Transcription
Gold is actually not quite money. There is no money today.
No. Um, because there is no entity. There's no one thing that serves the three roles of money, which is, you know, unit of exchange, unit of account, and also store of value. The dollar fails on store of value. Gold fails on medium [music] of exchange. But as a store of value, gold is unmatched. And it also plays an important role. [music]
The European Union, the 27 member states of the EU consume 38 exogles of hydrocarbons and they [music] only produce five. And there's just no way that you can have an industry with that fact set. You just can't because you're paying the cost of capital of everyone else to get the primary energy you need that forms the foundation of your industry. It's the equivalent of a nuclear weapon, an economic one. And Iran now has it. They don't need a nuclear bomb. They have it. They have one of the world's [music] most advanced missile repertoires that 60 days of hot war or 45 days of hot war proved could not be destroyed militarily with the kit that [music] the US has. So that same US military is going to go fight China off China shores over Taiwan. Don't kid yourself.
>> [music] >> I'm your host Fazen Rani. Let's connect the dots. [music] My guest today is one of the most influential and unconventional thinkers in energy markets and geopolitics. Known simply as Doomberg, the anonymous green chicken has built a global following by focusing on the forces that actually drive civilization: energy, resources, industrial capacity, technology, and power. While most commentators focus on headlines, Doomberg focuses on systems. The result is a perspective that has attracted investors, business leaders, policymakers, and curious minds around the world. So today, we'll connect the dots between energy, AI, geopolitics, wealth preservation, and the future of the global economy. Dunberg, welcome to connecting the dots.
>> Wow, it's great to be here. Such a wonderful introduction. I really appreciate it.
>> It's a genuine pleasure. Thanks for making the time. So let's begin. As you see a lot of the world the way I do as well. Obviously, my research is not as in-depth as you guys. I believe energy is everything. You often say that energy is everything. So if we stripped away politics, markets, and media narratives, what are the three biggest energy realities today that most people still don't understand?
>> Yeah, it's it's a great question. You know, our our catchphrase is energy is life. And the foundation for that is just a simple observation of physics, which is humans are machines and we are fighting the forces of entropy. And in order to establish a reasonable standard of living, you have to continuously waste heat. That sounds odd to those who haven't studied physics to hear, but it's literally true. The amount of heat you get to waste defines your standard of living. And the more heat you get to waste, the richer you are. And everybody wants to be richer everywhere. It's a fundamental attribute of the human condition. And so I think the least understood aspect of energy, which policymakers still get wrong, especially in the era of climate dogma, is that there's some finite amount of energy that humans will be satisfied with. And that if we just got more efficient at using the same amount of energy, somehow this would be a utopian vision. Like most centrally planned utopian visions, they fail on their face, especially when they meet reality. So I guess like the first thing is that the human endeavor is is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy, and the integral of primary energy consumption by humanity always goes up and to the right. It is like the most foundational bet that one can make in the markets and in geopolitics and so on. And so that lens explains a lot of our writing. The second thing that I think most people get wrong is for modeling purposes, we should assume that there's an infinite amount of hydrocarbons beneath the surface. For practical purposes, on time frames that matter to humans, there are. I think it's pretty demonstrable at this point. And then that leads to the third aspect that I think makes Doomberg kind of unique in this regard. Aside from an acknowledgement of the the human endeavor and the fact that we have this infinite supply of primary energy resources to achieve that endeavor, um, we arrive at our conclusions using a a framework of thinking called lateral thinking. And it's a pretty powerful approach to analyzing the world that very few people truly understand. And it can be weird for people who aren't practiced in the art of lateral thinking to read Doomberg pieces and to internalize what we mean when we say certain things. And so just as an aside, that one of the projects for 2026 for us is we've been contracted to write a book and the book is all about how we think. It's not really about energy or geopolitics. It's starts with the framework of how to think about the world in a way that allows you to make better predictions about it. And so the first two things I just described, we would characterize those as as mental models in a lateral thinking framework. And so those are the three things that I think make Doomberg unique that allow us to make predictions that work, that allow us to understand the world with a pretty high hit rate, and also I think make us attractive as a as content creators to those looking for signal in a sea of noise and looking for trusted outlets in a a really a failed media landscape, at least as measured through the the legacy media and their ongoing challenges in in in getting an audience. So a bit of a long answer, but that's the sort of the three big things that are top of mind for me today. F, do you do you do you mind sharing just a little bit more about the lateral thinking as opposed to what the linear way of going about just everything moves up in a straight line? Is that
>> Sure. Since I'm literally writing the chapter on it, I could we could spend the whole podcast on it if you'd like.
>> So,
>> good. Thank you.
>> What is lateral thinking? Lateral thinking is wildly misunderstood. The vast majority of people are inherently linear thinkers, and that's a very solid and reasonable outcome of Darwinism. If society were run on lateral thinkers, it wouldn't survive. A linear thinker is typically very good at deductive reasoning. And all deductive reasoning starts with axioms. Okay, what do I assume to be true? And then how do I formulate a conclusion from there? And lateral thinkers are good at deductive reasoning too. But there's one major difference between the two types of thinking. And once you understand that difference and then you program yourself to be able to harness the power of lateral thinking on command, then you could really make a big impact. So a linear thinker looks at a situation and spends a lot of time searching for true axioms, like this, this axiom that I'm going to use for brainstorming for deductive reasoning. The first task is to make sure that axiom is relevant, makes sense, it's real, it's true, it reflects the world as we know it. It's the opening salvo to their foundation of analysis. A lateral thinker can indulge in brainstorming and deductive reasoning with an axiom they know is untrue. And in fact, doing so on purpose, it unlocks different ways to look at the world occasionally. And so the fundamental thing that unlocks lateral thinking is having zero emotional attachment to the correctness of an axiom before you indulge in brainstorming or deductive reasoning. So what do I mean by that? I'll give you an example, I guess, is the best way to do it.
>> Sure. We correctly called that Mark Carney would become prime minister of Canada, that he would take over for Justin Trudeau and he would win the election and that he would be, much to the shock of his opponents, the driving force behind unlocking Alberta's energy for the world. In other words, Canada has this amazing energy bounty and a parade of liberal prime ministers has opposed its development. And we came to a hunch that Canada needed to unstake its energy and that Carney would be the perfect man for the task. And that was an outcome of a lateral brainstorming exercise. And we came to that conclusion because we just we started with an assumption that said, for whatever reason, assume the next prime minister must unlock Canada's energy. You know, you had Trump just won election, America's energy dominance. Well, why why not make that North America's energy dominance? Then we started to observe Trump's pretty bizarre behavior, attacking Trudeau in a very vicious way, but refraining from attacking Mark Carney. And also Trudeau attacking the Conservative candidate at the time who was pretending to be a sort of Donald Trump of Canada.
