The 30-Year Overnight Success Story

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

Great art is never created in the safe middle ground but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous.
– Salman Rushdie

THINKING OUT LOUD

The 30-Year Overnight Success Story

Back in the early 1990s, an oil and gas wildcatter by the name of Aubrey McClendon grew famous for his entrepreneurial skills and building a natural gas-based company. But it was in the early 2000s that McClendon and others sparked a modern-day gold rush in domestic oil and gas.

That gold rush came about from the “discovery” of new methods to extract oil and gas from previously untapped shale formations. But that discovery did not happen overnight.

The shale oil and gas revolution happened because a determined, head-down geologist and entrepreneur, George P. Mitchell, had been experimenting with these technologies for 30 years prior. He tweaked and tweaked until he got them just right. (Mitchell, by the way, was the son of a poor Greek immigrant, Savvas Paraskevopoulos.)

Mitchell had the patience and perseverance to try, fail, tweak, try, fail, tweak, try, fail, tweak again and again until he finally got to a productive process to use these new, innovative technologies to unlock massive oil and gas reserves. 

Mitchell started working with these technologies in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1997 that he hit the winning product design. Aubrey McClendon and others then quickly adopted these technologies. A shale gold rush was off and running.

Because of the collective efforts of many key players up and down the shale value chain, the production of domestic oil and gas will hit a record high this year. It wasn’t too many years ago that people were talking about “peak oil.”

We should all thank McClendon and Mitchell, and the countless others who contributed to unlocking so much oil and gas. Thanks to them, today the average price of a gallon of gasoline ($3.33) is cheaper than the average price of a gallon of milk ($4.00).

Many of the new green technologies coming on the scene today remind me of this 30-year overnight success story. I’ve had the pleasure of working with several of these new “better mousetrap” green tech companies. Their dreams are vast. Their goals are grand. Their motivation to make our world cleaner is sincere.

The odds seem reasonable that many of these new technologies will fail and get tweaked—wash, rinse, repeat— until they either fall away for any number of reasons or survive this often slow, costly, and arduous gauntlet of trial and error.

The oil and gas pioneers of yesterday faced the same challenge as today’s green technology entrepreneurs.

The infrastructures the green energy innovators seek to penetrate and/or even replace are enormous. These are legacy infrastructures on which the whole world depends. The owners and managers of these infrastructures are not going to risk the sustainability of their assets or operations or risk global economies by trying out some new unproven gizmo. 

Today, it feels like we are in about year ten of the next 30-year “overnight” success story in energy technology. These new technologies likely still have a lot of trial and error to go before they prove capable of supplementing or even replacing our legacy hydrocarbon infrastructure.

If a  30-year overnight success story proves true in green tech, then by the net-zero year 2050, we may have succeeded, and then some, in reducing the world’s carbon output. But by about that time, we’ll probably be beginning to worry about a coming ice age, right?

THE ECONOMIC VIEW

Leading economic indicators
Say we are headed for slower growth
Yet stock market is priced for perfection
While a Goldman analyst isn’t bullish
But US economy leads the world

The restaurant world has problems
Starbucks’ sales keep falling
How resilient are consumers?

Boeing and Intel are in crisis
Manufacturing is boring.
Boeing machinists reject the deal

INFLATION, DEFLATION, OR BOTH?

Inflation has cooled.
But consumers are still seething
Here comes the $20 burger meal

Car insurance costs to rise
Health insurance, too

Electricity power construction costs set to soar
It starts with higher pipe prices
And includes transformers
As well as labor
Global demand also isn’t helping

THE LABOR VIEW

A future without check-out lines
Sam’s Club tests labor elimination.

Where are people working remotely?
Mid-sized cities are the beneficiaries.

AI to radically change most jobs
Emotional intelligence is the top survival skill.
Navigating the white-collar jobs recession

MEANWHILE IN EUROPE

The slow implosion of the EU project
Hire some more bureaucrats to fix it.
EU economy stuck in a rut

Reality bites EU’s green ambitions
Higher energy costs are an economic drag.

Could Europe become the next Palo Alto?
In their dreams, maybe.

THE GLOBAL GAME

Tibet had 1,000 years of vibrant culture.
But now it’s in a dark age

The entire island of Cuba went dark
And it’s still dark

A global time bomb is ticking
The IMF worries about global debt.
As gold hits record price territory

THE UKRAINE FIRE

Europe still Russian-gas dependent
Keeping Russia in the chips.

Why does Russia need North Korea’s help?
Because they are weak
Russia needs North Korean weapons and troops.

Putin crony plunders Ukrainian steel plant
The spoils of war are good for now.

THE GAZA FIRE

Russia helped Houthis attack ships
By providing them targeting data

Israel targets Hezbollah bank
Hitting their money system.
But Hezbollah is not giving up
$500MM may be hiding under Beirut hospital

Fighting rages in Gaza and Lebanon
When will evil cry uncle?

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

Putin gathers his BRICS allies
BRICS have more GDP than G7

The US updates Asian military operations
Getting ready for a China what?

Iran threatens global energy supplies
Send in the diplomats!

FINANCE

Private credit is keeping companies alive
PIMCO says private credit is overvalued
Private equity is getting fragile
Secondary sales are booming
New fund management fees at record low
Distressed debt funds are growing
Debt tries to keep companies alive
While BlackRock’s AUM hits record
Private credit is a great asset class
Apollo exec talks their book.

