TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #334: Energy, food, ESG, and Bitcoin with Doomberg

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Doomberg to discuss the unfolding energy and food crises, the nature of ESG, and bitcoin. Follow Doomberg on Twitter Read more from Doomberg Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl CrowdHealth

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this RIP, RIP 334 of TFTC. I sat down with Doomberg, Doomberg, talk everything from energy, food, and Bitcoin, a Bitcoin skeptic, like not the most ardent Bitcoin skeptic. I think he's pretty close to coming around. It's a very civil conversation, which we need more of as we explain toward the end of this rip. I think you guys are going to love this one. It was brought to you by good friends at Unchained Capital. Unchained Capital is here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model while giving you financial services for your Bitcoin as well. They help you eliminate single points of failure by getting you into their collaborative custody product,

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of $99 a month for the first six months. Use the code TFTC or TFTCBTC. Change it up. them. I don't know if that's, try TFTC if that doesn't work. TFTC, BTC, the first thousand members are going to receive a discounted membership of $99 a month for the first six months. That's a deal. Okay. How does it work? You pay a monthly contribution in dollars into your health funding account. This is a custodial account held by a well-respected Bitcoin custodian. So you put dollars in, they have a portion in dollars, and then they have a Bitcoin custodian

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They really don't actually pay for anything, at least in my experience at the end of the day. And I'm very comfortable with the way CrowdHealth is set up and I am going to be using it going forward because I think it makes more sense. Incentives are better aligned with CrowdHealth. You guys should think about it too. Join CrowdHealth.com slash TFTC. Enjoy this rip with Doomberg. I always want to say Bloomberg when I'm saying it, but the play on words, they got gone. Doomberg, Bloomberg, Doomberg. It was an incredible rip. Warning. He's not an art and Bitcoin-er yet. We're going to get there though, freaks. Enjoy. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to TFTC.

It's your boy, Marty Bent. Sitting down with a very special guest today. I'm very excited for this. I've been doing more research than I have on this particular guest. I'm sorry to all the other guests who have come before you, Doomburg, but I think the content you and your team are writing is extremely high signal, and I wanted to be well prepared for this interview. and reading your posts is extremely enlightening.

Your posts are well-written and most importantly, they have very high signal information in them across a broad spectrum of topics. So I want to thank you for joining us today. Did we lose him? We might have lost him. I have to ad-lib here. oh it looks like you're in the green room

Doomburg we've got to let you in do you have to let him in Doomburg if you're if you can hear me you might have to turn your mic on in settings should have troubleshooted this this is the first time he's using um ecam I'm going to shoot him a dm

right now the feds don't want to hear what he has to say we'll see if he comes back oh there he is we good to go now can you hear me hi there

there we go can you hear me yes sir somehow i got put into a green which is kind of ironic considering i'm a green chicken i could hear you the whole time but i dropped off and signed back in such as such as life for live broadcast but a real pleasure to be here and appreciate the opportunity oh well again like i said your your content has brought me and a lot of the people in the bitcoin space i don't know you're somewhat of a cult favorite in the bitcoin space particularly in the realms of energy and ESG because in the Bitcoin space, obviously Bitcoin mining uses a lot of energy and it's been villainized. And I think the way you've been writing about energy markets, particularly as we roll into this global energy crisis that's unfolding

due to many factors, policy or between Russia and Ukraine and a somewhat political unwillingness to actually bring about energy security i'm very excited to have you on to talk about this topic particularly but also we'll get in to esg evs bitcoin of course you've written a couple pieces on coinbase and micro strategy in recent weeks and um i think there's there's a lot to talk about today you know marty it's funny because um people have interpreted many of our pieces in the crypto space, which I understand is different than Bitcoin, as we're critical or self-proclaimed no-coiners. And so I was happily surprised when you invited us to come on and immediately agreed to do

so because we have probably a little bit more nuanced view on the situation than most and have tried to write things sort of impartially and consistent with what we believe is going on, but always open-minded for a friendly debate and to try to learn more. And so it was really great that you're having us on. And again, like I said, really happy to be here. I mean, we like having skeptics on. You can't just live in a bubble and have an echo chamber. Even though the echo chamber has its values to some extent,

it's important to get outside perspectives on Bitcoin particularly, check our priors and really steel man what we're trying to do here. well you know right right is where the wrong is found and so if you can't have a friendly debate with somebody and learn something and maybe even change your mind um then what's the point exactly so let's start with energy though again like i said you've been writing incredible posts on the landscape of the energy sector and its effect on prices and everything going on in the world right now, how dire is the situation in energy markets? Would you describe it as dire? Where are we right now in your mind? It's pretty bad. So I would start by taking a step back and

saying one of the key themes of our writing from the very beginning and one of the motivations for us in creating Doomberg is we come from the energy sector. The team has decades of experience in heavy industry, in the commodity sector. We have a pretty detailed understanding of how physics and life interact. And we have observed with some alarm how our key policymakers and influencers have lost touch with physics and don't have a direct understanding of how their decisions are impacting real people. My personal background is I'm a PC scientist by training, and I spent a couple of decades leading research teams. And most of my focus was on energy topics, both traditional and renewable. Spent a lot of time, for example, working on solar technology.

