The Ledger, every show

“The returns in the private market at the late stage are actually going to start matching the returns at the early stage. If you look at top quartile performance of early stage funds versus late stage funds, I think they're going to be pretty close to each othe…”

“I see renewables as just a massively overcapitalized space. It will likely torch capital on multiples of what happened to shale.”

“And the back of the envelope math says, well, in order for Germany to be a hundred percent renewables plus a hundred percent battery, the battery piece of that equation was 270 trillion dollars.”

“And when you look at the delta between, if I move from a coal plant to a natural gas plant, and a natural gas plant to a renewables plant, That first step has 2.5 times the environmental impact.”

“We were admittedly slower than our peers on the application layer for AI because we were very worried about how fickle they were when the wakes of the models were getting wider and wider, and we spent a lot of time in infrastructure, and we're continuing to sp…”

“I'm very bullish that we're going to go well above that.”

“One is I think oil's off to the races. And I do say this to CIOs with a, Hey, think with your inflation hat on this thing is the input to almost every product and humanity. And the reason why is largely the world has lulled itself into a soft slumber on the ba…”

“Currently, Republicans under the age of 35, 80% of them say climate should be in our top five list of policy issues.”

“Carbon will be a commodity that rivals oil and gas in scope and scale, and you need to be ready for that.”

“Really where you want to focus in carbon capture are in industries that emit pure CO₂ as an industrial byproduct. Industrial accident is a better way to think about it. So those are really ethanol plants, ammonia, so fertilizer, and then natural gas processing…”

“We are gonna get to coal plants and natural gas plants, a hundred percent certain in the next decade.”

“When the government's asking you to measure something, I got news for you. That thing's going to be taxed. That thing is going to be taxed at some point in time, which is a whole different revenue source for the energy transition over time.”

“I mean, we always, I think we always kind of looked at the social media posts about a founder raising around and a VC making about themselves as like pretty cringeworth. Like, don't throw your shoulder out patting yourself on the back type of situation.”

“Agents start using inference in an exponential way. The demand curve goes way up for what we, what we're going to need from an inference perspective.”

“When you control capacity by owning the data centers and the GPUs, and you control the software, you're in an advantageous position to be able to meet the moment and deliver inference for a market that, you know, we fundamentally believe is going to grow expon…”

“I don't like complicated financial engineering. I don't like inserting puts and calls and preferred equity and ring fencing debt securities because maybe I'm too dumb to understand it, but I think that it just ends up with misalignment and transactions where e…”

“It's not really an energy transition. It's an emissions transition. The emissions is what we're trying to get at.”

“Power prices in western Oklahoma are -20% of the time today. They will pay you to take the power.”

“A good project in carbon capture might be an unlevered 20 to 30% rate of return might be somewhere around three to six times your money. These are competitive with traditional private equity economics.”

“We think there's too much capital chasing renewables, and renewables are actually disrupting our grid system. They're causing intraday price volatility. They're causing electricity to be less reliable.”

“I'd argue vehemently there's too much money in the energy transition. It's just concentrated in the hands of very large funds who can't get out of bed without writing a billion dollar equity check.”

“I think one that I'm bearish on is electric vehicles. There's several things about EVs that are, when you dive in, they're just not a good fit for your average customer.”

“I actually think the solution set for the U.S. Is going to be hybridization of everything.”

“99.9% of the world's lithium reserves are in the hands of just four countries, China, Chile, Argentina, Australia, none of which are the United States.”

“The United States has reduced its CO two emissions since 2005, largely on the back of fracking and getting that natural gas molecule out.”

“And what we try to do is merge these worlds together, is just to say, hey, when we're in those conference rooms, realistically, we're not bringing up climate. We just aren't. We're bringing up money. And when we're in other conference rooms, we talk about how …”

“We are investing in pure play inference software providers like Ying and the team at Radix Arc that just came out of XAI. They're the inference team there.”

“I think it's going to be just like every underestimated infrastructure forecast. We're going to spend X and we always spend X plus some multiple of that every single quarter. Everyone revises up. I think you're going to see revisions up on tokens for sure.”

“The energy is like pharma. If you're a tourist, you're probably going to get your face ripped off. And if you don't know a component piece of the energy ecosystem, or maybe the second and third layer of the onion, you can really miss something really bad.”

“Anytime something's overcapitalized, you're likely to lose your shirt. Just because a market is growing doesn't mean you're making money. That's a really hard thing for people to grasp in energy.”

“There's this concept of half cycle. How much does it cost to just do a project? And then there's the full cycle. What do I have to pay to get access to that project? And that's where a lot of people lose in energy.”

“The ESG pressures at your typical endowment foundation, the vast majority didn't take the form of you have to divest all of your natural resources. It typically took the form of you're not allowed to invest again in natural resources.”

“It was in May of 2020. Not a car on the road, not an airplane in the sky, not a cruise ship on the ocean. Oil prices went to -37 dollars a barrel. What do you think global demand was down? You think it was 50% that month? 70%? It was down 10%.”

“That global market is about three billion dollars a year. For some sense of scale of how big the IRA is about a trillion dollars.”

“Ironically, by virtue of putting a price on carbon, you've actually made carbon valuable under the IRA.”

“China controls over 90% of the rare earth refining capacity.”

“The United States, by virtue of fracking, has natural gas prices that are just structurally lower than the rest of the globe. They are 80% lower than Europe.”

“Up until about five to seven years ago, it was almost a religion here to be the first institutional investor into a company. And as a result, you're almost organizationally introverted. You're spending your time going and finding something that someone hasn't …”

“And actually the early innings of that was me trying to convince Arkady to sell me his 30% stake of ClickHouse, which he rightfully refused to do.”

“Really what that tax credit says is, hey, if Ted goes out and he takes one ton of carbon dioxide gas, and he injects it into the earth, permanently getting rid of it, we'll pay him 85 dollars per ton that he does via tax credit for a period of 12 years.”

“There's only 10 or something permanent sequestration wells operating in the United States right now.”

“If you look at Vogel, the most recent Nuke plant to come online, I think Southern Company had said it was going to be fourteen billion, ended up being forty billion.”

“So like on the late stage in terms of investors, we've got about six investors that deploy most of that capital.”

“But there's at least a 100,000, some people estimate up to a million orphan wells in the United States.”