BTC Sessions - Globalism Has Already Lost (But No One Sees It) | Dixon & Doomberg

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 086: Doomberg and Simon Dixon break down oil markets, the Strait of Hormuz, the end of globalism, Bitcoin centralization, and Michael Saylor's Strategy.The forever war is quietly reaching its endgame, the dollar is set to weaken hard over the next decade, and Bitcoin was attacked from every direction at once — Doomberg and Simon Dixon unpack what real capital already knows.In this deep macro conversation you'll learn why oil never hit $150 and what the sub-$90 Brent price is actually signaling, why the Strait of Hormuz is a card Iran can only play once, and how China may have already won without firing a shot. You'll see Simon Dixon lay out what MicroStrategy's Strategy is really built for — funneling as much Bitcoin as possible into Coinbase and Fidelity — and why holding shares instead of coins makes Bitcoin weaker. You'll also hear a self-described no-coiner and gold bug explain exactly why he'd still tell you to get long Bitcoin as the Western financial system unwinds. This is part one of two.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro1:36 - Doomberg and Simon Dixon on Global Shifts2:07 - Shipping Choke Points Unwind Globalism5:10 - Western Media Propaganda Exposed8:14 - How Media Gets Captured by Power12:13 - Real Purpose of Ukraine and Middle East Wars22:38 - Biggest Empire Change in Our Lifetime25:18 - Why Everything Depends on Beijing28:35 - West Captured by Financial Industrial Complex39:43 - Reading Oil Gold and Bond Markets45:17 - Is Blackrock Weaker Than Its Reputation53:25 - Building Mental Models for Information Overload59:23 - What Energy Markets Are Really For1:06:13 - Why Oil Below $90 Risks Greater War1:09:07 - Real Capital Knows the Deal Is Coming1:16:34 - Coldcard Hack and Contested Bitcoin Fork1:17:50 - Doomberg on Bitcoin Encryption Vulnerabilities1:24:00 - Self Custody Custody Risk and Sovereignty1:36:24 - Michael Saylor Willingness to Sell Bitcoin1:39:52 - What Strategy Is Built to Achieve1:48:54 - Where to Find Doomberg and Simon DixonMentioned in this episode: Doomberg's forthcoming book on analysis and mental models, Simon Dixon's book "Game of Money," abundant mines hosting, and BTC Mentor for secure self-custody setup.🔗 Links & Resources→ Doomberg: https://doomberg.com→ Simon Dixon on X: https://x.com/SimonDixonTwitt⚡Sovereign Sessions — AI, Privacy, and Bitcoin education: http://youtube.com/@SovereignSessions?sub_confirmation=1💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Benn and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io ⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #SimonDixon #Doomberg #MichaelSaylor #Geopolitics #SelfCustody #Globalism #OilMarkets #Gold #StraitOfHormuz #MicroStrategy #Coldcard #SoundMoney #Oil #energymarket

The journalists are not here to report what is happening. They're here to report what somebody wants you to know. There is no such thing as a United States of America as a nation state. It is simply the military as a full rent militia for power. The longer oil stays below 90, the more desperate Iran gets. Oil staying below $90 is actually quite risky for a much greater war. If you view the reemergence of shipping choke points as a thing, it has to lead to a much weaker dollar, much higher Bitcoin.

much higher gold. What is strategy? It is designed to sell securities and end up with as much Bitcoin as possible in Coinbase and Fidelity, the same place that the US government is putting there Bitcoin. If you own strategy shares instead of Bitcoin, then you are making Bitcoin weaker. I think we're about to experience regime change where you just need to get along something. Quickly, guys, if you want to help the show continue at no cost to you, for today, just hit the like button. All right, so we've got Simon Dixon in Duneberg together for a geopolitical and macro analysis of this global transition that you won't find anywhere else. In this conversation, we go into the Middle East Forever Wars and the U.S. transition to regional power. We cover energy

markets and what the recent price action is signaling. We go into Bitcoin's centralization and the ongoing simultaneous attacks. We also cover media propaganda and so much more. And this is actually only part one. In part two, Simon and I go deeper into the cold card in ongoing Bitcoin infrastructure hacks, as well as the recent Bip 110 failed fork that happened just this last weekend and what it means. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on part two. All right, good morning gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited to have this conversation. Very excited actually to get you two together. And there is a huge, ungodly amount for us to unpack. There's the war still grinding on in the Middle East and Ukraine, the energy markets,

the yen intervention, Bitcoin, AI. It seems like everywhere I look, there are world-changing events happening. So to kick off the conversation, Duneberg, I want to start with you. You always have these amazing lateral thinking hypothesis that really stopped me in my tracks. So with that, what ideas have been rattling around in your head lately that maybe nobody else has caught on to yet? Yeah, it's a great question to start the week, I suppose, fresh out of the gates here on a Monday morning. But I would say, you know, we're pondering a bunch of stuff that seem to be converging. So there's the outcome of the war in Iran. There's the outcome of the war in Ukraine and just the remarkable thicket of totally fabricated propaganda that we see in the Western press, which is an interesting indicator

of rethink challenging times ahead for the NATO alliance. And then this breakdown in the international law of the sea, the freedom of navigation, the reemergence of choke points in geopolitics, and then news this morning, of course, front page of the Financial Times of China inaugurating the famous northern sea route, you know, going through the Arctic, which is a geopolitical win for Russia, assuming it gains momentum. Lots to talk about how they all converge is what we're trying to put together internally. We keep coming back to, oh, and of course, Scott Besson's infamous yen intervention, you know, by five to 10 billion yen with the handy currency.

ticker in brackets just in case the guy who used to trade for Soros forgot what the yen symbol was. You know, stage for our Reuters photograph for everyone to see. You know, I'm not sure which direction you want to take it. I can tell you where our lead hypothesis now, which is if you view the reemergence of shipping choke points as a thing, I mean, they always existed, but for many decades, they were sort of an afterthought in history classes. really it's an unwind of globalism by definition.

The biggest beneficiary of globalism has been China, and the biggest loser of globalism has been U.S. manufacturing. Trump ran on a campaign of reinvigorating U.S. manufacturing. That's an impossible task with possession of the global reserve currency. The U.S. dollar is way too strong for that. And so if you view sort of at a meta level, the reemergence of global shipping choke points as an axiom for analysis going forward, it has to lead to a much weaker dollar, much higher Bitcoin in dollar terms, much higher gold in dollar terms.

And when you mix in the yen intervention sort of end of times for the Western financial system, the great monetization event that must eventually happen, one wonders whether we aren't at the beginning stages of a pretty significant historical pivot point that will become much clearer to the great majority of scholars in 10, 15, or 20 years. Not to start too heavy, but, you know, that's what I was pondering on my morning walk as I was trying to get my steps in for the day. I want to get, Simon, I want to get your response to that before that, though, quickly do, right?

I want to double tap on. You said increase in propaganda in the West. Is there something specific that you're seeing? Look, I mean, you go online to Twitter and read, read various independent media blogs. And all you see is video footage of Ukrainian men being snatched off the street, violent fights with their families. This is sort of forced mobilization.

There's a critical shortage of manpower in Ukraine. They're talking about deporting military-aged men from Europe, basically to send them straight to the front line. That's all you see. And then the front page of the Financial Times this morning is a story about how all of that's going on, but just in Russia. which is, of course, I mean, I would put the odds of that report being factually correct at less than 1%. It's kind of like the old CIA axiom.

Like always make counter accusations, right? Like projection by accusation. And so when you see a story like that, look, the Financial Times is a great newspaper. I subscribe to it. I read it every day. It's one of the first things I read. It has great reporters. They break amazing stories.

And every once in a while there's an article that's just absolute total horse, you know what? And I often wonder about the genesis of such articles. Like, who are the reporters? Like, how does this get to the front page? Like, it's just such malarkey. And so counter to, like, what even a cursory inspection of primary source intel can give you. There was a, you know, all manner of Ukrainian blogs, pro-Ukrainian Twitter accounts who have been cataloging the violent nature of the forced, you know,

conscription of young Ukrainian men, there's reasons why millions of them fled to Europe in the first place. And yet here we have in the Financial Times, if you were, by the way, the British propaganda's the worst. And so if you're in Britain and that's what you read and you think that's true, why you think the wars being won. And man, it's just really amazing. I find it, like, it, when you read the news as a content creator and your job is, and, you know, as I mentioned before we hit recording, you know, we were working on a book in the first chapter is called Why most analysis fails, and it's all about procuring and grading and, and, and assessing inbound information correctly.

Like, that's, that's a very fascinating data point. I'm genuinely, extremely interested in how that happens. Like, it's the literal reverse of what any neutral observer inspecting the metadata would conclude. And yet, it's just right there. it's truly amazing. Again, it's probably a whole podcast in itself. It is, in fact, the last chapter of the book, which we haven't written yet,

propaganda in the age of AI. But anyway, that's sort of what I meant by that reference, because I literally just finished reading the morning papers before jumping on with you. Very interesting, Simon. I'm curious. Your thoughts? Okay, there's a whole podcast of content so we could go down. So let's do the media one. Let me respond to some of those and then we can see where we want to go.

The media one, I've always used the methodology of following the money. And there's several threads you can follow. Is it a public company? If it's a public company, then it needs financing. If it needs financing, then ultimately it serves its shareholders. And there is a hierarchy of signing off information when the information is sensitive. And so the journalists are not here to report what is how. happening, they're here to report what somebody wants you to know.