And we were seeing this diversion from the fundamental laws of physics and really bad outcomes for innocent victims in society. And so our overarching theme of the energy aspects of the pieces that Dumbert writes is that energy is life. Literally, your standard of living is defined by how much heat you get to waste um this is a concept we've explored multiple times and most recently we had a webinar with our pro subscribers where we over a period of 90 minutes walked through sort of our fundamental mental model for the world and had an extended q a on it but um if you constrict the supply of energy and 85 of the total energy used to augment human standard of living today is derived from fossil fuels um you are literally destroying life and

And we're seeing that now after several years of, I would say, catastrophic underinvestment in primary energy development. There's just less energy to go around. There's less life to spread. The wealthiest amongst us are going to pay the clearing price, which is going to export significant inflation to those that can't afford it. And we're seeing something that we predicted all the way back last October in a piece that's called starvation diet, that the world is going to go through an epic famine and hundreds of

millions of people are going to die because of policy blunders on the part of Western elites that have no true connection to the fundamental laws of physics and how their idiotic decisions are going to manifest in deep human suffering. And so that's, you know, wish there was a cheerier answer to your first question, but that's the reality on the ground. That's what we've been documenting that's what we're beginning to see and it's really kind of um we wish we were wrong i mean it's important to start on this focus i think people need to understand the gravity of the situation there's very serious things happening in the world right now as it pertains to energy and food and the hens are coming home to roost no pun intended since you're a green

chicken but uh i mean just in the last week alone we had india say that they're going to stop exporting their wheat we had sri lanka they're about to run out of petrol they're already going through a food crisis obviously what's going on in russia and ukraine is constricting delivery of some of their wheat exports and china has a lion's share of the world's wheat that they're holding up in in inventory as well um so so they claim that's one of the big mysteries is how much of that is real and some of the behavior of the chinese communist party in the past few months has been pretty alarming and one wonders what's really going on over there it's a pretty opaque society as you know what particularly about their actions is alarming to you the um ongoing zero

zero covet um you know they call it dynamic zero covet and the shutdown in shanghai and we know many people in china and spend a lot of time there during our careers and um a lockdown is baffling it is um destructive it is crushing to global supply chains that's it's underappreciated the full wave you know the waves are yet to flow out across the world i suspect in the next few weeks and months we're going to see a series of really odd shortages of things that we take for granted today because of what's going on in china it's it's a real catastrophe a calamity um of human suffering that is seems like an own goal and and i i can't say that i fully understand it i'm assuming you're aware of what's going on in cities like shanghai um over the past few weeks and um

it's really really bizarre i can't explain it um tried i've studied it a lot tried to understand And I don't have a good answer, but it's in a time of global shortages, you know, that you referenced their wheat supply. Let's see. Drop out again. No, I'm here. Let's see. Let's see if it's real. They're behaving in very strange ways.

And our radar gets peaked any time we see such bizarre behavior. Yeah. So it almost seems like, I don't know, you have many different views on all this. Is it a controlled demolition? Is it a deep economic attack via China and others who would like to become the superpowers of the future trying to destabilize the West? And you take into consideration the energy policy that has been pervasive here in the United States and in Europe, more particularly over the last couple of decades, where these countries opt into becoming less secure using the specter of calamitous climate change as the reason to drive towards these unreliable, unstable, more expensive energy resources in favor of reliable and abundant

resources that we're just refusing to take out of the ground and deliver to market. Yeah, it could be as simple as President Xi is isolated and has no idea what's going on on the ground or is, you know, like, how did Stalin happen? How did Chairman Mao happen? We could be living through one of those right now. So it is certainly exacerbated by the global energy crisis. But there's something very deeply disturbing going on in China today. And I don't think that it's sort of, as one would say on Wall Street, fully priced in. yeah there's it's going to um the the sort of circling waves uh outflowing from the rock hitting the pond uh you know it's going to wash up upon our shores here pretty soon and you hear

people use the phrase gradually then suddenly a lot in many different contexts we talk about in bitcoin when potential hyper bitcoinization will happen gradually then suddenly it seems like we may be reaching a suddenly point in global markets and this energy and food security like how quickly Do you think this could unravel? You mentioned a few weeks. We'll feel some effects of the supply chain disruption out of China, again, going back to India, closing their wheat exports, Sri Lanka going through a very dire situation. How quickly do you think that could spread and does it come to the West? I think the fall harvest in the Western Hemisphere is going to be an important period of time. I think we're seeing the early warning signs of crisis. We wrote a piece that was pretty impactful called Farmers on the Brink a couple of weeks ago, where we predicted the global famine once again and outlined.

