War in Iran Is Already Reshaping East Asia's Energy Future

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Tracy, it's April 9th, 905 a.m. There's a ceasefire-ish. There has been something announced that's called a ceasefire. There does not seem to actually have been much of a cessation of fire per se. Maybe it slowed down a little bit. Some of the headlines this morning are about Israel continuing to strike hard in Lebanon. Iran saying that, well, if there's no ceasefire in Lebanon, there's no ceasefire at all. But overall, at least as of right now, the market, etc., we saw that huge drop in oil Tuesday night. The market's still sort of buoyant, right? Still sort of resilient. Well, I think the important thing for the purposes of this particular discussion is if you take a look at what's going on in the Strait of Urmus, it still seems to be shut more or less. And shout out to the Bloomberg Function, Ecan, Hormuz, Go. You can see the number of ships that are going through that particular choke point. And I have two as of today, which is basically not like two today. There were some headlines about how maybe even in the good case, they would let through 10 to 15, which is still sort of nothing compared to normal ship traffic. So like nothing's back to normal. I was going to say to your point, I think the thing that's confusing everyone is we keep seeing these headlines about like a billion barrels lost of world supply or 20% of the world's oil supply now choked out because of the Hormuz situation. And yet, if you look at the oil price, WTI, Brent, they're definitely up, but they're not up as much as you might think, given the scale of disruption. I think many people feel intuitively the price should be higher. And then of course, there's the whole refined products situation, which is more extreme. And a lot of the prices that feel really extreme in general have happened where we see it in East Asia, whether it's like Singapore jet fuel, etc. Or a lot of the headlines that you see about extreme rationing come from East Asia, I forget which country was, they're like, you know, they're doing that classic thing of only drive to work if your license plate ends in an odd number on this day, whatever. Very 1970s. Yeah, and we're seeing a lot of these types of headlines, some in Korea, some Thailand, etc. So it also then raises the question, you know, the straight up Hormuz is closed, maybe it'll be open. But does this change future energy trajectory in some way? Does this mean there's going to be more comfort with coal mining over the long term? Does this mean that economies are going to try to accelerate decarbonization efforts more intensely? Could this be a huge boon for the American LNG industry where we know we're building a lot of export terminals, etc. And if, you know, there's some sort of impairment to Qatari LNG, then I don't know, huge questions about even just setting aside market price at right this second or this week, the future of energy. One thing about our current market moment is we are getting like a crash course in real time about the flow of energy throughout the world. And as we will see in this conversation, like it is still very much geographically constrained east versus west. And so as you say, the big question is whether or not the east kind of, I don't know, scrambles even harder to adapt to this. Well, I'm very excited to say we do in fact have the perfect guess. Someone who knows about all this stuff. Someone who's been on the podcast before, but we haven't talked to him in years, which is really sad because we really like the guy. And so very excited to welcome back on to the show, Alex Turnbull. He's an investor based in Singapore, but he's also a researcher with the Australian National University focused on energy security, really knows the energy seen very well spends his time thinking about the present and future of energy. So Alex, thank you so much for coming back on Outlaws. Thank you very much. It's great to be back on. Yeah, really, really appreciate it. Talk about like right now, you know, this phenomenon that we talk about where prices are up, but you know, by some measures, still within some sort of historical range, whereas the headlines that you see about rations, etc. like, well, this is extremely dire, etc. Give us your lay of the land from the account from the from the Asian perspective, from the perspective of East Asian countries, like how dire are things just like right now without that without that flow? Terrible, frankly, the challenge right now for Asia is that most of that crude supply does come from the Middle East. Or there are some countries which do have some domestic production, Malaysia, China, of course, but broadly speaking, Asia is a massive crude import and principally from the Middle East, because it's the most proximate supply, and generally it's the cheapest shipping distances and costs. So Asia is very heavily exposed right now and more acutely thinking about what the impacts might be how they might want to pre answer than the United States, of course, which produces a lot of oil, but still needs Middle Eastern grades for blending and refining, also Europe, which has access to roots quite readily. How much do the spot prices actually matter at this moment in time? Because you can look up something like Dubai, Oman, or some type of oil that you would assume would be maybe flowing into East Asia, and you can look at the spot price. But like, if it's not actually moving, does that like moving out of the Strait of Ormuz into Asia, does that mean anything? It does certainly for some grades. So for Omani crude can still be loaded and is being loaded. Those are real prices, prompt Brent, these are, those sorts of trades are real. So you're often