>> Yes.
>> And so we came up with this internal hypothesis that Trump wanted Carney to win. Just let's brainstorm around that. You know, there's it was plausible. Carney was the chair of um, Brookfield Asset Management, you know, trillion-dollar asset management firm. Trump surely knew him. did a lot of business in New York real estate. Brookfield has a lot of real estate. So, we just said, "Okay, this is a plausible thing. Let's just brainstorm that Trump wants Carney elected." And as an axiom for brainstorming, we had no emotional attachment to whether or not it was right. And we through that brainstorming came to the conclusion that, well, if you wanted to unstick Alberta, you had to slay the carbon dragon in Canada. And, you know, Nixon was the one who opened China because he was a staunch anti-communist. And so in order to slay the carbon dragon, you needed a real carbon evangelist to to go in there and do that because they would have the street credibility, the relationships and say, "Look, it's time that we cut a deal with Alberta." And then we further brainstormed that, well, wouldn't a fake sovereignty crisis give Carney out to make the concessions on carbon to keep Alberta in Canada? And I know this is a bit of a a tangent, but all that came out of a brainstorm exercise that started with Trump wants Carney to win the election. And uh, we published the output of this lateral thinking in December of 2024, before Mark Carney was a contract you could bet on on Poly Market, and virtually everything we predicted came true. Now, that was a particularly successful mental model. But we got so much hate and critical feedback from our conservative-leaning Canadian subscribers that they just couldn't conceive that Mark Carney would be the one to unstick Alberta. And yet here we are. Major infrastructure pipeline, you know, pick your favoriteou with Alberta. Suddenly there's a sovereignty crisis. It all sort of came together consistent with our mental model. Now, here's the last part about lateral thinking. When it stops working, you have to discard it. So, we made a further prediction on that model that Ed Milliban would unstick Britain. And part of that prediction was that maybe Ed Milliban would win a messy labor race to replace Kier Starmer when Starmer just resigned this morning. It doesn't look like that's going to happen. There's a chance our mental model survives if Starmer gets a chancellor position and then does an about face on climate. Why um Milliban sorry why why does Miliban have to unstick Britain? Well, because he's the equivalent of Mark Carney. He's been so pro-climate net zero that only he can undo it and get the drilling going in Scotland, which also happens to have a bit of a separation crisis burgeoning and and, you know, constitutional crisis forming in Great Britain. Separatist movements are are growing in Scotland. It's a carbon copy of what we saw in Canada. So, we extended our mental model. Now, in a world where Milliban doesn't get anything, you know, Bham replaces Starmer and maybe West Streeting gets Chancellor and they keep going down the net zero nonsense. Well, then our mental model is starting to to falter. It's no longer good at making predictions. So, we just discard it. We have no emotional attachment to it. It was a mental model that was working well. We conceived it by having no emotional attachment to the underlying axiom and whether or not it was correct or not. And if it runs its course, we'll just create a new one. And that this is the the the concept of lateral thinking allows you to look at problems in ways that are completely unexpected, fundamentally because you don't care if your axiom is right or not. So I know it's a bit of a long answer, but I could give you perhaps a different example. We just published a controversial Go ahead. Yeah. Go on. No, go on. I was going to say that's brilliant about the Maran and that's a good example because Marani would be one of the last people you'd expect given he was part of the World Economic Forum.
>> He's been head governor of certain central banks as well. So do you think obviously Trump is changing all of these things and Alberta is trying to obviously there's there's a they do want to separate from Canada as well. So a lot of these pieces landed right.
>> Well, like we thought it would. It was a phony separatist crisis you would need in order to have the the the church of carbon stand down. Like we have to plug our nose to keep Alberta in the fold in Canada. And oh, by the way, orange man bad, you know, Trump was playing his role, the tariff war, all that stuff. And so we thought to extend it to England, for example, Britain. We thought, well, nothing happens in Canada without the approval of the crown.
>> So maybe this was a dry run for Ed Milliban on sticking Britain in the North Sea. It still might happen, but I could tell you that as we record today, that mental model is starting to wobble a bit, which is fine. It was a great one. It served its purpose. But let me give you the new one we just published because we have a follow-up piece on it. We started thinking about these trillion-dollar IPOs. Like nobody can justify the valuation of these companies coming to market. You know, obviously SpaceX. I don't like to talk about the company specifically because is actually the mental model goes beyond it. But we started brainstorming with an axiom that said, okay, markets are, you know, rarely this wrong. Let's assume it's justified. What could be the driving force behind a a $2 trillion valuation assigned to a money-losing company that you isn't worth a fraction of that? And more importantly, why is the SEC standing down? Why are the passive flows rushing to admit SpaceX? And we came up with uh, a mental model that basically said, this is a form of stealth financial repression. So when when you walk through the mechanics, let's just imagine, you know, you and I create a company. It's worth zero. And we go out and get some investors. You know, they're accredited investors. And I don't know, we raised $10 million. Pick your number. Effectively zero as it pertains to a trillion-dollar IPO. Not to me and you. $10 million is a sizable amount of money to me. I don't know about you, but okay. We raised we raised $10 million in investor capital. Then we IPO and we raise $1 at a trillion-dollar valuation.