We had surveyed with pretty extensive contacts in the agricultural sector, And we had surveyed our American contacts to get an understanding of what was going on with the inputs into farming from a cost perspective. And then playing that forward to, sure, in the U.S. we'll be able to pay that price, but farmers overseas aren't going to be able to. And we're seeing that play out. And one of the things we predicted all the way back in October in Starvation Diet is that a cascading series of protectionist policies would be implemented that would eventually lead to economic vapor lock. We're seeing that today with Indonesia banning the exports of palm oil or India banning the exports of wheat, the war in Ukraine and the impacts on Belarus, who is a major producer of potash, the ports along the Black Sea being closed. We in the West have been lulled into, I would characterize it as a false sense of security. What I believe will happen is we will pay any price. We will bail out farmers who are actually having a fantastic bumper year financially this year because U.S.-based farmers are financially sophisticated, able to pre-buy their fertilizer, hedge their crop yields.

all these sort of sophisticated financial tools that aren't accessible to the marginal farmer or the median farmer around the world, makes this year especially lucrative for U.S. farmers. But for those farmers that weren't able to do that, won't be spreading fertilizer. We're going to see substantial challenges. And so in the U.S., we will bail out any farmers in trouble. We will give stimulus to those less economically fortunate. it. And we won't see major food shortages here in the US, although I would say the baby formula shortage has certainly caught our attention. But most importantly, since we're

going to be setting the clearing price, we're going to be exporting a massive amount of inflation. And so the riots that we saw in Peru, what we're seeing in Sri Lanka, like you mentioned, we suspect that that is just the opening salvo of a series of rolling crises around the world. Turkey, for example, as most people aren't talking about it, but Turkey is undergoing substantial hyperinflation almost today. It's certainly inflation that is out of control. And one of the things that we've preached is that countries that are net energy importers

are the ones that are going to suffer the most in a time of an energy shortage. And so the currencies of countries that are net energy importers, like Japan and Korea and the EU, are collapsing. And the currencies of the countries that are net primary energy exporters, like Russia or Norway, are strengthening. The U.S. is kind of balanced.

We produce about as much as we need. There's some imports and exports at the margin, but they kind of net out. And so the U.S. dollar is sort of, as a benchmark against those currencies, doing just fine. But if you look at Canada as an energy exporter, currency is strengthening. Australia as an energy exporter, currency is strengthening. like we're finding out the true essence of life uh in a period of energy abundance then the value-add economies do well and those currencies appreciate but we're in that we're in a deep energy crisis today do you think this energy crisis is going to wake people up you think it's going to begin

to have the silent majority stand up and say all right maybe this transition to unreliables and and this unwillingness to drill for oil and gas isn't a wise decision. We should be drilling more and securing our grid systems and our delivery systems and making sure we're more robust. Because the whole climate hysteria, I don't know how you would describe it, but I think people have been psy-optic to believing this Malthusian view of the world that humans are bad, energy is bad. And as you described in the beginning, energy is extremely important.

And for some reason in the 21st century, humanity, having gotten this far, has decided to make an energy regression and really invest in less reliable and most importantly, less energy dense sources like wind and solar in favor, excuse me, in disfavor of oil and gas and nuclear to that extent too. You wrote a piece on nuclear recently, and that's another thing that really perplexes me in terms of energy policy is why has nuclear been so demonized when it's the most energy-dense source of fuel that we have on the planet? So you can't be a serious environmentalist and be anti-nuclear. And this is a point that we make stridently in many of our pieces, which we just, just any environmentalist that is opposed, anybody who claims to be an environmentalist and is opposed to nuclear power is de facto anti-human because you literally cannot generate sufficient primary energy to create enough life abundance. and what will happen is the rich will get enough and the poor will die and so it's not a serious

policy so i would say that you know from a climate perspective we take it as an axiom that we would like to generate as much human abundance standard of living inducing goodness divided by the minimum amount of co2 emissions that we can make and if you have that as your framework as your prism that both count, not just reducing emissions, but also increasing the standard of living of as many humans on the planet as we can in an equitable way, then you can't seriously be opposed to nuclear power. And there's a place for renewables. There's a place for fossil fuels, and there's a huge place for nuclear. You have to do it synchronized and intelligently. We've put out probably three separate pieces now detailing what we would do if we were in charge of the

world. And to the extent that people have read those and maybe we've changed a few minds, that's great. But by and large, it is going to be unavoidable. We are not producing enough primary energy today to maintain the current global standard of living, let alone increase it and spread it more fairly. And this income inequality, as it's called, is really energy inequality. And once you stir up the populace, it's not clear that you will get a better result. You're just going to get a different result. And so I would say that we've let things go too far. And if you look at what's going on in the early stages of this, what we have called global famine,

it's not clear that a good outcome is on the other side. Anytime you enter into a singularity, it's impossible to know what's going to happen on the other side of it. We could see massive regime change. We could see significant wars. It's just when you read history, in times of energy scarcity, wars happen. That's just the way it goes. Energy is life. And when you're faced between potential death and fighting for life, people choose to fight.

And that's what's going on. You can't draw the direct line, but correlation in this case is causation. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty simple math. People get desperate. They get hungry. they're going to go seek food and if somebody else has it and they don't that's going to lead to direct physical conflict and direct physical conflict is negative for the future production

of food and so you can end up in a pretty negative spiral right disorder is spontaneous it's one of the key elements of the doomberg philosophy and um you know on the path from abundance to starvation is riot it's a pretty heavy situation other than that things are great well that's so that's one thing that frustrates me is i completely agree with the thesis that you've outlaid and that you've been writing about for over a year now and it seems very obvious to anybody who has any critical thinking skills and can read second third order project second third fourth order effects and yet we have this political class globally that It seems like they're just handcuffing humanity where we're beholden to a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats who really don't understand the intricacies of the energy sector and why it's important.

