Robert Bryce 0:04
Hi, everyone, welcome to the power hungry Podcast. I’m Robert Bryce. On this podcast we talk about what else energy power, innovation and politics and I’m pleased to welcome back for the third time everyone’s favorite green chicken. Doom Berg, welcome back to the power hungry podcast.

Doomberg 0:19
Robert, you know, it’s either a hat trick or third time’s a charm, I guess.

Robert Bryce 0:25
This is a hat trick. We’ll call it a hat trick. So let’s jump right in. You have just published a piece on substack announcing that you are quitting Twitter? What’s going on? Why are you out on the Twitter business? Well, first,

Doomberg 0:41
Robert, thanks, again for having me on. And yes, this is the first chance we’ve had to talk about the piece that we just published called notes on x. And, you know, as you and I have discussed many times offline, and I’ve had similar discussions with literally dozens of other authors on substack, who make their living, writing on that platform. As we all know, with the new ownership of Twitter now, x, things have changed, especially for substack authors. When notes, which is a competitor to Twitter was rolled out by the sub SEC team in April of this year, retribution against substack creators was pretty swift on Twitter, a lot of us were in disbelief in the early days and held out hope that maybe things would get better. As you may recall, in the beginning, you could post a substack link, but nobody could like or tweet it or comment on it, it was the craziest thing, right? That was that was lifted. But what hasn’t been lifted is a complete D boosting of any and all things to do with sub stack and the platform. As we quoted in the piece, you know, we as an experiment, we recently published a link to our most recent piece, and as such a tweet would have gotten several 100, or even 1000 likes last year, and it got 14 lights over a period of a week and a half. And, and when you’re in a relationship and and the other side changes. First try to make it work. And then eventually, you have to overcome what we call the P sunk cost fallacy. And even though we have an account extensively with, you know, more than a quarter million followers, we’re a very small team, our time has to be prioritized for maximum impact, we have decided to stay lean, we don’t have a separate social media team or anything like that I do all of the tweeting and writing. And our editor does a lot of the operations. And we’ve kept everything very, very tight knit. And we believe that’s part of our secret sauce. And so when you do that, you have to prioritize right, and four or five months later, nothing has really changed. The return on investment for us, was very low. And I think it’s the same for many other substack authors, and everyone is in limbo and wondering what to do. And so we decided to tell the world that we’re going to spend our time on notes, which is suspect’s competitive product offering. You know, the old saying is dance with the one that brought Yeah, and we built this business in partnership with substack. They’ve only ever been amazing, collaborative, working hard to make sure that our success was realized so that their success could be realized as a true partnership, their stand up people, we’ve gotten to know everyone from the CEO on down to individual developers as we have collaborated with them to try to make their platform better. In a symbiotic relationship, that is truly a win win. And there comes a time in life where, you know, to everything, there is a season, we have found that our time on Twitter has become more bitter, the trolls more prominent, the impact smaller, and life’s too short. And so we’ve got a big enough business, and if this hurts our business, so be it. I will miss many aspects of Twitter, we outlined some of them in the piece and how our audience could could help us in that regard. But by and large, we won’t miss the negativity that the algorithm puts in our face. The time wasted. Allowing that algorithm to make us angry or upset or to engage with trolls and so on. And notes is a bit of a more civilized place, at least in the early days. And we’re going to make a go of it.

Robert Bryce 4:11
Well, it’s an interesting and unfortunate. Well, interesting. Yes. And but more unfortunate than interesting. I mean that this platform, which has been a kind of a town square, right for very for many years and open I think especially journalists pay a lot of attention to it. And of course, that I’m on Twitter still, but I’ve noticed the same thing. My my links to substack articles get throttled. I wrote a recent piece on on Ford and electric vehicles tried to post it wouldn’t post. I looked for it after I posted it wouldn’t show up. I mean, you know, it was clear that this was a strategy and, you know, why isn’t why isn’t then Elon Musk could say who is doing this? Right? Well, why aren’t you doing the same thing, the New York Times The Washington Post or any other media outlet in the world instead? It’s substack. So I don’t know I think maybe it speaks to an AI Like you, I’m all in on substack. I just find after 30 years in the journalism business, that the ability to publish what I want, when I want how I want is key, and incredibly rewarding, but none of my editorializing here. What does this say, though, about the modern media business, because I see it being more and more atomized, right, more and more platforms, more people segregating. But substack seems to be growing more robust, I mean, handicap how you see some legacy media outlets versus some of the new newcomers, including substack, although you’re biased, of course, but I mean, give me your kind of how you see things and how they’ve changed just in the last 18 months or so.

Doomberg 5:41
The thing I like about substack is thus far, and this could always change. And if it does change, we’d have to reconsider. They seem to be consistently for freedom of speech. And on substack, you have the Robert Rice’s and the two birds alongside, you know, environmentalists and global warming alarmists, and pick your favorite members of the opposite side of the of the scientific and political spectrum that you and I might occupy today. And that’s all right. I mean, I think that’s perfectly fine. And I think substack has thus far stood behind its authors who of course, still must adhere to their terms of service. And we keep a close eye on our comments section. And we have deleted a few obnoxious comments that we think go outside the bounds of, of the discourse, we would like to see associated with our brand. And we unfortunately had to block a user or two but nothing compared to Twitter. For us. I mean, barely a day goes by where you don’t have to block a dozen people for saying just the most outrageous or nasty or, or hurtful things. And that just comes with the territory, of course with being online, and I like to joke to the members of our team who sometimes get upset when people attack us as if if you if you spend enough time on the internet, looking for somebody saying bad things about you, you will find them. And it’s best to just ignore that and move on and the ultimate ignoring and moving on for us is I’ve looked at where I look forward to getting my mindshare back. I look forward to spending my time interacting with our subscribers, I think we are big enough that we can get everything we need. From the amazing, brilliant, you know, we have 175,000 email subscribers, if we can’t crowdsource article ideas or find experts to bounce things off of from that crowd. Shame on us. And and the real deciding factor for us was we both know that an email is way more valuable than a twitter follow. Sure. It’s a more intimate form of relationship and a commitment when somebody gives you their email that you want to use it and, and so on. We had 258,000 followers on Twitter, and 175,000 emails on substack. Would we trade that email list for a million Twitter followers? No. 2 million Twitter followers doubtful. Right? So what are we doing? You know, let’s we have this asset, we’ve earned those emails through the reciprocal relationship that we’ve created with our audience and, and then the final thing I would say is that this aligns our incentives and so we are going to gamble that audience led growth will be sufficient to create a business that we will be happy with. And this aligns the incentives, if we continue to delight our readers, and occasionally ask them to help us grow. If we have accomplished the task of delighting them, they are likely to respond in kind. And that’s far better than trying to please or even trig, an algorithm that is programmed against you, you know, and again, we have a finite number of days left on this planet, we intend to live every single one of them the maximum. And every hour, we spent trying to figure out how to make Twitter what it once was, is wasted. It’s, it’s never going back to the way it was. And that’s sad. But that’s okay. You mourn loss, you go through the five stages, and you get over it. And we are forward looking, we’re excited at the prospect of focusing all of our energy on one, one website, and with a team that has been nothing but supportive of and if substack succeeds, and I should say full disclosure, we invested in the author led round, we are now equity owners and substack whoever smaller position might be, I don’t want people to think we’re talking our book. That was not an input into why we left Twitter, but it certainly weighed on where we decided to go logically. So we’re all in on substack we put our money where our mouth is we invested in that author round, and and we’re gonna make a go of it with a team that you know, we’re gonna dance with the one that brought us Robert Stewart Holly could say,