>> Well, what you've created is basically a trillion dollars minus $10 million of potential tax liability. So anybody on our cap table that eventually sells into the frenzy owes some portion of their capital gains to the government. And another aspect of lateral thinking is you're very comfortable with infinity and zero, these philosophical constructs. So, okay, let's take it to $10 trillion. So, if our podcast company goes to market at $10 trillion and all the the lucky people who got to invest at a $10 million valuation and they can sell it, well, they're creating tax benefits for the federal government. Well, at $10 trillion and 15% rake, you've solved the deficit for a year completely in the US. Whole clock. They've just invented a trillion dollars of taxable assets. It's a form of money printing. It's a form of QE. And the forced ownership of it in retirement funds through passive flows is the repression part of it. You're going to own this worthless asset. Not saying SpaceX is worthless. I'm I'm talking about our podcast company that we've IPOed as an extreme example because these extremities often prove rules. The reason why nobody's going to care about trillion-dollar IPOs and what happens to the ultimate bag holders of them is because there's a taxable event created. Real money ultimately gets sent back to the US Department of the Treasury in a way that helps Bessant with the wave of short-term paper that he needs to refinance. It's a very similar explanation for the emergence of stable coins and why, you know, the money laundering that's transparent on all of these, you know, cryptocurrencies is not nearly as cracked down on as if I want to wire $10,000 to my mother, a report has to be written up and sent to the Treasury about me. Well, it's because if your fundamental mental model is the US Department of Treasury is doing everything it can to avoid the collapse of the dollar, suddenly the emergence of trillion-dollar IPOs is plausible. Now, do do we think that there's some grand conspiracy behind this? Perhaps not, but who cares? It doesn't need to be right. It just needs to work. And so, we're doing a follow-up piece later this week, give you a preview, where we extend that mental model, and we look at fusion. This hype around fusion is just nonsense. And as we've said for years, fusion is a fake technology that solves invented problems. There is no meltdown risk or radiation worries about modern reactors or quote unquote nuclear waste, which isn't even nuclear waste at all. It's just partially spent fuel that can be recycled. And yet fusion gets kicked around as this civilization-altering technology, yada, yada. Well, suddenly, if you're looking for a parade of trillion-dollar IPOs, a fusion breakthrough sort of fits the hype bill pretty good, doesn't it? I mean, and so suddenly when we look around at these fusion startups raising enormous amounts of money from well-heeled investors on what amounts to nothing, well, it's not nothing in that context. It's a great shell to go to market and IPO at a trillion dollars. And so suddenly things like that make a lot more sense. And again, I have no emotional attachment to the correctness of the axiom. If a fusion company comes to market at a wildly exaggerated valuation, well then our mental model is working. If SpaceX is a one-and-done in this regard, then the mental model failed and we discard it and and we move on to something else. But we currently have an operating mental model that the entirety of the US federal government is interested in bringing extraordinarily hyped stocks to the public market. And by the way, it fits all the bills. The cap tables are filled with rich donors. Some of their profits are going to be recycled back into donations. A rake of it is going to be sent to the treasury. Everybody wins and the the losers are dispersed. They're spread and they're convinced they want to own it. Like the retail frenzy. You see what I'm saying? Like you can get pretty cynical. But that's just two examples, like predicting Carney and explaining SpaceX in ways that make sense once you see them, but couldn't have been arrived at without being unafraid to take logical leaps at the beginning and say, I don't care if this is right or not. What if it is? What does it mean? And that's a skill that can be worked on. It's a chapter in our book, at least one chapter in our book. And it it is what has allowed us to make a bunch of off-the-beaten-path longshot predictions. I just was looking at one the other day which we may or may not revisit. Many years ago, we predicted that Lula in Brazil might be a double agent and might be the thing that undoes the BRICS currency. And now I'm just starting to see reports that that's in fact exactly what happened under the radar and that Russia and China have been frustrated with Lula in Brazil and that's why they didn't attend the last BRICS meeting. And and so that prediction turned out to be true as well. So that that's I know it's a bit of a probably not what you anticipated. we talk about today, but it's been kind of fun.
>> No, it was it was actually fun. In fact, just on the last bit, the Lula and the Indian prime minister as well sometimes because I was raised in India and I always wonder whether India swinging which way. So we we'll park that for now because I do want to just pull on some threads that you brought up there as well.
>> Sure.
>> Because everyone sees AI and I want to combine the AI and the nuclear thing as well. So then I'll let you run again. Everyone sees AI as a technology story and you see it as an energy story. And now just now I think AI trade is becoming energy constrained, especially because of the war, which we'll go into later, rather than innovation constrained. Right? And you talked about nuclear energy as compared to the fusion IPOs. Nuclear energy is underappreciated. Do you think for the next decade? So can you combine all of this of why AI and energy?
>> Sure. So I'll give you this. Dovetails into another of our mental models.
>> Sure.
>> Which and by the way, we we like, we write articles and then for our premium tier, we do a monthly presentation as well. We just published one this morning on Argentina. We published one late last year called we published one late last year called Mental Models: Six Axioms That Explain the World As It Exists, and then in brackets, "for now," like cuz like they might not. And one of the mental models that we have been playing with for many years goes back to Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near. Fantastic book. And that mental model is that the human endeavor is infinite compute. Now, you you may have heard me say earlier that the human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against entropy. Well, infinite compute is nothing if not an energy story. And and that the ultimate form of entropy is is highly refined information. And so if the human endeavor is infinite compute and you use that as an axiom for brainstorming, and we did, one of the things you realize is that the AI revolution necessitates a discarding of the carbon constraints, the climate framework. Has to go because you cannot stay on that Kurzweilian curve of infinite compute if you are not taking advantage of all forms of energy possible, especially the highest energy density forms. And and for sure, this always nonsensical opposition to nuclear on the part of climate alarmists had to go. That's like the first casualty to go. And so we wrote a piece a couple of years ago now called "Fission Chips," you know, how basically how the AI revolution and the need to feed the compute beast, you know, would necessitate an end of the sort of the focus on intermittent renewables and all that jazz. And it kind of has. But in fact, the fuel that has benefited the most, at least in the US, has been natural gas because it's in such abundant supply. And we have to stay on that curve. And the speed with which you can bring natural gas to market is much faster than nuclear for a variety of political reasons that ultimately in a piece called "Bridge Burning," we talked about how natural gas would be a beneficiary as well. So that mental model of the human endeavor being infinite compute, AI is just the next evolution of that. And so if your assessment is that whatever stands in the way of increasing energy extraction will eventually be removed, then you can get into some funky predictions which wrap into the war and other things. And so, for example, one of the things that stands in the way of infinite energy extraction is the US dollar system, the focused use of sanctions, especially sanctions on countries like Russia and Iran who are net energy exporters. And so what we're seeing now as a result of this war is the beginning of the unraveling of the sanctions, we think, and that end state is necessitated by the operation of our mental model of infinite compute. You see how it all sort of connects together. So the Doomberg tagline is lateral thinking about energy, finance, and geopolitics. We deploy the techniques of lateral thinking through the lens of physics, and the ultimate axioms of of physics are sort of immutable. And then you just look at the geopolitical and financial landscape and say, well, this might be what's going on, given this sort of operating mental model. And again, a mental model is only as good as it as its next prediction. And then the last step you need to be able to do this continuously isn't is the full and total embracing of being wrong. Like you need to know when you're wrong.