And they prefer to virtue signal for votes over actually get things done and make the world a better place in the context of regime change. Again, it should bring a lot of disorder. It's already bringing a lot of disorder. do you think it leads to regime change in the sense that private industry just says all right we're not going to listen to you anymore we're going to begin drilling we're going to begin delivering this and you have a collapse in confidence in the government and people just start getting shit done by themselves because that's what it seems like right now people are just waiting on permission permission permission and i think the point has gotten to such an extent

where we cannot wait for that permission anymore. It is. I wish I could say that I were more optimistic in that regard. Until the very top of our political leadership in the Western Hemisphere gets serious, we have a lot more pain to suffer, is one of the themes of some of our tweets, for example. When you live in a cocktail party circuit,

the hors d'oeuvres just show up. you know the the connection the raw connection between you know life death and energy is foreign to you it's so foreign to you that um it's only natural that you assume that your platitudes matter and they don't matter actually and we've said this a fair number of times which is you know in the battle between platitudes and physics physics is undefeated and um there's literally no circumventing fundamental laws of the universe, which are disorder is spontaneous. It takes energy to impose order on your local environment. Your standard of living is literally defined by how much order you get to impose on your local environment. To do that requires wasting heat,

which means harvesting energy. And the integral of our ability to do that divided by the number of people, defines the global sort of standard of living. And we've attacked supply, and we have made bureaucratic red tape a key hindrance. We have a whole army of litigators whose job it is to slow down such projects. Our geopolitical enemies have no such constraints, which is why we allowed ourselves to be in a situation where Putin would feel emboldened to roll into Ukraine because he had all of the energy cards in Europe. China has taken over the key ingredient supplies for the renewable supply chain and has leveraged

access to cheap coal and slave labor to put similar Western corporations out of business, and we just allowed this to happen. So we're led by unserious people. And unless and until we get serious politically quickly, we're much closer to Sri Lanka than people in the Western hemisphere would like to believe. And this is not just because we're doing it. No, I mean, just today, this morning,

Janet Yellen come out and prove that she was completely disconnected from reality, saying that the average American household isn't feeling the pains of inflation yet,

which is just... It reminds me of Prince Charles reading from a gold throne a few weeks ago. I don't know if you saw that. I don't know. I missed that one.

You know, vowing to fight the devil of inflation while sitting on a gold throne, quite literally. I mean, you couldn't make it up. If you look up out of touch in the dictionary, literally in full costume, sitting on a gold throne, Marty. Yeah.

Well, this is where we can bring Bitcoin. That's why I like Bitcoin so much. Again, I've been studying Bitcoin, enamored by it for nine years now, which is hard to believe. Almost nine years. And that's what drew me to it. I'm 30 years old. I was a child of the great financial crisis. In 2008, I was a senior in high school and really saw how messed up that whole collapse and then the bailouts were. And I guess you could say that radicalized me to a certain extent as I went into college, found Bitcoin in college. And to me, going back to like, all right, when are we just going to stop listening to these people? That's the future that Bitcoin presents to me.

we can opt out of this madness and start coordinating under a Bitcoin standard and not be beholden to the current predominant political apparatus which really uses the money printer as the core of its power and its ability to lead us down these stray paths. So our relationship with Bitcoin is an interesting one

And we have written some pieces that are perceived as skeptical. And let me lay out our view, and then I'm happy to discuss it with you. Our view is money is literally at the heart of the power, as you alluded to, of these admittedly corrupt regimes. We live in corrupt societies. Let's be very clear. So in many ways, with the true Bitcoin maximalists, we have a lot of overlap in our agreement. And the crypto world is a different world, of course, than the sort of Bitcoin maxis, as we would call them.

We totally sympathize with the desire for a store of value that is outside of the reach of corrupt government power. Our belief is that people in this space underestimate the counterpunch that's coming from that corrupt economic power. And that unless and until you can transact in Bitcoin for the essentials you need to have a high standard of living, then Bitcoin, like gold, is not truly money. It is a potential store of value. So, for example, instead of Bitcoin, I personally hold a hodl, physical gold coins, anticipating that I am preserving the future purchasing power for my children. An ounce of gold today is $1,800 and change, and what $1,800 buys you today will be what

that gold coin could buy my children in 20 years. That's how I look at it. I understand the store of value mindset. The skeptical aspects of our writing in crypto is just the sheer volume of grift in the space and the shocking willingness to circumvent US law. still are a country of loss and um and the radical underestimation of of what's going to happen when the regulators get serious about it because it is as you have said correctly a direct assault on their power base and we expect the counter punch that's sort of the main thesis of what we write

about as it pertains to bitcoin yeah the crypto space like you mentioned is filled with a bunch of grifters that are opportunistic parasites i would argue who are just trying to get a quick buck and play to the novel nation state of this technology and there's these buzzwords and marketing to take money from other people on on the hype of potential technological innovation that they proclaim um whereas bitcoin as you rightly pointed out is more focused on the sound money store value and via the lightning network and second layers working on making it a very viable medium of exchange allows you to transact in in bitcoin seamlessly um at low fee cost and yeah it is as a bitcoiner um who many would describe as bitcoin maxi i don't like that term

because it was coined by vitalik buterin um to try to grift people to ethereum saying that that bitcoin um is slow dumb and old and this boomer coin but it is frustrating being in consider like having bitcoin thrown into the whole crypto basket when if you really understand what bitcoin is trying to accomplish as opposed to the the crypto universe they're very different things bitcoin is very focused and principled on actually bringing sound money and having a sufficiently distributed system so that it can survive that counterpunch you're describing that is coming and bitcoiners are expecting it as well it's something we talk about on the show a lot like what is the counterpunch what's it going to look like when's it going to come is a very uh reoccurring topic

on this show particularly and can i ask you a question in this regard because it's something i actually um would love to understand how you would sort of frame it but um there's the value of Bitcoin and then there is the current price of Bitcoin. We have argued that the grift is impacting the current price of Bitcoin. Do you see it that way? You can't separate what's going on with Heather and the current mark-to-market US dollar quote unquote price of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has swung wildly as I've been in and around the sector since long ago.

