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The Doomberg interview, the #1 writer on Substack · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:16
  Welcome to our third episode.
• 0:17
  I'm really excited.
• 0:19
  I'm your host Todd Royal.
• 0:20
  I'm with Doomberg.
• 0:21
  Let me tell you who Doomberg is.
• 0:23
  He is the number one writer on Substack on energy finance, geopolitics.
• 0:28
  Really also has one of the most unique marketing symbols.
• 0:33
  He's taking themselves, he's uh the team of Doomberg.
• 0:35
  He's a green chicken, uh, Chicken Little along with the Doomberg machine.
• 0:39
  So Doom and Berg.
• 0:41
  Uh I highly recommend anybody look at his work.
• 0:44
  The go to Doomberg.com.
• 0:47
  You can find them all over.
• 0:48
  He's also all over this podcast and interviews all over YouTube.
• 0:51
  And Doomberg, first question for you.
• 0:53
  First of all, thanks for being here.
• 0:55
  Just let people know how Doomberg came about, the marketing and uh you guys, your background.
• 1:00
  Sure.
• 1:00
  Well, first of all, congratulations on the new show and privileged to be an early and hopefully a repeat guest uh on the program.
• 1:06
  Yeah, so Doomberg is the brainchild of a small team.
• 1:09
  Um we are from heavy industry.
• 1:12
  Um we had spent a couple of decades each in the private sector, public markets, you know, um commodities energy type focus.
• 1:21
  And uh we had built our own bespoke consulting firm.
• 1:24
  Um, and then COVID hit, and we lost 85% of our business uh within 90 days, um, which was a shock, of course, and uh and uh we called it internally sort of a high high pucker factor moment like you just go back and get get a job, or do you power through and rebuild?
• 1:41
  And so we decided to power through and rebuild, and um uh a very famous hedge fund manager um gave us a tip and he said, Hey, look, there's this whole industry over here creating content that's predominantly sold into Wall Street.
• 1:54
  There's probably a fair bit of um marketing and business execution experience that you could sell into that space.
• 2:00
  Why don't you try to go consult into that space?
• 2:02
  And so we we did and um picked up some pretty high profile clients and really helped them a lot.
• 2:08
  And um, in so doing, you know, I in my career I I was sort of known as a uh uh a writer who could write technology to people who write checks, given my science background.
• 2:19
  And um one of the co-founders of Doomberg just coincidentally happens to be a brilliant editor and loves loves doing it.
• 2:25
  And um at one point uh in our journey, we rebuilt our consulting book to pre-COVID levels, which was great.
• 2:32
  Um, our biggest client on this side of the ledger said, um, why don't you guys just do your own?
• 2:37
  You know, you you follow all your own advice.
• 2:39
  You're great writers and great editors and great marketers, just build your own.
• 2:43
  And so we we sat around and um the aforementioned editor in chief conceived of the Doomberg brand, and we thought it would stick.
• 2:50
  And uh we launched in May of 2021.
• 2:54
  Um we're free for a year.
• 2:56
  We've definitely proved product market fit and um went paid in April of 2022, and it's been a crazy journey ever since.
• 3:03
  We're over you know, 300,000 total subscribers.
• 3:06
  Of course, not all of those are not all of those are paid.
• 3:08
  If they were, I would I would do far fewer podcasts, but um but it's been a smashing success.
• 3:14
  Um, and you know, the the branding part of it for your question is um starts with the green chicken, and we built our business on Twitter originally when you can still build businesses on Twitter and and port your audience to other platforms.
• 3:28
  Substack is our channel, so we're we're one of the earlier you know, finance-oriented Substacks and finance energy, like you say.
• 3:35
  That that market opportunity was open to be had.
• 3:38
  Um, most people speaking about energy either um worked in universities or worked in governments, and very few people from industry ever participated in the debate because they're hidden behind public affairs teams and investor relations teams.
• 3:50
  Yeah, um, and so that that was there to be had.
• 3:52
  And by the way, legacy media just does a terrible job on this topic.
• 3:55
  And so um, we grabbed the ball and ran.
• 3:57
  It's been smashing successful.
• 3:58
  But back to the marketing, you know, when you're scrolling on Twitter and you see another guy in a tie as the avatar, you you just keep on scrolling.
• 4:06
  But when you come across you know, the green chicken, the colors pop, they stand out, and uh that's a stronger impression.
• 4:13
  And impression is is is the first stop in the customer journey.
• 4:17
  Go ahead.
• 4:18
  No, that's literally how I found you.
• 4:20
  Yeah.
• 4:20
  Um, you know, I would use Twitter, I would even use Facebook for news, you know, subscribe, like certain things, so it'd show up within the algorithm.
• 4:28
  And um, I remember I had a for uh professor from graduate school, gentlemen named uh Dr.
• 4:33
  Victor Davis Hansen, and somehow you and he had aligned, you know, your group.
• 4:39
  And I remember I kept seeing the green chicken moniker.
• 4:43
  And clicked on it, read it, read a few tweets.
• 4:45
  I was like, oh, okay.
• 4:46
  This is pretty fast.
• 4:48
  This is pretty fascinating.
• 4:49
  You're also one of the first people I saw talking about nuclear power.
• 4:52
  Yeah, that was an early one for us.
• 4:54
  Um, but you know, once we grew on Twitter, um, we've since left Twitter for a very specific reason.
• 5:00
  But um one of the things that we realized was this very diminished returns on that end of the customer journey.
• 5:07
  So in this business, it's very, you know, you have to understand your customer.
• 5:10
  All business, all businesses delight their customers.
• 5:12
  And so we we had character sketches of our ideal clients, and and the way we were going to grow the business was we will be a must-follow FinTwit account, and we will be the world's best podcast guest.
• 5:23
  And it turns out retrospectively that um the primary benefit of Twitter, you know, the customer journey is impression engagement, email, paid premium.
• 5:32
  That's your people go from left to right, they rarely double jump.
• 5:35
  You get an impression, then you engage with it.
• 5:37
  Maybe you give us your email, and then eventually you jump up to paid, and maybe we can upsell you to premium.
• 5:41
  This is a standard business model in the newsletter business.
• 5:43
  And so Twitter is actually pretty weak impressions.
• 5:46
  Um and relatively weak engagements, you know, a comment or read or retweet or something.
• 5:53
  But the strongest form of engagement we discovered was being heard on a podcast like this.
• 5:58
  So and then if somebody hears this conversation and goes to Doomberg.com uh and gives their email, they're like 10 times more likely to end up paying.
• 6:08
  Got it.
• 6:08
  And the primary driver of Twitter, as it turns out, was social proof to get invited on podcasts.
• 6:13
  Really?
• 6:14
  So once you've got over 10,000, 50,000 followers, we built it up to 250,000 before we left.
• 6:21
  Yeah.
• 6:21
  Um the um the people who host podcasts, you know, this is a very, you know, uh collaborative relationship between podcast hosts and guests.
• 6:32
  You know, you hope that our listeners will come and discover your show and we're kind of f fishing in your pond.
• 6:37
  And and you know, people think it's some big mystery, but I mean, no, there's no money ever changes hands.
• 6:43
  We just, you know, have a conversation, you record it, and if some of our audience hears you and likes you, that's great.
