Big Digital Energy

0:17 Good morning, digital wildcatters. See how I did that recording in the afternoon, but we went straight to good morning. I'm so confused. Yeah, exactly. We're all confused. It's good afternoon

0:29 on Monday. We dropped this Tuesday morning though. So this is, and some fans want a live show, Chuck. That's true. We tried that for a while. We had our issues. Is it because it got naked a

0:40 few times? Probably.

0:43 The worst part of that about that is you weren't actually in the studio. You're outside the window.

0:50 Par you, let me in. Partners in crime, Kirk Coburn, Mark Meyer. Mark from, are you disclosing your private location? There are in Tennessee, just outside of Nashville. Gotcha. I thought we

1:03 had sent you to the bunker in case something happened, you know. The cabinet member that goes there during the - I don't think many of our listeners don't know this, but Mark is actually a

1:13 songwriter. No, that is true. Music producer and big fan of country music. So I was having a big fan of music. I was having brunch in his neck of the woods up in South Dallas the other last week

1:29 actually. And I took a picture of the breakfast joint and all it showed is like a stage with a guitar and he knew exactly where it was. Knew exactly what seat I was sitting in and said, Why the

1:43 hell are you up here? And didn't call me. Nice. Was that Doseedo? Doseedo. Doseedo. The breakfast, Doseedo Junior. Or what's it called? It's the breakfast place and whiskey bar. That's right.

1:58 They just added the whiskey bar and the big barn is what they call the main venue which was, oh, it's been 15 years ago. It's actually a reassembled Kentucky tobacco barn

2:14 very old and, you know, acoustics in that place are fantastic and they've, they've become quite a draw nationally and certainly from, from Nashville you see a lot of, see a lot of pretty big

2:26 headliners. Got to. All right. Well, real quick, before we jump in, I have a point to the uniform I'm wearing today. There is a coffee place in Richmond, Texas block house. It's two blocks

2:40 from my house So it's not uncommon on a weekend that I will go out for a run, a walk, whatever. A stroll, if you will. A stroll. Tell my daughters when y'all wake up, text me, we'll all meet

2:51 at block house. We do that yesterday. We're inside eating. And I'm like, how'd y'all get here? Sarah drove. Sarah drove her sister two blocks. So my, my anti hydrocarbon children, I was a

3:07 little snarky at the end of breakfast. I said dad's gonna go ahead and walk home. because I care about the environment and I don't want to pollute and I never would have driven two blocks. And

3:18 Sarah Yates looked at me and said, Dad, your hat says petro and your shirt says stallion energy. I'm really not buying that shit.

3:27 Fair enough. Kids. All right, August 16th, which is better known as the date that Pete Best was fired as the Beatles drummer a year ago. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed. Kirk laid on us

3:41 Yeah, one year anniversary, which is interesting. I Googled it, so I was trying to find like, what do we know about the one year anniversary? The White House made a great press conference and a

3:51 press release, but all the lives are saving. It is the largest and most largest bill ever enacted for clean energy, if you will. I tried to find something negative about it. And I found only one

4:06 thing negative about the

4:09 IRA is when one year anniversary and it's on. Twitter from Social Security Works. And this is quote, Every single Republican voted against the inflation reduction act. That's what they said. That

4:23 was it. Everyone's saying how great it is. Of course, everyone on Biden side is saying how, this is the best thing that's ever happened. But Social Security Works comes out and just wants

4:32 everyone to remember that every single Republican voted against. So that's the one negative thing I can find about. Well, you know Beyond that, the name is would be another negative. The actual

4:45 name of the inflow thing to affect that. Well Biden must have to do with inflation. Yeah, and Biden finally came out and said that, oh, by the way, we maybe shouldn't have called it that. But

4:54 it's wild, the grab bag that's in there, it's got an alternative minimum tax on corporations, had a 1 excise tax on stock buybacks. That's the

5:05 whole 80, 000 new agents or whatever it is and then just all these green health care tax capping senior drug prescription costs. I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, a lot of pork in there. Yeah,

5:18 the, I was listening to a podcast this morning talking about the one year anniversary and the guys were very pro clean energy and their take was 60 of it was good stuff and we have to stomach the

5:32 remaining 40 of it That was kind of their time. And the, I listened to that as well. And the negatives in the 40 mainly had to do with CCS and direct air,

5:46 which they were like because there is room in the bill for CCS, which is interesting because we're going to come to another story about that. Yeah, they were a wistful about it because they're

5:57 saying the Europeans are looking over the pond saying, Look, they're doing a lot. We need to get off the high center here and do some things that actually bring. clean manufacturing into the UK

6:12 and Europe, and otherwise they're going to get left behind. So there were lots of impact there over time. It's going to give us lots to talk about over the next. They were lamenting the fact that

6:22 they've got a bunch of hydrogen fuel cell companies ever in Europe, and we're getting to do all the cool battery stuff. And I was just like, I've got a hydrogen deal we'll talk about. Perfect.