We wrote a piece where we described investments we made in the Bitcoin space back in 2016. But the current price of Bitcoin is undoubtedly tied to some aspects of the grift and the hype. And I wonder, what is your reaction to that statement? Because I understand when people critique our work in our comments or on Twitter, there's a sleight of hand, Bitcoin can't ever go away, which is different than the current quoted price of Bitcoin is in line with its value. What is your response to that?

I mean, yeah, when it comes to, so are you alluding to like Tether driving the price of Bitcoin or something like that? Yeah, the Tether dominating the float and various high-profile bad actors might be running what we would call a fiat pilfering machine where they swing the price of Bitcoin around

and they induce people to use leverage and their fiat that they deposited to go buy their Bitcoin in the first place is pilfered from them because they're making leveraged trades and they just assume like, oh, I made a bad trade. That's why I lost my quote unquote money.

I think there's a whole different, there's a community of true believers and then there's a community of speculators. And then there's an overlay of grifters on top of that looking to take as much money from the speculators as possible. And that's the real weakness or the real threat of the ecosystem

that is sometimes unacknowledged. And I was just curious. Yeah, no, I don't think there's any doubt that there is some sort of price manipulation i think that's driven just by the the sheer size of the market right now it's much easier to manipulate of course you have these actors these grifters these people these speculators looking to arb um the relatively low liquidity and the price movements that that can incite in bitcoin um big players coming in to sort of play that game i don't think tether is driving the price i think tether historically if you look

at what happens bitcoin price goes up and then more tethers printed because there's a demand for bitcoin and people want to get in and trade it and tether like it or not i know there are laws in the us but for the speculators who don't care about the laws tether allows them to get around that via their the gray area that they play in and the nature of that particular token uh on this show we've always told people don't mess with tether it's not worth it the value is bitcoin stay humble stack sats is something that we say week in and week out here um and with that being said like you can't stop people from using that stuff it may affect not even only tether there's many other ways to manipulate the price of bitcoin and yes it's probably happening but at the end of

the day like you said that you mentioned like the value of bitcoin the network i mean what that value is driven by utility that is unique to bitcoin in the sense that the network enables you to make transactions that are literally impossible the other any other monetary network um outside of the bitcoin network and um yeah so their cryptocurrencies are similar but they're inherently centralized due to the nature of how they're launched and how they've been gamed since their launch. And so, yeah, I mean, I do think we're in a transitionary period. And again, going back to the fact that Bitcoin is still in its nation stage and there will

be this fuckery with the price to some extent with whales coming in and trying to move into one direction or the other to scalp an arbitrage play. But over the long run, what really matters is the distribution of the network, the decentralization of the network. Are people running nodes? How distributed is mining? Is it actually facilitating peer-to-peer transactions? And that part of the Bitcoin network is only getting stronger by the day. And so the inherent utility is undeniable. Maybe that value isn't reflected in the price quite yet.

But when push comes to shove, when you have this global energy crisis, this global food crisis, you have central banks seizing funds, you have Canada freezing people's bank accounts, people are naturally going to turn to Bitcoin because it's going to be the only option for a lot of people who are beholden to the whims of these central banks and politicians who don't want people to use their money in a certain way. And when that momentum builds and people are literally forced into Bitcoin because it allows them to make the transactions that despots don't want them to make, you'll have a liquidity profile that makes it much harder to manipulate the price, as some people may be doing it today. That's the way I view it, at least. I have a slightly nuanced view, which is you can't separate money from the surrounding legal framework that defines it as money. And we have tweeted with some controversy that solution to U.S. dollar tyranny is not a different currency, it's a different government. I guess you would say that if you can establish yourself as the network effect solution, then governments have to respond to Bitcoin as opposed to what we would say is, you know, this is all great, except if the government just decides to arrest anybody who owns Bitcoin, you're going to get arrested. yeah that's i mean they could certainly try to make that move but again we live in the social media age and uh again so i think we're hitting this very interesting inflection

point that's a bet i'm willing to take i'm willing to get arrested for bitcoin i do believe it is an imperative if we want to live in an abundant peaceful future and i'm willing to die on this hill maybe it sounds crazy but like again you know this weird inflection point where we have the energy crisis the food crisis you have a dementia riddled president here in the united states and you're you're seeing a collapse in confidence in these institutions and i believe we're reaching an i am spartacus moment here in the west where the the emperor wears no clothes and when push comes to shove people are hungry they're unable to put gas in their cars they're able to go to work like the government up to this point has been a very scary uh