seeing, even for loadings from Yandu and Saudi Arabia, OSPs, which are, in case, you know, indications of price are anywhere from $20 to $25 above whatever the prevailing Brent contract is. So in terms of like the knock on effects on the economy, mentioned some of the rationing thing, okay, yes, this is very, they're highly exposed to it. What is it, is it hitting now? Is it, is the economic destruction already taking place? Like, talk to us about like just sort of like, I guess, on the ground figuratively and literally, what are some of the ripple effects that we're seeing? You're certainly seeing serious constraints on consumption where they don't really have a lot of refining capacity. And where there is, they just don't have large amounts of crude storage. So places like the Philippines and Vietnam are already under some significant stress. A lot of it is also driven by the fact is this kind of a question of whether you can get credit lines to be able to pay these prices. And ultimately, the decision of the refineries is if they don't have inputs, they have to shut the refinery down, which incurs a large amount of fixed costs and downtime and so forth. So a lot of the players are kind of living hand to mouth and trying to get whatever they can to stay open as long as they can. So that's how you have this extreme willingness to pay for prompt cargos in order to keep these assets operating and running. But then the futures curve is out 30, 60 days. And that's a long time in the current February context where you could get resolution or not. And so that that disconnect is going to remain, I think, so long as there is no sense of a clear path here. Who's not getting energy? Because all right, if there are some entities that are almost going to be completely price-unsensitive, they have to keep the lights on. They're going to just pay whatever. So you get these huge short-term spot prices. But volume is volume. And so who is actually being forced to turn off the lights or not run a refinery or whatever because they're getting outbid? If there are fewer molecules, there are fewer molecules. Yeah, I mean, certainly less high-income countries in Asia, you'll start to see quite an acute crunch in the Philippines. So they've recently secured some cargos from China on a one-off basis. Some Vietnam the same, places like the Pacific Islands, they're in a not very good place. So it's already starting to begin the demand destruction starting mostly by income. So you mentioned refineries there. And one of the headlines that's come up recently is Asian refining margins slip into negative territory, which would seem like a bad thing if you're a refiner. And I take the point that you need to keep these assets going because it's hard to shut them down and then restart them again. But if you're not making any money, how long are these refiners actually going to keep going for? Well, some Chinese tip-off refineries, just small private ones, they live in a different political slash economic context. And if they are told to stay on, they will. It depends on which in many of these countries, you don't have purely market price fuels. So whether that's Vietnam or China, places where you have market pricing passed through like Australia, the price of fuel is getting very expensive indeed. So in those situations, basically where Tracey mentioned a refiner might be actually operating at negative margin, that's an environment in which the retail price of fuel is not liberalized. The government sets the price of fuel or sets some band or something like that. And the refineries just have to keep operating until the next time that band is changed. Okay, got it. So what are you seeing? Let's talk about right now, is this, is there what's happening with US LNG? Is it all being taken up by Europe? Is Asia trying to get in on the action or bidding for cargoes? Like what's happening with American flows? American flows are going to move to Asia quite sharply right now. So Asian prices and spot even the JKM futures above European TTF or Title Transfer Facility futures for the next period, that could change quickly. But at the moment, Asia has a much higher urgency and willingness to pay as they go into summer, higher power demand from cooling air conditioning, and also just a much more acute dependence upon LNG in certain countries. So in Europe, you've also, so you're going into summer, you have this solo and wind and it's not quite panic stations just yet. So I think Europe will be a little bit more slow to fill its storage, but then by, this goes on till say June or July, then that's when the real panic will set in. Support for the show comes from public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called generated assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R&D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins, or the S&P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on public, you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and builds a one of a kind index. You can even back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. 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Your team's feedback is scattered across emails, chats and sticky notes. It's a mess. But PDF spaces in Adobe Acrobat gives you one collaborative workspace to streamline every file and comment. So if you need six departments to finally agree on a proposal, do that with Acrobat. Need to turn a mountain of feedback into one plan of action? Do that with Acrobat. Want to stop searching for files and finally get everyone on the same page? Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. For Asia, how much of a role does Russian oil play right now in terms of replacing lost Middle Eastern supply? I mean, most of the Russian crude has already been sold anyway, and it was been sold very heavily into Chinese refineries and teapots. So it's not like it. Some of it was sitting offshore when it was going through a period of more robust US sanctions. The offshore barrels of oil and water has been dropping very sharply as all that crude has been absorbed into various places in China, like I said. So yeah. So I think that's sort of that has provided something of a buffer to this shock because there was this backup of Russian crude that couldn't know if it was quite sure whether they could pay for it without getting sanctioned by the US. But of course, that's melted away in the current context. You mentioned that the Philippines has imported some gas from China. And I'm curious, like, what has China, we know they've been a big accumulator over the years generally of natural resources, and they have strategic stockpiles and so forth. But right now, what are they doing? And are they trying to play some role in stabilizing or easing the crunch for the region overall? I think they've been very strategic. And certainly there's more or less control on exports of oil products right now, which is not very helpful for the region, because they have over time been large exporters. They are clearly doing this in a very targeted fashion. And I would assume there's other considerations behind that. Oh, wait, say more. Well, for example, China has territorial distrued with the Philippines and Vietnam and the South China Sea, and they've now got something. Oh, interesting. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Oil as geopolitical is the tale as old as. As old as time. I was going to say time, but I guess as old as what, 200 years or something like that. Okay. So we were talking about the potential for an energy crisis to actually hasten decarbonization efforts in Asia. And this is something that came up before on an episode we did on China's teapot refineries. Are you seeing rumblings of that at the moment, or are people still in sort of wait and see mode? There's definitely been a notable pick up in certain areas where there was already a bit of momentum. So in Japan, they have been undertaking a number of nuclear restarts. They've been moving very tentatively as the public got behind nuclear and the politics became less challenging. That is all apparently accelerating now. So Japan will push very hard on nuclear restarts. And more importantly, the public polling is really strong for it. So there's not a lot of political risk. And of course, Tape Chi had a massive election win. So she's in favor of the public's behind it. And there's a matter of necessity now. So I think that's something one could assume is only going to move faster. And then in Korea, there's also a lot of push for nuclear restarts. So that's moving quickly. China is doing some very pointed stuff to try to reduce LNG burns and use in chemicals. It's tricky and tricky to, if you've got a plastics plant, that's kind of hard to do, but they're having a red hot go at it. And similarly, you're also starting to see a staggering acceleration in EV adoption. If you do calls to auto dealers around Asia and ask them how much time electric vehicles stay on the lots down to single days, and many of them are back on it now. So if there probably wasn't EV. Is that something you're doing? Are you calling up the car lots and asking them this? Yeah, of course. We'd say more about this and what would they have said? This is actually, this is not, this is new. This is new, this is underground information. But talk about this, like what would they have said a month ago? What are the type of dealers you're talking to? What would they have said a month ago? I mean, January, when there was, you would see BYD cars, for example, couple of dealers in Australia, Singapore, other parts of Asia, they would be on the lot for 25 plus days. The inventory turns were kind of a bit slow and the market did look kind of glotted. We're down to single digit days in most places now. So anything China can produce out of the review sector, I think we'll get some this year. That's just really the, the constraint is on the supply side, not on the demand side now. I don't know the degree of granularity that you pay attention to American politics. Are you familiar with, do you know who Thomas Massey is? Does this name ring a bell? Yeah, yeah. He's a Kentucky from Congressman from Kentucky who drives a Tesla with a bumper sticker that said this Tesla is powered by Kentucky coal. So he's like, you know, he's a politician from Kentucky, Republican, very pro coal, but he's also pro Tesla. So he is his coal powered Tesla. Is that basically the sort of near or medium term future of Asia, which is like, okay, LNG is impaired, BYDs are flying off the lot. And so essentially we have a lot of like de facto coal powered Teslas driving around, or sorry, coal powered BYDs flying around. To a certain extent, yeah, I mean, it's also, there's also very hard analytic math behind this in the sense that there are the streets of Hormuz do not, aside from the East West pipeline, which looks like it got pretty badly hit today, the last 2448 hours, there is no way for that world to make its way out otherwise. So this is very different to 2022, where you have sanctions, you have this and that, but the spice will flow if it can physically move or be moved by pipelines by rail or what have you. And so in 2022, I was pretty sanguine about the impacts on the oil market, because Russia's got a lot of pipeline capacity to China, to through Kazakhstan, and there was clearly not really the appetite to do full on shadow fleet sanctions that would be required to slot down. In this case, you actually just can't get it out. That's all there is to