Daniel Yergin

And how people, you know, looked at oil independence.

I don't have a good answer to that because it also, I mean, there's oil, but there's also religion.

There's also the Arab-Israeli conflict.

You know, there's Iran, which is really...

in some ways a neo-colonial power in the Middle East.

I mean, it has probably, if you look at its proxies, 250,000 troops and other countries who belong to various militias and so forth that, and, you know, and Iran that,

You know, it's interesting when sometimes when I'm in the Arab Gulf countries, they don't refer to Iran, they refer to the Persians in the sense that Persia wants to dominate the Middle East as it did in centuries past.

Yeah, I think, I mean, most, you know, if you look at Norway or if you look at the Middle East, there are offshoots of oil.

Singapore's, of course, is the offshoot of hard work.

Well, it's very interesting in Saudi Arabia.

It's a question whether you use that money as a national development bank.

Yeah.

which is one thing, which is quite another thing to use it as a, basically as a global diversification investment vehicle.

And I think in Saudi Arabia, what's called the PIF, the public investment fund is doing both.

I think in Abu Dhabi, they've differentiated the roles of these different funds.

as to what is a global fund.

But I think the argument is the same argument that you would get from a financial advisor in the United States, which is diversify.

Well, yeah, but you do want to diversify your economy.

You want to bring in investment.

And there's also another critical need.