>> And you're going to be wrong a lot. And when you're wrong, you have to that's just the next input into your iteration. And a lot of people are
>> stubborn about being wrong. So, we saw this. I I have a piece in my head. I haven't written it yet. Like, we got it wrong when the Iran war started. We thought we'd see $150 oil. Everybody thought we'd see $150 oil. We didn't. Okay.
>> Why didn't we? Why didn't we? Can you
>> We could. Sure. We'll get to that. But
>> the first thing we did was we stopped assuming we'd get to $150 oil and said, "What did we miss?" Right. We're the whole cadre of content creators on Twitter. My friend JJ at Market Vibes calls them the hair pullers. They just invented all of this like it must be market manipulation because their axiom of $150 oil was immutable to them. They were unwilling to admit that they were wrong. We admitted we were wrong 7 days into the war. Wow, we're 7 days in. This this this isn't going as we thought. What did we get wrong? And so we just have not an emergency brainstorming session, but just as part of our daily work, like we got this wrong. Why? What's going on? Well, and and by the way, in our lateral thinking, price is usually pretty strong like as a source of information. So you start with price being true and work from there. You don't assume price is being manipulated, especially in the oil market. But here we are all these months later and still over the weekend, these people that were wrong on oil, and I'm saying that we didn't get it right. We just recognize we were wrong much sooner than they did that are still wrong on oil were clinging to the hope that war would break back out so that their price would finally materialize. You see what I'm saying? Like that's what we call
>> that's what we call wishcasting. You're not forecasting, you're wishcasting. There's a desired outcome that you wish to see and you lose you almost lose control of your senses in chasing that outcome because then you've spent your personal credibility, you've gone on TV, you've posted to your Twitter followers and you just can't get out of the market is telling you you're wrong, you're wrong, except that you're wrong and formally the new mental model and they just can't and they're stuck in it and it's just been fascinating to observe.
>> You finish. So while we sorry, I'm assuming you've finished that point. So while we're on it, let's go a bit deeper. Do you think we've stepped stepped into World War II? Not really. World War II. I just still think they're going to be tinier conflicts on the outskirts with the Russia-Ukraine running separate and all of that stuff. So, how are you seeing a reshaping of the global order? And especially, can I actually just remembered something I wanted to clarify this when you were talking. So were you saying when during the Biden years, obviously the whole green agenda, build back better, the Trudeaus of the world were going a certain way and when Trump has come in now, obviously the world is being changed and moved towards a certain way? And because of that, because I heard something which you were there was an underlying tone. Is this was kind of all planned by Trump to let China's, the Russia and the Iran, the energy producers come back online to fight the nonsense that their prior years were doing? Can you just clarify that thinking process?
>> Sure. And again, there there need not be, you know, a Trump grand plan. Like I see those, we call them 5D chess plans. Like we have no emotional attachment to whether it's Trump or somebody controlling Trump or nothing. And it's just random and it's just working. Do you know what I mean?
>> Yeah.
>> And so, but we we had a hunch that this was happening because of um, COP 28, you know, the these COP meetings, these, you know, United Nations carbon meetings. COP 28 was peak ESG in our mind. We even put it out at the time. And for whatever reason, our pattern recognition, the whole sort of arc of that story really strongly reverberated internally that this was it. The peak is in, the high is in. And calling inflection points is another sort of attribute of lateral thinking. Like you you accept that you've reached the peak maybe before everyone else does. And and so in a world where COP 28 was the cyclical peak of ESG, you don't need a Trudeau or a Biden anymore. And the type of person who can disrupt it is a Trump. And so Trump magically wins the election. We could talk about the Western Hemisphere and the results in Colombia because that also fits another mental model of ours that we predicted as well. But, you know, there doesn't need to be this conscious plan of Trump's. Who knows? Maybe it is. It's fine. It doesn't matter. The fundamental axiom of we're past this stuff is what matters. And that allowed us to talk about Carney. And then that allowed us to make the prediction about Milliband. And we'll see if that one turns out. Maybe it's not Milliband. Maybe it's another version of Milliband. Maybe he's too far out to stare down the carbon clause. Who knows? But Britain needs to get unstuck for sure. Um, and so that's just sort of the way we look at it.
>> Yeah, fair enough because this is what I'm thinking as well. After COP, the world kind of changed in a little way and then we got all these green agendas and all of that being pushed down our throats. And whether it's Trump, as you said, somebody, whoever is controlling Trump or whatever. Now it suddenly seems to be the AI and the whole thing comes back to the energy that AI is going to need. Whether they have digital IDs and they're going to control the population and monitor the population through AI and digital IDs and I don't know, CBDCs and all of that. What are your thoughts on that? Is is that going to need a lot of energy and that's why we're seeing the push towards the AIS and the nucleus and all of that stuff?
>> I mean, I I think if the human endeavor is infinite compute, you don't need to understand why. It just is. Again, that's sort of back to lateral thinking. Like I what you just asked is sort of a classic linear construct of is why is that aim operative? And I it's that can be interesting. It's just not necessarily useful. In fact, can dislodge you from the proper outcome. Just you know what I'm saying? Like I don't think population control is needed for infinite compute. And so I view that as maybe a local phenomenon in Britain. Who knows? There's something weird going on in Britain for sure.
>> Yes. [laughter] They they seem to be jailing little people for just Facebook posts and there's rapists just running on the streets. So obviously yes.
>> You said it, not me. But I digress. Who knows? There's let's let's take a step back and give you another philosophy of ours.
>> Sure.
>> We have a very firm rule that we don't publish anything that we don't 100% believe the moment we hit send, but we don't necessarily publish everything we believe because there's certain topics that just aren't worth getting into. You know,
>> the you don't need to get into every hot button issue of the day. These things tend to burn themselves out. You don't need to participate. We've long ago grown past the need for clicks to build a durable business, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And so, there's lots of hot button issues that we don't touch. And the fundamental drivers of what's going on in Britain is getting close to a couple of them that we broadly ignore or we've decided consciously not to participate in. But on the energy side, Britain needs to get unstuck. And so that our knowledge of British politics is more centered on our fa fascination with just how terrible their energy policy has been. How can you go from the apex of empire to this flaccid energy vassal, this de-industrialized state, this rump of a country? And the only path out is through drilling and reversing all of these policies. And so we're keenly interested in things that might reverse that. That necessarily means we get a little too close to things like the subjects you just alluded to. And we see all that stuff. Believe me, Twitter does a a fantastic job of shoving them in our faces 24/7. But, you know, another one of our axioms internally is that Twitter isn't real.