Robert Bryce 9:40
well, that that line I think is variously attributed but to one is to Darrell royal, the former University of Texas football coach, right who was asked I think one time why he why he was always his team always ran the ball. And he did. He said, Well, you dance with the one who brung you and

Doomberg 9:55
it shows the difference in our cultural background. I first sort of comes tonight.

Robert Bryce 9:59
Oh, should I Oh, Okay, well, I think Darrell royal Darrell royal predates Shanaya. So anyway, yeah, that’s in fact, there was an Austin band by my friend Dan Hart, it called the WHO brung is in tribute to Darrell Royal. So just as a little bit of,

Doomberg 10:14
I guess, I must be measurably younger than you.

Robert Bryce 10:16
Well. Yeah, maybe so. So but as this, I want to ask that question again, because we’ve talked so many times offline as well. But we you mentioned once the the riches are in the niches and the 175,000 email subscribers, and all of them paid, of course, but you’re reaching an audience that would be a in what I would think about in the old days would be a sizable or a medium sized newspaper in America. Right. So you have considerable reach. And is this the inevitable to feed on that question, or that that comment? Is this the inevitable result of where media is going that these niches are going to be where the riches are that this atomization that’s happened this this segmentation of the marketplace? Whether it’s streaming video or or news related outlets? Is that it seems like to me that’s what I see just this continuing segregation, which is ongoing. Is that does that rhyme with you? Does that seem like that doesn’t sink? Is that my in the right ballpark here and thinking and thinking about? Yeah, so what the trend is,

Doomberg 11:25
I agree with the trend, but perhaps we have a different opinion as to its genesis. Okay. So I would say, you and I and substack are taking advantage of an inefficiency in the market that is a combination of the media, dropping the ball, on serving the public and becoming what I would say is overtly partisan in the ugly team sports team, the politics of team sports, you’re side by side. And the media’s job, of course is to Ignasi report on the news not to pick sides and to shape narratives, to try to bend the political support of one party over the other. And I do think at that, had the media not become so overtly partisan, I don’t think this inefficiency would have opened up it estimate been made worse, of course, by Google and Facebook, undercutting and kneecapping, the revenue models of the media sector which forced them to sort of to go into sort of more click Beatty and and everything is a news alert, and, and the weather maps are redder now to try to get everybody more afraid. And so, but I do think that as a consequence of that there is an opportunity for independent citizen journalists, and we are not professional journalists, you are, but we try to be professional in our journalism. And I think that’s an important distinction to make. And we have earned the credibility of our supporters through hard work showing our homework, good writing, good editing, good photoshopping, a little bit of humor, teaching people stuff they didn’t know reframing the views of the day in a different light. And that’s the reason why we went for the subscriber model. The advertising model is is a whole different ballgame. And I do think that the 100% subscriber support, it allows us the flexibility to be, you know, provocative, without being polarizing, and to write about all manner of topics that would be taboo in modern journalism. Imagine trying to get an article critical of the proposed solutions to the so called climate crisis printed in the Washington Post The New York Times today. Maybe an editorial if you’re lucky, but certainly not a not an article. And so if,

Robert Bryce 13:40
let me follow up. Because I think that’s the key here is and you use that word narrative, and I was talking with my, my friend and publisher and former publisher Peter Osnos, who founded Public Affairs books, where I published all six of my books. And there was a recent article and he went, he wrote for The Washington Post for many years, and there was a recent article in the Washington Post that I thought was just ridiculous, right? It was about land use conflicts and renewables, which is something I’ve been reporting on for a dozen years. And it just inflamed me. And so I called Peter and I said, What do you do about this? You know, what should I do? And he said, ignore it. Right? He said, This is the narrative and we’re then hit that was the word that he used as well. And I think that that’s, that’s the story. The narrative is the story right with the media, these legacy media outlets, I think, in particularly the post National Public Radio, New York Times would have been traditional, the traditional elite, East Coast publications, that they have a narrative that they’re continually selling, particularly around energy and climate power, that all of these are part of this, this kind of nexus of worldview. That is excluding other other voices that I think is reflecting back on what you said that, that excluding other voices or excluding even what I think would be even handed reporting which this post report piece did not have, that that’s driving me I think people to seek out individual writers who they say I trust that person. And I’m going to subscribe to that person because I trust that person or that team, in your case with the green chicken. And that’s my that’s my quick observation. Because I think that word narrative is really important. And I

Doomberg 15:14
would say that goes both ways. We will never get trapped in never admitting, for example, that we’ve got something wrong or coming, bringing to our audience and opinion that we think most of them might disagree with, but doing it from a framework of, of intellectual honesty. Yeah. So for example, there are there were times where I felt it was important to recognize that the Gavin Newsom was making correct moves on nuclear power and, or when East Palestine more famously was being hyped up on Fox News as being a catastrophic event for the entire continent of North America. People on Twitter, were talking about how people in Mississippi downriver from Ohio, ought to be buying bottled water, we stepped up and wrote a free piece of a free piece called railroad where we systematically went through what was in each of those rail cars and, and correctly in hindsight, indicated that this was a local tragedy, a regional event and national nothing burger. And because it was in the moment being used to bludgeon presidential Biden, um, some of our audience were upset and the way that we frame that it was inconsistent, for example, with how, you know, Sean Hannity, and, and, and waters were just pounding away at Biden day and night and as transportation secretary as well. We wrote an intellectually honest piece, we stood by our principles, we had dozens and dozens of people from the region reached out to us and thanked us for writing that piece. You know, we had one fella reach out to us who was 60 miles up wind and up river away from the event and was wondering whether he should move. You know, like, God bless him. I was like, I can’t tell you what to do. Right. But if it was me, I wouldn’t be moving. Right? You know. And so, if you’re intellectually honest, if you try to have it, the way that I would use it is, it is much better to be ideological than partisan. We have a set of ideologies that we believe that we stay consistent with, and we won’t change them, just because the potential opponent politically has adopted one of our physicians, or if our potential, you know, theoretical political ally, has taken a position against. So for example, many of our readers might support Kennedy, let’s say, right? His position on nuclear power, in our view disqualifies. Yeah, for the presidency. I don’t care what other positions that is, is a make or break position for us. And anybody really worked with know that. And we’re not going to shy away from saying that if he becomes a serious candidate, right. So I think it’s okay to be ideological. I think partisanship is a real stain on our society.