opponent in this game if you will but i do think if people are hungry they're unable to put gas in their cars they're not able to work and their money is not buying anything then the collapse and confidence in the institutions that led to these problems is going to happen rather quickly and the prospect of government shutting down what is essentially the greatest lifeboat we have out of this system is just going to be untenable. People will hit the streets. I don't want it to get violent, but if they were to try to bring violence into the game, I think it would be met with violence at some point in the future because people are just going to be pushed too far to the edge. You know, I don't think there's much difference between your beliefs and my strong

support of the second amendment and my willingness to own physical gold it's all just head it's all a hedge against edge cases um you know and um and i think somebody's gonna clip this and be like marty's inciting violence well i don't want this at all like no i'm not saying you are either but people bitcoiners don't like saying like hey it's like the thing you don't say but it's like we have to recognize the situation here and i do say this because i think it's important to really highlight the potential down the road. Think about second, third order effects. Like, hey, if it goes here, it is going to get violent. It does not need to get violent. There are ways in which Bitcoin can actually help the U.S. dollar. You want to talk about curbing social unrest.

Think about the potential of Bitcoin continues to do what it has done historically in terms of compound annual growth rates. Imagine going to public pensions and beginning to restructuring them with bitcoin uh and the us government actually opening the door say all right maybe we should fix these liability problems we have bitcoin as a tool to do that like it could actually you can make the argument it could prevent the likelihood of social unrest in the future and it's something that the government should actually really look into if it if it does really care about preventing this unrest that is inevitable if we keep going down this path it doesn't seem like they're too interested in preventing it if the evidence would seem they're interested

and provoking it, you know, it's, it's, um, it's a pretty, and again, what, once you sort of get into that, you know, event horizon, singularity type outcomes, it's, it's really impossible to predict what, uh, what, what, what the other side will look like. And each individual participant in the society, um, has to figure out how best to hedge against those edge cases. So, so for me personally, for example, in addition to physical gold, I'm a big believer in investing in our personal skills so that the present value of your future earnings is an inflation-resistant asset. I'm a firm believer in personal preparedness. I believe that prosperity starts at home. I'm all for increasing my personal working capital to hedge against such edge cases to

the extent that I can. And a firm believer in the Second Amendment, like there's no country in the world could occupy the United States of America. I mean, just forget about it. It's not going to happen, right? And so, you wrap it all together, dwelling on the edge cases can lead you down some rabbit holes. But at the same time, I'm sort of a defensive pessimist. I like to think about those edge cases, um, develop a reasonable plan to hedge against them and then, um, you know, go forward and lean into the current debates culturally and philosophically and politically. Um, knowing that at least the foundation from which I'm leaning into those debates is sound. No, I completely agree. I mean, me personally, I'm, I'm from Philadelphia from the Northeast was living in

New York before the pandemic. I made my family down here to Texas, seeing the writing on the wall and trying to live physically in a, in a location that I think would be more stable, uh, than, than other parts of the country. Uh, I think Texas because of the love of the second amendment down here and the, um, the sort of self sovereignty ethos that, that lives in Texans is, is something that I, uh, really respect and want to live in an area where there's a lot of, uh, like-minded people thinking this way i've got freezers full of of meat preparing for the potential um uh food crisis i've got my second child on the way in a week now and so we've been buying congratulations yeah thank you we've been buying formula preparing good idea for that

potential uh shortage to compound and yeah and again like going maybe i'm an idealist so like you're and i have the pessimist and the doomer mentality in me as well but i also i don't know why but i also have this like idealist optimistic view too and that's part of the reason why i've started this media company to educate people about bitcoin and these macro themes that are playing out as to try to front run or not front run but like to get this information to as many minds as possible because i i do believe that if you can change minds uh and we can begin to fight back against this impending doom that is being brought onto us by by these idiotic governments and that's really the genesis uh formation of doomberg actually is to get into the

get into the arena of ideas to express and articulate our beliefs politely um one of our philosophies is that we will listen to any authentically held belief politely expressed and i do think that one of the shames of of social media and i would say to be totally fair one of the challenges with the bitcoin community is the vitriol with which um people are attacked if they express a dissenting view of of the technology or their future potential or the price of bitcoin and um we have experienced a lot of that um most of the pieces we write about crypto in general and occasionally bitcoin in particular are really edge cases that define sort of the interface between the u.s dollar system and bitcoin and

regulatory uh matters and the way the world used to work and um for example our pieces about michael saylor are actually not anti-bitcoin they are pointing out the fact that this man has created a potential uh hum you know cascading cell yes yeah and um and at some point he's going becomes systemic potentially you know to the bitcoin to the current price of bitcoin which as you say you don't really care about but many people who are drawn into this um do speculate with dollars they you know they can't afford to lose and and so um i would say like the vitriol that we receive for some of our more critical pieces is is off-putting and does a detriment to the underlying philosophy that you are expressing that i respect because it is authentically

believed and politely expressed well that's what yeah i mean i i've participated in the vitriol at some points in the past more recently more recent years just having had discussions like this with very smart individuals like yourself we've had ben hunt on we've had a lot of skeptics on and i do think that vitriol particularly on twitter that's the other thing too like twitter isn't all of Bitcoin. There's so many quiet Bitcoiners or people who just lurk on Twitter who are very much more even keeled

than your average tweeter online. I do think there is some value in, so I guess what I would say is what you're witnessing on the vitriol from these individuals on Twitter, i think it's um it's driven by uh the inter-bitcoin versus crypto war so that for years you've had this bitcoiner bitcoin only versus like the the crypto scam world and that's been like a very long fought and vitriolic uh back and forth between those who are pushing the crypto scams