>> So,
>> okay. So, what's your view on Europe then? Because Europe seems to be committing suicide, right? Obviously, now they've Germany's decommissioned all these nuclear plants and stuff. Just a quick one because they've isolated themselves from Russian energy as well.
>> Another great mystery of our time. And here's where physics can just you can just say what I'm going to say and then there's just no rebuttal to it. The European Union, the 27 member states of the EU consume 38 exogles of hydrocarbons and they only produce five. And there's just no way that you can have an industry with that fact set. You just can't because you're paying the cost of capital of everyone else to get the primary energy you need that forms the foundation of your industry. So it necessarily follows that if you cut off cheap Russian natural gas, which was a de facto form of domestic production for Germany, the entire European experiment collapses. It just does. It has to. It's never presented that way. But for all the happy talk about, you know, Putin bad, war with Russia, defend Ukraine, the trade-offs are there. They're real. So you can you can have those set of policies, but they necessarily physics dictates they will come with industrialization, economic malaise, ultimately debt default and currency collapse taken to their extreme. You can't print jewels. You can't print you can't you can't print energy. You can print euros, but you can't print energy. And so with 38 exigwels of consumption and only five exigles of production, that 33 exogles of imports is crippling. It literally crippling. Just to give listeners a benchmark who probably aren't familiar with those units of measure, 33 exogle hydrocarbon imbalance is roughly the size of the entire US natural gas production. So every year, the European Union imports the entirety of US natural gas, which is the largest energy machine on earth. The US natural gas network is the the largest, most valuable, vibrant machine on earth that is the foundation of the US's AI advantage. Back to back to AI and infinite compute and the human endeavor. And so Europe is by definition because it doesn't produce its own energy. It it can't produce anything meaningful for the rest of the world sustainably. So. And so it is destined to be a a museum that tourists sometimes visit and not much else.
>> I totally agree. When I get interviewed, I constantly say the Europe project is a fail. And I think in the next by 2030, 2032, the whole thing is going to break apart. Firstly, because there's, as you said, 27 countries, there's only one central bank, which just doesn't serve the purpose. And now we're starting to see the cracks. Just in thanks for sharing that about Europe. I want to get your input on China because that is an important play. And if you I've obviously from just stepping back from what happened in Venezuela and then Iran as well. I knew this was a bigger conflict. And I think America or Trump has been told the next war is not going to be Russia, it's going to be more China. Can you connect all of this? And what is the one thing that the West consistently underestimates? I don't know that we're going to see war [snorts] with China.
>> Okay.
>> Look, I we we controversially, we've been following the Iran war quite closely, of course. And
>> I we did a fascinating experiment the first first night. I I do most of the writing overnight, you know, between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m. And I was up when war broke out because war broke out on the night of the 28th, morning of the 1st, around midnight Eastern time. And so I we decided, okay, like this is really happening. Wow, this changes everything. So we bought a we bought a new iPad and created a new email and login credentials with Apple and downloaded Twitter completely fresh. No history, no bias, no algorithm knowledge of who we were. And for we spent an hour training that algorithm that we wanted the pro-Iranian side of this war. Give us the pro-Iranian side of this war because the first chapter of the book, by the way, is called "Why Most Analysis Fails" or "Why Most Analysts Fail." And it's because they don't have a wide enough aperture for information and they don't have a system to grade it and categorize it as it comes in. We do. And so we wanted to see what the other side was saying and we trained the algorithm to feed us that and then we have a way to sort of categorize it. So like to get on our curated list of pro-Iranian commentators, you had to produce interesting things and you had to resist the temptation to repost or post obviously fake stuff, AI fakes, all this other jazz. And over time, we got half a dozen really intelligent, thoughtful, polite, urile commentators who were distinctly pro-Iranian giving us the other side of the war. And and for the first three or four days of the war, it was like a surreal experience to refresh the four U tabs of our legacy Doomberg Twitter account and the new um, friend of mine called it the Muhammad feed. Don't be offended by that. Just just a way to describe it, right? Uh, what is the Muhammad feed saying about what's going on in the war in Iran? And [clears throat] we knew immediately that this this war was lost catastrophically so. And we knew this because in the early days of the war, Iran was able to with pinpoint accuracy take out US DAD radars and various other advanced billion-dollar missile systems. They were able to empty the military bases in Bahrain and Qatar, Iraq, Kuwait, and all of this was very clear and wide open in the open source but wildly underreported in the West. And so if you just got your your news from Fox News over here or Sky News, pick your favorite, you had no idea what was really going on. And so this is a long way of saying I don't think the US is any position to go to war with China. If Iran comprehensively defeated the US in this war, and it did, the US is not going to go to war with China. China is 10 times Iran, 20 times Iran. And so what do I say? Let me take a step back because to some of our American listeners, what I'm saying is is borderline blasphemous. If the one-sided nature of thisou came as a shock to you, that says everything about your information sources because it was very clear to us 4 days in that this would have to be the best outcome the US could get. The worst outcome would be complete destruction of the Middle East oil and gas producing assets across the whole region, which would be a true calamity for the world. And luckily, Trump is not that foolish. It took him a long time to take the L, but he took the L and he gets he he deserves credit for taking the L. There's lots of people angry with them for taking that al and we'll see how durable that acknowledgement to reality is. But it was very clear to us in the days after the war broke out how it had to go. There was no military solution to the Strait of Hormuz. They had the escalation dominance. There's one water treatment facility in Saudi Arabia that underpins 5 to 6 million barrels a day of oil production. They know how to destroy it. When they dropped two missiles down the two trains that Exxon happens to co-own in Qatar as a message to the US after the the gas field was attacked in Iran. Whoa. By the way, this goes all the way back to a mental model we described in October of 2024, a piece called "October Surprise." You may not remember this,
>> but on October 1st, 2024, a series of missiles were exchanged between Israel and Iran. This predates the 12-day war in June of 2025 and predates the ultimate disastrous war of March 2026. So we observed this and what we observed again using open source intelligence subsequently confirmed in the Washington Post was that Iran demonstrated the ability to circumvent Israel's air defense system and to hit with pinpoint accuracy down to the building level what they wanted to hit across Israel. And we thought to ourselves, huh, that's an interesting axiom. And we wrote a piece called "October Surprise" where we developed a mental model that said war can't happen between Iran and Israel because it would end so terribly for Israel that it that wiser heads would prevail. And we walk through the logic of that mental model. Boy, did we get heat. I mean, there's talk about an avalanche of hate and all manner of accusations just for pointing out what we thought was a situation of mutually assured destruction. But it turns out that we were right about everything except the cooler heads part, right? That that you didn't internalize that the ability to destroy anything in the Middle East at will is the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. By the way, the dominance over the Strait of Hormuz and the ability to destroy Saudi oil production is the equivalent of a nuclear weapon, an economic one. And Iran now has it. They don't need a nuclear bomb. They have it. They have one of the world's most advanced missile repertoires that 60 days of hot war or 45 days of hot war proved could not be destroyed militarily with the kit that the US has. So that same US military is going to go fight China off China shores over Taiwan. Don't kid yourself.