Robert Bryce 17:57
Well, I liked the way you put that, too. I like better to be ideological than partisan. Because yes, you have to have some belief system of view of the world. And you know, how you see things, right, your ideology about an understanding of it, and rationality about it. But let’s move on. So we talked about media, and I don’t want to spend this whole hour just talking about media. I want to talk about the you know, how you’re interpreting the world, and particularly recent events. You did a presentation recently on, you called it Doom scrolling. And one of the things was the fiscal cliff. And this year, as you know, the national debt will hit 1 trillion payments on the national debt, national debt will hit $1 trillion per year, our payments on the national debt will exceed the amount of money we’re spending on national defense. I I’ve been watching this debt thing for a long time. And this seems really worrisome. And there are some people are dismissive or you know, dismiss it or not, it’s very clear that the politicians in Washington are not going to rain and spinning. They didn’t do it under Trump. They’re not doing it now. The spending continues a pace that here’s the question, How worried should we be about this enormous amount of money, the debt now $32 trillion? I think that the federal government is racking up, how concerned should we be?

Doomberg 19:13
So just to frame it for your audience. This is a presentation that we gave our monthly students into our pro tier who are higher level subscribers. And I shared that with you in advance because there’s some interesting things in there and the title was Doom scrolling. The subtitle was searching the globe for things to worry about, which is a fun, fun thing for us to do. And, in fact, it’s worse than that. It’s we’re about to cross 1 trillion in interest payments on the debt, not

Robert Bryce 19:40
what I meant to say the national house 32 trillion, the interest payments are $1 trillion. We’ll hit $1 trillion

Doomberg 19:46
per year. Incredible number, if you think about it. Our national debt crossed a trillion dollars at the end of the Carter administration. And the first federal budget that surpassed trillion dollars was in the array In the administration, and now we’re spending a trillion dollars a year on interest on way too much higher. Again, if you just do back to the envelope Look, I understand, you know, there’s duration in the debt portfolio. And, you know, not all bonds are coming due and need to be refinanced. But just as the back of the envelope 5.5% interest times $32 trillion, is 1.8 billion a year, theoretically 1.8 trillion billion 1.8 trillion a year. We didn’t

Robert Bryce 20:28
get our units wrong here. So what’s more

Doomberg 20:31
zeros? I mean, there’s reordered three orders

Robert Bryce 20:35
of magnitude, right? So 32 trillion in debt, a trillion dollars a year in interest payments alone on the debt. And if we’re financing that at five and a half percent interest, that’s $1.8 trillion a year just on the debt repayment.

Doomberg 20:49
So just on the interest payments, yeah. And interest payments, here’s the scary part. To your question, those interest rate increases, in fact, may be inflationary. So, Jerome Powell, of course, is raising interest rates in the hopes of breaking the back of inflation. But in reality, those interest payments, go to the investor class. And as our friend, Luke Grohmann, calls them their form of fiscal stimulus for the rich, that money is being spent. Now, of course, the velocity of that money is different than giving, you know, $10,000 per household, printing cash, universal basic income style, but it is still a trillion dollars going into the economy. And then you layer on top of that the increased cost of capital for the oil producers, which is an inflationary pulse. And you could begin to wonder whether, in fact, raising these rates will in fact, spur inflation in a second wave here coming up soon. And then the other thing that is amazing is our entitlements that we promised, right? Many of them are in the form of services, not actual money, Medicaid, pick your favorite, you know, veterans benefits. And then even Social Security, of course, is indexed to inflation. And so you can see an entitlement doom loop on top of debt, getting to the point where we dive off what’s known as the fiscal cliff, and one of the things that we are pondering is whether we have just become so numb to the outright fraud, corruption, waste, and mismanagement that DC has foisted upon the rest of the country, that we are, you know, quote, unquote, retreating to the quiet of our personal gardens, in the hopes that this will all just somehow magically get better. Could you imagine 1015 years ago, the rampant insider trading we see in Washington DC, or the outright corruption, I mean, cocaine in the White House, Robert, you know, oh, the Secret Service has no idea who did it. Wait, wait. It’s insane. Where we’ve come? We have no, by the way, this is bipartisan. We had the head of the Senate for the Republicans, Mitch McConnell, you know, freezing at a microphone. And we have another senator from California who, who’s instructed on how to vote because he’s really not there. It’s we are it feels like end of Rome, Banana Republic type stuff. It really does. And, you know, so if you’re gonna go around the world look for stuff to be worried about, we think that US fiscal situation is certainly one of

Robert Bryce 23:14
them. When you see fiscal cliff, what do you mean,

Doomberg 23:18
where the marginal buyer of the debt and pay of interest is the government itself printing, which should

Robert Bryce 23:25
show that to service the debt, the government just has to keep printing more money. And then this is a never ending inflationary cycle

Doomberg 23:32
emerging, you know, what we would typically assigned to an emerging economy that has dollar denominated debts that it can’t service and you know, you have this hyperinflationary spiral. I know anytime you use that word, lots of people on on Twitter, which I won’t have to worry about anymore, like to attack you for using it, but you tell me who’s going to be buying a 1.8 trillion a year in interest payments for the loan, the mountain of debt that we have to serve, as I saw that we have a trillion dollars of new debt to issue between now and the end of the year? I think it is the who’s buying that at some point. It’s, it’s pretty amazing that you believe for a second that any of this debt is going to be paid back through economic growth.

Robert Bryce 24:13
Let’s go to that then. Because that’s the other part of this that will so the other word, the other word that pops into my mind is Zimbabwe, right, you know, we’re Zimbabwe, and we’re planning we’re printing trillion dollar currency notes that are you know, whatever name your number $1,000 currency notes, because the inflation is so out of hand. But talk about that in terms of the the, the recession has, there was a store an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal just yesterday, the day before saying, Well, this recession everybody’s talking about looks like a soft landing. So is it possible that this all the spinning under the inflation Reduction Act, which I also want to talk about, that this is stimulating the economy and economic growth enough? That it’s staving off this inevitable economic doom loop what I mean, what how do you see the resilience of the apparent resilience of the US economy right now? I’d say I had Peter say knowledge on the con on the podcast a while back. And he’s saying it’s all illusion that there this is there are serious problems afoot. But how do you read it?