And sometimes that could be true. Other times it's propaganda. Other times they just are subjects they can't touch because it's a corporate sponsor. Other times it's a covert CIA, MI6, Mossad mechanism via some kind of NGO think tank network where ultimately the corporate wrote the policy. the policy then goes through a network of financing and then suddenly an anonymous source contacts a journalist or a relationship

and by that point you've got either a captured journalist or a journalist that is protecting their sources or a hierarchy by which they can't report. So the reason I think the Financial Times is a good media outlet is not because I believe in their reporting. is because it's predominantly a mouthpiece for what I call the financial industrial complex, the FIC.

And so when the FIC want you to know something, some faction of power, whether it's private equity, whether it's at the asset management layer, whether it's the investment banks, you know, they are trying to indicate where capital is about to flow.

Now, you could be on the wrong side of that trade or the right side of that trade. And so for me, I don't see media as a mechanism for receiving information. I see it as a median for analyzing what some faction of power needs me to know, and then I kind of go backwards from there.

And so the media is just 100% captured at this stage. And then that kind of translates down to social media where we went through a model where we were in extreme censorship. So if you wanted to speak against Israel, there was a time when that would lead to your cancellation. but we've transitioned to since Elon Musk took over more like a, I think he framed it, freedom of reach but not freedom of speech.

And so the way that I interpret that is that now they want you to talk and they want you to give your real radical version of yourself in your extremist thoughts and it's making your social credit score, it's making your feeding the data in. And then there's, They're gradually social engineering you, where if you report a more extreme version of what you said, you might get more boosting.

If it's aligned with a particular agenda, you might get more boosting. And so what they're doing is they're gradually training people through freedom of speech but not freedom of reach in order to get the maximum reach by servicing the agenda that the algorithm needs you to serve. and that's determined by sponsorship, advertising, and various propaganda outlets. And so we're getting this time when we're getting, you know, social media is really engineering some of the most extreme ideologies and then servicing you and feeding you up, videos and shorts that make you into the most extreme version of yourself with extreme bias that really makes you feel like, you know, whatever they need you to feel,

whether there's an invasion, you know, and the Ukraine example is like the perfect example. Look, Ukraine war is pretty simple when you bring it down to its essence. And I connect it to the Middle East. You know, there has been a century of Forever Wars in the Middle East, which is extremely profitable, you know, a massive chunk of the American dare.

is because of the Forever War in the Middle East. I mean, maybe that's about $15 trillion of revenue there. You know, the goal of Afghanistan was not to win a war. It was to spend money for 20 years. And in the end, you took a version of the Taliban that was resisting against drug trafficking and replaced it with a version of the Taliban that was allowing drug trafficking for the CIA Black Op and Massad operations and MI6 ops. So they did a regime change to support their drug trafficking cartels in the West,

and they spent $2 trillion to replace regime change to Taliban. So the goal of the war is not anything that the media is telling you. The goal of the war is a portfolio to prop up the stock market. And so if you look at them, bring that back down to Russia, Ukraine, there is probably another trillion dollars that military stocks can make from the Russia-Ukraine war. There's significant collateral that BlackRock can get in order to gain access to certain minerals and resources and trade routes. And Russia's going to end up with a chunk of the land. Now, we know that in the end, the private sector in America, UK, you know, the private companies,

They're cashing in on the war, you know, whether it's BAE systems, whether it's Lockheed Martin, whether it's Raytheum, General Dynamic, through to Israel and Albaite systems. They're about to do a public offering. So a lot of the state assets in Israel are being privatized and going public now. But the stock market is loving the war. And so, you know, and we're getting this decoupling of the economy from stores. And then eventually you move into leverage, negotiate. and then you get rebuild. And rebuild is extremely profitable as well.

But if the Forever War in the Middle East is coming to an end, which I believe it is, and then you need to then determine what's happening at all the trade routes, how much oil is going to come, what happens with OPEC, what happens with the Petro dollar, the Japan carry trade, the Euro dollars, what happens with all those things. That's a radical change and protection of thought. It's a radical change of empire. the biggest change we'll ever see in our lifetime we're experiencing, then the military need to make up for lost profits.

So if they can have another three years of war in a bounded escalation environment, then Russia gets what they want, BlackRock guess what they want, the military companies get what they want, the banks get to finance, the governments end up in death, and then you can just, it's a free-for-all and grab for all of all the resources. And so both the military industrial, and Russia are not incentivized to end this war. Russia gets more land, the military get more profits, the banks get more financing, and then in

the end they get the resources. So they'll push out a narrative to make you believe that you're defending democracy. It's why in the UK you look at people thinking, well, we've got homelessness, drug addiction, wealth inequality, we've got immigration challenges, we've got jobs going, but somehow we need to still waive a flag of Ukraine, put something blue and yellow in our bio, and figure out why we've got $3 billion to send over to Lockheed Martin General Dynamic rathium so that Zelensky can launder some money. And we can bounded escalate so that the economies get screwed, the private equity come

in and purchase all the assets, and the stock market reaches new highs while you socialize the cost through the national debt on the people. And that's the deception. The media is there to deceive you into thinking that you're doing something for a reason that you think is morally grounded when really you're actually servicing power. And the media is there to, you know, is controlled captures. It's either public or paid or sponsored or the victim of covert operations. Duneberg?

well that's a lot yeah the only thing I would add is that the mirror of everything you just described

exists exist within Russia as well and in fact the second chapter of our book is on lateral thinking

and mental models and we walk through an example of a crazy hypothesis that you know because the lateral thinker

is comfortable brainstorming around axioms that are provably untrue just for fun and interest in effect. And so we played around in the book with a mental model. We'll see if it survives at it, by the way.

But Putin is a puppet of Western intelligence. And what would that look like and just play around with it? And we don't really believe that, but it's plausible. But then you end up on a much more plausible one, which is a grinding war of attrition benefits both sides, especially if it's being fought outside of pre- 2014 Russia and outside of the NATO territories. Because the military industrial complex of Russia is printing cash too, right? And Putin has many powerful people that he's trying to balance internally.

And so, I mean, I do think there's a lot that part of the, the reason why I started with that Financial Times articles, because you can't just produce articles like that. You have to have like 85, 95% of your stuff is, is, you know, who, what, when we're why straight reporting give that veneer of authenticity, but

partitioning that against, like, literally the subject of the book is maybe it's an impossible task if I believe what Simon is saying is how does a person navigate the new information deluge in a way that preserves their individual freedom of thought.

So when I first read 1984, you know, as a child wish I hadn't. Probably explains many poor life choices. I was going to say, how young? Oh, boy, I don't know. You know, you tend not to remember the traumatic experiences of youth, yeah. But I committed to myself that I would always be a free-thinking person, right?

And it's becoming really challenging to do. I think a lot of what Simon says resonates. I think history teaches that you really. can't be too cynical in real time. And, you know, the last decade has proven, if anything, that many conspiracy theories, quote-unquote, evolved to conspiracy fact. And then they become old news. And I point to, you know, the comings and goings of Dr. Fauci is sort of just one of many examples as a general rule, that which you're not allowed to say. We have a mental model internally. if you could lose your Instagram account over it,

it's probably true. Eventually, no need to go and be a martyr in the middle of it, but as a rule of thumb, if YouTube is demonetizing it, it's a pretty good indicator that there might be some truth to what's being censored.

So I agree with much of what Simon said, obviously, I'd nibble at the edges of a few broad points. But yeah, you know, there's no question that war is always a racket. We as a team, in our writing and in our podcast appearances, have been consistently and firmly anti-war, which occasionally really annoys some people.

But alas, such as life, that's our view. We think, for example, this war in Iran is an utter and total catastrophe, except for, I suppose, if you're making Patriot missiles and now the world believes that you're super duper short supply of those and we'll pay anything to get more of them. But there's an awful lot of suffering and dead people that are on the other end of this. And it's truly sort of boorish at some point when you think about it. It doesn't, it's not all that complementary to the state of humanity and the willingness

and gullableness of society to fall for the, old weapons of mass destruction trick again like how many times do we need to see colon power holding up a vial of yellow powder at the united nations before we begin to wonder maybe whether things aren't quite as they're being articulated you know um last thing i'll say is if you really want to freak yourself out um just get on youtube and go look for um because it's out there propaganda in the United States. And all these people have archived, like what was being said about Japan and about Germany. And I would say if you're discretion advised, it's pretty shocking stuff.

Let's just say it doesn't age well. It's almost unbelievable what was routinely shown to American audiences. I'm sure it's the same, if not worse, in Europe. And this stuff is archived. You can go see it. So, yeah, you know, lots to say many directions to pull. Not sure how we're going to wind our way all the way back to Bitcoin. But here we are.