• 6:48
  And vice versa.
• 6:49
  And so yeah, uh, we got very much diminished returns on Twitter after a while because the podcast appearances became self uh self-funding, so to speak.
• 6:58
  Yeah.
• 6:58
  Um so we we do about a hundred a year.
• 7:00
  And uh all inbound requests, we've never asked to be on a podcast.
• 7:04
  We'll go on any podcast that you know passes our minimal social screen.
• 7:08
  Um, probably not gonna see Doomberg on the KKK today, but um but the antifa podcast, maybe or the other end of the spectrum, yeah.
• 7:17
  Um, but basically any finance-oriented, you know, uh family-friendly show, even whether they have five subscribers or five million, we treat each appearance the same way.
• 7:27
  And uh one of the fun parts about it is being able to be early guests on shows like this and then watch them grow.
• 7:32
  Well, I appreciate that.
• 7:34
  And um, yeah, tell me about yeah, tell me about your your latest venture, and just so I the reading classics out loud.
• 7:40
  Tell everyone about that.
• 7:41
  I actually uh and part of that, I received my email today.
• 7:45
  I think today is Rudler is Rudyard Kipling.
• 7:48
  Um, it's such a nice way sometimes now to to unplug.
• 7:55
  Yeah.
• 7:55
  So please please uh please plug that for lack of better terms.
• 7:58
  Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
• 7:59
  I wasn't expecting it.
• 8:00
  Yeah, classics read aloud.substack.com.
• 8:03
  Um it's um a new Substack of ours that we launched, uh the Doomberg Team launched on September 1st.
• 8:09
  The co-founder and editor in chief of Doomberg that designed the green chicken is very passionate about the classics and you know, Fierce Mother, homeschooler kids, you know, her idea of a vacation is walking the camino.
• 8:23
  Um and and the mission of Classics Read Aloud is to curate, uh resuscitate and and bring back to life, you know, these brilliant, mostly short stories from 100 years ago or older that are in the public domain, very well produced.
• 8:37
  You know, we've invested in excellent sound editing and excellent high-quality podcast studios.
• 8:43
  She's got a great voice for it, very passionate about it.
• 8:46
  And this actually aligns to one of our sort of internal ethos, is that um we try to focus our time on things that feel like you get to do.
• 8:55
  Yeah, and pay others to do anything that feels like a have to do.
• 8:59
  They pay them generously.
• 9:01
  And if you spend all of your time doing get-to-do activities, like I get to write the next Doomberg piece.
• 9:06
  I get to come on this podcast with you.
• 9:08
  I get to be on the internet all day thinking about what we're gonna write about next.
• 9:11
  Look, Doomberg, we research right, publish, promote, and defend a piece every four days.
• 9:15
  You've got to you've got to be passionate to be able to do this for four years.
• 9:18
  I haven't missed, I haven't missed the deadline yet.
• 9:21
  And I don't intend to our subscribers will never know if we're on vacation because I'll write three or four in advance, and I'll still be online answering all the comments, right?
• 9:28
  She has that passion for classics read aloud.
• 9:31
  We launched it on September 1st.
• 9:32
  It's approaching um, I think almost uh 3,000 subscribers already.
• 9:36
  Oh fantastic.
• 9:37
  Yeah, and and by the way, the overlap in the Venn diagram of people who love Doomberg and people who love classics read aloud is probably a very valuable audience.
• 9:44
  Probably is.
• 9:45
  And so that's another attribute of it.
• 9:47
  Oh, so okay, I'll give my plug for uh Graham Green's short stories, one of my favorite books.
• 9:52
  Um I've read it two or three times, yeah.
• 9:55
  Love it.
• 9:56
  Send her an email, she'll get a few of them for you.
• 9:58
  Yeah, so a lot a lot of these are.
• 10:00
  Inbound, but like as she says, like no with in the age of TikTok and Twitter algorithms, like there's so much great stuff that's buried in history.
• 10:08
  Yeah.
• 10:09
  And this isn't Audible.com.
• 10:11
  It is curated with an essay with some thoughts about it, beautifully produced, uh, right on the Dubert.
• 10:17
  By the way, couldn't be any different than Dunberg's, you know, sometimes uh let's say provocative writing and and the subject matter, but it's still produced in the same quality.
• 10:27
  And it also shows the breadth and depth of of the team.
• 10:29
  It does, and it's it's nice sometimes to get past the energy and finance and geopolitics.
• 10:35
  And yeah, she does, she does a great job.
• 10:37
  Like I said, I've listened to it.
• 10:39
  I when I first came out, I sent in my email.
• 10:42
  And I also had to uh was very fortunate, had to read the classics in high school, and then when I went to graduate school, a shout-out to my favorite professor, a gentleman named Dr.
• 10:51
  Robert Kaufman, uh, my very first class, first day of grad school pepperdyne, I went to Pepper Dine School of Public Policy.
• 10:58
  They did great books, and I had to walk in the first day having read Plato's The Republic.
• 11:03
  Yeah.
• 11:04
  You know, he as he said, what is justice?
• 11:07
  Um to segue.
• 11:11
  Um you've written some great stuff lately.
• 11:13
  Again, I cannot tell people enough.
• 11:16
  This is well worth your to subscribe to you guys.
• 11:19
  Will you talk about your recent piece called Shipwreck?
• 11:24
  Um, about President Trump, the tariffs you wove in the US Navy.
• 11:28
  Would you talk about that and really how important an upcoming Supreme Court case related to U.S.
• 11:33
  tariffs is?
• 11:34
  Sure.
• 11:35
  As you and I were chatting just before we hit record, um, very true people understand the scale of what Trump is trying to pull off and the tactics that he's trying to use.
• 11:43
  So maybe I'll start there.
• 11:44
  Please in essence, um, Trump recognizes that the U.S.
• 11:47
  has halted out its manufacturing base as the opening story uh of shipwreck makes abundantly clear.
• 11:54
  Um and in order to do that, he has a sequencing issue.
• 11:59
  Um, and an affordability issue.
• 12:01
  How do you uh reshore French or all of the critical vulnerable weaknesses that that Wall Street has driven out of the Western world?
• 12:10
  One major failure of the markets is that it does a very poor job of pricing national security.
• 12:16
  Yes.
• 12:16
  Um, it ascribes basically no value to it until the government is willing to overpay for it, which is where we're heading now.
• 12:22
  Okay.
• 12:23
  So what's Trump's plan?
• 12:24
  Trump's plan is he is going to raise tariffs on everybody.
• 12:28
  And then in exchange for lowering them back to higher than where they were, but much lower than the initial opening bid.
• 12:35
  Um, he is um getting these countries to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the US to rebuild these supply chains domestically.
• 12:45
  Um and this a lot of people write this off, oh, that's just a headline.
• 12:49
  It's real.
• 12:49
  Like I we both participate in the private markets, and and there's a tsunami of cash coming into the US right now.
• 12:56
  And all of this is predicated on Trump's um tariffs, gambit.
• 13:01
  Yep.
• 13:01
  And it's so in the in the peace shipwreck, we talk about how basically um, you know, uh South Korea is gonna help rebuild the U.S.