it. And so if you look at that vulnerability with oil where 20 plus percent of the market comes in the Middle East, and LNG, which is about the same numbers. And then you look at say a big network flow graph model of global coal market, which I've done, the coal is not really dependent upon choke points. But the biggest producers are places like, you know, first of all, China produces enormous amount domestically, it's the largest producer, India does too. Australia, South Africa, these are all places with access to open ocean, no quirky straits. And so you don't really have to worry too much about whether some geopolitical event takes out coal. The most reliable option, of course, is just producing stuff in country, whether that's solar when, you know, batteries, nuclear. But in a pinch, and currently, I think coal is going to have a bit of a comeback for that reason. Yeah. Sending coal aside for a second, when you look at alternate sources of energy, do you have like, I don't want to say a personal favorite, but which one, which one of them do you think comes out on top in the sort of medium to longer term from this particular situation? It's like asking someone, well, you know, what one should I grow? What should I plant? I'm like, well, okay, where are you? So if you're anywhere close to the equator, or have a good solar resource, solar is crazy cheap. And if you've got to be around, batteries are also pretty cheap, because that's hard to beat. If you're somewhere in the Baltic or something, then it's whipped, right? So I think the appeal with solar, which is that you can roll it out very quickly, particularly with households. And it's interesting, you're already starting to see the impacts of Australia's government pushing residential batteries. And that is that the intraday spreads in power in Australia are very subdued. And the gas fire generators are not really pricing the market anywhere near as often as they used to. And gas burns have actually collapsed as they have in California. So if you want to kind of decouple from gas prices, batteries plus storage, solar plus storage is a very quick fix and can be rolled out very quickly. And it seems to be working very well in Australia, that the price impact of this shock is vastly less than 2022 already. This is really interesting. Talk about that spread. So to some extent, would it be fair to say that a proxy or a gauge of how well solar plus batteries is working or affecting a market is not at lower prices per se, but in a diminishing spread between the highest and the lowest price of the day and that you have this growing, that it's a sign of a sort of pure power stability? Yeah. I mean, one thing in power marks is a spark spread. So what is the cost to get out of bed for a gas fire power plant? So you take the heat rate times one of the gas prices and you work out how many hours a day over a week are effectively priced by gas. And what happens in Australia was we had a lot of solar and not much storage. And still the peaks were still very expensive because that was the gas plants knew they could set the price. What's happened with this proliferation of storages, that the gas no longer reliably sets the price in those hours. And particularly in Australia, where it's often somewhat oligopolistic market structure, having a lot of residential batteries tied together in a mesh network, which then bids into the market is really crushing those peaky times of the day. And that has a disproportionate impact on average daily prices. The problem in places like the UK is there's a lot of renewables, there's really no storage, so they're not getting much benefit out of this because they still get priced on the margin by gas. Is it just because they haven't made the, they have to buy the bullet and buy a lot of batteries from China? Or like, why is there the lack of storage to complement the renewables in the UK? Market structure design, they're fixing this right now and I'm sure they'll be in a very different place in two years. But it was something of another side, I would say. So one of the things that stood out from a previous episode we did on the energy situation with our Bloomberg colleague, Javier Blas, was he was talking about how the world is still very much divided between, I guess, east of the Suez Canal and west of the Suez Canal. And if you're east at the moment, you have energy problems because of the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. And if you're to the west, maybe the pressures aren't quite as acute just yet. And one of the things we keep hearing from the Trump administration is, well, we have a lot of oil here in the US. We are hashtag blessed in carbons and molecules and all of that. When would you expect or would you expect at all the pressures from the Middle East to start really filtering into the western part of the world? Well, like I said earlier, you've already seen it in LNG. So Asian buyers are outbidding European buyers for now. That's obviously pushing up prices for Europeans. You are seeing more and more tank of traffic from the Atlantic base and move towards Asia, as Asia just is happy to, there's maybe $10 or $15 more shipping costs, but they are willing to bid those barrels at this point. They do not care. So the idea that any of these systems are going to be, there are frictions caused by shipping and time, but if the pull is, and the need is, that acute in Asia will absolutely find its way to the Western atmosphere. Support for the show comes from public. Lately, it feels like there are two types of investing platforms. Some are traditional brokerages that haven't changed much in decades, and others feel less like investing and more like a game. 