searching, everything is unbiased and, you know, this. it's kind of it's kind of deeper. I mean, we've always talked about,

50:20 you know, rewriting history and things of this nature. And so, um, but anyways, they, uh, uh, surgery had a meeting at Google, which, you know, he's not even CEO anymore. And I think

50:34 they're current CEO. Um, I think he's going to get axed over, like, I mean, just talk about fumbling the back of the eye over the last year. I mean, he's going to get ran out, but they have

50:46 this like this internal hackathon meeting and video came out yesterday and like they're panning the room and there's a skinny white dude sitting there in this shirt. And the shirt is a naked chick.

50:56 Like, I mean, nipples out, like it looks like he's got boobs and like a woman's abdomen. And so that was yesterday's Twitter meme plotters. Like, what the What the hell is going on over it?

51:08 Like, over at Google. Like it's one thing to have Chuck showing up and like ripped jeans and, you know, sweatshirts, but this dude's like in a very serious AI meeting and I'll have Jacob pull up

51:17 the picture. That was the guy from Tasha. So lots of interesting going, things going on over at Google, but I think that they can take finger of the week this week. So we'll get back to it. And

51:28 there goes BDE from the internet. That's right. It was nice knowing you guys. We're definitely getting suppressed on YouTube. Exactly. Owned by

51:39 So anything big happened in this week that we need to talk about? I don't think so. We got Empower coming up at the end of March. Yeah, get your tickets. Yeah, it's gonna be a good turnout.

51:48 Everyone's excited about it. So hope to see y'all at Empower and we will catch y'all on next week's episode.