• 13:10
  shipling industry.
• 13:11
  Uh in a prior piece, the one that preceded it, um, we wrote about how Japan is going to help rebuild um the nuclear sector in the US.
• 13:19
  That piece was titled playing catch-up, which I'm sure you read with uh interest.
• 13:23
  Um and so the challenge with all of this is it's kind of unconstitutional what Trump is doing.
• 13:31
  Uh pretty blatantly so and um people sued because it's the US and it's a litigious world.
• 13:38
  And um Trump's lawyers appear to have gotten a drubbin by the Supreme Court in the hearing, before which you know predates the decision, which might take a couple of weeks or months, probably a couple of months, is my guess given what's on the line.
• 13:53
  Uh it doesn't look as though the tariffs as they exist, um, are gonna survive judicial inspection.
• 14:02
  Yeah.
• 14:02
  And what that means for the deals that have already been signed, or the deals that have not yet been signed, I think of Canada and Mexico, for example, um, is going to determine the fate of Trump's presidency, perhaps, assuming all the other noise that we're currently hearing this week isn't uh isn't too crippling to him.
• 14:20
  And so it is a tough one.
• 14:22
  As we ended that piece, like we are torn.
• 14:25
  Um the idea is actually quite brilliant.
• 14:28
  And only a man of Trump's confidence and bluster could have moved the ball as far down the field as he has.
• 14:35
  But the US is still the constitutional republic.
• 14:38
  Yeah, and the how matters at least as much as the what I don't know how the Supreme Court's going to rule.
• 14:45
  You can't really judge from a hearing.
• 14:46
  They might be able to twist themselves into a pretzel or two.
• 14:49
  I'm old enough to remember John Roberts, uh, Chief Justice John Robertson, the Obamacare decision.
• 14:55
  Um it doesn't look good for Trump, and that's causing a lot of uncertainty in the markets, both public and private.
• 15:03
  But for now, um things are still going forward as planned.
• 15:07
  And you know, but Trump himself has admitted on truth social that this would be a devastating blow to his agenda.
• 15:13
  Oh, it would be.
• 15:14
  And but I I know Barrett came after him really hard.
• 15:17
  Uh the conservative part of the of the court came after him pretty hard.
• 15:21
  They'd be hard-pressed to rule in his favor given how much they have been focused on what's called the major questions doctrine.
• 15:28
  Yeah.
• 15:28
  Um again, neither of us are attorneys, not legal advice, but the major questions doctrine we've written about prior as well.
• 15:35
  Um basically says the president can't overinterpret what Congress meant.
• 15:40
  There's a there's a point at which Congress should have specifically said this law means the president could do that if that's what they intended.
• 15:46
  Yeah, and this is a gross violation of uh of that principle.
• 15:49
  And so that same principle has been used by conservatives to claw back power from the EPA, for example.
• 15:55
  You can't read into the, you know, uh the air quality act that uh Congress was meant to regulate carbon dioxide, for example.
• 16:03
  I think that's what's coming.
• 16:04
  And so you know, it's it's a sword with two edges, and it's probably gonna cut against the president here.
• 16:10
  Yeah, I wonder too if he'll try to go through the administrative state then at that point.
• 16:14
  Like it'll be interesting to go, okay.
• 16:15
  Well, you kind of go into the deep economic state.
• 16:18
  When you try to do something through the Fed through commerce through something to get that money, I just I wonder.
• 16:26
  The thing is, too, it's not like these are grants from these countries, these are investments in equity and debt, and they'll get a return.
• 16:33
  There's sort of a classic win-win for all involved.
• 16:36
  Um, it makes a lot of sense.
• 16:39
  I don't know what the remedy would be.
• 16:40
  Maybe Congress can pass something.
• 16:42
  You know, Congress is so torn.
• 16:43
  Um, I don't know that it could, I don't even know whether it would need to surpass the filibuster or it's something they could do via reconciliation since it's primarily finance, but um, I don't know.
• 16:53
  Um, but it's a it's a fine mess.
• 16:56
  Yeah, it's a it's a fine mess.
• 16:58
  And I I don't see how they yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear.
• 17:02
  You don't have to be an attorney to realize that tariffs typically come from Congress, typically come from legislation that the president signs, not unilaterally, you know, puts forth.
• 17:14
  But I agree with you, it's it's it's genius, it takes on a lot of issues that need to take place.
• 17:21
  Uh you you do, you have a completely hollowed-out manufacturing base.
• 17:25
  Um, I want to go to your next article, speaking about Hollowed Out, your recent one, and I may want to come back here a little bit to this, but I don't think people also realize what's going on in Britain.
• 17:37
  Um I I do uh my wife, uh her job uh many times has taken her to London the last number of years.
• 17:46
  Uh the couple of times I've traveled to Europe, love Europe.
• 17:49
  I've only passed through uh Britain.
• 17:51
  My wife just adores London, and anybody I know adores it.
• 17:55
  But would you also take people through to realize the severe damage going on right now with um our cousins, forefathers, brothers, however you want to put it over in the island nation.
• 18:10
  Yeah, in many ways, Britain is on the verge of collapse culturally, civilly, uh, economically and our main interest from an energy perspective um as well.
• 18:23
  And California, you know, uh is the closest example in the US that we can find, but at least California has, you know, the the tech industry and yeah, you know, and all that stuff.
• 18:33
  Uh Britain has none of that.
• 18:34
  Britain has uh a more suffocating regulatory regime uh against its heavy industry than even California does, which is amazing.
• 18:43
  Um Ed Millibon is the um let me get his she get his full title.
• 18:47
  I like to read his full title because it's actually a contradiction, and you'll um yeah, uh he is his title is Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero.
• 19:00
  And the two of those things, of course, are oxymoronic.
• 19:03
  Um because the pursuit of the latter undermines the former.
• 19:07
  So um Ed Milbon is a classic um he's the globalist delight, isn't he?
• 19:14
  And so he is um and he's violently anti-hydrocarbon development.
• 19:20
  Um but long story short, in the UK today, we're seeing a couple phenomena.
• 19:26
  One, a very underappreciated one happens when you have suffocating regulatory regimes like this is the ownership of critical energy assets trades hands from strong to weak.
• 19:34
  So the super majors wash their hands of it, and companies with thinner track records and shakier balance sheets are often trying to buy something on the cheap.
• 19:43
  We talk about uh the Lindsay Oil refineries, the opening story to that piece.
• 19:47
  Um probably the first time any of our readers had ever heard of it.
• 19:50
  Um, but that refinery, um, you know, the owners of it, uh an outfit called the Prax Group, um uh fell into uh bankruptcy.
• 19:59
  Um
• 20:00
  The Brits would call it administration.
• 20:02
  And of course, there's suspicions of fraud in the books.
• 20:07
  There's a large hole of cash missing, which of course is leaving creditors scrambling for whatever they can get.
• 20:15
  And the the that refinery was actually sold by Total to this company in 2021 for just for just 167 million.
• 20:24
  I just want to get rid of it, get out of it.
• 20:27
  And so and similar sales Shell and ExxonMobil are dumping their North Shea gas fields and a very strategically important gas terminal, the back end terminal.
• 20:37
  The proposed buyers from Italy has a very sketchy track record, as we point out in the piece.