>> Yeah, I think that that fight's going to be a bit different and in a few years coming. But even with the Iran one, you you you made a good point and from my sources, what I'd also heard was Iran had actually attacked more targets in the UAE than it had in Israel. And there was some underlying understanding from the Iran's perspective. And you talk about energy. So tell me if this is correct. During COP, when the petrol prices had dropped and sometimes into negative territory, but they've gone down quite a little bit, obviously countries like the UAE and Saudi had taken on a lot of debt, sovereign debt. And obviously with this event that had happened in the Middle East as well, they could not they they started seeing some cracks in their servicing of the sovereign debt, which also connects back into them asking for swap lines with Bessant and the US Treasury. Again, I won't go into details of everything that I have been told was happening on the ground. What can you connect in that? And of course, this war was not supposed to be won. And I think in fact, just before I get off it, Israel will be isolated. Uh, but they're continuing with the whole Lebanon thing, I think, is coming. Sure. Right. So, this actually we had a mental model around the UAE early on. I hate to keep using that phrase, but it's literally how we think and so it'll make sense.
>> Yeah. So we came to a slightly different understanding of how the UAE and its role in this war evolved. So we developed a mental model early that said from the perspective of AR, the UAE is a proxy for Israel. It, you know, signed the Abraham Accords, Israeli IDF in UAE, all kinds of financial ties. So from the Iranian perspective, the UAE became a way to strike back at Israel and also to demonstrate to the rest of the Middle East what could be done to them if things escalated. And so it was home to selective escalation, retribution, relatively small player compared to the other countries in the Middle East with the ties to Israel as a demonstration of what happens if you get too close to Israel and what we could do to you, Saudi Arabia, what we could do to you, um, you know, Bahrain, Iraq,
>> Kuwait, Qatar. And so what you see now is the reporting that after
Some of they're dropping a couple of missiles on Ross Lafen and using the UAE as sort of the punching bag. Qatar cut a deal with Iran that you you see this in the reporting, maybe the New York Times over the weekend, that the Trump administration knew and blessed, you know, some kind of arrangement that the Qataris made with Iran. Similar story with the Saudis, who clearly cut some kind of a deal with the Houthis. Red Sea was never closed. The East West pipeline still flowed. Nobody damaged it. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes? It's the Middle East, right?
But but but the UAE as proxy for Israel explained a lot for a lot of that war. Now, is that still true? There seems to be some public fighting between Netanyahu and, you know, Amiradis. Who knows? But as a temporary mental model for day-to-day action in the war, it worked quite well.
And what do you think is happening with that sovereign US swap line that was asked for? What do you think had to do with that? Is that where I'm kind of right, the revenues dried up because this rate was shut?
Sure. But don't forget, there's a lot, there's other, there's other currents beneath the waves here. The UAE left OPEC. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have a long history of of friction. The US government is interested in weakening OPEC. It's sitting in a founding member's capital right now in Venezuela.
And so there's multiple objectives here. But for the war, our mental model was UAE proxy for Israel. And that worked quite well because, by the way, only in the Iranian propaganda, which we tapped into, could you have even seen that hypothesis because that's how they regularly referred to the UAE. And so, and that wasn't being portrayed to Western audiences in the Financial Times or, you know, pick your favorite news outlet. And so it's only because we had access to this second feed and that we decided to proactively embrace Iranian propaganda with a full understanding of they have deep fakes and lies and, you know, they're deeply biased and all of those things, which are just as true on our side of the the pond too. But absent that initial decision, we would not have seen, for example.
So let me tell you a story of how how this war went for us. So we got, we got the Muhammad duck feed. And sorry if that offends anybody. I don't think it would. It's kind of a funny label. I don't think it's funny.
So, we have this feed on. And so we see the early reports of the destruction of the THAAD. We see the early reports of the destruction of the THAAD radar systems. And this is buttressed by what seems to be authentic Chinese satellite images. The Chinese are very much involved with the Iranians. And a lot of this is leaking on Chinese social media, which is then being redistributed through Iranian Twitter. And we think, ah, that's interesting. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. And then like four days later, we read that the US is moving THAAD missile systems out of Korea, which is an interesting connection of the dots, right? And so, wow, we remember when those THAAD missile systems were put into Korea in 2017, this was very controversial with the Chinese. It led to a major rift between South Korea and Beijing, economic reprisals. Yet they they followed through. They installed a full THAAD missile system, six batteries, the whole nine yards. And yet they reached some, no more new threat. So the political price to get him into Korea was huge. And a week into this war, the US is pulling them out. Huh? What did that tell us? That the initial signal that we were getting was a good one. The accounts that pushed it were worth following again and keeping a closer eye on because that was what we would call a validated source of information. Now, no validated source of information is permanently validated, but for what we were doing, wow, where did we first see this? Let's keep an eye on those accounts because they were right. They were more right than Pete Hegseth's daily press conferences. Because it also, we knew if those THAAD radar systems were in fact destroyed, it would be a cakewalk to destroy the water treatment facilities in Saudi Arabia.
And so for this whole time, you could see who held escalation dominance. Even if Israel nuked Iran, does that stop Iran from escalating? No. And so Trump, I think, realized early on that this wasn't going to plan. This was not Venezuela. You needed to get an exit, an off-ramp. Hard to do. The Iranians invented chess. They're pretty good at negotiating. And here we are.
Feno, so just obviously we could talk for hours about the war and the strategies and all that. Where do you do do you think this is the end of the escalation or do you think this is just because of the midterms and obviously Netanyahu also has elections coming up? Where do you see this uh continuing later on in the year and next year or not? I mean, I don't know what would have fundamentally changed about Iran's ability to achieve escalation dominance. And so, I mean, say say this carefully. One of the reasons why you should really hesitate to get into wars is they're hard to get out of.