and bitcoiners who are like no you're confusing everybody and you're taking attention away from something that that we should really be focusing on and is our only way out and then that permeates uh to the no-cointer world as well where people are so battle fatigued that they just begin flat this is the way i read it at least um and i've tried to stop doing that um and being i will be a bit uh i will joke around with people and tease people but i'm not going to say I'm not going to say that you're a terrible person or anything like that well it's bad for your adoption

if only the early adopters are pure enough and I have as we have gone through this journey the we have probably underestimated the war between the bitcoin

puritans I would say in the altcoin world and the layer of grift that is attached to the latter And so it's just fascinating to watch. I read Lynn Alden's most recent piece at post-Luna UST collapse, which tried to differentiate between Bitcoin and everything else. And I would say that, you know, in full transparency, I probably agreed with 90% of what she wrote. I had a few, you know, things that I would love to debate with her about or at least inquire and have an intelligent discussion, which is sort of how discourse proceeds. um and we've long told our friends and and i said this about the podcast like you can't let twitter

decide what you see you you can only operate on twitter using lists yes you have to curate a proactively diverse list of different views and only allow twitter to put that in front of you because if you submit yourself to the algorithm the algorithm is optimized for negativity and it will make you negative and we've fallen victim to that um we try really hard not to like you say and it's hard not to sort of punch back when people totally mischaracterize what you said or try to denigrate the work of your life because Doomburg is the work of our life

and we're very proud of this project and it's literally how we intend to feed our families and so when people attack the franchise, the instinct is to punch back and we have fought that very, very hard but I would say it's just all part of the ongoing sort of way in which people interact. most of my best friends I've never met they're just

icons on the internet and Slack or Twitter DM rooms that I've gotten to know and love you know it's very we're all on this journey and we end up in our own sort of social circles for a variety of reasons and I would view the true Bitcoin maximalists I know that's a phrase

you don't like but being at its core a social circle definitely definitely and I completely agree TweetDeck and List are the Twitter hack that everybody needs to incorporate into their lives. TweetDeck's the most underutilized resource

on the planet right now. Well, I mean, Twitter's the worst run company in the world right now too. I mean, it never has so much value escaped shareholders. Yeah, I mean, it's arguably the greatest communication tool that humans have ever come into contact with.

It's truly phenomenal. It is truly the global human town square. And we have used it with great success for Bloomberg. Like we have been very systematic about treating Twitter as the front end of our strategy and its work. Yeah. And I mean, I consider Jack Dorsey a friend.

He's been on this podcast. I've talked to him outside of the show a bunch. And it is interesting speaking with him and hearing his original idea for Twitter as this communications protocol, which you can see he's trying to get back to that core idea with things like blue sky um and i i would just say i don't think he's um ecstatic with the end result of where twitter is now um it's in quite the limbo as we're talking as you can imagine

yeah i mean that project veritas uh well but also just the whole um elon thing yeah yeah yeah it's it's um amazing to watch we'll see um i have i think that's a potentially very interesting development let's put it that way yeah there's so much value in twitter yeah i i would not be sitting here right now speaking with you without twitter twitter um this podcast would not exist without twitter the inception of this podcast was me dming something meeting with them in person and them convincing me to do it um it's and and my appearance on this podcast right now was from you dming me and so you know i was like sure yeah i'm happy to go by the way like i think um we have a philosophy like as long as we will go on uh you know any podcast that is is willing

to have us unless there's some like you know obviously disqualifying like extremism on the podcast um you know that you should be able to you should be willing and able to sit down and defend your views anywhere on any medium um with anybody who has authentically held beliefs politely expressed. Well, I'm happy that we're able to do this. I'm thoroughly enjoying the conversation. Yeah, same here. In your mind,

what's it going to take for Bitcoin? What will happen within the Bitcoin world or externally that would convince you that, all right, this is something worth paying attention to? Or maybe it's already something worth paying attention to, but all right, there's some signal here.

I think we should dedicate more time to focusing on this and potentially adopting it. My biggest fear is that the early experiments in decentralized ledgers and blockchain technology is going to facilitate the adoption of central bank digital currency. And we are in a very dangerous time in humanity. Privacy, we have a piece in our head that we haven't begun to write or research yet. But the way we write our pieces is sort of this weird mix of just immersing ourselves in content and then developing a concept and then researching it. And then when the idea comes for a full piece, we put it out.