6:32 All right, let's go one quick round across the table. Kirk, I'll go to you first. Give us one thought on the IRA prediction something. Well, I think it's it's definitely a kickstart and given,

6:48 you know, wind behind clean energy projects. But we talked over the last few weeks, although a lot of these projects are at a standstill because of timelines, approvals. So I don't actually see

6:59 the IRA. I'm not sure in 10 years if we're going to look back and saying It's just a big waste of money because private organizations have already put into place in the EV angle, but we're talked

7:13 about how we're gonna see a huge slowdown in EV adoption because of charging infrastructure. We have a grid problem. So it'll be interesting to see if everything can catch up to the IRA, I don't

7:25 think so. So my prediction is that it's gonna be a wishwash. Wishwash, Mark, thought prediction something? You know, we'll have some blowups. I think it's going to take longer to build and

7:43 deploy all this for reasons that Kirk cited, mainly related to the synchronization of the grid and the infrastructure build out. And the market will take care of a lot of it as it has in the past.

7:56 Ultimately, these things need to stand on their own. And unless we get into a situation where we really start to force things in terms of consumer choice, then I think that's a pretty good somewhat

8:12 Darwinian mechanism that is somewhat insulated by the fact that you've got all of these incentives and subsidies in the middle of the whole process. So my thing is going to take a lot longer. So my

8:26 barometer on whether something's good or bad is how much censorship is required to support it. And so I went to Google today and I googled IRA reflections after that. That's only one watt per Google

8:43 search. So if you used AI, it would have been five watts and chat GPT only runs through 2021, I think so far. So you were actually doing you're being environmental of being environmentally truly

8:56 the one watt So I googled IRA reflections after a year, you know, reviews after a year or something. I literally. after pages and pages of searches, got to a story about the Irish Republican army

9:14 before I got a negative criticism on the IRA. So if Google has to censor negative criticism, it's just gotta be bad. That's my take. All right, number two, story. Permian resources, buying

9:29 Earthstone energy. Mark, you got any thoughts on this, Steel?

9:35 You're the one that populated the show notes with the metrics. I have not had a chance to kind of dig into the details, so I'll flip it back to you. Okay, so basically you got Permian resources

9:48 and they're buying Earthstone. It's creating a 14 billion company. It's a stock for stock deals. So you get almost a share and a half of Permian resources for your Earthstone stock.

10:01 You know, the press release was kind of typical of what we've seen in a lot of these things. We've seen mergers and we hear accretion, synergies, accretion, synergies, 175

10:13 million of annual synergies they talked about. We could see this one coming 'cause Earthstone, we talked a few weeks ago about small cap companies not wanting to sell. Well, Earthstone had a lot

10:25 of private equity backers, I think NCAP was in it, et cetera. We need to get their cash back to raise another fund And how do they do that? They merge to their more liquidities. Hopefully they

10:35 can dump the stock in the market over time. Earthstone was just over 130, 000 barrels a day combined. This is a 300, 000 barrel a day, BOE per day company, 400,

10:48 000 acres. You know, you got to give credit to Earthstone. They were founded by Frank Lozinski. And if you haven't met Frank, he's a great guy. He is an accountant. only person in oil and gas

11:01 that I've ever heard of, talks about net income matters. And when he would buy something, he would run out depreciation. If he wasn't generating net income, he just wouldn't do it. Very

11:11 disciplined. His kind of right-hand man was Robert Anderson, who's a great guy, really good engineer. Robert took over the last few years. So if you look at it, basically Earthstone stock price

11:22 doubled over the last five years. The XOP, the oil and gas ETF, has basically been flat over that time So kudos to Earthstone for selling and giving their shareholders a double. I mean, I'm just

11:36 curious Chuck over, who are the investment bankers, maybe it's the private equity guys, but who are the investment bankers that are getting in and pitching these deals? Or is it just two companies

11:46 being, or two companies just being wise and doing it themselves? Chuck, what say you? That's your world. You know, I think a lot of the public to public stuff, Everybody knows each other.