Exactly. And they're they're even harder to lose. As and especially if the ego gets in the way. Right. All manner of ego, national pride. By the way, you you may have a population that has been feasting on its own propaganda. Again, if you think the one-sided nature of this is shocking, that says everything about your information flow, not about the realities on the ground. Because the reflects the realities on the ground. This is not the disaster. The disaster is the outcome of the war, which shouldn't have been started in the first place. So then you ask me, what you're really asking me is, will Netanyahu scout the deal by escalating in Lebanon? I don't know. I hope not for the sake of Israel. I hope not for the sake of the people of Lebanon. We do not believe it would be ultimately accretive to either of those populations to do so. And I just don't think Trump wants to see that. So then you immediately get down to well, okay, what are the power flows within the US on this issue? And that's a whole other can of worms that other people can do a better job of addressing than we can. But absent some wonder weapon that dismantles all of Iranian missile technology all at once, some EMP device or pick your favorite, we don't know. And by the way, if such a weapon existed, you would have thought they would have used it by now. Israel's a small country. Back to when we wrote October surprise, like we pointed out in that piece that there's five water treatment plants in Israel that produce most of the country's water. There's five power stations that produce most of the country's electricity. There's two natural gas fields. That's 12 targets. Everybody knows the geolocations of those targets.
Exactly. You could make Israel unlivable very quickly. And that was our foundation for mutually assured destruction. And the hate we received, man. Like you wouldn't we had to like stop looking at the comments at some point just for simply pointing out that this is an axiom that needs to be considered. And boy, if it had been considered, we'd be in a wildly different place than we are now. So I don't know what the answer to the question. Like when I watch this clip of Ben Gavir circulating on Twitter, again, Twitter is not real, but you may not guess. Go for it. Let's see how that goes. I don't know. I think there's a world where things could still escalate. I don't dismiss that. People in times of war make irrational decisions all the time. I pray that it doesn't for the people of Iran, for the people of Israel. And by the way, the people in these countries aren't really at war with each other, right? I often tell people, you know, I often tell people because in the US, you know, we have people who only see RARH, Fox News, you know, CNN, sort of a very naive worldview, you know, they see the helicopters fly over the World Cup stadium and they think the US is still the the strongest military power just because look at those helicopters. I get it. Like, go back and watch Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, wonderful documentary series about eating around the world and watch his episode on Iran. Go to it. You pull it up. CNN's show. You know who I mean? Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown. Wonderful television show. You go watch that hour-long episode of his time in Iran and tell me why we're at war with Iran. I can't figure it out. Right. I mean, the people of these countries do not want war. They care about their family and the well-being of their children and their neighbors. This is what people care about.
Exactly, man. I don't think the people do it. Sometimes the politicians are not even the politicians, the neocons and the hands behind them. But again, we leave that. I still think there will be a bit of escalation just personally from Netanyahu's point because he wanted a regime change which he hasn't still got and he's going to try and bomb Lebanon to.
Look at this. This is this is a disaster for Netanyahu. It's bad for Trump. It's it's it's disaster for Netanyahu 100%. Yeah. So what do you do again? Wars are really hard to lose. That's why you should get into them.
Yeah. Exactly. Based on obviously everything that we've talked about, what do you think uh the biggest markets are currently getting wrong? The main thesis or a trade or an investment where you think the fundamental misunderstanding about how the world is changing hasn't crept into anyone market.
I think the, you know, markets are pretty efficient. It's a difficult question to answer. I would say look, if you ask me where the markets are going from here, I think oil is going much lower assuming peace remains and these assets aren't destroyed. Ultimately, I think we are in a a regime change from unipolarity to multipolarity and the US dollar system is breaking down. We're writing a piece about sanctions. You know, like that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Clearly, Iran was in some ways made strong by all these sanctions. Russia certainly being made stronger by these sanctions. China is being made stronger by these sanctions. There comes a point where you reach a tipping point. We think that maybe the gold markets are a little misreading the room at the moment, but um, that's probably about as much as I can say on markets. GF, where let's say we haven't talked gold and silver because I thought maybe uranium with the nuclear story might be one of those where people are just haven't even tapped into that story yet or do you see that differently?
Well, we we don't like to own consumable commodities, industrial commodities. Gold is not a commodity for reasons we can talk about, but silver, copper, oil, natural gas, uranium, we wouldn't own any of them because the long-term real price of all commodities is lower. The commodity companies are deflationary machines. Technology makes them better. AI makes them better. There's an infinite resource base. We're not running out of copper. We're not running out of aluminum. We're not running out of oil. We're not running out of gas. They're getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. And I don't know why you want to own anything that is fundamentally getting cheaper over time. The one exception amongst the commodities is uranium because you have this entity in the middle of the uranium market trying to corner it, which is SPART Physical Uranium Trust. Legally perfectly disclosed, but that's what they're doing. They're buying and taking offline huge amounts of uranium in an effort to drive the price higher. That's an input into a mental model that you need to consider, but we we wouldn't own commodities as a general rule because their long-term price is lower.
Okay. So, that is very contrarian to the market, right? In a way, let's talk gold, mate, because obviously you think exactly the way I do, gold is not even a commodity. It's it's a it's money. It's a monetary metal. What are your views on gold?
Gold is actually not quite money. There is no money today because there is no entity, there's no one thing that serves the three roles of money, which is, you know, unit of exchange, unit of account, and also store of value. The dollar fails on store of value. Gold fails on medium of exchange, but as a store of value, gold is unmatched. And it also plays an important role and will play a far more important role geopolitically as an asset that is used to settle imbalances in international trade, a so-called neutral reserve asset. US Treasuries used to perform that role. And the overuse of sanctions is whittling away at that utility. Nobody would argue that US debt is now neutral in the sense that anyone can own it, anyone can sell it, nobody has to worry about their money being confiscated because we just confiscated Russia's, not so much their T-bills, but the European debt. But the point is the same, the direction of travel is the same. And so gold is emerging, reemerging to its rightful place as the neutral reserve asset of choice for central banks around the world. And it's its attributes make it fit for purpose. It it's got the right stock to flow ratio. It's literally an inert metal. There's not much of it. Doesn't the amount of it doesn't grow outside of the control of markets. And it's nobody, and central banks can't central banks can't print it either.
But you also said unit of account, right? It it wouldn't be a unit of account. What about the new talk of it being put on the blockchain and being used in that sense? But again, that's another fiat version, don't you think?