We'll find our way back there at some point. But I actually, Duneberg, I kind of want to unpack that a little bit more. Simon had mentioned the idea of this one being the biggest change of empire, probably of our lifetime, and also the idea that the Forever Wars and the Middle East might be coming to an end. Simon, you've spoken a ton about the idea of shifting to a multipolar world. And then similarly, Duneberg, I believe you framed it more as like America's becoming a regional power, which to me feels like similar-lined kind of ideas. I'm just curious your thoughts on whether or not that's something that we're witnessing

right now or what's happening. Much depends on the appetite for China, the appetite by China for all of this type of nonsense because China is the global superpower today. I think anybody who thinks that, you know, anybody who watches Fox News, I suppose, would assume that America is still the, you know, the undefeated heavyweight champion of geopolitics, but anybody who's been to China that looks at the numbers that does any basic analysis beyond, you know, nominal GDP as measured in U.S. dollars can see the writing on the wall. China has long ago surpassed the U.S. in everything that matters except crude oil,

and even there, they figured out a way around that weakness. If price action in the oil markets prove anything. So they make more steel, they burn half the words cold. They make all the cars. They make all the batteries. You name it. They make it. They make it cheaper, better, faster, quicker,

with more innovative potential. And you can bet your bottom dollar that same manufacturing prowess and technology capability has been shoved right into ballistic missiles, subsonic, supersonic, hypersonic, air defense missiles. They have a much larger army. And so if China is genuinely interested in sort of hegemonic global domination, then I guess we'll see a repeat of what we've observed for the past 60, 70 years in the post-World War II era, but with Chinese characteristics, as we like to say, there's a world where China decides

that it is big enough and comfortable enough and just doesn't need all that noise. and aspects of Chinese diplomacy would indicate that they prioritize stability above all else, which would be a refreshing change in a way. And so then it comes all the way back to where I started my first answer to you, which is this regime change in the reserve currency of the world. And China has been working actively with Russia and its other BRICS partners since the global financial crisis to slowly insist systematically chip away at the underpinnings of the British-derived U.S. Guller hegemonic

system. We gold bugs are attracted to that hypothesis because China seems to be working to put gold back at the center of sort of neutral reserve asset premier status as an asset that settles and balances in international trade. And so maybe a mix in a blockchain or two, who knows, but that seems to be where we're going. And so I started this answer by saying much depends on Beijing. And if the war in Iran has caught us anything, it's that the U.S. military is woefully unprepared to take on China, you know, especially with ongoing depletion of weapons in Ukraine. And so I think I don't want to put words in Simon's mouth, but I think the hypothesis that the forever war in the Middle East will be winding down is one that is

born out of necessity. And there'll be lots of money to be made in the rearming the intra-war period, I suppose, and that has the benefit of being far less controversial. And so we'll see. But if I could tell you that the Pentagon knows the score, that if Iran could take out all the Gulf Coast bases, and they did, that means China could take out all the Pacific bases, and they can. and good luck defending Taiwan all those miles away

when all China literally has to do as a 15-day naval blockade and Taiwan runs out a natural gas. They don't even need to attack Taiwan. They could win without firing a shot except a few warning shots from the Chinese Navy. And so the U.S. is in a dangerous. It's dangerous for the world, the U.S.'s current position,

which is a declining unipolar power in denial with still lots of dangerous weapons and a seemingly lower threshold to use them than one might have thought a decade ago. One company I like pointing people to when they ask about Bitcoin mining is abundant mines. They were founded by Bo and Christine Turner after losing over half a million dollars

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so earnings don't just stop. And every machine is insured at full replacement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S., powered by hydro, and mining equipment may qualify for 100% your one bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundant minds.com slash sessions. Simon, I want to get your response, but I also want to just kind of highlight, if I'm hearing things correctly from Dumeberg's position, it kind of sounds to me a little bit like things are happening out of necessity, like it's kind of the result of previous actions, where I think

from your perspective, you attribute a little bit more to intentionality, but I want to get your overall view on what he just laid out. Yeah. I think the directionally, we're at the same place, but probably coming at it from a different perspective. I don't believe if a country like America is a sovereign country. So this kind of ties into where we probably get back to the Bitcoin story in terms of self-sovereignty and stuff like that.

But you could be, you as an individual could be sovereign. in a country that is captured. And so that's the case in the West. The entire West is captured by what I call this financial industrial complex, which is that the banks create the currency. All of the companies are public companies. The largest shareholder in all of them is BlackRock. BlackRock's a public company.

All of the securities are created with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. The government debt is issued, the bond market, the stock market. The commodity markets are structurally have more paper claims than physicality. The currencies are always a tool for reallocating capital and financial power or raging wars. So you've got commodities that are derivatives essentially now. You've got currencies that are really managed via a network of central bank, so the members of the bank for international settlements. You have a stock market whose job is to take the value of the national debt and pump it into the stocks.

The bond market is simply how long can you facilitate this debt and obviously the unique case of the US, how long are banks willing to use treasuries as collateral, and it's all managed by asset managers. And so when somebody says the US, I look up. what do you mean, the US? The US is a corporate, captured government whose job is to take on national debt and pump it into the stock market. And every politician is effectively sponsored by a lobby.

And that lobby is either at its extreme, a blackmail network, or just a funding mechanism for determining whether you can execute their policy. And a politician's value is how many people can I believe, get to believe, that what I'm doing is for them while I'm servicing my lobby. And so Trump's a classic example.

You look down the line. Firstly, you look at his financial interest. He's deeply financialized into Middle Eastern, Saudi Arabian, you know, like the affinity partners, his fund that had $2 billion dollars from Saudi. Then you look at his actual lobby financing. At the top, it was Elon Musk, an important node in private technical interest that relies upon China.

Then you had the financial melon family, the second largest funder, so a previous banking dynasty. And the third was Mary Madelson, which is Israel, which is a node of military power. And so he's funded by Middle Eastern interest. technical interest, financial interest, a military interest. And that's the hierarchy. So when I look at what Trump's going to do, firstly, he needs to use his military to serve

Saudi interest. That's what he's being paid to do. At the same time, the lowest funder is Israel. So Israel is, while it looks like Israel rules the world, Israel is just simply a front for plausible deniability for military companies. And so you've got him servicing that need for military companies on the two front war, unwinding of the Forever War and escalating of the European revenue, which then leads to him being pushed into a regional power.

But what happens with the rest? Well, China is the one that's facilitating all of the sovereign welfare. you know, by purchasing this energy, having the world's largest manufacturing base. So Iran is dependent upon China, Saudi is dependent upon China, Qatar's dependent upon China. Across the whole region, everyone's dependent on China. Now you look at the technical companies, as you said. As Dumanberg said, you need batteries, you need that whole ecosystem. So America can't produce a weapon without China.

So can we stop pretending that there's even a war between China and America? What there is is a negotiation, just as there is right now. And China is negotiating with private power that controls America and controls the West. So, you know, you might as well sit down with SpaceX and Larry Fink. And in fact, they did. You know, when we were talking about before, the meeting in Beijing was just Trump with his pool of real executives that represent the shareholders to control the bond market and the stop. market, negotiating with Xi Jinping, where Tim Cook is saying, please allow me to continue my factories.

I need Huawei to copy our, you can, Huawei can copy it, but we'll keep our factories there. I need the cheap labor. Elon's saying, please make sure the rare earths are continuing, you know, we need to go, we need to continue receiving those rare earths. The financial institutions are saying, look, we know we can't penetrate your financial system, but maybe we could set up a multipolar world and we could have a financial. Center in Dubai and Riyadh, and we can integrate those into SIPs, and maybe we just create an alternative system altogether that circumvents SWIFT, like a network of Central Bank digital currencies via Embridge. And so these are the real powers. There is no such thing as a United

States of America as a nation state. It is simply the military is a full rent militia for power. It is fully financialized, securitized, and now BlackRock wants to tokenize the whole country, every security, every share, every market, every currency, and it will be a programmable stable coin. That is what America is. A control grid, a technical power, and the technical and military power are controlled by financial power, and that financial power is global in nature, but they can't penetrate China, so they have to negotiate with China. Because China, actually, their military, financial and technical power sits under the government.

The US government sits underneath financial, military, and technical power. And so you've got that, the Chinese government, negotiating with military, financial, and technical power. And they all know that there's no such thing as World War III. So how do we change the order? Well, you engage in negotiations that look like wars. And right now, the Iran War is about how do we negotiate the fact, Iran, Amman and probably a syndicate within the region of interest are going to control the strait of Hamis. How do we get rid of the U.S. bases? Well, Iran, you blow them all up,

then we'll enter into, you know, Saudi and Yemen will resolve, you stop funding the militias, we'll enter into a political process, negotiation, we'll do that across Lebanon, we'll do that across Yemen, and eventually Iran, you're going to have to accept $300 billion of our capital, and you'll get sanction relief. We've got to determine how you're going to price your oil. Is it going to be in yuan? You know, what happens with OPEC? And so to me, this is military escalation in bounded negotiations

to determine and what the world order looks like at the end of this. And whatever happens in the Strait of Hormuz, however that is constructed, whether it's a service fee or a toll, whether it's over. So remember the deal that they signed for the Memorandum of Understanding. 60 days where they won't charge. That's over on the 17th of August. So you get escalation, bounded escalation up to the 17th of August. You get a blowing out of the bond market leading into that.

You get these taco trades. But oil and gold are telling us we're not in World War III. So the markets are telling us, but we're getting this stress in the bomb markets. So the 17th of August is where Iran has said we're going to be charging a fee. And so now,

financial power, military power and technical power are trying to get as much as they can using Trump and the American military to put together a facade that looks like there's something else here. Okay, what do you need? A narrative.

We're mass destruction. We care about women's rights. in Iran, oh, this is, you know, you know, but what we're seeing right now is the pretense of the American Empire wanting to do good is now being exposed that really it was just a captured state and it was the same, it's run by the same Dutch Empire, British Empire, Federal Reserve, financial power and it's been a four to 500 year empire that's coming to an end. And it will be regionally controlled. Now, that involves Russia saying, what's the settlement with Ukraine?

China saying, what do we do with Taiwan? And Europe being just completely destroyed so that it can be sucked up into privatization programs and they can print a bunch of money and prop up the stock market. So that's kind of the game as I see it right now. And, you know, that's like, there is no such thing as UK. Like, there is no such thing as US. There's no such thing as Germany. There's just regime changes that are sponsored by different lobby powers.

And every time you get a regime change, you get a new narrative of why they're propping up the stock market and destroying the economy. Doobrug, there's a ton for you to respond there. I wanted to get your thoughts on all that. I do want to also tag in there too. Simon specifically mentioned the bond market, the gold market, and the energy markets. We've got the U.S. 10 years sitting at 4.684. Spot gold is at 4,349, and WTI is sitting at 80 bucks a barrel right now. I'm curious if you're interpreting the market signals in a similar way or if there's a different read for you.