11:59 Everybody goes and gets cocktails together and just something. A middling country club? Middling country club. They go to a

12:08 soccer game and sit in somebody sweet in Austin, maybe. You know, they do things like this. And, you know, when the time hits, the board says something. I don't know how much actual process

12:22 shopping there is, 'cause everybody just knows each other in that world But, potentially it'd be great to have Will or Robert come on the podcast and see if they'd talk about it. They're invited.

12:32 I will say this, the merger proxy that comes out, 'cause I'll have to get a vote. We'll give us some of those details, so we should probably read it. So, when they come on, should I push Joe

12:42 Rogan off the show? Oh, yeah, probably so. All right. Again, Mark, yeah, I keep seeing Bob. Yeah, a

12:50 couple of things we've finally found the only person who read my first research report.

12:59 part of which was entitled Earnings Matter.

13:03 You know, I think to

13:06 you that it's interesting to see these cases where large private equity sponsors selling tech stock and, you know, have some of that ongoing liquidity uncertainty, but it also speaks to, I think,

13:21 the quality of the acquirer and the, you know, the execution that they have certainly demonstrated over the course of their life as well. So I think, you think we see more of this? I think we

13:38 have to. I mean, I think we have to. At the end of the day, there's no reason that EP companies shouldn't be like cell phone companies. Maybe there are six of them I mean, I think there's so

13:48 much risk with, if you look at even the political environment and what's happening, I do expect a massive recession next year. we're headed that direction. I see a administration that'll probably

14:02 continue, maybe not, but if they continue, there's gonna be more and more pressure. And I think having a bigger balance sheet is gonna be helpful and stronger lobbyists as well. Well, I was

14:13 listening to Mark Andreessen on Joe Rogan. That happened in July, but it just kind of made it to my playlist this weekend when I was out running my stroll, as you say. And one of the things

14:26 Andreessen talked about was financial meltdown, and they passed Dodd-Frank, 'cause these big banks were too big to fail, and Dodd-Frank's intention was to break up these big banks and make it

14:38 easier to start small banks. Fast forward to today, we've got a handful of really big banks and we haven't started bank in five years. Yeah, Silicon Valley Bank was a, the big guys need to come

14:49 in

14:53 and save the little guys. Yeah, and so, basically you have the unholy alliance between big business and government. and people go back and forth the whole time and they're kind of in bed together.

15:02 And I think you're right, if we're gonna continue to be regulated more and more, potentially out of business, you're gonna have to get bigger and bigger and have clout with the government. So you

15:11 can have that day taunt and five guys in a rusty pickup truck just aren't gonna happen anymore. I agree. And that's bad 'cause guess who brought the shale revolution to the world? Five guys in a

15:22 rusty pickup truck. It was not the majors

15:26 So,

15:29 story number three. Utah and Oregon, GPS mandates for electric vehicles. Kirk, what say you? I mean, and basically gasoline taxes are there to generate revenue for road maintenance. That's what

15:46 they're, the purpose. Now EVs aren't buying. The more gasoline you use, the more you pay in taxes, the more you use the roads. Yeah, that makes sense. But the rise of EVs, They're not paying

15:56 their fair share. According to a few states, Utah and Oregon are mandating these GPS, they just voted to mandate GPS trackers so they can charge EVs on a per mile fee. Now,

16:12 this also in Utah, they also assign a driver score based on driving behavior. So if you know quite a few of us that own EVs, our driving behavior has gotten, well, I mean, we go as fast as, I

16:24 mean, they're fast as hell. So we drive like, like maniacs. So that's the, the purpose is to give the fair share. Now, we know the EVs are heavier, they're worse for the roads because they

16:38 create more damage to the infrastructure. So it's an interesting play. But when you say start thinking about tracking, then you start setting off 10 foil hat wares, which is, I'm in that camp

16:50 right now. It's like, the government wants to track you with digital currency. tracking your car, hell no, or is anyone gonna put a GPS? Already have one, it's called a phone, and they can

17:01 already track me. But - Well, but the subtlety there, and we've talked about this on BDE is right now, the chip in our phone that tracks us, the government does have to go get a court order.