Of the three attributes of money, unit of account is the least important. Um, I think the two most important are medium of exchange and store of value. And so you have fiat currencies are really good at medium of exchange. What you need is this reserve asset to uh move into and out of over time in order to not necessarily take a bet on credit when you're when you're having your currency. You see what I'm saying? So, if I trade with Russia, I don't want the ruble. I I don't want to sit on a bunch of rubles. I I want to exchange it for gold and then buy rubles back with gold when I need to get more rubles to get my oil. And so, gold as as that sort of neutral reserve asset. And people say, "Well, gold doesn't pay a yield." Well, Treasuries pay a yield. Is that yield real? In other words, does it does that yield more than compensate for depreciation? And few would argue that it does. And so gold is nobody's credit. It has historically served that role. It's it will serve it again. And in order for it to serve that role efficiently, the total market cap of gold needs to grow, which is why I own a lot of it in my retirement account. Full disclosure, I'm not talking my book. And so I I just think gold as a as a savings vehicle, not an investment, is unmatched.
Yeah, absolutely. And even when you said gold doesn't have a yield, the same people keep arguing that it's just a rock. Anything that is a debt instrument or has debt attached to it seems to have yield. Again, the I think even Jim Rickards in his book has clearly said gold doesn't have a yield because it's like the actual physical dollar in your hand. It doesn't have a yield. It only gives you a yield when you deposit it into the bank and then you've taken a bit of risk to it. That is exactly why gold doesn't have a yield on it as well. And yeah, some people will argue it takes you money to store. But do you think it could become the future with obviously if it was put on the blockchain or again governments might see it as no no we're not going there we have other alternative methods for you to transact?
There's not in in my mind there's nothing special about the blockchain. So you're probably asking the wrong person.
Okay. I mean, there's ways to keep track of who owns what gold, I suppose. To the extent that blockchains are, you know, excellent ledgers, you might want to use it. But, you know, that strikes me as a technology looking for a solution.
Totally agreed. Just one more question for you because the podcast obviously is also called connecting the dots. Let's go back with 2026, 10 years from now, in 2036. What are the dots people might look back? Do you think people looking back might have failed to connect today? Just a short one.
Yeah, I think sure. I think the main themes of the day is in fact, and I didn't get to say this earlier, we are in World War II. World War II started in 2014 and continues to this day. Our mental model is that the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran are just battles of World War II that started all the way back in 2014 for reasons that are probably too deep to get into now. Maybe I'll come back on in the future. And the Iran war is a turning point and might mark the end of World War II. We hope. We hope that there isn't a giant crescendo. I can say it real briefly. World War II started when the US sanctioned in earnest a P5 member, one of the co-victors of World War II, which is Russia, because of the Ukraine incident. And the whole point of the United Nations was to prevent the winners of World War II from sanctioning each other. They got together and created a club where they would police the world together and it would be in their interest to not go at each other because they were they were the victors of World War II. And the breakdown of that post-World War II order. And when you read the Chinese and the Russian propaganda, it's always framed in this way. Even Xi Jinping's statements when Putin was just there talks about the effort to rewrite who won World War II and to rewrite the rules of that. And so sanctioning Russia in 2014 over Crimea is the beginning of World War II in our construct. And I think 10 years from now in 2036, those dots will be retroactively connected in the same way that people look at World War II as starting in the '30s when Japan invaded China, not necessarily in 1939 or 1941 at Pearl Harbor.
NA, thanks for thanks for that. And obviously it it started a lot sooner also because of the Maidan revolution and stuff. If people had read up on that, they would understand the Russia-Ukraine thing was again manufactured in a certain way. Hey, quick I want to do a bonus lightning round. one word or a shortish answer if you want, just I know because you're busy as well. Where do you see oil in 2030? Not a price prediction, just a quick.
Lower.
Approximate lower. Gold or Bitcoin?
In nominal terms, higher.
Yeah. But if you had to pick one as uh I I already know the answer.
Yeah. Gold.
Yeah. Yeah. Most underrated commodity?
Natural gas.
And most overrated then because you took a time there a bit of time there?
Sure. Crude oil.
Okay. And uh the most overrated narrative right now?
AI, maybe.
Elon Musk.
Okay. Biggest surprise of the next decade?
Just how far ahead China already is in technology and industrial development versus the Western world.
Yeah, I next time you come on, I definitely want to go into the China piece because I did ask you as well, but I still would love to draw deep on that. One book everyone should read.
The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, only because we referred it multiple times internally. And if you're bored by that or you think it's cliché, I would recommend The Deep Hot Biosphere by Thomas Gold.
Okay, I'll get the names and the links off. Yeah, I probably made that. One thing wealthy families should be doing today to preserve their capital or one or two things or top three things.
Boy, that's a whole conversation. I I think embracing your children much earlier in co-joining the task of managing intergenerational wealth is something that isn't done as often as it should be. I I think nepotism is highly underrated. And I think that European houses have three stories for a reason. You know, kids upstairs, the adults in the middle, and the grandparents downstairs. And you kind of move down the floors in life. And uh for wealthy families, yes, there's a benefit in having your children go out on their own and independently earning it and etc, etc, etc., but there's also a benefit to having them work on the family farm a lot earlier than modern society would tell you is optimal.
Yeah. And especially the next decade, it's it's going to have a big impact.
Huge.
Yeah. Uh if only people can see that far ahead as you said the X's and the Twitters and people are just I think I read somewhere the other day the attention span is now down to 4 seconds for the average human being right so doing this hierarchical length is shrinking over time I can assure you.
Yeah, so and this is why I love the I I do this podcast as a long form because I actually want an audience that actually has the capacity to sit through these kind of deep analytical conversations as well. For the first interview, I obviously as the guest who's appearing for the first time, this question. How does Doomberg define success?
Boy. Well, I can dovetail. One of the ways I personally am trying to define success is that the next generation of my family can live off the capital and not on it.
Okay. Thank you. Anything else? Uh just a quick one I might have missed at all that you think is pertinent.
Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough.
It's been a good discussion.
Thank you. And where can most people find you? Cuz I know your research is brilliant, mate. Where can people find it?
Sure. Doomberg.com is a one-stop shop for all things Doomberg. If you've made it this far, you might be interested to sign up for our annual subscription. We write about 90 articles a year. Our pro tier gets those articles and an additional 12 video recorded presentations. And also we have our sister publication Classics Read Aloud, which you can find there as well. Listen, it's been fantastic and looking forward to the next discussion.
Absolutely appreciate it. Thanks for your time. We look forward to having you again. Thank you. Uh [music] uh down.