Well, what Sam is describing is his construct to view the world. We would call that a mental model. our view is a mental model is operable if it explains the past and successfully makes predictions. A lot of people don't like to think that way and don't like to hear such views. We think that way and we have slightly different views. So I would argue or I wonder whether Simon would agree that in his construct, China, Russia, in Iran are actually sovereign nations. and that is one of the reasons why they're at war with the sort of blob of the Western

Atlantis' global financial oligarchs to borrow a word the Europeans used to describe rich Russians. The mental model we've been toying around with a little bit is that there were basically three winners of World War II, you know, a U.S.-led British European bloc. Russia and China and the global order that was set up after World War II was funneled through the United Nations Security Council. There was a P5 permanent five, but it was really a P3. It was Russia, China, the U.S. And yes, France and and Great Britain had vetoed. And our mental model is World War III has actually been happening since about 2014 when the taboo

of sanctioning a P5 member, a co-victor of World War II by the U.S., outside of the purview of the United Nations Security Council, broke that system of governance, I would say, for lack of a better phrase. And so we think that, you know, Crimea. Do you say 2014? Do you mean, do you mean, 2014? Yes, starting with the, but really the war kicked off. So you had the Maidan coup, as the Russians would call it. Regime change, you know, fight for freedom, as John McCain would call it from the steps of Kiev. Then you had the Russian response, which, if anybody had been following modern Russian history and the rise of Putin wouldn't come as a surprise.

So you have Crimea. But the war began with the sanctioning of Russia as a consequence of Russia's response. to the Maidan movement. And so what you see then is China and Russia saying, okay, if our veto power at the Security Council does not protect us from, you know, the weaponization of the U.S. dollar system. And I agree that like the DXY is just the dollar.

It's just, you know, all these fiat currencies in the West trade off each other as a mirage. The strength of the dollar is not measured by the DXY. It's measured by the dollar price of gold. the breaking of that P5 commitment that, okay, the three victors of World War II will co-main is the world and we have spheres of influence and we are protected by the veto at the Security Council, which is before then really supposed to have been the only sort of global body capable of implementing sanctions.

Then that kicked off the Shanghai Gold Exchange. That kicked off Russia selling its treasuries. That kicked off the tensions in Ukraine. Putin and Lavrov submitting various treaties to realign European security architecture, to revert back to sort of the post-World War II settlement. And so if you're relitigating World War II, that's our definition of the commencement of World War III. And then you see, you know, the role that energy plays in all of this, which, of course,

is how we arrived at all of this nonsense, because we're deeply interested. in the flow of hydrocarbons around the world and what it means for geopolitics and economics. And so you have this alliance, we call it the, you know, in order of decreasing relative power, the Kryn alliance, you know, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the coincidence or the commonality between those four

is there amongst the most sanctioned sovereign countries in the world at the, moment. And so this is literally just a battle to relitigate the partitioning of global power, wealth in the post-World War II era. And it's no surprise that Europe is the big loser in all of this because Europe was the most destroyed, most weakened, former colonial set of powers in the aftermath of World War II. And so when you see in a fight to the death or a fight to reorganize or a scramble to reset the way the chairs are situated around the global table. The U.S. is discarding Europe, vassalizing it in a way that I think is shocking to many

European intellectuals and elites. But that's what's going to happen to Europe. When you have Kayakala says your premier diplomat, you should expect to lose a few bouts with the Chinese and the Russians, that's for sure. And so here we are. that's sort of our mental model. The only critique, I would say, is that, I mean, I've seen this line of thinking

and I agree with some of it. Most men, I might even admit to much of it. But the overestimation of the power of BlackRock is one thing that I do object to. BlackRock is a pass-through vehicle for passive investing. It's not really, having worked in large corporations and had Black Rock as a major shareholder, they're relatively passive.

They rarely vote their shares. They're huge. Larry Finkmaker, for a great boogeyman. We've written critically about Larry Fink many times. And it doesn't matter. It's just a, I think, a potential weakness in the narrative that could blur the soundness of the rest of the mental model.

Last thing I would say is I only point that out because when we express lateral thinking and outcomes of them, people who aren't used to the language of, of, actions and mental models and operative models and predictive models and models that you have to discard because the data comes in and convinces you that it's no longer good for making predictions. When they hear off-the-wall thinking, they're not, they generally recoil at it. Sometimes it makes them angry. But also, one has to be careful that any sort of nullifiable statements of fact might be used to dismiss the entirety of the thinking. which is something we guard against. Like, oh, well, this person's, I'll give you a classic example. And I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I think it's an interesting one. When I hear somebody that I otherwise respect on a podcast,

and I probably consume about six hours a day of podcasts, just because we're in the business and I need inbound information and I need to write articles and it makes for great time killing during walks. And they're making good points, and I find them to be interesting, and they, okay, I grade them for, you know, let's put this person in this category. And then they talk about energy. And I'm like, oh, my God.

Like, they just have no idea what they're talking about. Like, when I hear people talk about the U.S. running out of oil, I just want to scream into my iPods. You know, like you have no freaking idea what you're talking about. And it can be disqualifying. And it's really important. I think if you want to be a sovereign person capable of thinking for oneself that, you know, you're able to absorb the concept,

even if there's like a striking piece of information in the communication of that concept that you think is provably wrong. So anyway, a bit of a, it's only because this is literally the book we're writing that I'm giving this a lot of thought. Simon, I want to get your thoughts on BlackRock, maybe being a bit weaker in kind of Duneberg's position on that.

I also, because it's an interesting topic, and I will come back to, I do want to come back to what you're seeing, Duneberg, in the energy markets, and, of course, we will touch on Bitcoin, But I do want to hit on BlackRock quick. And then Simon, I actually want to get your thoughts on developing your mental models and how you kind of reason through these things. The thing is at least an interesting topic to touch on with regards to how the audience can begin to process information.

Yeah, sure. So with BlackRock, you're right. So BlackRock is a lot of things. It is a passive asset manager. It has a bunch of funds. It has a very important ETF department. And interestingly, you know, when Larry Fink was the innovator, most people attribute to the mortgage-backed security.

And BlackRock ended up the one that ended up, you know, got the contract with the Fed after the global financial crisis and also the COVID contract as well. To me, it was about data because the most important thing that BlackRock has is the best data in the world. And so it's Aladdin, scenario planning combined with passive ETS, combined with the sum of their allocation, I mean, let's say there's $20 trillion in Aladdin, let's say there's $12 trillion of assets under

management, let's say $5 trillion of it may be managed and the rest of it is passive in ETFs. And after the global financial crisis, BlackRock ended up with the bottom EARCLAZ ETF Division, which is when it became significantly more powerful. But when a lot of sovereign wealth funds, a lot of central banks, a lot of treasuries, a lot of pension funds, in fact, a real large polar capital is using BlackRock Aladdin in order to Sonorio plan some of the best data, the best in intelligence software you can use. so if you're telling your Aladdin that you would like to scenario plan

what happens if the straight of Hormuz you know, why happens if there's an invasion and then the straight of Fulmuse happens here? It's through capital allocations that you're able to move capital in more coordinated fashion knowing that 50% of trades are done by bots as well, an algorithmic

and high frequency trading. And so it doesn't have to be a man Larry Fink, you know, on a board that is able to control the world. It is, in fact, pulls a capital with access to data that can, in a non-conspiratory way, determine the shape of markets. And I think that's a position that is accurate in terms of where BlackRock is. Then you combine that with the fact that when everyone's pulling together their capital, that gives you board seats, and you have the ability to join the World Economic Forum as an interim chair, and then your investment officer also gets a role at the World Economic Forum, then

you're able to say something like, you know, if you don't prioritize your ESG score, then that determines how we allocate capital. And everyone knows what that means. It means if I need capital, I need to prioritize. And every country right now, as currency wars, as the American Empire is becoming less of a nationalistic empire and more of a privatized corporate capture, you know, ETFs and the flow of ETFs into your country and that passive bid is significant in terms of if no one wants to invest in Saudi, but they're investing in the Black Rock Saudi ETF. Like, you have leverage and that leverage can be utilized and those board seats can be pressed

and the sovereign wealth funds are also using your software. So there is a degree of centralization that's emerged here at the same time as everything going towards technology, programmability, tokenization, social credit scores and stable coins and tokenize everything. So I think we can read ahead. and see where we're going here. This is programmatically being able to allocate capital in an optimized algorithm. And, you know, a situation where this whole K-shaped economy is causing such concentration

of wealth up to those that control the money printer, that you will owe nothing and be happy. And be happy means we'll give you a stable coin as a university. basic income and we end up with the asset, you custody the assets with us, we'll give you the token. And I think you can look at the numbers since the global financial crisis and see where BlackRock's assets under administration are taking it. Very interesting. And then Simon, just quickly on that second part, with regards to mental models and how you're thinking about these sort of things, I would just love to even get a couple quick words from you on that. Yeah, both Duneberg and myself have taken time out to write a book. So you've got me at the right.

right time. So the book that I'm writing is really figuring out what are actually the subordination layers and the sovereign layers. What makes a country sovereign? What makes it subordinate? And so to me, there are, you know, when I look at wars, I look at the battle for subordination, leverage, and you're able to resist with sovereign. So if you manage to keep your energy, you know, like Iran did or Saudi did, then you have a couple of directions. You can either do what Iran did, which is fund a network of resistance

that gives you leverage and negotiation to try and get your sanctions removed because they didn't install a central bank and make you subordinate to them. Or you have another way of going, which is, well, why don't we become, like, Saudi, offer the petro dollar? You know, we'll form OPEC.