• 20:42
  So that's one thing that's going on.
• 20:43
  When you have shakier companies holding critical assets, maintenance, maybe it gets cut a little bit, reinvestment doesn't happen, you know, um, safety corners and all that other stuff.
• 20:52
  I'm not saying that these specific companies are engaged in any of that, but that's generally what happens.
• 20:57
  When you sell your refinery to a private equity firm and leave California, it's on it's unlikely that you know you're going to get the same level of of uh care.
• 21:05
  And so, but the the second challenge is they have this oppressive um excessive profits levy.
• 21:13
  Um that is stifling uh investment in the industry.
• 21:17
  So the marginal tax rate for oil and gas companies in Britain today is 78%.
• 21:21
  Oh my God.
• 21:23
  Which of course means nobody's investing.
• 21:26
  And suddenly, like all oppressive tax regimes, you end up collecting less revenue.
• 21:32
  And um Rachel Reeves, who's the chancellor, you know, the sort of the finance minister, I guess, in uh in our terms.
• 21:41
  Um, she's gonna propose an autumn budget in a couple weeks.
• 21:45
  And that autumn budget is pivotal.
• 21:48
  And how the EPL, the excess profits levy is handled.
• 21:53
  Um is going to really set the tone for how Britain evolves over the coming years.
• 21:58
  Look, um, one of the great mysteries of our time is how few analysts begin with energy.
• 22:03
  Oh, it's it's energy explains like so much.
• 22:06
  And this is why Doomberg is successful.
• 22:08
  But if you just look at British energy situation, it's it's a disaster.
• 22:12
  And if you have the most expensive electricity in the Western world, guess what?
• 22:15
  You can't make steel there anymore.
• 22:17
  It's not that cut, not any more complicated than that.
• 22:19
  And if you don't, you know, produce your own hydrocarbons, you've got to pay somebody else's cost of capital to get it to your island.
• 22:26
  And so, you know, domestic production matters.
• 22:30
  It's shrinking everywhere you look.
• 22:31
  Um, the whole country of Britain now has less than a million barrels a day of refining capacity.
• 22:37
  Cut by two-thirds from the 1970s.
• 22:39
  It's not like they're driving any less in Britain.
• 22:41
  They just have to import refined products and you know, you're an island.
• 22:45
  That's that's not exactly energy security.
• 22:47
  So, how Reeves handles the EPL in the upcoming budget is going to matter a lot.
• 22:54
  It doesn't look good.
• 22:56
  And the person waiting in the wings to take over from fatally wounded, never hear cure.
• 23:02
  Stomer is none other than Ed Milibon, who's the most popular member of the of the labor government right now.
• 23:08
  And labor won this electric last point I'll make is really crazy how it came to be that the British people are stuck with labor till 2029.
• 23:19
  Um, I I I didn't understand that part.
• 23:23
  Yeah.
• 23:23
  Uh so I was I was actually going to follow up that with you.
• 23:26
  And I I didn't get that, and I'll be the first to admit to you that I I don't have a great understanding of parliamentary governments.
• 23:33
  Sure.
• 23:34
  I've done a tad bit of study on it, undergrad, graduate school, but not a lot.
• 23:39
  So when I read that, my mouth hung open.
• 23:43
  So would you explain that?
• 23:45
  Let everybody know what this means.
• 23:47
  All right.
• 23:48
  So Britain, like Canada, um, has a first past the post parliamentary system, which means you vote once, and the person with the most votes wins the seats.
• 24:00
  Um these are typically called ridings, at least in Canada.
• 24:06
  And you could get 28% of the vote in a writing, and if there's enough parties competing, you could win the seat with just 28%.
• 24:16
  And so if, say, for example, there's one liberal party running but three conservatives, you might split the vote and the liberal will win.
• 24:25
  So in the 2024 election in Britain, the Labor Party got only 34% of the popular vote.
• 24:34
  But they parlayed that into 63% of the seats in the House of Commons, basically a supermajority.
• 24:41
  Um that's because the conservatives fell.
• 24:45
  But um, take Nigel Farage's reform party.
• 24:48
  He had a breakthrough in vote counts, and I think he got like five seats because he just now didn't win any ridings.
• 24:54
  You could be second in every writing and get no seats.
• 24:57
  You see.
• 24:58
  Wow.
• 24:58
  So no, okay.
• 24:59
  So is it almost a little bit like the the top two system in California?
• 25:04
  No, no, it's literally one vote, one and done, and the plurality wins.
• 25:09
  And so if you're a large national party competing in all rate in all writings, yeah, and there's multiple parties, you can have a pretty low vote and still get most.
• 25:19
  So, for example, if the election was held today, I think reform would have an even bigger majority.
• 25:23
  Um, because the labor party and the conservative party have collapsed in popularity.
• 25:27
  Uh, but they were never going to call an election because they know they'll get wiped out.
• 25:31
  So you're kind of stuck with labor till 2029, even if Keir Stomer is the least popular prime minister in the history of the country.
• 25:40
  Um, like just to give you a comparison, France runs a similar system, it's slightly different.
• 25:46
  But in France, Marine Le Pen's national rally got 32% of the vote days after the British went to the polls, and they were just given 22% of the seats.
• 25:56
  Now, why is that?
• 25:57
  Because Macron cut a deal with the leftists to selectively pull out candidates from various ridings to stack the deck against national rally.
• 26:06
  And that's this is how France's government is now broken because the most popular party only has the third most amount of seats.
• 26:12
  And um there's you know, so there's all kinds of games that are being played by the European elite to suppress popular uprisings.
• 26:20
  That's essentially what this comes down to.
• 26:22
  And um, and so this is part of that trend.
• 26:25
  Okay.
• 26:26
  I've got to take a break.
• 26:27
  I want to come back and build on this, and I'm gonna have you go really get back to the refineries issue, because you know the the point of you're saying energy is live, but people don't really start with energy to really say if you have a bad refinery here in Britain, here's what this means, then I'd like to piggyback that and want you to talk about the EU and the disaster going on with the EU and then related to the Ukraine war.
• 26:51
  So um I'm here with Doomberg.
• 26:54
  I'm gonna we're gonna take a break, and we will be back here in just a moment.
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  We're here with Dunberg.
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  Number one rider, substack of finance, energy, geopolitics, kits in up good things.
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• 30:46
  You will not be disappointed.
• 30:48
  I wanted to build on with you because you left me with my mouth hanging open about how uh the British um elect their people.
• 30:57
  Talk to me, though, and really tell the audience, because you talked about okay, this refinery went out in Britain.
• 31:03
  And that energy is everything.
• 31:04
  I think you're I think believe you're saying is energy is live.
• 31:07
  If a refinery goes out in Britain, then how does that build upon the troubles of the EU and then ultimately how the British and the EU believe that they can defeat the Russians in Ukraine?
• 31:17
  Can you kind of connect the dots here of some kind of deep geopolitics for the audience?
• 31:23
  Sure.
• 31:23
  Let me just wrap up the UK story and then we'll pivot to the EU because the UK is not in the EU and it's it's a separate issue, but but related.
• 31:30
  Look, when you're an island nation, energy security matters above all else.