17:16 Yeah, it's gotta be, it's gotta be subpoenaed, a judge has to sign off on it. Now, we've all seen that judges are willing to do stuff like that, but they at least have to do this I think to this,

17:26 to the point, these programs are normalizing tracking. And what I found really interesting is, if you had to say, what is our most conservative state in the union, maybe it's Utah, maybe, you

17:38 know, maybe it's Texas and maybe it's Florida, but it's certainly up there. What is our most liberal? Could be Oregon, California. So you have opposite ends of the spectrum,

17:50 both of them wanting to track us. So it's not a Republican or a Democrat issue. No, it's a government versus the people issue. And the interesting thing in these two examples in the piloting,

18:03 this is essentially a piloting step. One is mandatory and one is voluntary. Of course, you can imagine the uptake or lack thereof in the voluntary one. Guess which one is mandatory? Oregon, and

18:14 it's an Oregon's

18:18 the volunteer, I'm sorry. Right, which is a bit surprising If you think about the political spectrum that Chuck just described. And it was, I saw it posted on LinkedIn and it was in a widely read

18:33 and widely disseminated publication called AxlAddict. And it was a very short article and they did have space for first reactions and comments and they were all exactly along the lines of what you

18:46 were describing hurt in terms of, This isn't just about paying our fair shares, EV drivers. there's kind of a slippery slope of privacy and tracking here. If I live in Utah, they're like, Kirk,

18:58 you drove zero miles? Yep, 'cause I tear that GPS right out. Now, 'cause, and I might start a, that's a great idea. Like instead of sort of the local radio guys that you go to to put in that

19:09 cool sound system. And those guys are always like installing, still in equipment. I'm gonna have a business where we just de, like we, we changed the GPS unit Nice. And we give it false data. I

19:24 could do that. It's probably legal, I'm pretty sure. But what's interesting about the Oregon approach, you would think that Oregon would be mandated in Utah, it would be voluntary. But in Oregon,

19:36 this sounds very Oregonian to me. They allow drivers to volunteer for a per mile fee system. So the each, 'cause it doesn't that sound so like, Oregon, happy, like, what do you think you should

19:48 pay? like, oh, I should pay two cents per mile versus it's hilarious. That's not gonna last. Yep. No, it's happening. And we've talked about it on BD. And Michigan is exploring watching both

19:56 programs. So Michigan's in the

20:03 hunt as well. Yep. Crazy. So Mark, you texted the story this weekend and I don't even know what to make of it. But cruise cars are wreaking havoc in San Francisco. Like San Francisco has people

20:20 urinating on the street Let's just go ahead and throw autonomous cars in the mix to screw things up. So last Thursday, there was an incident involving a cruise autonomous taxi that had a passenger

20:34 in it. And it was approaching an intersection at which it had a green light and right away in its lane. But there was a fire truck coming the other way. And it's a fairly complex kind of nuanced

20:48 limited visibility points in this intersection, the car, the. autonomous taxi and the technology recognized it, initiated braking to slow the vehicle down, but couldn't avoid the head on with a

21:00 fire truck that had crossed over into the oncoming lane to get through the intersection on its way to an emergency. So as a result of this, and apparently after a music festival, really same week,

21:14 I believe, there were several of cruises autonomous vehicles that got stuck in the middle of traffic and created quite a traffic snarl. And that was because, you know, the density of the crowd at

21:26 the event kind of strains the bandwidth. And so there was there was a delay in getting instructions to the autonomous vehicles. And so created quite a bit of a traffic problem. And as a result of

21:37 all this, the Department of Motor Vehicles, mainly because of the ongoing investigation into the emergency vehicle crash, the DMV in California has asked crews to reduce the number of their taxis

21:49 by 50 on

21:51 a daily basis. until the conclusion of the investigation and Cruz, I think, announced today that they're a couple of days ago that they're going to comply with that. They go to 50 vehicles during

22:02 the day and 150 at night. Well, I mean, you say Cruz around me, I've got flashes back to Vietnam, which we'll talk about here in a few minutes. But - Foreshadowing. Cruz is the damn company

22:18 when my charger broke at home I no longer have my EV. I sold it, but I've such range anxiety and anger over the charging problem, which I'm starting a company to fix that. We'll talk about that at

22:31 another show.

22:34 There's only really one fast charging center in the middle. That's non-Tesla, I mean, Tesla dominates, I know how to do it. But the rest of us have to use non-Tesla fast chargers. There's really

22:46 one fast charging station in the center of Houston And when you go there to charge, every damn spot. So cruises in Houston, if you didn't know that, and they're taking all the charging spots, and

22:60 that's happened five times I've gone there. So I don't wanna have EV anymore. I don't like the experience, but the crews, those mother-effers are in our way.