Doomberg 25:17
Probably somewhere in between, I think there are real pockets of strength, especially with the onshoring nearshoring movement. And, you know, we’re measuring economic activity. And there’s a lot of activity going on right now as we ponder the weaknesses that we have inflicted upon ourselves visa vie China and reliance on them for key elements of our defense supply chains and manufacturing supply chains. And so I think there’s, there’s no question that some of that is real, but then you get back to inflation. And, you know, how high do interest rates need to go? And for how long do they need to stay there? And what does that do for the US fiscal situation? It’s a real catch 22. But at its core, we have never raised interest rates this fast with this much debt. And that’s the difference between now and the Volcker era, for example, debt as a percent of GDP is several times higher than it was back then. And the second order effect of raising those interest rates, ie fiscal stimulus for the investor class, and we’re all investors really pensioners, you know, pick your favorite. You know, the union employees that have a significant pension. I mean, they’re all, you know, one way or the other, getting those stimulus. Now, again, the velocity of that money is smaller than if you just gave handed out cash to people, but it’s not zero. And I think it may have been overlooked. So you have, again, a trillion dollars in interest payments is finding its way into the economy, just as we’re uncorking a firehose of cash into the renewable sector, just as we are on shoring as quickly as we can critical materials and supply chain elements. So you can make a case that the US will have pretty impressive nominal GDP growth, but at the same time, you could have a fiscal spiral.

Robert Bryce 26:59
So well, right. Okay. So let’s talk about one of the things you just mentioned there, China, I’ve been intrigued. I had a guest on the podcast recently, Arjun Murthy, who’s a former Goldman Sachs guy and super smart and really enjoyable conversation, you know, very lucid, very concise in his talking about energy and why oil demand and energy demand is going to going to continue to grow. But he used this great phrase peak China, there was a headline today or yesterday about slowing growth in China. What happens in Peter Zion has talked about this as well, that the demographics in China are being strained and that they’re, you know, they the one child policy is going to come back to haunt them. They’re there, they their economic growth is slowing. What would a What does peak China mean to you? Does that phrase ring true? And what does a what would a slow decline in the Chinese economy mean for the rest of the world?

Doomberg 27:53
It is a difficult question. And I would say any Western analyst that claims to have a magic ball to look into magic eight ball to look into China is probably fooling themselves. It’s a bit of a black box to outsiders, as many times as I’ve visited it, I can’t claim that I know it well. But I will say this, when I hear the arguments about demographic changes, what the what people don’t point out is, and what I think is the most important number is the ever increasing size of the Chinese middle class. So yes, the total population may be peaking, and beginning to tumble off. But as more and more of that population emerges into the middle class, that as you know, is or oil or coal, or natural gas, more electricity. And there’s an inflection point of your PTU used per GDP, right? And famous chart and the size of the Chinese and Indian and the Indonesian in the Pakistani middle class is growing. And I think that effect will swamp the sort of it’s, it’s, it’s the average versus the mean, right? Or the median versus the mean, I guess is a better way to say it. I would say that the parameter that matters most is the size of the consumer population, the size of the people that have tasted our way of life and would like more of it, that matters more than the top down total average numbers that are being talked about from the demographics point of view. So if

Robert Bryce 29:31
I’d read that back to you, I interpreted this way that if you have more wealthy if you have more wealth and more wealthy consumers or they’re getting richer, what are they going to do? They’re going to use more energy and energy as a proxy for GDP. So that that continued economic growth and available funding right or discretionary money discretionary spending in all of those countries, Indonesia being the one that has had the most rapid growth in coal consumption. The IEA report on coal just came out recently. that, that that that increase in wealth will then stoke GDP, because they’re going to be using more energy, they’ll be consuming all kinds of things more than they have in the past.

Doomberg 30:12
So we put up a piece several weeks ago, where we formulated what we call Doom bricks, possibly, which goes something like this, every molecule of fossil fuels produced will be consumed and burned by somebody somewhere. And local restrictions, only shift who gets to benefit from the privilege of doing so. And as we invoke, you know, our climate policies in Western Europe in the US, that just frees up coal, natural gas and oil for the Indonesia’s and the Pakistanis, and the China’s of the world, which gives them the taste of the lifestyle that we have enjoyed and taken for granted for many decades. And there’s this is why you see record coal production last year, record coal production this year, I just saw record that we have an all time record oil demand. We just crossed the pre COVID highs, right. And that’s going to continue because everybody everywhere wants a higher standard of living, especially those who have tasted it. And so if you if you have a higher standard of living for a while, and then it’s taken away from you what happens political upheaval. So the leaders of China probably aren’t as worried about the total population, they’re probably worried about the growing size of their middle class, and how do they best serve them? Because as we both know, if there’s one thing that’s true about the Chinese Communist Party is they are paranoid about maintaining their grip on power. Right. And, you know, we I’ve been to Shanghai, I’ve been to Beijing, I’ve been to, you know, the various cities in China, they would remind you of the best parts of the biggest cities in Europe, in the US, they’re vibrant. They’re full of entrepreneurs, growing really fast cranes everywhere. Sure, the property market and all that all those growing pains that many people like to point you, but that the size of the middle class in Asia is growing. And I do believe that will swamp the Peters, I have a hypothesis in the medium chair. So it’s not just raw

Robert Bryce 32:09
number of people. It’s what they how much money they have and how they’re spending it. It’d be another way to think about it.

Doomberg 32:14
What is their energy demand? Yeah,

Robert Bryce 32:16
yeah. Got it. dethroning the dollar, you talked about this, as well. And this has been something that’s been discussion point for, I don’t know, ever, about how long the dollar is going to remain the reserve currency. Maybe we covered this enough in talking about interest rates in this and the rest of it. But if the dollar does if, well, I’ll ask it this way. Is the dollar going to be dethroned? I think you quoted Luke Grumman saying this very thing that it was going to happen. And here it is that the existing debt back monetary system is fundamentally incompatible with Peak Cheap Oil and commodities. So monetary system change is highly likely coming one way or another likely sooner than most think.