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At IBM, we've seen this firsthand, but by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions slash repetitive tasks and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. You need to make a huge presentation in an hour. Adobe Acrobat uses AI to take all your documents and generate a presentation with a single click. Build slides quickly and streamline the process. Need a last minute pitch deck? Do that with Acrobat. Need to level up your presentation design? Do that with Acrobat. You have 30 plus documents that need to be simplified into a proposal. Do that. Do that. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at Adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. So there is this view and I think it really started with, well, some people have had the dream for a very long time, some of the great pioneers of the industry. But then in 2022, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they're like, okay, the future belongs to US LNG exporters. That this is just, we can keep growing export, adding export terminals forever, because there's just going to be all that we have all this gas and there's just incredible demand for it all around the world. Is that story at risk? I mean, again, like if part of the thing that's going to happen is that around the world, there is this, and the political appetite for restarting nuclear and so forth is higher. Are there any weaknesses in the US LNG growth straight up lineup forever story? I think there's a lot of problems with it. But then mostly due to overall problems with gas. First of all, the gas turbines you use to build a power plant in Asia are the same ones you use to build a data center. And the cost of a turbine is now, it's over $2,500 per kilowatt. It's used to be about 1000. I mean, this is, this crunch in gas fire turbines is, you know, well, well, well noted, I would say, then you have the issue of, so you're kind of been, your customers have been priced out of using gas for that reason a lot. Then you have this geopolitical risk attached to supply from the Middle East. There is no certainty that, that if there is some sort of toll on the straits of Homoos, that the Houthis might say, well, I'd like some of that too, please. And then we have another issue in the Red Sea. So I think while US supply is probably low risk, depending on the actions of the US government, of course, people are overall looking at this market and thinking, well, is this really what I want to build my power grid on? And the answer is probably not. So I got it. So US LNG, yes, that is this perfect substitute for LNG from anywhere else. The big question is, if LNG generally has the potential for such volatility, then maybe a country just decides, oh yeah, okay, the US exists, but maybe a country just decides, this is not the future of energy for me. Yeah, I meant to just look at this and say like, I don't want, this is far too much crazy in a five, six year period. And I'd like something boring, please. We're all full up on crazy. Yeah. So one of the reasons we wanted to speak to you is because you are in Singapore and in Singapore, you can literally see the tankers sitting out there in the street of Malacca. But talk to us about the general vibes in the city as a big hub of oil trading. It's very interesting. People in the physical business are same levels of stress that are extraordinary. And then they look at their phones at equities and just, they don't get it. Yeah, we don't get it either. And it's also what is quite challenging is people who have been in the physical trade and dealing with this part of the world and have a deeper empathetic anthropological sense of how a toll is likely to be received in a lot of that world or whether that's a stable configuration, they have their doubts on whether we can get back to normal terribly quickly. So there's that. People in government are taking this extraordinarily seriously. They're very concerned. They are Singapore, I think is more than most places as a real sense of what a wartime economy looks like due to historical reasons from the fall of Singapore and World War II. And so I can tell that there is a real gravity and I think that's coming out certainly through some of the comments of the foreign minister, Vivian Balakrishnan. Do you think, I mean, talking just pure politics, like, okay, the US and Israel, they start a war and suddenly everybody around the world immediately has to do rationing, higher energy prices, etc. You know, for years, there was this talk like, okay, the US is going to pivot to Asia and try to have closer relationships with some of the non-China Asia countries and so forth. And just generally, like, does this, we hear about this, the version of this conversation we hear most about is in Europe, right? And like, what is the future of our relationship with the US? What is the Asian version of this conversation and thinking about the future of the US either as some sort of like business or political partner? The problem is this, is that if this is what one side of politics is going to be about on a sustained basis, which is doing stuff which doesn't make a lot of sense and is very damaging and unpredictable. And the other side is maybe a bit of a wet noodle at times, but a bit more predictable. You kind of need to live through the full cycle, right? So Republicans are, what you're saying, they're more, okay, more stuff like this, and the Democrats are the wet noodles. Okay, we keep going. But I'm just trying to make sure, okay, keep going. Yeah, sorry. So, sorry, I mean, so, so if there's that perception that there is going to be this regular source of volatility and also, you know, politics animated by things which do not really animate Asia, like evangelical Christianity or a desire for