Earlier today, we spoke with the CEO of Diamondback Energy and asked him how the Iran war is impacting not only his company but the entire energy market.

Industry experts have been a bit flummoxed on, uh, on where prices are.

I think there's a lot of things happening, uh, you know, beneath the surface, uh, adapting around the world to either lower, a little lower demand, uh, barrels moving, you know, to different places around the world.

Uh, but this can't, you know, go on, go on much longer because, uh, at the end of the day, you know, this, this supply hit's the greatest supply crunch in, in history by, by a multiple.

Uh, you know, it cannot be sustainable with, with an economy that's growing.

Is this the same as it was in the past, or are things different now?

now?Well, you know, I'll, I'll always trust Dan and what he has to say.

You know, he's, he's one of the foremost experts in the, uh, in the industry's history.

So without giving away your secrets, how is that impacting drilling? Is it improving drill cycle times? What is it doing for the business?

Yeah.

Well, listen, longer is better in this business, right? If you don't have to go vertically, then you don't have to waste, you know, dollars that aren't producing oil going from, you know, surface of the, of the Earth to, you know, call it 10,000 feet.

So anytime we can avoid that vertical section of wellbore, we save about a million to a million and a half dollars.

So if we can do that more often, we then have to build less surface facilities.

You know, the efficiency in the lateral is better.

The time to TD is better.

Maybe for the listener, you already mentioned it briefly, but what is Viper and why do you maintain a position in it, and why are you CEO of it?

Do you remember when that started to be talking about and what were your thoughts at the time?

Yeah, that was a pretty wild time for all of you at Shale.

If you go back to Kind of the end of 2023, you had Exxon made their move on Pioneer, right? And that was kind of a pretty significant deal, a very significant deal in the basin.

Once that happened, Chevron moved on Hess.

And this was all during a time when deal scrutiny under the Biden administration was pretty heavy with everybody getting second requests.

And after that, that kind of left the two big buyers of big assets on the sidelines.

And we were trying to buy Crown Rock, which ended up going to Oxy.

What are your thoughts now? Do you still view it as a problem or is it a mixed blessing? What are your thoughts?