I’ve got some time, I’m just going to lean into banging head against wall. 
It’s Wed, what’s 650 words amongst friends.
I apologize if I wasn’t clear prior. It’s not a coinflip. On just about any transaction that doesn’t involve actual work or goods produced, there just happen to be the same ratio of winners as there are losers. So, your uncle being a loser and you being a winner isn’t particularly newsworthy. Every transaction, somebody wins and somebody loses and, in general, nobody really cares about anybody else’s big win or bad beat except as it relates to their own life story. Obvious, sure.
Every single person who bet on the Eagles to win the Superbowl won. In all those bets, the other side lost. If somebody looked at a few months of PetroHawk results in 2009 and envisioned another 30,000 Eagleford wells and went and bought minerals, they most definitely won. Bigtime. All of those people. We know that with 100% certainty today. Similarly, if you had the minerals and decided not to sell them, you won. If you sold in 2009, you lost. End of story. I don’t think it was as clear in 2009 what the smart move was, but it’s easy to pretend as such today.
It’s not just Eagleford. Oil volumes in this country have more than doubled since 2009. If you were buying minerals in that timeframe anywhere, the odds are much more than 50/50 that you were the winner and not the loser. Obviously. But nature abhors a vacuum. If there is a bet where one side wins 80% of the time, eventually more and more people fight over the right to make that bet…and that changes the odds. The more people who are buying minerals, and the more money that goes into buying minerals, the more likely that selling minerals is a reasonably solid choice today. I think it’s correct to think that over the past 15-20 years, in general, selling minerals was a bad idea. Will still have to wait 15-20 years to tell for sure who is the winner and loser from this point forward.
It’s easier to think of it as witchcraft for some, but buying minerals is writing a loan. You give somebody a lump sum today for the vague promise of more money down the line over a 30 year timeframe. Today minerals is a competitive market. In any sort of competitive market, the easiest way to get that loan is to offer the person the biggest lump sum (effectively the lowest interest rate). If you are writing no loans, you are failing. So you have to offer whatever it takes to make loans. At some point it’s like real estate in 2007, you have five loans out to a stripper who can only make payments if they can refinance every 2 years and take out equity. That’s not a business or a plan, that is just hope. There is a pretty good chance you are going to wake up one day and realize that you are not the winner. Maybe that is happening, maybe it isn’t. It sure seems it will happen at some point, things tend to go to their tulip phase and tip over. People can’t help themselves.
And as a last note. None of this land was given by God to the people. Unless you are a native Comanche or something, if you own Central Texas minerals today, the route from 1800 to you has some past transaction in the grant/patent or chain of title that almost assuredly contains something worse than a lowball offer to Granny. Nobody loves shady stuff, but that’s the story of everywhere.
That is my take as a mineral owner, holder, seller, buyer. Carry on.