a catacomb or fighting with the Pope, like if this is kind of what the US is now, then there is going to be a natural desire to insulate oneself from it as much as you human can. And that there are real limits to what you can do. It's a big economy. It's very important. But, you know, food, fuel, you know, basic material flow security, I think is going to be looked at very differently going forward. And I think there is a, that will lead to a drive towards much higher energy security, which is not going to go well with US efforts to promote fossil exports for sure. Is China the natural alternative in that scenario? I mean, we already talked about some shipments from China going to places like the Philippines. Are we seeing the emergence of that sort of energy diplomacy? I think what people have not appreciated well is that China responds well to strength. The US now responds well to strength. So who does Trump not mess with? China, because they've restricted very well some basically threatened to put Detroit and Dekate Act arrest and shrug their shoulders. And I think what Europe in particular is missing is that there are hands they could play that may be not intuitive to them, but doesn't mean they wouldn't work. The IRGC appears to have beaten the US to the most humiliating geopolitical defeat since Suez. And looks like they're going to get a toll out of it. So what, like, what is the takeaway from how to deal with the US going forward? But similarly with China, I mean, they've been very aggressively coercive on material supply chains with technology. So I think this kind of idea that is a mid-sized power, you should be thinking that you need a pimp to keep you safe on the streets. I mean, actually, all the pimps are bad. We need more pampery. All right. You want to leave it there? I think that's a good place. All the pimps are bad, strike me is a pretty good place to leave it there. True words. True words. Sorry, sorry if that's a bit strong, but it's like, sorry. No, no, it's like, it sounds like a good spot to leave it. Alex Turnbull, it's always great catching up with you. Really appreciate you taking the time. Very interesting conversation. Cool. Thank you. Bye-bye. Setting everything aside, and there's a lot in that conversation to talk about, I think a story that I want to do more coverage of is essentially how solid is the US energy story actually? Because I think there is this view that, okay, we have achieved oil independence, basically, I know we still bring in some blends of crude from or kinds of crude from anywhere else, but we have plenty of oil and then we're going to have plenty of gas and gas exports are going to go to the moon. And I think that Alex presents an argument and there are good reasons to think that maybe the future isn't going to be gas related and there are reasons for economies to not build an LNG dependent economy. And then I think there are questions about, well, what if the oil depletes a little bit faster than people think and so forth? So I just want to do more on actual stress testing the assumptions about American domestic energy. Absolutely. And it's really interesting what Alex was saying about just the EV dealerships. You can see some of this starting to happen and the alternative so far is not turning to US gas, it's not even buying a Tesla, it's let's buy a BYD. The other thing, just on a pure basic oil and gas basis, I think to Alex's point earlier, there are these interconnections in the overall market, which we haven't necessarily seen the pressure from one half of the world come into the other half of the world just yet. And there's an open question over how that happens. Sorry. The reason I'm not expressing myself well, but one of the papers I was reading from Alex's sub-stack actually, or one of his sub-stack contributions, is a paper from 2022 called The Myth of US Energy Independence. And so I think there is this open question just on a pure hydrocarbon basis, how much of the hashtag blessed America story actually is true. Yeah, no, I mean, a lot of things don't seem to be going great. Some things are going better for the US than others these days, some not so much. I do think a lot of people are like, well, at least we have energy, at least we're not like it's like. On a relative basis, sure. But if that were to change, if they were to get a reassessment about America's energy stability or energy independence, or that would be a really big story. I also just think it's very interesting that the nuclear reacceleration, etc., that's happening in Asia. That there's political will now. There's nothing like an energy crisis to change political will towards nuclear power. And on that political will, his last point, which is like, what is the lesson that we keep learning is like strength matters. And it's like, Trump hasn't gone very hard against China because China went very hard against the US. Iran may end up in a situation in which it comes out stronger than it was two months ago, where it actually is collecting a toll, you know, getting a cash cow for the Strait of Hormuz. So it's interesting is his point where it's like, okay, Europe, other parts of Asia, what is the lesson that they learned from this? And maybe the lesson is that sort of like biding your time and trying to be friendly and obsequiously, maybe that's not the answer. Maybe stronger lines are the answer for global diplomacy right now. Also, the pimps are bad. All pimps are bad. PSA. Pimps are bad. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stullworth. Follow our guest, Alex Turnbull. He's at Alex BH Turnbull. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Arman, Dash O'Benot, at Dash Bot, and Kale Brooks, at Kale Brooks. 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