Doomberg 33:02
Yeah, that’s Luke’s view, we included his along with four or five others in a piece that we called something or nothing, where we did a bit of a deep dive on bricks and whether or not how real this was, I guess, is the way to say it. Our view is the desire to do so is strong and has only been made stronger by our sanctioning of the rest and reserves. Right. I think the bricks will make a go of it. I think it’s much harder than people think. I think the US has many tools in his toolbox to fight back slow or otherwise dissuade people from going down that path. I think historically, if you take a look, serious attempts in the past have resulted in surprise wars and overthrows of regimes. And there’s no question that the Chinese would like to see an alternative to the US dollar system, which is one of the reasons why we are worried about whether or not a kinetic conflict over the Taiwan situation might coincidentally evolve from the BRICS efforts to try and get away from the US dollar. We live and exist in the US dollar system. And we intend to continue to do so we would like, you know, a better set of policies that we currently have. But and also, of course, we’ve warned our friends in the Gold Bug community that if a gold backed currency does truly represent a threat to the US dollar hegemony, it is not impossible that the US government might outlaw the private ownership of gold again. So you should be careful what you wish for in this regard. And and this is an example of us writing through ideological lenses to an audience that is mostly pro gold and telling them a message that they might not necessarily be happy to hear.

Robert Bryce 34:41
Well, we’ll stay away from crypto because there that’s another set of issues but you also mentioned the inflation Reduction Act and you said it will torch taxpayer money in an inferno of corruption. What kind of corruption

Doomberg 34:55
we need look no further than the now infamous 2009 Green Energy Act of Ontario for an example of what is sure to follow, which is all manner of insiders will lie in their pockets at the expense of the public purse, and nothing good will come of it. Outrage will grow amongst the populace and governments will be swept out of power, only to be replaced with saner politicians, or at least politicians who are willing to implement saner policies in the hopes of gaining and keeping power, which is the way the system is meant to work. And we wrote all of this in a piece called cheat codes, where we talked about how Ontario is basically a decade ahead of the US, and why can’t we just skip in between and I should say, that piece was motivated by listening to Dr. Chris key for his recent appearance on your wonderful podcast. And since we consume all of the content that you put out, that was a great genesis for cheat codes for us. And so I get the chance to thank you for putting out that great podcast because we certainly enjoyed it. And we made an article out of it.

Robert Bryce 35:55
Well, and Isn’t it remarkable, and you know, I have great admiration for Chris Kiefer, I consider him a good friend. And you know that, here’s this guy, you know, six nine medical doctor who works in the emergency room in Toronto, suddenly becomes the leader of improbably, he comes out of nowhere and becomes the leader of the pro nuclear movement in Canada and effects, this incredible change in policy in Ontario. So not just that they are refurbishing Pickering, they’re going to expand the Bruce Power Station, they’re going to build what forgot the numbers. I’ve talked about it. But you know, what, multiple gigawatts of new capacity. It’s just a truly incredible story and one that amidst a world where there are so many things to be cynical about, and you know that Tam, here’s one guy, and it’s not all due to him, but he had a team, he worked with other people that met with right person right time. But wow, I mean, what an incredible story. So Well, thank you for that acknowledgement. But you know, I’m happy to give credit where credit is due. And that belongs to Dr. Keefer. I mean, what an amazing story.

Doomberg 36:54
And I will say that is in the same way that you and I could carve out our own audiences. Kefir has carved out his own following and has used it for the broader good and good for him. And that is, of course, proof. He is the exception that proves the rule. The rule is that says of advocacy in our system can still work. It’s easy to get cynical, and to throw up your hands and say, What does my one voice matter? You know, we started a blog with a green chicken as the front of house and look at look at the impact that we’ve had in our own small way. And look at the impact you’ve had with your podcast and your substack. And if more people would get into the arena, we could probably affect more change. And hopefully, stories like Dr. Kiefer and the impact that he’s had in Canada. And hopefully, we got so many reach outs from us staffers of politicians asking this taken, can I forward this, can I share this, like, this is this story we want to tell internally. And I do think that just like me listening to Dr. Cooper on your show people reading our piece or people listening to you are a public speaking engagement that you give like, one, you know, one swing at a time of the axe does the tree fall, and it’s certainly not going to fall if you don’t swing. And if nothing else, at least you’ll get some exercise, you know. And so

Robert Bryce 38:14
the great Wayne Gretzky line, I missed 100% of the shots I never took that was

Doomberg 38:19
like, our advice to all substack creators reach out to us is chop, chop, keep swinging. If your axe is sharpen up and you swing hard enough, and you’re accurate enough, and you’re thrust, that the tree will eventually fall down.

Robert Bryce 38:32
So we’ve talked about China, but I want to I want to just follow up on the Taiwan conflict, because this is something that’s been that ever present thing, right? And they ever present looming kind of, well, will they or won’t they? And if they did what then happens? And to me, I, you know, my simplistic view of geopolitics, I’d look at it and think, Well, if China did that, will then they’d be subject to all kinds of sanctions that would result in big effects on their economy, or are they too big to to sanction? I guess that’s the flip side of that. So um, you know, on the one hand, I’m thinking, well, if they did that they were you know, there they’d be, there’d be a significant price to pay that economic and industrial policy, but then on the other hand, maybe they think they’re too big, and the West can’t live without them. So I guess I’m trying to hold those two conflicting thoughts in my own head. Do you weigh one side or the other more heavily? You think Taiwan invasion is inevitable?

Doomberg 39:26
A little more than a week ago, we had what I would describe as a why are we hearing this Now moment? When Kyle basketball people who’s a famous hedge fund hedge fund manager with a bit of an expertise in China was presenting at the Hudson Institute of all places on his belief that President Xi Jinping was preparing for war over Taiwan. And I would encourage everybody here to Google, you know, Kyle bass, China wars, first thing that comes up, you can watch that it was 45 minutes long. I watched it. We watched it as a team. And he makes a pretty compelling case that The Press in the West is, you know what they’re reporting about what President G is saying and doing versus what he’s actually saying and doing if you go and read the source documents, that that chasm is as wide as can be. And domestically, he is preparing for war, stockpiling foods, stockpiling energies, you know, drills and, and just things he is saying the literal words on the page couldn’t be more clear. Now, you could wonder whether that is a pro at pre emptive defensive posture under the assumption that he has observed what has happened in Ukraine and would not like a repeat in his neighborhood. That’s a hopeful interpretation. Kyle, basses interpretation is that GE is preparing for a pre emptive offensive strike, which will undoubtedly lead to a kinetic conflict with the US. All bets are off in that scenario. That’s kind of a singularity event from an economic and, and really military perspective. I mean, even in Ukraine, it’s not like we have, you know, US soldiers, direct indirect combat with Russian shoulders is, is it’s a bit of a proxy war, right. But I don’t know that we could imagine a scenario where a breakout of kinetic conflict between China and Taiwan with the size of the US Navy, and what Biden has said about the situation and whether or not that would quickly devolve into an outright conflict between the Chinese military in the US, and then how that could somehow not lead to an exchange of nuclear weapons. It can get pretty scary if you think about it. And