• 31:33
  You need supply of primary energy, you need supply of food, you need fertilizers, you need all those things because you're an island and you never know when ships can't get to dock, right?
• 31:42
  I mean, um blockades happen.
• 31:44
  Who knows?
• 31:45
  Um, and so if you don't have a refinery, by definition, you have to import gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel uh from abroad.
• 31:53
  And um it's not like you can build a pipeline.
• 31:56
  Um, I suppose theoretically you could, but they're basically now reliant on foreign suppliers.
• 32:03
  Ironically, probably a fair bit of Russian oil going through India making its way to Britain.
• 32:08
  Um and on top of that, it's by definition expensive because if you have your own refinery land base that then just feeds your domestic fuel supply chain immediately, you're not paying the tankers' cost of capital.
• 32:20
  Yeah.
• 32:21
  Right.
• 32:21
  And who knows where that oil is coming from, by the way, right?
• 32:24
  Um, and so that's the issue.
• 32:27
  Um, it's always better to produce your own energy.
• 32:30
  One of the great the strategic advantages of the US is it's the world's largest energy gigaper.
• 32:35
  Um, you know, produces the most oil, the most natural gas, has the largest coal reserves, has 90 nuclear reactors.
• 32:40
  It'll take a lot to weaken the U.S.
• 32:42
  energy infrastructure.
• 32:43
  And anytime there's a uh uh uh another huge advantage that feeds energy security is that you could stop exports.
• 32:48
  Like if natural gas got too expensive, Trump's gonna stop energy exports.
• 32:52
  I mean, let's be clear.
• 32:53
  Um Microsoft's not going to pay $10 a million BTU natural gas, um, and the country still exports it to Europe.
• 33:00
  Um, so let's talk about Europe.
• 33:01
  Europe is the basket case.
• 33:02
  So Europe is a catastrophe.
• 33:05
  The European Union, the 27 member states of the EU is a flaccid energy vassal.
• 33:12
  So the statistical review of World Energy publishes every June.
• 33:15
  It's like Christmas for us, right?
• 33:17
  It's a really comprehensive set of numbers by country.
• 33:21
  And then in the last year's edition, they started pulling out the 27 members of the European Union as a separate line item.
• 33:27
  So you can just sort of inspect in the aggregate.
• 33:30
  Very useful.
• 33:31
  So these are rough numbers that we've calculated.
• 33:36
  In 2024, um, Europe consumed 38 exajoules of hydrocarbon energy.
• 33:44
  That's coal, natural gas, and oil.
• 33:46
  So 38 exajoules is probably not a number that is very, you know, you don't have a framework for that.
• 33:52
  So let me give you one.
• 33:53
  That is the energy content of all the natural gas produced in the United States in 2024, just to give you a size of it.
• 34:00
  And the US is the largest natural gas producer in the world.
• 34:02
  Okay.
• 34:02
  So those 27 member states consume 38 exajules of energy.
• 34:06
  Domestically, they produce less than five.
• 34:11
  I'm sorry.
• 34:12
  Um, what that means is wait, repeat that again.
• 34:16
  Like just slowly so we can all digest this because it's laughable.
• 34:21
  I feel like I'm in a I'm in a Saturday night live skit with you right now.
• 34:24
  So apologies.
• 34:26
  Just say that again.
• 34:27
  38 exajules of consumption, split roughly between oil, gas, and coal.
• 34:33
  And only 4.7 exajules of production domestically on uh within those 27 countries.
• 34:40
  Remember, Norway and Britain are not in the EU.
• 34:44
  And the Netherlands just shut down its you know, super gas field and all that stuff.
• 34:48
  And so um when you have to import 33 exajules of energy before your heavy industry does anything, you are crippled.
• 35:00
  Um you have to pay, just take natural gas.
• 35:04
  You have to pay the cost of capital of the exploration and drilling company, the midstreamer who brings it to the LNG export terminal, the uh liquid, you know, the LNG export terminal operator who liquefies the stuff, freezes it and puts it on a boat.
• 35:20
  You gotta pay that cargo, you know, the LNG cargo ship, the owner of that.
• 35:25
  Then you got to bring it to your regasification import facility, and then you gotta pay the midstreamers who take it from there to your power plant, your cement plant, your steel plant, your chemical plant, your heavy industry.
• 35:37
  And you tack on everybody's cost of capital along the way, and you're paying two, three, four times what China pays for its domestic energy, what the US pays for its domestic energy, and you just can't compete.
• 35:48
  So if you don't have energy, you can't have heavy industry.
• 35:51
  We like to say you don't get to have nice things.
• 35:53
  And if you if you don't have heavy, if you don't have heavy industry, you have no military capacity to speak of.
• 35:59
  Um, because last I checked, it takes a lot of energy to make steel to make bombs.
• 36:04
  Bombs are nothing more than concentrated energy released in a small place.
• 36:08
  Um Europe has no geopolitical power.
• 36:12
  And the situation is a dramatically worse because you could people over the situation a bit before the war in Ukraine because they imported 15 billion cubic feet per day of cheap natural gas from Russia via pipeline.
• 36:24
  And now most of that is gone.
• 36:27
  There's still some coming in through Turkey, but the EU is desperately trying to even shut those taps off, which is insane.
• 36:34
  Um, so a bad situation, a risky situation has devolved into a crisis, one that is not going to be solved with the current suite of leaders because they don't even comprehend it.
• 36:48
  I read an amazing article in the Financial Times yesterday or the day before.
• 36:52
  I posted a picture of it on Substack's notes, which is its version of Twitter.
• 36:57
  An expansive multi-thousand-word essay in the Financial Times called The Big Read, can Germany's industry ever recover.
• 37:03
  The word energy is not even in it.
• 37:06
  I it's so mind-boggling to me that a premier newspaper like the Financial Times.
• 37:12
  I have my issues with the Financial Times, but I read it every morning.
• 37:15
  Yeah.
• 37:16
  Um, there's a lot of propaganda in there and a lot of nonsense in there.
• 37:19
  But this entire article, which was a serious investigation into whether and how Germany could recover.
• 37:25
  The fact that Germany shut off all its nuclear power plants, has intermittent wind and solar at the core uh of its energy grid, and no longer imports cheap natural gas from Russia is the problem.
• 37:36
  Everything else is a derivative of that problem.
• 37:39
  And so you're looking at symptoms and the root causes so clear and predictable.
• 37:43
  And the best way to prove something was predictable is to have predicted it.
• 37:47
  We've been writing this for years.
• 37:49
  And no, it's it's not going to turn around with Fridget merchant charge with Ursula von der Leyen and the European Commission spinning out new bureaucracies and um pockets of money uh to be wasted through corruption out of Brussels.
• 38:01
  It's going to be solved when Europe gets serious about producing its own energy, and that's not on the horizon.
• 38:06
  And back to the UK.
• 38:07
  If Ed Middlebend takes over the helm, a lot of damage could be done between now and 2029.
• 38:12
  So I think actually, between France and Britain, and we could see a uh a financial crisis.
• 38:19
  Um the markets are going to turn probably on the UK first.
• 38:24
  Um, and we could see a real it'll take a shock like that in order to wave people up to it.