23:12 Yeah, no, we all sit there and we think, okay, we're just gonna change to electric vehicles The history of energy is always about building on the existing infrastructure. And to some degree,

23:26 we've had to do this from ground zero. I still don't understand why buckies doesn't have charging stations for electric vehicles, you know? Right. To have. Well, what's interesting, I will say

23:39 give them some of the benefit of the bout. Why doesn't crews in Waymo have like remote control command centers? Like when the car's stuck in the middle, they have to send someone out to go figure

23:50 out what to do. Why isn't someone in somewhere a way watching a monitor going like let me just remote control this car out of the way? Yeah. They can do that. Yeah. Why don't they do it? I mean,

24:00 that's how we basically fly drones and bomb people and, you know, all around the world. So I don't know. I don't know, but fun to watch. The line I like best about autonomous driving cars is

24:15 that the sensors basically have the sophistication of a drunk sophomore in college driving.

24:25 And before you laugh too much at that, and I'm not condoning drunk driving in any way, shape or form, but drunk sophomores actually aren't that bad at drivers in the grand scheme of things. Wow,

24:34 that's fun. That's gonna come back and haunt each other. Well, but I did not mean to condone it in any way, shape or form, but yeah, no, it is that level. That's where the sensors are. Unless

24:44 you're trying to get mad to sponsor a show. Yes It's it's not a sophomore not a soft where artificial intelligence issue, it's literally the sensors that are probably the bigger problem at this

24:59 point. But anyway, all right. So basically they have as much control as you and me right now. Exactly, the old boomer. All right, let's stick with cars. Then fast, merged with SPAC partner

25:15 BlackSpade. They're founded in

25:17 2017, had a valuation of over 85 billion on its NASDAQ debut through Vietnamese EV car company.

25:27 Who knew? And you know, the whole kind of crazy, I mean, we all, just a quick refresher on how a SPAC works. SPAC goes public at 10. Basically the deal with the shareholders is, we'll find a

25:39 deal to merge with. Come to you, you can vote to do it. Great, if you don't wanna do it, shoot it down and we won't do it, that's how it works. So it's technically a merger People figured out

25:50 it's actually a. better way to go public, because when you go public in the S1, you cannot provide projections. You can't do any sort of future looking stuff. In a merger, you can do a private

26:01 placement and provide all those projections. So that's why a lot of these things are - I don't like SPACs for many reasons, and I've written a pretty good blog on this, but we'll go through that.

26:13 I'll let that slide for now, but a little bit more information about VIN fast It's owned by VIN Group, Vietnam's largest corporate conglomerate. Who knew? The company began delivering its electric

26:27 SUV, the VF8 in US. in March. VIN fast CO is Li T2T,

26:37 excuse me, for the - I should know this, since we have the second largest Vietnamese population here in Houston, emphasized the company's commitment to sustainable mobility And now it's the largest

26:48 US. listed Vietnamese company by market cap.

26:53 Yeah. So it's been public now or trading for a week. I think it hit as high as 37 a share. It's at 17-ish today. When it hit 37, it was bigger than Ford. All these other car companies. Yeah.

27:09 It talked about VINFAST. I saw a headline today. VINFAST CEO loses 15 billion from where the stock peak. She owns what 99 of the equity. It's owned by a fan, not

27:28 VLONG, Vietnamese richest individual. But the reviews for the VF8 model have largely been negative, which brings me to the question about the genesis. Is that sort of the same negativity of the

27:39 genesis or are those two separate? Look at you digging in on me. Anytime you read a review about a genesis car. The first sentence is always they hired the designer from Bentley, they buy their

27:54 leather from the same place, Bentley buys their leather and then it talks about what an amazing card is and the last sentence is always you just have to get over the mental hurdle of driving a

28:04 Hyundai. I would love to have Genesis sponsor of the show and

28:10 if they do, I'm a happy G80 driver. I love my car. I really do It's over right now over the former Tesla, um, it's a, it's a, the Tesla, Tesla is amazing piece of equipment. I paid 140, 000

28:27 for the Tesla. I paid 50, 000 for the, for the G80. So fair enough value by was the, the G80. Here's the, here's the bet on this whole spec story The company aims to sell 50, 000 vehicles this

28:40 year, but has only shipped about 11, 000 so far. Are they going to hit the number mark?

28:49 They're building a factory in North Carolina.