Robert Bryce 41:37
it is damn scary. And one of the things that scares me, I mean, not that nuclear war is the second order thing to be scared about. But you mentioned the age of the US leadership. I look at President Biden, I’m not, you know, not taking any joy in saying this. Is this guy really capable of matching wits with GE or being the commander in chief if if we go to into a military conflict? And if it’s not him, then who’s going to call the shots at a Kamala Harris? I mean, you know, who’s going to be the one that’s going to say, yes, we’re gonna go to war and then have any kind of strategy that is sensible, given the complexities that would inevitably result. I mean, that is deeply scary. And I’m sorry. Because now I’m scared scratch that was here,

Doomberg 42:22
you know, when I read 1984, as a child, which now I wish I had done, you know, it’s hard, it’s hard to imagine that the obvious cognitive decline of the President, which is sad, has somehow become a partisan issue. Like, I see what I see with my own eyes, like you can tell me that this isn’t happening. I know what’s going on. Everybody knows what’s going on. And some people are lying about it. That’s basically what it comes down to. And so I don’t think that expressing concern about the cognitive decline of the President, which couldn’t be more obvious. Yeah, like I it says obvious is two plus two is four.

Robert Bryce 43:04
I saw it on I saw it on Joe Biden’s fate Jill Biden’s Yes. In the campaign, that there was one time where he got lost. And you could see this look, I mean, obviously, you know, controlled but still the look on her face, like a strict and look like Oh, god. Wow. And, you know, in wanting to intervene, but not sure quite how to do it. And then, you know, but we’ve also had this, you know, we talked about the interest rates and the debt on the debt payments, on the interest going like this. The other one graphic I saw the other day was the average age of the US member of Congress, which was the same that we’ve had this incredible increase granted an unfortunate increase in the average age of our representatives and our senators. And I don’t think that’s good for democracy, either. We need that we need to turn those people over we need fresh blood in there. And instead, they seem because is the entrenchment? Alaska this way that entrenchment is that a reflection of this gerontocracy that’s been now so firmly entrenched that they don’t want to leave because Oh, my might get one or the other side in here, if I quit. I mean, is that is that one of the problems that we have one of the identifiable problems that we have in terms of our government in DC,

Doomberg 44:15
I think most of us are scared of leaving office have a fear of being arrested. Corruption has reached such on both sides. What is Mitch McConnell doing? Everybody saw what happened. Again, that’s not a partisan issue. You can observe what happened with Mitch McConnell at that infamous press conference and say, it’s probably time the man hung it up. Yeah. Right. And Dianne Feinstein. Yeah. Dianne Feinstein, like she is not there. She’s just not there.

Robert Bryce 44:44
So who’s doing the voting who’s decided or it’s a party party bosses that are saying this is what we want, tell her to vote this way. And then the aide pushes the button or does whatever it is, but that’s not that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. And that’s one of the most powerful the the most populous and arguably the will the state with the biggest GDP in American from California. So it just reflects a deeply.

Doomberg 45:06
Look, say what you want about Joe Manchin, Joe Manchin is a lucid well read, ideological politician who has taken stances on various issues. And if you had dinner with them, and you would know that he would be able to coherently articulate his platform and the basis for it, and would be open minded, and all the things you would expect from a politician that we used to have from politicians, and it’s really amazing to see like, it can’t be that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the two very best people that we have to choose from. For the next president. Again, I’m sure I’m gonna annoy many people on both sides of the aisle by saying that I didn’t vote for it.

Robert Bryce 45:47
You can, you can say it again. They’re both octogenarians. We don’t have anyone else here in the whole country that I mean,

Doomberg 45:53
I didn’t vote for either of them. I’m not ashamed to say it. And and I think that we deserve better. I hear that Hillary Clinton is considering running again. And my god, I mean, enough already, like, can’t we just is there no fresh blood? Is there no new ideas? Is there not yet a new generation, and the longer this generation hangs on the worse? I think the political revolution will.

Robert Bryce 46:17
And that’s one of the things that makes Robert Kennedy Jr. I mean, I think scary. I agree with you. I mean, his his position on Indian Point of closure was just ridiculous. And he should apologize for it. And reverse course, I don’t expect that to happen. But the one thing that makes it interesting, right, that the the politic the horse race of American politics that happens every four years is that he’s saying things doing things that they’re, you know, people like him aren’t supposed to do, right and calling things out. And, you know, he’s only gotten this much traction, of course, because he was saying his last name, but still, you know, at least we’re not bored.

Doomberg 46:54
Yeah, look, I would much rather see DeSantis versus Newsom. You have, you know, two

Robert Bryce 47:01
relatively young big state governors that

Doomberg 47:05
executive experience, clearly on opposite ends of the

Robert Bryce 47:09
ideological stances that you know, but yeah, that would be refreshing, would it? Really would I liked that idea.

Doomberg 47:17
I mean, again, you could choose to vote for either or neither. But at least, it’s an injection of executive experience. Say what you want, California has been run a certain way, or has been run a certain way, you’d let the numbers speak for themselves. They both have policies that many listeners would find highly objectionable, that’s politics. And so at least that would be a reasonable choice. But in fact, in my ideal election, you would have Newsom running against the Santas running against Joe Manchin as an independent. And then we could have a choice across the political spectrum left, right and center. And maybe we might end up with some kind of a coalition government that makes some real compromises for the good of the people going forward. Not to get to

Robert Bryce 48:01
the mansion, as a dark horse is really quite intriguing. So let’s forget about those people for a few minutes. Let’s talk about Russia. You mentioned in your presentation on Doom scrolling, the Russian conflict and the Ukraine situation. And it’s been this gradual escalation all along. And now the provision of cluster bombs to the Ukrainian side and the ever increasing amount of money, I think you said it was now $75 billion in direct military aid from the US alone into Ukraine. And Neither side seems to be making much headway. Neither side seems to be willing to compromise there. I don’t see why Putin at this point would compromise because he’s in a situation I think, where if he goes down, he goes down fast and hard and maybe with a bullet in his head. I don’t you know, Russian politics is opaque. But nevertheless, it’s not an opaque and not pretty. What What’s your view on what happens next with Russia? And what how do you think about the conflict and what how it might end?

Doomberg 49:04
It’s how does it end? That’s a great question. Like, what is the path out? Yeah, we’re not leaving either side of reasonable path out.