We'll make sure everything's priced in dollars. We have packs in order to negotiate. But if we're able to keep our energy and slowly get more and more of our energy without you, then we can fuel a sovereign wealth fund. And by fueling a sovereign wealth fund, we invest in all your tech companies and therefore the financial industrial complex partners with us over the national interest. And so to me, you know, then you've got the extreme. You've got China, which is the most sovereign country in the world. It's got its own, you know, it's got its own Belt and Road initiative.

It's got all corporate power is underneath the government. But, you know, when a government is very sovereign, and the countries of the sovereign, you know, Dumesburg talked about them, you were talking about Iran, North Korea, Russia, China. When a government is more sovereign and it's a spectrum, you know, the reason that people, Putin became public enemy number one is because, you know, he was trying to expel the oligarchs and resist privatization over national assets.

And so he was told that he's the next Hitler, right? And so the narrative, he goes right back to the media, is based upon how can you take a sovereign country and make it subordinate? And there are a number of ways to do that. You have strategic choke points. We're seeing that, the weaponization of the strait of Omis. you have proxy wars, funding different militia groups. And just so you know, America is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world by far

significantly more than Iran. And even that word, you know, I would argue that the Ukrainians are being used as useful idiots and tools thinking they're fighting for their country, but they're in fact a pay-for-rent militia for military power. and that power doesn't help Ukraine. But to me, it all comes down to that. And so once you live in a very sovereign country, what I've noticed is often the people, it's more authoritarian,

and so the people are more subordinate. Whereas you take America, you've got freedom of speech, all these different things. You've got a fully captured government that is fully subordinate to private corporate power. but the people may be more sovereign in terms of their freedom of speech. But they don't know who they answer to. So they think they answer to the government

when in fact private corporate power is significantly more powerful than the government. And so you get this whole covert power mechanism that distracts people into thinking this is a democracy. And then you've got those two extremes. You've got that authoritarianism. Then you've got a fake democracy. but really what's happening across all of these, it is the largest pools of capital within each country

controls the countries, whether it's the private corporate power in America or whether it's the CCP in China. And so that's really, it is the game, the book I'm writing is called Game of Money. The game of money is for a country to utilize as much of its, remain as sovereign as possible by utilizing the assets that it has. And the Empire always wants

to take those assets, whether it's through financial, you know, currency wars, covert wars, or whether it's through physical military wars, or whether it's through technology and data. You know, these are the things that determine whether your country is sovereign. And then there's you at an individual level and your business as well. This is kind of what I'm trying to mentally map out at the moment in this book. Don't leave your life savings to chance. With Bitcoin, it is imperative that your setup is both secure and accessible, not just to yourself, but also to your family, if anything, should happen to you.

That's why I've assembled a team of the best educators on the planet over at bTC mentor.io. We help you make sure your Bitcoin setup is rock solid, and we also help you set up your freedom and sovereignty tech. things like privacy, self-hosted AI, and sovereign computing. In a world of increasing surveillance and censorship, isn't it time you leveled up? Head over to bTCmentor.io and book a call today. Love it. Duneberg, I want to jump back for a moment because, of course, your area of expertise is like the hydrocarbons, the energy space.

I want to know if there's anything in particular, maybe the last couple of weeks that you've noted. I'm surprised to see oil not higher than it currently is, but I was even at the beginning of the Iran war breaking out. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. So taking a look specifically at the energy markets and maybe we can even tie that into the recent rise, the recent kind of little run-up and gold we have here. What exactly are you seeing in markets? And what are you kind of making of it? Sure. Before I do, I just want to say that Simon, I don't think this interview is going to be accretive to your social credit score. Just definitely not. Probably not. Just how to help. Just FYI.

Expect a call from, you know, big brother here. The thing that I, the big aha moment for me, so, you know, I'm recording later today, knock on wood with my friend Nate Mack over at Canadian Prepper. And I like Nate, Nate's a lateral thinker. He's successful on YouTube. I'm sure you know his channel. And that, you know, I put him on in my early morning walks. And last week I'm walking around and getting my steps in. So my cardiologist says I got a chance. and I listen to the guy and he takes a dig at Duneberg and I'm like, Nate, like I thought we were friends. It wasn't really a dig at Duneberg,

but he was making the point that I've been on a show saying that the oil price is important signal back to this whole inbound information and grading and what does it mean. And I think that the oil markets in particular should be listened to. And then he sort of recalled that that And in this monologue on one of his World War III updates, he said, you know, friend of the show Dumburg, which is always, you know, get ready for the dig.

And he says, you know, he says that the oil markets are efficient. But then, you know, look at the Korean Stock Exchange. Down 25% one day, markets are deficient. It's all over the place. You can't argue that markets are efficient. Well, that was a big aha for me. And I'm probably going to relitigate that question with Nate later today. But your question is around energy markets.

The oil markets are wildly different than the stock market. They have a different purpose. They have a different structure, which serves that different purpose, and then they have, broadly speaking, different participants. And I think this whole question around why isn't oil 150, when people are convinced it had to be, and then the quick pivot to manipulation, which is made easier, by the way,

by the clear insider trading that's going on in and around the White House. But there's a difference between insider trading and overall manipulating the price of oil. I just want to click you jump in. The fact that they're selling early access to truth social. It's like, oh my God, guys. Like, we're just out in the open now. Whatever your views of Trump were before his second shot at the Oval Office, this has been wildly

corrupt. I mean, it's just overt, no pretense. I mean, give me a break. Oh, and I back back to my. answer before we trigger all of the partisans that are still listening. The oil market exists to ensure a steady supply of crude to refineries at a price where they can earn a spread making diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline. That is it.

That is the purpose of the oil market. It is to ensure a steady supply of crude to global refineries at a price that allows them to make a spread making diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel. Every word of that purpose is really important for people to understand. The structure of the oil market fits that purpose, expiring contracts settled mostly by delivery, where crude grade, location, and timing, determined price. And there's two forcing functions that sit atop the oil market, which is delivery and consumption. Oil is delivered somewhere and consumed.

And the purpose of the stock market is wildly different. The purpose of the stock market is to assemble risk capital to fill the equity stack of company cap tables. And stocks are basically immortal up until an M&A or a bankruptcy or a buyback. They can trade forever. They trade on the pink sheets. Sometimes you see Hertz going up 50-fold because some people decided in a group chat that they're going to manipulate the price higher. to point to Hertz or Korea and say that's why oil is not $150 is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the energy markets are.

They exist to serve the human endeavor, which is, of course, ever more consumption of energy because your standard of living is defined by how much energy you get to waste and everybody everywhere wants a higher standard of living. And so in order to ensure a steady supply of oil to refineries at a price that allows them to earn a spread, making diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline, an enormous amount of things happen. And so that oil never got to 150. Hand up.

We thought it would. We're wrong. Not afraid to be wrong. Not afraid to admit when we're wrong. Always interested to learn why we were wrong. And the fact that it dropped below 100 pretty quickly and stayed there, we think, is meaningful information. And to think that it's just manipulation and then to go on Twitter and say,

it to your half a million followers and cause a bunch of people to get long oil because they believe the manipulation is temporary and has to blow up, I think is quite dangerous and irresponsible. But I digress. The energy markets are telling us that two of our overarching mental models are in fact in play. The fungibility of hydrocarbons is growing. Arbitrides is a powerful force. China flexibilized four to five million barrels a day of crude demand in a way that nobody thought was possible. Much more crude oil has been leaking out of the Middle East than people thought when the closure of the Strait of Hormuz took 20% of global oil offline, well, it turns out it didn't. And the net effect of all of this is that Iran is overestimating

its current leverage. Look, I think the war in Iran by the U.S. was a catastrophe for the U.S., which I still think exists. It might not be sovereign, but it exists, and it's still the way we analyze it. But Iran assumes that they close the street of Hormuz, they will catalyze. a global calamity, and that's just not true. And if that is their theory of victory, to borrow a phrase from a really good substack, we found during this called Policy Tenser, and I want to give him credit,

came out very early with a very prescient call on March 6th, that this was a strategic defeat for the U.S., inevitably so, and we agree. But as we wrote last year, in a piece called straight shooting, like the closure of the Strait of Ramos is a card that can only be played once because the beating heart of energy

is going to find its way to market. when you close down one blood vessel, other blood vessels form. And so one of the ironies, one of the things we're playing with, and we haven't wrote this up in a piece yet, lots of things don't make it to the mast head, is that oil staying below $90 is actually quite risky for a much greater war because Iran will have overplayed its tactical leverage, short, leverage on the straighter of Hormuzan become desperate and start blowing up the assets in the Middle East that underpin all of this, which I think they've been hesitant to do out of fear of triggering a nuclear response. Because there's a lot more nuclear weapons around the Middle East than people are modeling. Let's put it that way.

Wink, wink, wink, nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. And so, and there's always, of course, the Samson option, right? And so the fact that all of these workarounds have been so quickly found is surprising. consistent with an overarching mental model that the spice must flow. And lots of things I disagree with Scott Besson about, but nobody would argue that he isn't intelligent. And he was on TV over the weekend saying, you know,

we're going to wait, we're going to smoke them out. We're just going to wait, Trump himself signaling to CNN over the weekend. Like, yeah, we're just going to do the Syria model. We're going to siege Iran. They think they've got power over the Strait of Hormuz. We'll build underground pipelines. the spice is going to flow. Sure, there's still choke points.

