Exactly.

Yes. And while you were there, you had a number of different roles, but most recently, you were the global energy and climate innovation editor. And you've had some great posts over the years in China, Mexico, New York, and other places. And you've also written three books on energy innovation and climate. So I want to start before we get into the weeds here, just by asking you to reflect a little bit. You have been spending much of your career thinking about the intersection of business, innovation, climate, and energy. And I'm sure along the way with all those assignments in those different locations, there must have been a couple moments that were aha for you. I know when I lived in Europe and Asia, suddenly I would see things in a different way, getting perspectives that helps me connect the dots when I'm thinking about global macro and global spillovers. So from your career to date, what have been a few of your aha moments?

Yeah, I appreciate that. And I also think that one of the potential huge positives of AI is that it might help us discover new innovations on the energy side, be it supply or demand, that can help us tackle climate that maybe we couldn't have even imagined a few years ago. So, I'm crossing my fingers for that. I appreciate your point on data centers and the need for power to run them. And that's also a negative as we think about climate and energy availability. But hopefully, the pros will outweigh the cons. But I agree with you. It's going to require collaboration and common sense solutions. Speaking of AI, you know that Sebastian Malaby and I spend a lot of our time here on the spillover talking about AI because it just weaves into everything, every industry, so many different macro considerations around it. And a few weeks ago, we had Christian Coates Ulrichson from Rice University's Baker Institute, and we were talking about the Iran war and energy in particular. And we sort of concluded there that China had, in a way, won the war. It was the new OPEC, in a sense. You know, its actions had an outsized impact on global oil markets. And, you know, it was, I think, a surprise to most analysts who, at the beginning of the war, couldn't imagine that China could, in effect, manipulate the oil markets enough that we wouldn't see a higher rise in prices. And it came through strategic building of supplies, diversification of supplies, but also on the demand side. China was the world's swing consumer. It cut crude imports roughly in half between February and June. So I think China is a discussion, and we'll come back to it later. It might be a template for other countries to think about. But for now, again, I think you and I want to focus on demand more than supply as a way to possibly manage shocks like the Iran war and climate challenges. And before we get into that, I do want to talk about one piece of news, which is more about supply, and that's Venezuela. You know, we're still just starting to get details about this announced deal. My understanding is the deal has not been signed yet, just announced. But in any event, what we know now, the U.S. government, which removed Maduro as its leader back in January and hoped that very quickly U.S. companies would flood into the country, start rebuilding oil and energy infrastructure. We would see much more production coming out of Venezuela, and that alone would help reduce energy costs, which would help U.S. voters, which would help the incumbents. And what we've seen instead is that, yes, there has been some movement into Venezuela. Yes, production has increased, but nowhere near the degree or the speed that I think this government wants. So, my sense is that part of the move, this deal with Venezuela, was a way to provide some reassurance to U.S. companies that the government is there side by side with you, so to speak, as an investor. It's pretty interesting, the details, though, Vijay. I mean, 100-year deal. The U.S. is getting a financial stake, but alongside a private investor who appears to have a pretty questionable track record both within Venezuela and globally, is it legal? What happens if there's a different Venezuelan government in the future and they don't feel the same? There's a lot of questions here, but let me just ask you, Vijay, as you're thinking about what's going to matter about this deal, how much it moves the needle, what are you going to be focusing on most in the weeks and months ahead?

Well, Rebecca, you outlined it pretty well. There are a lot of question marks about this deal, including some details of the deal we don't know, but the broad outlines, we generally get the idea. It's in line with what we heard at the early days of the Maduro snatch and grab operation, which were comments from the White House saying that the U.S. will take this oil. This is going to somehow pay for the operation and beyond, and American companies will, in effect, control the sector. I was reminded immediately because I covered an earlier war originally billed as a war for oil, which was the Iraq invasion. And Dick Cheney at the time very vociferously said the oil in Iraq will pay for the war and then sell. And so, of course, that did not happen, on the contrary. And a lot of it had to do with what are known as above-ground risks. There's no doubt Iraq had the oil, it still does, but a lot of it still hasn't come out. And in Venezuela, there's even less doubt in the sense that the nature of these reserves are different. This is not the light-sweet crude, as it's called in the industry parlance. It's in the Middle East. In Arabia, we have the world's cheapest. Easiest to extract oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and four of its biggest neighbors. That's where the lion's share of the world's remaining reserves are concentrated. Unless you start looking at hard to extract stuff in Canada, known as the tar sands, or here in Venezuela, which on paper has the world's biggest reserves, but it's really very expensive, costly by two men. That is, it's a mining operation with a lot of risk and complexity and infrastructure investment and long time horizons, which is why it is a very small oil producer at the moment. It is not one of the world's biggest oil producers, even though on paper it has a lot of hydrocarbons in the ground. And so we know where the oil is, but it's not easy or attractive to get out of the ground. And the political environment is highly volatile. This is a country that's had multiple waves of expropriations of foreigners, taking away assets. The rule of law is in question. The government there now is almost certainly illegitimate and will be deemed so by not just international authorities, but by any new government that comes along may invalidate contracts, for example. And so there's a lot of reason to doubt the grandiose promises that are being made, even if they're taken at face value. And you add to this the skepticism of the U.S. energy industry generally. When President Trump gathered together U.S. oilmen at the White House in the wake of that Maduro grab, the Exxon chairman, Exxon's a company that's had its assets seized twice in Venezuela. He was the only one perhaps rash enough to say publicly what everyone was thinking. He said, Venezuela is frankly uninvestable. And that's the reason we've seen such a slow pace of investment in the last few months. With the exception of a few companies that are close to the Trump administration or close to the administration in Venezuela, you're beginning to see a certain kind of crony capitalism emerge. And I think what's happening here is because of security concerns and investment challenges, the U.S. government, in the big way that it is now, including the role of the Pentagon, coming in and providing some sort of sovereign cover, maybe is a hope that private investors will follow through with the guarantee and pledge of American taxpayers' support and perhaps Pentagon support on the security front. I think that's the idea here. Will it work? We'll have to see. But I would have to say, let's wait a couple of years and see this. The reserves are no more attractive in terms of economic and geological terms because of this deal than they were a week ago.

Yeah, when you say a couple years, I'm thinking, okay, a couple of years, we have midterms in a couple of months, and gasoline prices are still averaging over $4 a gallon and the U.S. voters don't like that. Plus, the strategic reserves in the United States, while they're not at dangerously low levels yet, they're quickly getting to those levels where actually the infrastructure, the salt caves, could be at risk. So the timing mismatch, I think, is not unimportant here. I mean, maybe as a signal, this helps somewhat. I guess the one thing maybe the White House might be hoping for is that Chevron, which is, I believe you correct me if I'm wrong, Vijay, the only major U.S. company that has had continuing operations in Venezuela throughout all this, there's some speculation they might announce that they're going to add efforts there in the coming days or weeks on the back of this deal, so to speak. But I mean, strategic reserves, Venezuela is not going to help us fill them. Am I missing anything there?