REAL ESTATE

Existing home sales are dismal.
Sliding to a 14-year low

Is a home renovation boom coming
As Americans go back to cocooning?

Want to survive a hurricane?
Build a domed home

IS TECH A WRECK?

Apple has a new, world-changing product.
AirPods Pro Hearing Aids
Yet CEO Tim Cook
Wants to talk about AI and spatial computing
While Vision Pro is a dud

Meta’s new smart glasses
Are a huge threat to privacy
Meta faces multiple lawsuits
Over teen social media addiction
Which they claim to have improved.

THE CHAT ON AI

AI is dumber than a cat.
Suggests this AI pioneer

Big AI thins out the race.
Big tech dominates

What will AI look like in 2030?
A range of experts opines.

OUR GOOD FRIEND, FAILURE

Biden’s open border policy
Has created a sex trafficking explosion

All life forms make mistakes
It’s not just humans.

Are we too impatient to be intelligent?
Or are we all confident idiots?

THE NEXT NORMAL

Teens tell Hollywood to tone down the sex
Where did these rational kids come from?

Whole Foods predicts 2025 food trends
Get with the program now!

Welcome to the sandwich generation
Multigeneration cohabitation grows.

THE WAR ON CARBON

Argentina experiences an O&G boom
It’s drill, baby, drill!

Oil & gas production keeps growing
But 2025 may be a year of pause
IEA sees 2025 global oil surplus
And lower prices through 2030

If fossil fuels are quickly replaced
The decommissioning costs will be huge

THE ENERGY TRANSITION

America’s 54 nuclear power plants mapped
Tech now wants lots more nuclear power

Nuclear energy stocks are soaring
Get your FOMO investing here!

Scientists can now vaporize plastic
Good for recycling, but what’s in the air after?

THE EV DREAM—OR DELUSION

Move over, Elon Musk.
Here comes Benjamin Franklin!

A US lithium boom is coming.
Arkansas has a ton of it!
But producing it is slow and dirty

China’s EVs flood Europe
Before upcoming tariffs take effect.

THE CHINA SYNDROME

Chinese share buybacks soar
Government promises more support.

Fearing for the future
Chinese scramble to get money out

China’s GDP up 4.6%
But can we trust their numbers?

THE WASHING-TONE

Medicare has wasted billions
Bring on Musk’s government efficiency task force.

Biden proposes free birth control pills
Why did it take this long to get here?

Democrats lament the Supreme Court.
While liberal judges vote in lock step

THE ELECTION DISTRACTION

Conservatives are happier than liberals
Who woulda thunk it?

Trump makes fries at McDonald’s
One side howls with laughter, the other disdain.

MAKING A BETTER YOU

A perfect night sleep doesn’t exist
So quit worrying about it.

A little chaos is good for you
It helps you think better.

The importance of a couch friend
Take the stress away with a good bud.

HOW ABOUT A BREAK

Wisdom is virtue.
But who has it?

Life expectancy in the US.
An interesting map

The most popular Halloween costume
The year you were born

THE EXTRAORDINARY

Glasses for the hard of hearing
Wowsville! 

20% of the world’s steel
Is going to build Saudi Arabia’s dream city

Giorgio Armani at 90
“Work is the best medicine.”

MUSIC BOX

Stevie Wonder is touring again
“Signed Sealed Delivered, I’m Yours”
An American treasure, for sure!

María Dueñas
Violin prodigy of prodigies
2021 Menuhin Competition
Beethoven: Violin Concerto: II

CASTING AROUND THE PODS

How Hezbollah is destroying Lebanon
Experts discuss on Honestly.

How hunter-gatherers discovered agriculture
How work has shaped society.

Are smartphones stealing childhood
Or are we just creating new humans?

VIDEOS OF THE WEEK

Kagurazaka Bakeneko Festival
Release your inner cat!

Mickey 17 trailer.
We have to wait until January???

Director Martin Scorsese is 81
But he wants to keep making movies.

FROM THE HEADHUNTER’S KITCHEN

The best tacos in Mexico City
Get me a plane reservation!

It’s getting chilly out there…

Classic beef chili
Chili con carne
Short rib chili
Turkey chili
Green chicken chili
Pork chili verde
White chicken chili
Caribbean chili with black beans

THE RANDOMS

Secretary Yellen has joined virtually all the “professional” economists who are warning us that Trump’s proposed tariffs would be bad for the economy. Do these people not understand that Trump is always negotiating and that his tariff talking points right now are his way of eventually getting the United States better deals with our trade partners?

What seems to be holding up the US economy is constant government deficit spending, the gold rush in AI investing as well as the wealth effect created by the rising stock market and home values. Is this what we’d call an organic economy?

Whether you are talking about Europe, Asia, Africa, India or even the Americas, a few centuries ago there were just a few countries but a whole lot of tribes. Many of those regions today still have tribal values that trump sovereign values. But in the United States, and possibly through the Americas, tribalism takes a back seat to proactive assimilation.

Hey, Hollywood! Hey, Manhattan! Hey, Paris! Hey, DC! Hey, billionaires! Do you even care about regular people?

Could the soft landing everyone wants to believe actually land us in stagflation—a slower economy with higher prices?

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East with casualties over a million. Nine-percent inflation that’s put a record number of people on the government dole. Record levels of illegal border crossings, reported to include criminals and people on terrorist watch lists. Imagine the media headlines if these events had happened under Trump’s presidency.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

The Oopsie Doopsie
October 18, 2024

Sell Me Some Happy Pills, Please
October 11, 2024