Let's see. Let's see who could win a real war of attrition. Yes, we might be out of interceptors. But if Iran doesn't escalate, it's power dissipates. It's a ticking clock. And so ironically, the longer oil stays below 90, and I should say by oil, I mean Brent front months, because there's a thousand different prices for oil.

the longer that happens in global calamity because of Iran's chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz becomes a non-event, the more desperate Iran gets because it sees what it blees as the spoils of its initial victory, which I think is just undoubtedly what happened, slipping away from them. So that's probably more than you were anticipating for a relatively simple answer, but that's as of this morning how we're looking at the energy markets. There's a little bit of an interesting thread there, Simon. I'll toss to you this idea that Iran might escalate not having the levers that necessarily thought it had with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The first thing that immediately came to mind for me was the Hollywood ending that you've talked about before, that this could possibly be the reason to trigger an escalation that is the ultimate, the end of the war. But just pulling two things together, want to get your response. Yeah. So the reason that I believe oil isn't at the price that people are expecting is, it is. is because real capital knows that the deal is going to be done. And if you move past all the propaganda on every side,

you see bounded escalation that seems to correct itself with an element of short-term trader market manipulation. But throughout like the first phase, whenever the 10-year got to 4.5% or the 30% or the 30 year got to 5%, you had a taco. And most Tuesdays, that was happening. Because the bond market was deciding. And there is bounded escalation.

But real capital knows a deal is going to be done, is what the markets are telling me. And I think if this was potentially, or real money thought there was going to be World War III, and I think gold would be higher, I think oil would be higher, I think those would be moving in soon, And the bond markets are showing the stress that they should be sewing.

But that's at that, but that coincides with a realignment towards multipolarity, i.e. are in central banks trying to figure out what their strategy is with their, with their treasuries. Gold price is increasing and therefore gold becoming a bigger part of their reserve strategy than treasuries. And so you've got this accumulation of gold from foreign central banks, you've got the, you know, the cost of the US debt increasing, but then you've got this massive stimulus of growth in AI and everything. So, you know, you've got this growth that you can't have the average cost of the debt increasing above the, you know, the growth rate. So what I see in that side is a stimulus towards growth at all cost. It doesn't matter who it

affects, sacrifice the dollar if you need to, whatever you need to do. Don't allow anyone unnecessary to sell their treasuries because the bond market is deciding. But the oil and gold markets are saying there's going to be a deal. And so I believe, you know, when I look at everything, both geopolitically and looking at the markets, deal's going to be done. Now, how long it takes and how long you're bound those escalations in order to get the best deal. So if you look at what has Iran got left? There was Operation Economic Fury, which certainly impacted their currency valuation. It created inflation. I think it said like 80%. That's not sustainable. But the IRGC is very insulated. And there's the two-tier system

within Iran. You've got the government, the reformist, the pragmatist, call them whatever you want, that are mainly aligned with China. And then there's that massive dependency upon China. So China's been pulling its leverage at different stages. At certain stages, it's been purchasing, you know, the oil. At other parts, there was what can get through the straight of Hummese. And then there was, you know, the different things that we've been seeing with oil with China in terms of its strategic petroleum reserve.

And so to me, I see China having significant impact on the oil market because they knew this was coming. They built up the largest reserves in the world, just like there was movements before the Venezuela operation. Just like in Syria, things were allowed to happen. Because in my estimation, real power is negotiating. And then they're doing a show. And then that leads to an outcome where the next. phase of the negotiation is happening. And so for me, Iran and America have been negotiating for years.

Yeah, it's gone through different phases. But what it looks like to me is that Iran has decided that it's leverage over Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza is concluding. It's coming to an end. and in order to take those lever points away, which Iran had, then it's negotiating with those leverage points around sanction relief, and then what else has it got?

The economy is bad. Well, you've got quite a lot of a unifying force around the Iranian identity with the people. I think it's gone in the opposite direction. I think a lot of people were dissatisfied with their leadership, but as soon as this happened, there was a rally around the flag. So the thought of a, you know, 1953 Operation Ajax overthrow, I think, has gone as a Syria strategy. I don't think that exists.

But I see Iran, China, and power negotiating. And I think you will see around about the 17th of August or shortly after. what the deal looks like. Maybe oil is, maybe the striker for Moose is initially controlled by Amman, with Iran getting what they've agreed to. But there's a spectrum in that negotiation, but it's happening. And then there's other interests, there's Saudi interests, and Saudi is able to say, you know, all right, well, we need to resolve Yemen,

and we need to resolve these ports. I'm seeing resolution on a scale that I've never seen before in the Middle East. to me this is the Forever War coming to an end who has the relative power what are the PACs that are needing to be formed and the destruction for rebuild

and so whoever invests in Iran in that $300 billion which I believe will be the Gulf countries will determine the shape of this order what happens with the rebuild contracts of the bases that Iran has been destroying the U.S. assets. And then you look at the countries that were the leverage points, which is Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and those are all moving towards state

and integration of militia groups into army and state political solutions. So to me, what looks like chaos is a managed transition exit, of the US from the region, a recognition that the Middle East is now West Asia again because China's the most important player and everybody acting in their own self-interest to try and get the best deal, but it's always bounded escalation. And that's why the markets aren't reacting because real money knows that there's going to be a deal. Very interesting. Doomberg, I do want to get your thoughts on Bitcoin here. And I'm going to tag in a little bit. So Simon, you and I are going to do another podcast after this to go deep on some some technical infrastructure

problems that we've been having there and some chaos in Bitcoin as well as chaos and Bitcoin kind of governance and in a recent fork. And Duneberg, I would actually expect you might not even be aware of what has happened in Bitcoin over the last week or so because you haven't been on Twitter since I think 2003, something along those lines. If you're not familiar, just quickly laying out, there's a whole bunch of Bitcoin infrastructure that hacks and vulnerabilities were found. We had over 100 million in Bitcoin from the coal.

card, low entropy vulnerability, wiped. We had a contested kind of fork that happened just on Saturday here. And the two things just wanted to tag, and even with just that information, it was the first time you're hearing as one, I'm curious how you're interpreting, you know, Bitcoin's price mean Bitcoin even relative to gold right now and where you think things might be going. But then additionally, if there's any of that lateral thinking kind of instinct, for me, it definitely, if you're going to attack Bitcoin, definitely looked like it was being attacked, could all just be coincidence or as a result of the Chinese AI models, just in their recent capabilities. But I'd love to get a little bit of that lateral thinking in terms of the chaos

that's been in Bitcoin and what you're kind of seeing in the charts there as well. Yeah. So I've been peripherally aware. I guess I should confess at the outset that I'm a Bitcoin aware individual who happens to be a no-corner. my first private investment in equity that had something to do with Bitcoin, I think, was back in 2016. I took a screenshot of the price of Bitcoin at the time. I think it was like $195. But I've never actually owned a Bitcoin. I don't have a key, so I guess my wallet is of the physical variety.

I have a keen understanding of the attractiveness. of Bitcoin. The overlap and the Venn diagram of people who want to own Bitcoin and people who previously own gold is more extensive than the gold bugs would probably admit. They're an outlet of the same impulse, which is back to personal sovereignty, which is kind of how we started this whole thing. And so I understand it. I'm sympathetic to it.

I've written critically about shit coins and crypto, especially in the early days of Duneberg, which I think earned us a bit of a following amongst what I would characterize as Bitcoin maximalist, which I don't view as a derogatory term, at least when I use it. So that's a bit of a preamble. I think that's sort of like a disclaimer. I think Bitcoin, the reason why many gold bugs like me don't own it is because there's always been these background questions about the encryption, it's NSA software, quantum computing. Like when my American Gold Eagles arrive in the mail and I test them against my various devices that tell me whether or not it's a legit coin, I kind of can hold that and I put it in

a safe or I put it in a safe deposit box or I bury it at some remote property that I own and leave a treasure map for my kids if I ever succumb to a heart attack. And so I prefer the tangible. You know, it's sort of a Darwinian, the reptilian part of your brain, an instinct. Like if I salt my meat and hang it where I can see it, the lions won't get it. And so that's all to say that I've always in the back of my mind been concerned about the digital nature of

what is really a store of value. So last thing I would say and then we could talk about Michael Siler for 45 minutes of my bladder, let's meet. Is when you look at like money today, there is no money today,

is one of our arguments. So money has three functions, store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. There's no single entity thing that performs all free. Currency is not money. Fiat currency is wonderful as a medium of exchange.

It's a terrible store of value. Gold is not money. It is a very good store of value, but is a terrible medium of exchange. It's a decent unit of account, I suppose. And Bitcoin is not money because you can't use it to buy anything either. And so the attributes of Bitcoin that make it an attractive purchase for the sovereign individual is you could put an awful lot value in a thumb drive and slip through a border and nobody's going to know what you're carrying. I mean, that's really at its essence, one of the most attractive things about Bitcoin.

Now, anytime you say anything about the vulnerabilities of encryption vis-a-vis Bitcoin and not your keys, not your wallet and cold storage and, you know, you trigger a hornet's nest of hardcore, I don't know even what they are. one of the reasons we left Twitter is just like it's not worth it. So I just want to like sorry if that offends you, but like I do feel sort of validated

in the sense that I'm no expert in quantum computing or AI or advanced whatever. But I do have a graduate degree in one of the physical sciences and I'm capable of personally determining with very good odds whether the

coin that Mr. APM X delivered is money good. So I understand why people own it. I view the vulnerability exposed in the past few weeks as interesting, but also I'm kind of getting more to the school of thought of the sort of Ben Hunt, you know, in praise of Bitcoin with an exclamation point. Bitcoin has become a financialized product of Wall Street. BlackRock has a Bitcoin ETF, you know, to use the...