Robert Bryce 49:11
And meanwhile, the gray market has been dramatically

Doomberg 49:14
correct. But also, in our view, that is more more opportunities for inadvertent conflict escalation. I think that is the impact of the collapse of the Black Sea Green Deal than the actual impact on on global food supplies because I do think that grain will find its way to the market just like the oil and gas and coal does today. But it does set up for confrontation at sea that perhaps was was not there as people tried to bust the sanctions and so on. It is a scary situation and I’m I would say that I’m unabashedly anti war and pro peace and I’m old enough to remember then, when that would get you labeled with the unpatriotic liberal crowd, right? And today, somehow that makes you an alt right pro puppet. I’m the Other draft age children, I would if we are going to enter into a war I would at least like, like a vote in Congress and have my representative go on the record yea or nay as to why it is that we’re going to war. We’ve not done that we’ve normalized the usurpation of congressional authority by the executive branch of government, and in entangling ourselves in all manner of foreign affairs that the the average US citizen couldn’t care less about. And that’s not being unpatriotic. That’s that’s, that’s just my view. I, I think that the use of the US military is something that Congress should approve of. And that’s

Robert Bryce 50:42
the key insight that you use the right word of the year usurpation of the congressional authority by the by the executive. And that’s exactly, that’s exactly what’s happened. There’s been Congress

Doomberg 50:51
has just as much to blame as as, as the executive office. I mean, this used to be the when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war, right? Of course, he got it, and there was no chance that he wouldn’t, but at least, you know, your your local representative, went on record and said, yes, in my view, this is worthy of spending the blood and treasure of the United States in response to this unprovoked attack. Here, what we have is a drip, drip, drip, no one authorization being big enough to really matter. But the integral of all of those drips is the war,

Robert Bryce 51:35
slow escalation of a proxy war. And, you know, with no clear sense of how it might de escalate or end either one. But you mentioned that oil issue with one of the other things that’s interesting to me in terms of that global market is that for all these talks about sanctions, and the rest of it, that Russian oil is getting to market right with this, this idea, we’re going to stop the Russians from selling their oil, or we’re going to dictate a certain price, oh, no more than $64.32. And beyond that, no, that’s too much. It was always destined, it was always destined to fail, and it’s failed already. So that part seems a clear failure. If I remind misreading things

Doomberg 52:15
we’ve never been more right more quickly, on something more important than our view, which we expressed in the earliest days and sanctions policy that this was as foolhardy. A set of policies as one could implement. Anybody with five minutes worth of experience in the commodity sector knows that you cannot disrupt somebody’s revenue by trying to sanction their volume, the only way to disrupt somebody’s revenue is to flood the market and destroy price. And by trying to keep the Russian volume off the international markets, we only assured that the prices would stay higher for longer and that Putin would get more money to fund his war machine. We said this when it was unpopular, we got ridiculed, it’s turned out to be 100%. True, as we knew it had to be because of our own experience in the commodity sector hard learned over decades. And the thought experiment is simple enough. Imagine if we had been successful in blocking after goons, oil from coming to the markets. So instead of 10 million barrels that say five, the price of oil would have way more than doubled. Right. And he would have gotten more revenue on half bought. This is just a fundamental truism back when we went in our first adventure in Iraq, what did we do, we flew around the world, James Baker development hammer, made sure that all the major oil producers opened up the throttle, pumped full speed ahead, a lot of the world was oil, kept the price of oil, you know, under control, because that administration understood that you, you, you, you have to flood the market to keep prices low. And anybody who’s ever worked in commodities knows that if you have a tight commodity, and you’re a competitor, or even your own plant, if you have multiple other plants, you’re gonna make it up in volume, right? You’re gonna make you’re gonna make money when inelastic commodities go short. So if we had been successful, which we would never have been, because all it does is lining the pockets of the various black market participants who move you know this quote unquote, dirty oil from those who produced it to those who need it. In reality, it was never going to work in the first place. It hasn’t worked. And it’s a true policy failure. And we take pride in the fact that we call that early and and stand by that call.

Robert Bryce 54:30
What do you think has been you’ve made these calls and you’ve, you’re now the most successful or the top earning finance publication on substack. Congratulations on that. What if you had to, are there a couple of things or three things that you’d say have made you successful?

Doomberg 54:48
Man, we’re wrong. We admit it. So we thought Jerome Powell was finished. It really wasn’t that he got reappointed. We thought that Putin would never invade and he did. We got that wrong. I think anybody in this As content creation growth, who makes as many calls as you do, or I do, you’re going to get a lot of them wrong. And if you try to hide that fact, like, again, the worst case scenario risk did not evolve in, in Europe, thankfully, in the last winter, which many had assumed that we were cheering for when in fact, no matter how many times you said it, we would prefer not to see shivering Germans in December in January, because they’ve run out of energy, we are desperately trying to ring the bell to get ahead of such scenarios. When you get something wrong, I think it’s okay to go back into admitted and to learn from it and to try to do better. I think we right from an authentic ideological viewpoint, we have a consistent lens. And I think another thing, you know, like this recent room temperature superconductor News, I’m not sure how closely you’re following. Yeah, yeah, we wrote a piece, where instead of just giving our views, we shared with our readers, our framework for how we came to those things. Here are the five questions we ask anytime a news item like this hits the tape. And we are, you know, requested by back in the day, our CEO or now our subscribers, like what does this mean? Should we be worried about it? How should we position our company given this news event, we have a very simple framework for such situations, we shared that framework with our readers. And then we systematically went through that, and came to our conclusion and said, By the way, we help Iran, we are deeply skeptical about the superconducting breakthrough. But if you put it to me today, if this thing unravels in an unfortunate scientific misconduct event, or it turns out to be true, and our skepticism was proven to be incorrect, we would much rather have a ladder. Because the development of room temperature simply thought this would be a fantastic thing for society for humanity for, for the economy, it would be a true breakthrough that matters. And this this phrase, Holy Grail is often overused. But this would be a true Holy Grail, like this is a giant leap forward in technology, if it proves to be true. And even though we had to make a call, and we polled our subscribers using our framework, we would be deeply skeptical of this, we will be the first to write a celebratory piece admitting that we were wrong. And I think that intellectual honesty, and that consistency to your ideology. In the era of media partisanship and games of gotcha is something that we will we will never sway from it is it is the certainly the root cause of any success we’ve been privileged enough to enjoy.

Robert Bryce 57:29
Right? Well, and you I think you’ve talked about it in terms of your brand. And if I remember your your brand, that what you the the your brand ambition is to instill or to in to elicit excitement and pleasure in your in your clients. And that that’s your that’s your brand ambition. Yeah, remembering that

Doomberg 57:46
when our piece lands in our ideal clients inbox, they say to themselves, their gut feeling is Oh, I get to read that. Yeah, that’s the brand. And that’s what we hope to do. And the only way to do that is to delight them. And I think, you know, we’ve tried hard to carve out intellectual honesty and rigor, showing our homework. Here’s the lace with each piece. Yeah.