28:52 And I saw a comparative with the Tesla Model Y, which I guess compares with their five-seater, which is priced, the VIN fast is priced well to 1, 400 under the Model Y, but until it's

29:08 manufactured in the US. doesn't qualify for the 7, 500 credit. Ah, yeah So I'll take

29:18 the under on any kind of near-term targets. And I don't know what the timeline for that factory to be operational as I think it's 2025, but don't quote me on that. So I think VIN fast, oh, back

29:30 to that podcast you referenced Chuck, the podcaster in Dublin was expressing amazement at how a relatively short span of time between last trip and this trip, It went from almost no EVs on the road

29:47 to a lot of them. And Dubliners are buying Chinese, Korean, and I think even Vietnamese EVs. And so it'll be interesting to see how the American market, American consumer responds once, you know,

30:01 Venfast gets up on full production in the US. And it can compete with some more models that do qualify for the 7, 500 tax credit. In the old days when, on Saturdays, my parents would take me when

30:17 they were car shopping to car dealerships and they would serve hot dogs. And I loved hot dogs and cokes, it was awesome.

30:28 If this, if Venfast serves bondmies at their dealership, I'm going and I will test drive one until I get at least two or three of those sandwiches. Don't think I'll buy a car, but because I'm in

30:41 the market, but I will go test drive one So, as you were reminiscing about. car trips of your, I'm kind of reminiscing about the glory days of the SPAC, you know, where you would merge. The

30:56 first trade was 2X, the price. I'm kind of wondering if maybe Venfast is like funky town by lips. You know, that was disco's last stand, right? That was the end of disco right there. But man,

31:12 that was a great song. Hopefully, uh, hopefully we'll, uh, we'll, we'll see more, but, uh, what was that drug that would make people skinny and it killed a bunch of people? Remember? It

31:24 reminds me of this. I think I had fast in the name. It's not slim fast. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I forget. Never yet. I will bring that up. All right. On to saving the planet. Oxy buys carbon

31:38 engineering for 11 billion three equal payments. Mark, are they going to save the planet?

31:48 You know, I think technically

31:52 when we talk about other applications of carbon capture

31:59 outside of direct air capture at which Kirk is much more expert,

32:05 and we'll get into what Doomburger wrote about in a little bit, there's a connection here.

32:13 I do think as we prove both technical and starting to get over some hurdles economically and particularly with what, again, the IRA provides. You start to think about physically removing enough CO2

32:28 to then completely offset what you generate burning oil and natural gas, then yeah, I think

32:38 the industry has once again proven that, given a problem, given an incentive, it's gonna figure it out.

32:45 idea why Ox who would spend money on this deal. I looked at the deal early on. I don't understand direct air capture. It makes no sense to me scientifically. Maybe we need someone that's really

32:56 smart to come to the show and try to explain how taking air in from the environment and capturing the CO2 actually works. 'Cause what does CO2, it's like 04. It's tiny and they have to actually

33:10 burn a bunch of - 004. They have to burn a bunch of fossil fuels to actually capture the air, unless they're running them on renewables. But if you ever looked at this, go ahead. The point was in

33:24 terms of, okay, where do you locate these things? Do you locate 'em where you're at 004 CO2 concentration or do you co-locate 'em where the concentration's higher like next to industrial facilities

33:36 where it makes more sense? So the lower the CO2 concentration goes, the higher the energy intensity of the process.

33:46 working against yourself, right, the energy, the energy tax on the process and just locating a facility out in the middle of nowhere is, is ridiculously high.

33:57 So I know nothing technologically about any of this, and I do need to, to bone up on this, but I will say if Warren Buffett is buying from Bill Gates, I'm probably getting screwed. You're

34:11 absolutely. Yeah. Yes, you are

34:15 There's something that has that, but Kirk Rowland to the Domburg story, so I think this is the real point. It's perfect timing. So Domburg wrote a great piece about, it was never about emissions,

34:27 and the climate near has evolved from like global warming to climate change to climate crisis to the recent term global boiling, which set Domburg off to write a piece. There's been this shift in

34:42 focus. It's ever so slight, but if you listen to sort of the environmentalists here, the shift in focus been from carbon emissions to the act of burning fossil fuels. So it's not the emissions

34:55 anymore. It's about the fact that we're just burning fossil fuels in general. Now - Well, burning is bad, just - Just burning is bad. And they've even taken it a step further. If you listen,

35:07 they talk about even producing them You hear that too, just the act of producing them. They should stay in the ground. We're starting to hear that too. And - Well - Go ahead. It's interesting,

35:20 there's a couple of real examples in there as we approach COP28, which is, I believe, the UAE.