The boogeyman du jour. And so at the same time, most of my gold exposure is through sprat physical gold trust, and I'm counting on the fact that there's a vault somewhere in Canada that the government won't confiscate. You know, there's no risk-free way to port well through the generations, but to the extent that economic chaos, the great monetization event, and so on, our pressure points in the psyche of people aspiring to be sovereign. I can understand the attractiveness of Bitcoin,

which brings me to the simplest answer to your question is I think we're about to experience regime change where you just need to get long something. And if you're a fan of Bitcoin, then you better get long it because the U.S. dollar is going to become a lot weaker in the next five to 10 years as measured in whatever unit of account is your preference.

And I measure my net worth in ounces and acres and if you measure your net worth in Bitcoin, then, you know, get busy buying some. Simon, I want to get your response to that. And Doomburg brought it up. So let's tag in Saylor there. I think it's at least an interesting point in conversation. If his bladder can hold.

Yeah, I think, I think Doomburg brings up an honest conversation. And so as Bitcoiners, I think what's been happening over the last few years is, It should be very humbling for a Bitcoiner. But it hasn't actually taken away my conviction or thesis. There are parts of what's happening to Bitcoin that I see as very strategic attacks. But an honest conversation is required. Because the reality is that those that held their Bitcoin in custody, got wrecked in the last cycle.

And there are some people that held their Bitcoin in self-custody and discovered that a hardware wallet and a particular vulnerability on that hardware wallet led to them losing

for some people all their savings and which is heartbreaking. Yeah, friends are mine. Exactly. You know, but I guess

when I'm analyzing war, I always try to take the... I try to separate my role. And there's a humanistic, humanitarian person that analyzes what I want to happen and what is happening. And then I get to my analysis, and my analysis is the opposite of what I want to happen and what is happening.

And so sometimes you have to separate, right? And you... Me analyzing something is not me advocating, for something. My advocacy is the human spirit, the humanitarian side. My analysis is, well, it doesn't matter what I want, because I'm irrelevant, but here's what's happening. And here's what I think's happening. And sometimes I'm wrong, sometimes I'm not, but this is what I think's happening. And so the reason I say that is because on the humanitarian side, tragically, people lost their savings. I have direct experience.

for 15 years since I got involved in this of people getting rent and losing. And I've got direct experience of people that are deep in debt and are now billionaires. So I've seen the whole spectrum and the decisions that you make along that spectrum teach you something. So what happened to Coalcard,

the entire community and the entire sector is stronger and wiser as a result. And sadly, somebody had to take the hit for that. Because now everyone understands what entropy is, everyone's looking into what happened with Cold Card. And most importantly, Bitcoin worked exactly as it was designed. I'm not going to go deep into it, but this weekend, we had the polar opposite of the 2017 war,

and we learn what this means for Bitcoin. We're also seeing in real time what the centralization forces are, what that means. And so in Bitcoin, if you're having to have, having an honest conversation, Bitcoin does things that gold can't do. The ability for me to store my own value and send it to anybody, and if I want to use it as a median of exchange, it's deeply integrated into the fee at Rails. You can just go back to the old. You can have a Bitcoin debit card, and you can spend it anywhere. So you can use it if you want.

You have to go into those rails because most people aren't accepting it. That's real. and to have a fixed money supply. These are the three things that Bitcoin does. Now, we know for 17 years that we've learned Bitcoin has become stronger each one of those years. But to compare it to something that survived 5,000 years of attack is a dishonest conversation because the risk profile of gold and Bitcoin is completely different. And so I think the way that Duneberg was presenting it, there is a spectrum of risk within how to be sovereign. You either take a pile of cash and it just gets, it's the worst, you know, it's the worst store of value ever and you end up with nothing.

You end up with gold, but it's very hard to use as a median of exchange. You know, or you end up with Bitcoin and you've got to deal with these, these, these, these, these, these, these, these, risks around self-custody because you're in the digital sphere. And your job is to take your ratio of where you sit on that risk profile, because I don't know anything else as sovereign. Those are your three choices. Everything else is within the sphere of custodians. And you can even take those assets and hold them with custodians.

But the sovereign part of cash, gold, and Bitcoin is your only choice. So how are you going to manage that and manage those risks? Well, you just need to understand the assets, what they do and what they don't do, and pick your percentage. But Bitcoin does, I think, uniquely give you the ability to store your own money without, you know, own your own money without bank, send it without the government deciding what you can send before you send it. and take it anywhere knowing that the monetary policy is never going to change whatever a central bank does.

Now, if we custody it, the rules change. You know, because you're not storing your money when you custody it. You've got a Bitcoin IAU. And you can't spend it when you've got a Bitcoin IAU because somebody can say you don't meet the KYC source of funds and source of wealth requirements and we need to put a travel rule on top. And by the way, you're getting incredibly. wealthy, maybe I need to file a suspicious activity report.

I'll tell you what, why don't you just have a tokenized version of it, you know, or something like that? And what we're trying to discover now is can these centralizing forces change anything? And that's what we're discovering in real time. And that's what people need to understand if they engage in the Bitcoin community. but there is an attack called centralize as much as you can and see where you can change. And we'll find out whether that, who that they are, whether it's miners, whether it's economic nodes, whether it's developers, whether it's exchanges, whether it's Bitcoin Treasury companies, whether it's strategic sovereign reserves, whether it's legislation, regulation. all of those attack vectors are continually attacking.

And I think it's remarkable that Bitcoin's at $65,000 relative to what's happened over the last few months. And to me, there's only one choice here. The choice is, think of your entire life. What assets are you going to accumulate throughout your life? You're probably going to want to live somewhere that you own and is not a bank. probably going to want some gold. You might need a little bit of cash to meet your needs, but I personally believe that everyone wants to accumulate Bitcoin.

And so across your whole life, what percentage of your things that you buy are you going to be allocating towards Bitcoin? Because it solves a unique purpose. There's something else, nothing else solves. And we're going to find out whether it can be taken down by a quantum computer. or whether the centralizing forces can change anything. But so far, it's implied to me that they can't,

and there's a solution for everything. And every disaster needs to a stronger Bitcoin. I love it. Doonberg, I do want to get your thoughts at least quick there on Sailor in particular, and what Simon said. But I also just got a cookie throw out there because I do YouTube thumbnails for a living. I'm not sure if you saw Michael Saylor on Diary of the CEO, but I think I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw the like,

I made $15 billion dollars using chat, GPT. Like I was just so surprised. They just threw that right out there. Anyways, just wanted to tag that in to get your thoughts. Yeah, as a guest on many podcasts, I will say that once it is in the can, the guest has very little say in the thumbnail, as you know. Yep. And I remember once being on a pretty high profile podcast where the host kept asking me, what would it take for oil to get to 300? And I was saying it's practically impossible.

Then I kicked out one final solution. Well, if you pressed me, here's like a one and a hundred chance that oil could get to 300. And guess what made it to the thumbnail? Meanwhile, I was loudly bearish oil on every other podcast and in our writing. And so this thing triggered all manner of what the hells, you know. They're going to get that freedom of reach. Yeah, you know, look, we're all in the clicks business. I get it.

And so I would say I don't disagree with anything that Simon said. I do think as a sovereign person, you have to adjust the weights of your allocation against your goals. Do you want to bequeath your family with something? Do you, where are you on the nepotism scale? You know, I personally am strongly biased towards being a responsible provider. My personal allocation is I earn in Fiat. I live in the Fiat world. I spend in Fiat.

I save in real assets, which is the category that I would put Bitcoin, even though I don't allocate to Bitcoin. I have many real assets that I do allocate to. Golds, land, collectibles, watches, cars, pick your favorite. These things tend to do reasonably well as a store of value. and if you find entertainment from them

or you have some particular expertise you've developed all the better. And then I invest privately where I personally can, or my team and my partners can impact the outcome. So I don't own any stocks, which makes it easy for us to write about them under the Dumbart Mastead because I don't have any skin in the game,

which cuts both ways in this world. Some people believe you need to have skin in the game. Other people believe that you're just cocking your book if you do. And so, how one allocates your savings ratio. Because, again, I don't believe that Bitcoin should be viewed as an investment. I believe that Bitcoin is a store of value intellectually very similar to gold. Just a different manifestation of that impulse.

The reason why gold has 5,000 years is because computers weren't around 4,950 years ago. And so, you know, there is no alternative to gold that has the track record. by definition, it doesn't necessarily mean the track record will survive. Look, gold has its own challenges. We once wrote a provocative piece that upset many gold bugs, which is to point out that refineries are the big bank money laundering choke points where the government can exert control over the gold market. They've confiscated gold in the past.

And so there's no really escaping it. And I personally have decided that I'm going to defend my castle. staying in the U.S. I'm going to stay in my neighborhood. I'm going to, you know, when they want to get me, they'll have no shortage of reasons. There's no real defending against the blob. And so that's sort of my own personal ethos. And off we go. I hope I have a good credit score, social credit score, at least, while still maintaining some semblance. I know. Right. And so, you know, with some semblance of sovereign thought, at least, until they figure out the the neural link interface where they can police my thoughts directly, as opposed to indirectly via

algorithms. So, you know, then let's move to Saylor. I think he's, I've been fascinated by Michael Saylor. I know we've talked about him on the show before. He's a very smart guy, interesting character. I think the fluidity with which he is demonstrating his willingness to sell Bitcoin to prop up the experiment is a shrewd one, one I wasn't sure he'd be willing to take. And the normalization of his willingness to do that will come in handy in a true emergency. And so credit to him.