Robert Bryce 58:10
Just a couple more things, because we’re coming close to an hour. And my guest is, of course, the famous everyone’s favorite green chicken. I don’t know if you have any favorite yellow or blue or orange chickens, but the favorite green chicken in any case, of course, you can find him bloomberg.substack.com And Dubard. Team rather. We both been critical of the wind industry probably so I don’t like them. They don’t like me back. I’m okay with that. But you have a chart in your in your doom scrolling the collapse in the share price of Siemens energy, numerous collapses of these big structures onshore, the structures offshore are getting bigger and bigger. You point out that they are failing due to stress because they are getting so big. are they reaching the limits of that? There have always been operating at though, at The bet’s limit, right, which is the theoretical efficiency that you can get from a flow of fluid, right. What does this indicate? Is this the this precedes the slow decline of the wind industry? What cast this forward for me in terms of how you see this playing out?

Doomberg 59:15
Again, another series of ideas that I gleaned from listening to Christopher’s podcast, a couple of he had a guest on significant wind experience that really framed the narrative in a way that resonated with me, which is something I knew intuitively I’ve participated in the industry and various, you know, indirect ways over the years and I have observed it in the pursuit of blade length, ie efficiency, right. They have overlooked the balance of stresses that such long blades induce in the gearboxes and the stems and the materials of construction and in the rush to offshore they perhaps have underestimated the The impact of the environment on these structures and quickly erosion and and pick your favorite you know, everybody knows that operating in a saltwater environment is not conducive to no structural integrity,

Robert Bryce 1:00:15
whatever brief them on that that, I mean it’s kind of a bad environment to operate in I do that’s the part that leaves me gobsmacked is like so

Doomberg 1:00:25
when you’re an executive who owns equity and options, and you have quarterly pressures to show growth, and you could sell, you know, exercise those options and generate a large personal wealth, if you hit your numbers and write your share price like Siemens energy did collapses when you finally come clean. It is our observed experience having been executives at various publicly traded companies that the desire to come clean, doesn’t get any stronger as the problem grows. And so, you know, is this the quarter you want to come clean out? Let’s do it next quarter,

Robert Bryce 1:00:58
right? There’s a correlation between the coming clean and the closing date of retirement or what that only gets

Doomberg 1:01:06
worse, right. And so what we we view the wind industry at a significant turning point, and we made a call in that presentation that we could see a rapid unraveling of wind as a viable renewable energy option in the next three to five years. We view all of those installed turbines,

Robert Bryce 1:01:25
from your lips to God’s ears, let me just say that because I’m working on another piece on the wind business that I’m gonna have out very soon, on the backlash that is not constrained to the United States, but I’ll I won’t, but anyway,

Doomberg 1:01:37
let’s talk financial backlash, every single installed hereby is a stationary, giant liability to the equity holders of those that have installed them, there’s more reps and warranties as we would say, as to performance levels. And on top of that the great lie of levelized cost of electricity has, has led to governments, you know, contracting with the producers of wind power for electricity rates that are far below what those producers would need to earn their cost of capital. And, you know, in the long run that was can’t go on forever, usually doesn’t, right. And we’re already seeing major developers walk away from fixed payment contracts and just breaking up the contract paying the fee and washing their hands of it, as opposed to making a bad situation even worse. And we have convinced a generation of politicians and administrators that wind is the cheapest energy source available, when in reality corrected for how we actually use electricity. It’s amongst the most expensive and you have to square that peg of edge.

Robert Bryce 1:02:37
Yeah. So again, we’ve been talking for near well, more than an hour now. So you know, I always ask the same questions, because I’m always interested in these these answers. And what are you reading these days?

Doomberg 1:02:48
So Neil Howe has a follow up to his great book, the fourth turning, that he has just published. And so I’m reading his first book, because I never read it. And I don’t like to read the sequel before reading the original. So I am now well, let’s put it this way. The book. The fourth turning is online night table. Given the publication cadence that we have, publishing six to eight pieces a month, not sure that I get a chance to get past the first few chapters, but that is the book that is currently on my table.

Robert Bryce 1:03:14
The fourth turning, yes. Okay. Anything else you want to recommend or leave it at that

Doomberg 1:03:20
I would highly recommend was really great. substack called Robert bryce.substack.com. To guide you. This is a machine that puts out amazing stuff. I’ve yet to read a piece that I disagree with. And really great guy too, if you ever get to know so I would highly recommend Robert rice that substack

Robert Bryce 1:03:36
the check is in the mail doober check in the mail to Green Chicken post office box somewhere. What gives you hope? I mean, you know, the Doom scrolled. You know, I’ve said this many times, and I’m, you know, I turned 63 last month and in my lifetime since I was a kid maybe during the the threat of nuclear war, I don’t know at a time that’s more uncertain that I’ve experienced myself right at time of more kind of uncertainty in financial markets, political kind of schisms in American politics, schisms in you know, in society. And it’s worrisome, what do what gives you hope.

Doomberg 1:04:15
We’ve been closer to the abyss than we are now before and we’ve come back from it, kind of a Pascal’s Wager situation. And I would say what gives me hope is the upside of Germany, the global renaissance of nuclear power, if you and I had spoken 18 months ago, and maybe we did, where we are today versus where we were back then and then where that what that means for projecting forward is truly remarkable. I do think that once we get past this generation of leaders that are no longer, you know, a cog in very lucid, that we might end up with a new slate of politicians that has a different view of things. It’s time for this generation of leaders to pass the baton to those that are coming up. And obviously foolish America. couple of us all this capitalism. I am a patriotic participant in the US Capitol system and love my kids enough to try to do our part to, to leave them in better hands than we found it. And ultimately, there’s enough good people in the country and with good intentions, and even those who disagree with each other can do so civilly and constructively and with compromise. And so in the long term, I think this too shall pass. I think we will see peace and in Russia and Ukraine, and hopefully we’ll avoid war over Taiwan and we’ll get smart about our energy policies will become less flippant about wasting taxpayer money on various boondoggles. You know, if you look at Ontario and that piece that we wrote cheat codes, it is possible. The public can vote and new leaders can come in and they can reconcile with physics and good things can happen and let’s hope and pray that that happens here a post haste

Robert Bryce 1:05:56
that’s a good good place to stop. My guest has been Dubard your favorite green chicken, my favorite green chicken? You can find him on substack Of course doonbeg.substack.com You won’t find him on Twitter by the way. He’s done with that he has washed his wings of Twitter. So dim Berg Always a pleasure catching up with you. Good luck on notes. I will be looking for you on notes on substack. And to all of you out there in podcast land. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the power hungry podcast Make sure to tune in next week we will have another guest who won’t be a green chicken until then. See you