35:30 You have a leadership that has been vocal about - and certainly, if we can solve the emissions issue related burning hydrocarbons. That ought to be a good thing, right? And the former climate

35:44 chief of the UN who was instrumental in the Paris Protocols, the Paris Agreement,

35:52 I think Christina Figueres. Anyway, she's

35:57 really taken up very proactively and very aggressively this anti-burning

36:03 pushback on all this. And if we're solving the problem and you tell me that that's unacceptable, then the emissions really weren't the problem, were they? I mean, especially - We're safe. Go

36:17 ahead. No, we're saying this in the narrative. Yeah, these are the same people that have been critical, the negative part of the IRA, speaking up, going all the way to the beginning, is the

36:27 fact that IRA supports the development of CCS technologies. Because CCS is really, and there's quite a few CCS technologies that I'm aware of that are just about to reach commercialization. Um, I

36:41 think that's going to be a game changer. And I think if you think about the climate as a business, which Doomburg has done multiple pieces on, this is a big, basically propaganda to promote an

36:53 industry for a few people to make a lot of money, which I don't necessarily hate them for doing that. We all promote through marketing and self-promotion. It's just some degree. But I think once

37:07 you have CCS technologies flourish, it's gonna create a alternative to

37:15 burning fossil fuels in about emissions. 'Cause when oil and gas companies say, Hey, we're down to zero emissions, through whatever technology, there's quite a few good ones out there, it's

37:27 gonna create, it's gonna be an economic versus economic battle. But before the economic versus economic battle happens, you've got to win the war of propaganda And. that's what Doomburg's saying,

37:37 Is that many people are just against? burning fossil fuels in general. And if you turn off the spigot of fossil fuels, getting them restarted is gonna be really hard. Now, thank God we have small

37:49 independent oil and gas companies, Chuck, going right back. Five guys and rusty pick up. Five guys and rusty pick up. We need them on that wall. We want them on that wall. We want them on that

37:60 wall. Yeah, they even brought up the case of net power as an example of, you know, that same problem, so to speak, getting solved in a fairly ingenious way, right? Okay, you're burning

38:12 natural gas, but we figured out a way to basically capture and zero out the carbon footprint.

38:23 Yeah, we need to sit down with Danny Rice and get him to walk us through that, 'cause that sounded pretty fascinating. I mean, at the end of the day, unless, you know, the world elites are

38:37 gonna be able to sit around and tell us how to do things. They're gonna be against it. I mean, that's just - Well, they already have a GPS in my car. So they're about to get everything. I was

38:47 thinking of moving to Utah and that clinched it, no. It's over. It's over. So let's get back to that boiling point, 'cause Mark, you sent a

38:57 really fascinating tweet over by Joe Bastardi, who just by way of background has been my dad's favorite weather guy for a million years. Dad used to talk about listening to him on the radio every

39:11 morning. He's a very active tweeter, obviously as qualified as anyone on the planet. He's an expert. To talk about climate, and he's a

39:20 Texas Aggie, so. That's right. Don't hold back, guys. And his principle is grounded

39:28 in something called, I had breakfast with him long ago before he spoke at an intercom long ago. And it was just fascinating to hear him talk about, you know, the historical analogs, and I may not

39:40 have that

39:44 analytical basis precisely correct, but less reliant on predictive simulation and more reliant upon looking at, you know, the parameters of comparative analogs from historical weather events and

39:58 climate patterns. So yeah, he's a really fascinating guy, power lifter as well, I think, or bodybuilder or something, and he's

40:06 fairly outspoken. I do wish one thing about his tweets, though, that he would take a little more time to maybe clean up the typos and

40:19 some of the grammar, but some of the tweets are almost indecipherable, but Big Joe's a good dude. So the tweet you sent, I'm gonna paraphrase, but you take over Mark and run with it, basically

40:32 said, for all the talk this summer of boiling and heat, if you look at all of the data in aggregate, it's kind of been a somewhat mildish summer. Did I get that right? Basically, it's a lower 48

40:45 Canada and Mexico map, which is shaded mostly blue and light blue and deeper blues across the, you know, the West Coast up through the upper Midwest up into Canada and the East Coast. And

40:59 certainly we all know very well, especially where you guys are sitting right now, that orange red dome of misery sets over mostly Texas and a little bit in New Mexico. Point is if you, if you