I know a lot, he's very controversial, especially in the gold community. I listen to the people trying to convince me that, you know, STRC is a Ponzi. It's not a Ponzi. It's not a Ponzi because he's committed to Zimbabwe the equity to support it. So you're basically, I don't know why people would want to buy the micro strategy equity, but the preferreds, which have a committed yield of 10%, no obligation, of course. And the preferreds in the debt are chopping away at the senior claims of the Bitcoin allegedly held in custody on sailors' behalf. And so I don't know why you'd want to own the common if you just go buy Bitcoin,

but if you want to own the preferreds, which have a promise of a dividend that can be paid by Zimbabwe and the equity, what do I mean by that? He can print common stock as much as he likes, even if he sells it for a penny and keep hitting that dividend. I'm not saying he will. It's not investment advice. It's yielding 10%, 12% for a reason. There's no free money. But it's not a Ponzi in a classic sense because he could just Zimbabwe the equity.

And so he has created a levered. instrument that does really well if the dollar collapses and to the extent that people are interested in getting exposure to that through the traditional rails because he has done a really good job of disclosing everything. It's all by the book. It's all totally legal, especially in this embodiment of the SEC. Last thing I would say, just to put it out there, I once had the chance to interview Michael Saylor.

Really? Yeah, and I blew it. I was a co-host of a podcast that had him as a guest, and the way it was structured was my co-host got the first half of the interview, and I got the second. And I tried to get him on record about how he cussed these micro-strategy's Bitcoin, and he was very evasive because I had a developing mental, model at the time that there might be some smoke to that question.

He's a slippery, he's a slippery guy, he's a very smart guy. And by the time it got to me, the interview had kind of fallen off the rails and it, it didn't land well. And I got a lot of feedback that I quote missed my opportunity. But I've never been able to fully extinguish that question. Like, where is micro strategies, Bitcoin, who custody is it? maybe he's disclosed it since and maybe it's like a big nothing burger. But anyway, that's my one brush with history where I superficially interacted with the main himself on a podcast many years ago.

Simon? Yeah, all right. A few things I'd say here. So firstly, as we like, we always want to talk about people. I tend to avoid people because I don't like, you know, I always just, talk about incentive and structures, and I think it's easier because it takes the edge off. And so what is Michael Saylor? Well, he's an executive of a public company, which means he has a fiduciary duty to his shareholders. At the same time, he has bondholders, he has different

financialization products, you know, whether it be structured products or whether it be preference shares and convertibles. And so he is a a guy that rose out of the controlled demolition of a lot of our sector. And as a executive of a public company, which has a very, you know, a deep history. And that deep history is around during the dot-com boom and bust, crashing his share price by over 90%, surviving all sorts of things. And out of the ashes, we have a company that offers intelligence services

to the government, the US government. A division that is called Strategy Government Services that employs a 26-year veteran of the CIA in charge of covert operations for the US government. Other people that work for a department of Homeland Security.

So an incentive structure that relies upon working with covert operations and intelligent and a board and chair accordingly. And suddenly we get Michael Saylor as a character that is enthrusted onto the Bitcoin community. Just like in 2017, there was no one called SBF. Suddenly there was SBF out of nowhere. sailor came out of nowhere in our industry. And he gave the best pitch for Bitcoin. And so everybody built a relationship with him.

And he kept buying Bitcoin. And so he had a massive premium to net asset value three and a half times because he transitioned from an intelligence company to Bitcoin strategic reserves and a Bitcoin Treasury company. So that's the background. How did he get into Bitcoin? Well, he bought Strategy the company, bought a domain from EOS. EOS was a company that was co-founded by Brock Pierce.

Brock Pearce was the conduit for Jeffrey Epstein in trying to infiltrate various people within the Bitcoin community, whether it be developers or whether it be investing in companies like Coinbase. I was one of those early, early, early investors in the private equity of Coinbase. I sold my shares when it went public. But what is Coinbase? Well, Coinbase is now a public company, and the US government holds their Bitcoin with Coinbase. BlackRock holds their Bitcoin with Coinbase. Strategy holds their Bitcoin with Coinbase and Fidelity. and Fidelity came into Bitcoin in 2014, the same year

the prop peers started these, and Epstein started some of these investments in Coinbase. And so follow the money and you've got an interesting story to follow. But what is strategy? Strategy is a vehicle that if it succeeds and it has succeeded to one of the highest performing share prices since adopting the Bitcoin strategy and significant liquidity

around structured products. So it is a vehicle that had a significant premium and now doesn't have that premium. And so it's very hard to sell the equity when the Bitcoin is worth more than the equity. And so what do you do? Well, you create other products.

And when you create other products, you now have a vehicle that if it succeeds, it would centralize as much Bitcoin as possible. If it could, it would issue as much equity, as much debt, in order to end up with 21 million Bitcoin, if it could. Or there's a point at which it stops. What is that point? Okay. So it is designed to sell securities and end up with as much Bitcoin as possible in Coinbase and Fidelity. The same place that the US government is putting there. Bitcoin. So, right, we have now a vehicle for trying to get as much Bitcoin in custody. It is a centralizing force, whether inadvertently, covertly, overtly, or whatever, it is now got a bunch

of financial products that create the ideal arbitrage vehicles for some of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world. Whether that be Citadel, whether that be Janestry, the same Jane Street that is an appointed person for the Bitcoin ETF that is issuing shares that you can arbitrage around the Bitcoin in Coinbase. And so what has been built, an industrial complex around Bitcoin whose specific purpose is to centralize as much Bitcoin as possible, create arbitrage vehicles, which very successful hedge fund managers

can utilize in order to get risk-free trades that impact the price of Bitcoin. At the same time, you have people like Cantor Fitzgerald that are trying to say, strategy did it, why don't you do it, Adam Back? Why don't you do it, Jack Mallor's? Why don't you do it, David Bailey? And why don't you also fold in your media company

and fold in your self-custody wallet and fold in your services for borrowing against your Bitcoin and solving your shop Blockstream that was accepting funding from Epstein as well? And so all I see is a set of incentives around trying to centralize as much Bitcoin as possible, and it ends up a Coinbase. And so these are centralizing nodes. Now, I don't want to get into anything else other than that.

That is what it is. It is an arbitrage vehicle, and it centralizes as much Bitcoin as possible. And if it could, at what point do they stop selling securities to buy Bitcoin? Well, now they sell some of that Bitcoin in order to meet the needs of the dividends. So they are now subordinate to their preference shares, their bondholders, their dividend commitment. And so the financial industrial complex of investors, shareholders, bondholders, preference shareholders, whatever, is who he works for. And Bitcoin survives, because right now about 70% of all Bitcoin is, in self-custody.

And all of those are doing the opposite. And so that is just as a Bitcoiner, you just need to be aware that that's the opposite side. And if you own strategy shares instead of Bitcoin, then you are making Bitcoin weaker. And if we hit a certain point, then if they get all 21 million Bitcoin, which will never happen because so many have been lost. but there's a certain point at which Bitcoin now faces a threat where Bitcoin doesn't do what it originally did if it all ends up in custody.

And that's the spectrum, that's the game. Now, fortunately, there are many resistance against that. And so if you are trying to preserve Bitcoin, you either sit on the side of trying to make as much money, or you are in the sovereign game. And if you're in the sovereign game, then you need to join the battle. And one of the enemies is those that are trying to centralize Bitcoin. So that's the game.

And decide where you sit, understand what it is. And it doesn't really matter what you think about Michael Sela. It's just what you do. And where you sit and where you're going to understand what it is. That's the incentives. Beautiful. I love it. Gentlemen, this has been absolutely fantastic.

I think we'll have to try and get you guys together again. I'm curious to see what happens after that August 17. and just even quickly, the idea of being in the sovereign game in the battle, I feel like we have like a team captain from Team Cold and a team captain from Team Bitcoin working together on that whole greater sovereign thesis. So I love it. So Duneberg's starting with you. Where can everybody go to check out your work? And tell us a little bit more about the book that's coming up. Yeah, Duneberg.com for everything. The book is still in the early phases. No, we just, the ink is still wet on the contract. But I'm very excited about it. Great publisher. Great agent. great concept, wildly different challenge. I've written, I've written and we've published,

you know, edited, published, defended 500 essays, but writing a 60, 70,000 word manuscript is an entirely different beast. Hopefully we're up to it. As it nears publication and I have to do my little dance, be happy to come on and promote it because we're not writing it for nobody to read it.

You know, come read my boring book is not a great pitch. Not the best one. We'll have you back on and make a good one. But duber.com for everything, we ejected a squatter a couple of years ago. That was a wonderful investment, a pricey one, but makes it easy for everybody listening to find out more. We are capitalists, and so we live and die by our subscribers. We have no corporate sponsorships or branding, which I think gives us some editorial freedom. back to the conversation about media at the beginning.

So anyway, I always appreciate the conversation. Nathan Simon, interesting part of you. I learned a lot. And thanks for having me on, guys. You're very welcome. Simon. Tell us about your upcoming book and where can everybody go to find you.

Yes, I'm mainly on X at Simon Dixon 21, but I've been taking a break to write the book. And I got a YouTube channel with Simon Dixon 21. And in terms of the book, I'm on chapter 20 of 21. and then I've been trying to write it for six years, but I decided to just go completely cold and get it written. So it is going to happen this time. This is my fourth promise.

And yeah, so the book is called Game of Money. There's three parts. The first is understanding the game. You know, the second part is understanding the rules. And the third part is winning the game. And the subtitle is from subordinate to sovereign. and as at the country level, the business level and the individual level. If you enjoy this episode with Doomberg and Simon Dixon,

hit that like button and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on Part 2.