• 38:29
  But you wonder why Dunberg is successful, is because we start all of our analyses with well, there's look little Trump in the Western Hemisphere.
• 38:35
  We wrote a piece called Mosaic Theory several months ago, predicted that um Argentina would need a bailout and that there would be um frictions with Columbia.
• 38:41
  Look what look what's happening.
• 38:42
  Look at the news.
• 38:43
  I mean, it starts with energy.
• 38:44
  Uh well, I loved your uh run after Trump was inaugurated where you talked about Madero, Venezuela, like don't go get on a private plane.
• 38:53
  The super majors are down by oh god, I'm I'm blanking Guyana, I believe.
• 38:57
  Guyana, yeah.
• 38:58
  Yeah, and it's swimming in oil and natural gas now.
• 39:02
  And it was like, um, Venezuela, watch out if I were you.
• 39:05
  Well, let's let's tell that story.
• 39:06
  So we wrote a piece on inauguration today called Misreading the Room.
• 39:09
  Okay.
• 39:10
  And I believe the social media preview, I do have a bit of a photographic memory for these things.
• 39:14
  Um the social preview was something like uh if Greenland was the appetizer, might Venezuela be the main course.
• 39:20
  Yeah.
• 39:20
  And um we suggest we we said something along the lines of um, because yeah, as you mentioned, the super majors have assembled.
• 39:27
  The Armada has assembled in Guyana, which and Venezuela claims that it's the fastest growing oil and gas, you know, area in the world, or the most exciting right now, at least.
• 39:35
  Huge potential.
• 39:36
  We wrote another piece called Blooming Flower, where we talked about once that Armada assembles, they start to look around because there's a critical mass of supporting companies and engineering firms and you know, uh midstreamers that need to go where the supermajors go, and once they're there, they don't like to leave.
• 39:50
  And we said um, you know, Venezuela is sitting on the largest hydrocarbon resource base in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia.
• 39:56
  And so Chevron's been in there forever, and we we cautioned.
• 40:00
  Um Madura that not that he reads us, but um that the history of uh dictator strongmen who stand on the critical path of the super majors and all development is not a glorious one.
• 40:09
  No, it's not.
• 40:10
  So it's not don't fly private anytime soon.
• 40:13
  Um so anyway, that's a bit of diversion, but similar story.
• 40:16
  So you we we basically predicted that there would Trump would go into Venezuela back in January.
• 40:21
  Why?
• 40:21
  Because it's got a huge amount of energy, it's underdeveloped, and Chevron's annoyed.
• 40:25
  Venezuela used to produce four million barrels a day, it produces one now, it could produce five.
• 40:29
  Yeah, a lot of cheese.
• 40:31
  Yeah, it's a lot of cheese, it's a lot of uh it's a you know, I think people don't realize too, and I'm a big you know, former senator, now secretary of state, national security advisor, uh Marco Rubio.
• 40:43
  Rubio is a neocon.
• 40:45
  And Rubio, um, also whose parents I believe came from Cuba, correct holds some very historic grudges over Cuba and most of South America.
• 40:54
  Yeah, and Venezuela supplies oil to Cuba, right?
• 40:57
  Yes, they do, and the secretary, it's it's very interesting.
• 41:00
  I'd tell anyone, just watch what Secretary Rubio says when it comes to Venezuela.
• 41:05
  Watch, watch the terseness.
• 41:07
  He's he's he's this smooth, good-looking aerialite gentleman that's that understands the levers and halls of power.
• 41:16
  He starts to talk about Venezuela and Cuba, and you see the veins popping out in his forehead.
• 41:22
  So look, I think the trade is we're not going to do anything more for Ukraine, but you can have your war over here in Venezuela because when you're when you're in the bomb making business, peace is a working capital problem, right?
• 41:31
  And so the neocons need a war somewhere, and Trump knows Trump knows Ukraine is lost, and talk about that if you'd like.
• 41:38
  But so the consolation prize is you know closer to home.
• 41:42
  Let's pick on somebody our own size, you know.
• 41:43
  Um, and so I think that's what's happening.
• 41:45
  We'll see if Trump actually does it.
• 41:46
  Uh as of the time of this recording.
• 41:48
  Um, the Gerald Ford has just arrived in the Caribbean.
• 41:52
  And so we'll see.
• 41:53
  Uh what I do wonder is if if Marjorie, on the political note, if Marjorie Taylor Green is going to really rile up the MAGA base, is she going to go try to run for president?
• 42:02
  Uh I I have a uh working model, a political model in my own head that she's going to try to run for president, and she could be JD Vance's uh Ross Perot uh a la that you know the 92 election.
• 42:14
  I mean, I can see her, I can see her doing that.
• 42:16
  The MAGA base is very fractured right now.
• 42:18
  I mean, I I follow it on Twitter, the whole Epstein stuff is and you know, uh, other issues that people feel very passionately about, which we don't need to get into, but um, you know, and and Trump ran on a peace promise, right?
• 42:32
  Um the whole concept of America First is no foreign adventures.
• 42:36
  And um, for the record, we are strongly anti-war.
• 42:41
  We're an invasion of Venezuela would be uh unprovoked and illegal.
• 42:45
  Um to stop anybody, but um, you know, so that's just our view.
• 42:50
  Yeah, I I want to just return real quick to what you said.
• 42:53
  And yes, I'd I would like to get your viewpoint on uh Russia and Ukraine and the EU is that people really do need to understand.
• 43:00
  Uh our valued listeners is to say what Dunberg described about the cost of capital and all the different steps it takes to import natural gas.
• 43:10
  It is what he described is could have been over a hundred billion dollars.
• 43:16
  And that's to service the field, the tanker, the employees, the people are the re-gasification, it's a gas that's coming out of the ground.
• 43:26
  Um, how did you do it?
• 43:27
  Did you do it traditional extraction methods, or did you do it via fracking, which obviously the technology is much more advanced now?
• 43:35
  Did you get that natural gas from a country like Qatar, which has horrific human rights violations?
• 43:41
  The ramifications are so widespread.
• 43:44
  Um I just wanted to highlight and just say thank you for talking about that cost of capital issue affects everything else going on.
• 43:53
  Yeah, 100%.
• 43:54
  And um, you know, energy security is fundamental to manufacturing and manufacturing is fundamental to the military might.
• 44:01
  And this is why China burns 55% of the world's coal because it's cheap.
• 44:05
  It's cheap, and yeah, that's a whole other bag of worms to open up.
• 44:10
  But I before we even go there, I want to talk to you.
• 44:12
  There's been two things that have come out about Ukraine.
• 44:15
  Uh essentially, there's about 10,000 Ukrainian troops that are surrounded by the Russians, and Vladimir Putin literally invited the press in to see it.
• 44:22
  And then secondly, one of uh President Zelensky's closest associates.
• 44:27
  It looks like there's a hundreds of millions, if not into the billions of dollars of um corruption that's taken place.
• 44:36
  Yet we're being told put more into Ukraine, Britain, France, Germany, they're all gonna invade the poles are right there, Estonia is gonna come in and save the day, the Netherlands.
• 44:49
  I think I think their defense minister recently said that Putin should be wiped off the face of the earth, the Netherlands.