41:13 average all that out, then you're looking at normal to below to below normal temperatures across the much of North America where the headlines of the narrative have all been about things like global

41:24 boiling and climate change and all of that. When the data is saying that, you know, we're normal to below normal on an aggregate US. lower 48 in North American basis. One of my favorite things to

41:38 say when discussing current weather and how it's driven by climate change is to always ask the person, tell me the weather pattern that would disprove climate change, lay it out for me. What is

41:53 that? And that you always get a bunch of, Oh, I don't know, I don't know. And I go, well, how can weather prove climate change? But it can't disprove it? Doesn't that by definition mean it

42:07 can't prove it? Damn Chuck. You've heard it here. There we go. There we go. Okay, so we're we're making our wish list. We're trying to get Danny Rice to come on the podcast. We want Joe

42:18 Bassardi to come on the podcast. He'd be great. And I just don't know how we can let this moment pass without some irony on Hurricane Hillary getting California.

42:33 I saw

42:36 a couple of, just interject some humorous to me, a couple of Babylon Bee headlines. One was Hurricane Hillary makes landfall in California, and it destroys 30, 000 emails. And

42:53 Russian interference is blamed for the poor performance of Hurricane Hillary because it dissipated pretty quickly, and now it's subtropical. I saw some great surf in Newport Beach though, like the

43:07 surfers were out, they were out some giant waves. So it was nice to see hurricanes, usually there's a bright side, depending on where it's hitting. But if you were there before it hits or you're

43:20 on the edge of it, sometimes it pushes really good surf. And in this case, there was some great surf on some of the beaches in California. There we go Yeah, there we go. Fortunately, there was

43:30 no seeming major or any type of damage that would require a significant delay or shutdown at the Port of Los Angeles. Which given our problems of the past few years, that's actually a good point,

43:50 Mark. Well, they did say that there was damage, the reporter I heard on the radio on the drive this morning was talking about some conversations that she had had with farmers in the central and

44:04 Imperial Valley. And so there's going to be some impact on some key, you know, some key ag products that are coming out of that part of the world. We just don't know what that impact's going to be,

44:13 so get ready to pay more for tomatoes and almonds. Got it. Got it. All right. Do we have a finger of the week?

44:38 I'm giving it to Cruz automation as bastards

44:43 for taking my charging spot for ruining my EV experience and for screwing up what's already screwed up city of San Francisco. But you can what do you guys think? I've done. That sounds great. I'm

44:56 with you on that. I third that notion So one last thing, the interesting point about Mark Andreessen on Rogan is he was talking about San Francisco. And if you look at the Venn diagram where

45:12 literally it's two circles right on top of each other, it's San Francisco and it's literally the home of the LSD experiments, you know, all the hippie rock, the doors, Jimi Hendrix, all that

45:27 sort of stuff And it's also the home of AI and all these great things.

45:38 And his conclusion on it is it just attracts the fringe. And the brilliance comes out of the fringe, the Manson's come out of the fringe. I mean, cults exist in San Francisco, and that's why it

45:49 can be the weird wacky place that creates a race. Okay, so you're talking to one of our colleagues who happens to be in one of the creative spots of our country, Nashville. Defend Nashville, Mark

46:02 'Cause I don't think that same environment is in Nashville.

46:07 Historically has not been, although I will tell you, since it's been 15, 17 years ago, that I became a three or four times a year regular visitor in Nashville, it's changed pretty considerably.

46:23 You've had a tremendous amount of growth and changing demographics and changing politics of the.

46:33 Metro Nashville area. And so

46:37 I would say it's far from the case that San Francisco presents, but

46:47 it is rapidly changing to be, I think, a much more progressive, major US. city, and I'll just leave it at that. So he's saying he's not telling us exactly whether he thinks good music will

47:01 continue to come out of Nashville or not. Well, as I like to say, I didn't say that. I think, look, I think most of the mainstream Nashville stuff is no offense to any bro aficionados in the

47:15 room, but I think

47:19 country has been completely homogenized, at least in the mainstream. You know, it's like the same five lyrical constructs in the same token, like a true musician's playing. Yeah. I mean, as a

47:32 true Texas country music guy, I think when Chet Atkins took the slide guitar out of country music, made it that bastard pop stuff. It all went downhill. Amen. All right, everybody. If you liked

47:46 BDE, please subscribe. Please tell your friends about it. We will be next be back next week. Good to see you Mark. Cheers. Safe travel