• 44:55
  No, I think it was Belgium and Belgium thing.
• 44:58
  And he said Moscow should be wiped out, not just yes, this is very dangerous, reckless talk.
• 45:04
  Look, I'll throw it.
• 45:05
  I'll throw it to you, please.
• 45:07
  Your analysis of this war begins and ends with your view of Russia.
• 45:10
  The neocons believe Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.
• 45:14
  My view from industry is Russia's incredibly sophisticated technology-oriented civilization that has a long track record of marching from east to west and winning wars of attrition.
• 45:26
  Yep.
• 45:26
  Um, and this is an existential fight in their view.
• 45:30
  We got into this in December of 2023 because of its impact on energy, of course.
• 45:34
  I really started diving deep into the war.
• 45:36
  Follow it every day.
• 45:38
  Um, this is the first internet war of consequence.
• 45:41
  Um, and so you could follow satellite imagery, the line of combat contact day to day.
• 45:47
  You can see the movements.
• 45:48
  What happened in December 2023 is a massive Ukrainian counteroffensive was defeated by the Russians.
• 45:55
  Yeah.
• 45:56
  And we wrote, you know, we have a premium tier, Doomberg Pro.
• 45:59
  Um, we publish a monthly Doom Zoom.
• 46:01
  The one we're publishing this month is about World War III, how we got here and where we're going.
• 46:05
  And there's a big section on the Ukraine war and our view of the situation.
• 46:08
  But we wrote uh we did a Doom Zoom um back in March of last year, I believe, called um uh walking into the sleepwalking into the abyss, you know.
• 46:18
  Um how we were headed for World War III and nobody even cares.
• 46:21
  And in that presentation, um, we had a slide that the most concerning risk on the board to us was how does NATO lose this war?
• 46:28
  So it was clear to us all the way back then that the war was lost.
• 46:31
  Now, some people get angry when we say that.
• 46:33
  What we mean is that Ukraine can't win, and it's now a war of attrition, and Russia's always gonna win a war of attrition, and so it's gonna be a slow grind from here to there, and it's been one-way traffic ever since.
• 46:43
  Russia's careful, slow, encircle this town, let them try uh to fight their way out, beat those fights back, and then let them surrender.
• 46:52
  And if they don't surrender, then they eliminate them.
• 46:54
  And they're doing this in two very large, critically important areas of the Donbass right now.
• 46:59
  Um I pronunciations of Russian is I mean, I can't pronounce English words, so please excuse me.
• 47:07
  Um this corruption scandal that you referenced.
• 47:11
  Um, first of all, should come as no surprise.
• 47:14
  Before 20, before the war broke out, Ukraine was considered one of the most corrupt countries in the world is why the Bidens were hanging out there.
• 47:21
  Um, you know, surprise, a lot of this money is going into a dark hole that'll never be found again.
• 47:28
  And I the most interesting part of that is look, Trump's frustrated.
• 47:32
  He knows Russia is gonna win.
• 47:34
  He just wants out of the war.
• 47:36
  Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine has zero zero desire to negotiate a settlement because it's basically going to be capitulation terms.
• 47:45
  I I understand why.
• 47:46
  I involved it would be signing his own death warrant, um, given the political infighting in Ukraine.
• 47:52
  So there can be no peace with Zelensky there.
• 47:54
  And suddenly the anti-corruption agencies are closing in on Zelensky.
• 47:59
  And by the way, those are basically Western Rotten.
• 48:02
  I when I read those headlines, I hear the US is done with Zelensky.
• 48:07
  That's what I hear.
• 48:08
  That's what when I read those, that's what I read.
• 48:10
  Um how we get from here to there will be interesting.
• 48:13
  But it's not like this wasn't widely known for a very long time.
• 48:17
  Why is it now suddenly um the most important issue and the propaganda machines are now actually covering it?
• 48:23
  Um that tells me something.
• 48:25
  That's a sign that Zelensky's days are numbered.
• 48:27
  Um Russians are going to win, winners dictate terms.
• 48:30
  Yeah, that's just what happens.
• 48:32
  And so by the way, losing a war is hard.
• 48:35
  It's one of the reasons why you shouldn't get into them, right?
• 48:38
  Um, there was a much better deal on the table when the war first broke out, Istanbul agreement.
• 48:42
  Yep.
• 48:43
  The more you lose, the more you lose.
• 48:46
  And um, what was two regions is now four.
• 48:49
  And that might not stop the Russians um at this point.
• 48:52
  Russia's a very sophisticated country.
• 48:54
  It's outproducing all of NATO.
• 48:56
  It has a more advanced, larger nuclear arsenal than any other country in the world.
• 49:00
  Um, you don't build those things if you're a gas station masquerading as a country.
• 49:05
  By the way, the whole sanction strategy was a disaster.
• 49:08
  We've correctly predicted this in April of 2022 in a piece called um crazy pills.
• 49:14
  We've written several others since one called whack-a-mole.
• 49:16
  You can't stop Russia's energy from getting to the market, and even if you could, it would be a disaster.
• 49:21
  Yep for reasons that are lost on most planners.
• 49:24
  We're the what the 19th sanctions package from Europe.
• 49:26
  If sanctions could have won the war, it would have been over in 30 days.
• 49:29
  Yeah.
• 49:30
  We've thrown everything at Russia, and all we've done is hurt hurt the West.
• 49:35
  Um, and so it's it's tragic for the Ukrainians.
• 49:39
  Um, but it's also I think the death blow for the European Union is as well.
• 49:44
  I think this whole class of leaders can't survive.
• 49:47
  Look, the the we read everybody's propaganda.
• 49:49
  Yeah, right.
• 49:51
  One of the ways to get to the truth is to see how everybody is describing it.
• 49:54
  So we read Canadian, British, American, can't avoid American propaganda.
• 49:59
  Um, Ukraine.
• 50:00
  Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Israeli.
• 50:03
  And the worst, by the way, by far is the British, to go back to where we started.
• 50:07
  The British propaganda is just terrible.
• 50:09
  It's outright falsehoods, lies.
• 50:11
  As the BBC finding out, right?
• 50:14
  The way in which the war has been described to the British people versus the reality on the ground is that chasm is shocking.
• 50:21
  And there's going to be a reckoning.
• 50:25
  When everything about what has happened in the last four years is brought to light, and it will be.
• 50:30
  Oh.
• 50:31
  There's going to be huge recriminations.
• 50:34
  And you know, we're going to do a full presentation on it.
• 50:38
  We believe World War III started when Russia started dumping its treasuries and buying gold back in 2014.
• 50:44
  The evolution of the Ukraine story, what amounts basically to a Ukrainian civil war that the US and the West leveraged to turn it kinetic against the Russians.
• 50:58
  One thing listeners can do is just go to the 2010 Ukrainian election, which is the last election before the Maidan movement.
• 51:06
  And Ukrainian government statistics show you that 90% of the Dombass voted for the pro-Russian candidate.
• 51:13
  And that's because 90% of the people who live in the Donbass speak Russian.
• 51:17
  I don't care who rules the Donbass.
• 51:18
  It's not a not something I want to send my kids to go fight for.
• 51:21
  Oh, God, God, no.
• 51:23
  God's so you know it when you look at the line of combat and you look at the percentage of Russian speakers.
• 51:30
  There's a by the way, this is not Russian talking points.
• 51:33
  This is Ukrainian government election results from 2010.
• 51:36
  You can see that Crimea is Russian.
• 51:40
  So, you know, anyway.
• 51:42
  Yeah, yeah, you're not saying anything controversial.
• 51:44
  I always tell people with Russia a few things.
• 51:45
  I'm in the nuclear power business.
• 51:47
  Yeah, Rose Adam is incredible.
• 51:49
  Oh my God, Rose Adam.
• 51:51
  Um and and I love Westinghouse, and I love the technology.
• 51:54
  They can't even come close to Rose Adam.
• 51:56
  I I speaking of an industry story, I said that uh in the beginnings of a nuclear power job that I had had um almost five years ago, my very first month of analysis, and I said it to a group of industry leaders, and um to say that I was vilified, I was almost fired for it.
• 52:13
  I don't doubt it, right?
• 52:15
  Of saying I was a month into the job, and I said, Chinese National Nuclear Corporation is number two.
• 52:21
  Rose, you know, I I called them Ros Adams or Rose Adams, however, Razatom at the time.
• 52:26
  I said, they can do everything.
• 52:28
  I said, you can literally go to Moscow right now and walk in their office and it's turnkey.
• 52:33
  And five years later, you've got yourself, I think it's the V V E R.
• 52:36
  I go, you've got the most sophisticated enrichment program in the world.
• 52:41
  What a guy It's stunning to me that people don't realize that.
• 52:44
  It's never wise to underestimate your foes.
• 52:47
  Yes.
• 52:48
  So like when this war first broke out, and I, you know, Peter Zyhan, I like Peter Zihan.
• 52:53
  I've never met him.
• 52:53
  I enjoy his stuff.
• 52:54
  I find him entertaining.
• 52:55
  He certainly knows demographics, but I heard him on a podcast say that if the Western, you know, uh oil and gas services companies pull out of Russia, they won't be able to keep energy flowing and it'll ruin all their oil fields.
• 53:08
  I thought what is he talking about?
• 53:10
  I I saw that too, and I'm like, Do you think that the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians collaborating can't keep an oil and gas field running?
• 53:18
  Like what?
• 53:19
  Are you high?
• 53:20
  Or Gazprom and Rossneffe?
• 53:22
  If you go to the New York Times 2017 article about the weaponization of energy, they invented this.
• 53:28
  They knew what they were doing.
• 53:30
  I I just it's the head explode.
• 53:33
  China has an entire university dedicated to producing petroleum engineers.
• 53:37
  It's called China Petroleum University, and it's got thousands of students in it.
• 53:41
  Like this is so is I call this Western techno arrogance.
• 53:44
  It's dangerous.
• 53:45
  Oh, absolutely it is.
• 53:46
  Very dangerous because it leads you to think, oh, we can fire some tomahawks into Russia and nothing's gonna happen.
• 53:51
  I mean, I it's so crazy.
• 53:54
  Anyway, it it is.
• 53:55
  Um I've got to wrap up with you, unfortunately.
• 53:59
  Uh I would love to continue doing this.
• 54:02
  I there was I wanted to end on this because you've written about it before, which is when it comes to Ukraine and the internet, I believe, isn't there a website called Deepstate.com or something that literally tracks the movement of Russian and Ukrainian troops.
• 54:16
  Just give me about a minute on that, and we're gonna we've got to end the show.
• 54:19
  We wrote a piece last year called Mapping the War.
• 54:21
  In fact, deep state is the Ukrainian version of the mapping projects.
• 54:25
  Okay.
• 54:26
  There are more neutral mapping projects than pro-Russian mapping projects.
• 54:30
  One of the most fascinating things is you could look at all of them every day.
• 54:34
  And generally it's self-correcting.
• 54:37
  Because if somebody is way out of whack, then you know they're not credible if everyone else is saying this is what's actually going on.
• 54:43
  Um so deep state is Ukrainian.
• 54:46
  And if you just look at that alone, okay, you can see what the Ukrainian spin is on the situation.
• 54:51
  Um, and so we do.
• 54:53
  I I watch these maps every day.
• 54:55
  Um, and they never really get too far afield from each other.
• 54:58
  So if the Ukrainians and more neutral teams and the Russians are all saying that, you know, Kupyansa surrounded, then Kupyance is surrounded.
• 55:05
  Uh surrounded.
• 55:06
  Right.
• 55:06
  And so over time you get to know various open source intelligence.
• 55:10
  Yeah.
• 55:11
  And which ones are reliable.
• 55:12
  And by the way, even ones that are unreliable for a certain reason are useful inputs because you you know that that's probably wrong, right?
• 55:21
  And so um, when even they are saying things are desperate, you know they must be really bad.
• 55:25
  And so then you see how the mainstream media publishes this stuff, it makes you question everything you read in the mainstream media.
• 55:31
  I mean, it's so anyway.
• 55:32
  That that's what we do.
• 55:33
  I I study it every day.
• 55:34
  Yeah, not it's it's why people like you, it's why you guys have exploded in growth.
• 55:40
  It's why Substack has exploded, it's why podcasts uh like this one and others, they're exploding because people realize you're not gonna get this on the BBC or the ABC News.
• 55:51
  You're not gonna be told that uh no, the Russians are the best in the world when it comes to all sorts of things, including nuclear power.
• 55:59
  The Chinese are vastly superior in their nuclear technology and many other pieces of technology.
• 56:06
  You're you're not gonna hear it.
• 56:08
  You're you're gonna instead go, let's go overrun American cities by Antifa because you know, orange man is bad.
• 56:14
  Look, I mean, last quick comment on we we knew that China had escalation dominance in the trade war because we wrote a piece two and a half years ago called Geopolitical Warfare.
• 56:24
  Yeah, where we showed how China was willing to degrade its environment in order to get monopoly positions in critical rare earths and other elements, and that they would use this for geopolitical reasons when the time came.
• 56:34
  The time came.
• 56:34
  Trump always assumes he has escalation dominance.
• 56:36
  He does against Korea, he does against Japan, he does not against China.
• 56:40
  And we wrote as much, and you know, proven right.
• 56:42
  Yeah, and on an investment side, trillions are about to come into the the industry for the rare earth.
• 56:49
  I mean, trillions are gonna start flooding into America.
• 56:52
  And I know there's people that disagree with that assessment, but uh I yeah, it's coming.
• 56:56
  I see it's it's it's it's coming, and I don't think they're saying the industry.
• 56:59
  Well, anyway, Dunbarg, thank you for your time.
• 57:02
  Uh, my name's I'm Todd Royal.
• 57:03
  I'm the host, the our host of our show here, uh Geopower Energy and Real Politics, or you want to be fancy, call it real politics and to all my viewers as well.
• 57:12
  There's a great scene in uh Remains of the Day, I believe, with Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Reeves, where he talks about real politics, the politics of reality.
• 57:22
  Great movie, uh, folks, if you ever have a chance to see it.
• 57:25
  Um Dunberg, thank you so much for your time.
• 57:27
  Uh, look forward to having you on again in the in the coming months.
• 57:30
  Sure, talk soon.