Central bank digital currency is the single greatest threat to human liberty that has ever existed. And I would much rather live in a world where Bitcoin is the global currency than live in a world where the current power structure has complete control over how much I'm allowed to spend and on what. We wrote a piece many, many months ago, long before we sort of grew into something much bigger than we were back then, called Dystopia Coin. um and this is probably the thing that scares us the most um central bank digital currencies are the ultimate enslavement of humanity and that might sound alarmist um it's not it's not people have no idea so what happened in canada we wrote a piece about this dictator justin trudeau because what he is, left to his own devices. The only thing that stopped him from his very dangerous path that he was on was, I believe, a bank run as foreign investors pulled their money out of

Canadian banks and the Canadian Senate intervened and said, Justin, this is too far. Some of the global leaders are very very dangerous people and justin trudeau is among the most dangerous we wrote a piece called just watch me which actually told the story of his father who had very similar tendencies and his father called fidel no nice try i'm not going on record with that with his father his father pierre elliott trudeau um invoked the wartime act to bring troops into Quebec to put down a, albeit controversial, Quebec Liberation Front, I believe it was called. Anyway, the retroactive rewriting of the laws and the debanking of Canadian citizens for

the mere act of expressing a political viewpoint, however unpleasant the tactics they had used to express that viewpoint might be, was really shocking and eye-opening and scary. And imagine if, which is where Canada is trying to go, they had a central bank digital currency where the central government could decide what you're allowed to buy and whether you could access your money. It's truly, truly dystopian. And we're much closer to that now. And I worry. So, for example, I think some of the bad actors in the crypto community are just disinformation agents designed to create, you know. Diversions.

Aversions and to create a political cover for taking away people's freedoms. Anybody who is in the public square proclaiming the need and benefit for central bank digital currencies is somebody that you should not trust. yeah i mean what you have to do is look at china look at their social credit system look at what they've implemented like that and that's the future we have we get a bitcoin future we get that exported to the rest of the world well you get there's multiple ways to not have that bitcoin could be one of those ways but what are the other ways in your opinion i think political revolutions with seriousness um so again like i we have said that you know the solution to using currency as a weapon against the people is not a new currency it's a new political system because the existing political system just won't tolerate it so that's where i think we would probably

diverge in our views of how the future might unfold um absent a political change the amount of bitcoin you own is irrelevant well i would argue bitcoin is a political change right and then i agree like you could have a political transition that changes the architecture of the monetary system but again it's like a political system controlled by humans which is inherently corruptible over the medium to long term so you're just hitting the reset bunning and setting the stage for the inevitable return to where we are now let me say it differently the amount of bitcoin you own if you're a citizen of shanghai today is irrelevant that's true you're stuck in your apartment, your cats are starving, you can be whipped away on a false positive and shoved into

a camp, you're running out of food, you're on the 10th floor of an apartment complex and all you hear at night are the screams of wild dogs and cats that people have let out out of fear of being taken away to a camp and that if their pets were stuck in the apartment, they would die. The amount of Bitcoin you own if you live in Shanghai today is irrelevant. You need a political solution to stop these tyrants. That's just my view. I can see that. Yeah.

And so, now luckily that could never happen in the US. Because of the guns. Second Amendment. No, 100%. Like, good luck. I wish you luck. The people that are welding apartments closed in Shanghai would not get that done in Texas.

That's why I'm in Texas. that's why i live in flyover country too um like good luck to you i mean um so you know it is what it is i understand the theoretical framework um we've been fascinated by the government response the interface between the corrupt powers that be again if you read our pieces like if you read this piece that we just put out um on coinbase and and brian armstrong like we begin that piece with a raw and outrageous example of total corruption. Like how can you steal 1.6 billion of customer money that is supposed to be held in escrow

and nobody gets arrested? They became the governor of New Jersey. Oh yeah, it was after. He was. Was it after? Okay. But worse yet, we didn't mention in the piece, you know, lots of stuff doesn't make it into the piece.

Not only was he not arrested, he was allowed to start a new hedge fund a couple of years ago and he is operating a new hedge fund with $400 million under management. If you and I robbed a grocery store for $2,000, we'd be in jail for 20 years. It's incredible.

It's incredible. We're talking about John Corzine, Preeks. Yes, John Corzine, former US Senator and Governor of New Jersey, who started MF Global. And the firm was trading their own proprietary book. And when they made really big bets that didn't work out,

they dipped in their customer funds to make up the shortfall. And that was the pretext story for a piece describing the risks of holding your Bitcoin and your cryptocurrencies at Coinbase. Yes, which you should not do, freaks. Get your coins off of Coinbase. So let's jump into that. That rewording of the 10Q section of their filings is extremely alarming. If somebody is warning you that they are not bankrupt, you should take that as a hint that they may be close to bankruptcy. see so the piece that we wrote um sort of two main themes one theme is not your keys not your coin and this is literally the title of the piece and something that you and i i think would fully agree

on um and so if you are um housing your bitcoin on an exchange and they control that wallet that's not your big um you have claimed to it but you're just another claimant if that exchange fails and And it's not like there isn't a history of exchanges in general and crypto exchanges in particular failing. But then the second part is just this outrageous Twitter thread that the CEO of a publicly traded company put out where he says there is no risk of bankruptcy. I have a risk of bankruptcy. You have a risk of bankruptcy.

If you have fixed expenses of any kind, there's at least some risk that you could go bankrupt. But in this case in particular, as we detailed in the piece, Coinbase is struggling. revenues are collapsing. Their expenses are bloated. They have 3.3 or 3.5 billion in debt that they have to pay back. They are growing headcount like crazy. They burned a billion dollars in the first quarter. And they have a quarter trillion dollars of market-to-market value of crypto assets in their custody. And if they file for bankruptcy, which we would be the first to say is unlikely, but it's not zero. Um, you will end up being Mt. Goxed. Well, I don't know if you know the history of the lead up to the Mt. Gox insolvency,

but there was a very famous YouTube video, um, that Roger Ver made where it essentially looks like he had a gun to his head and was saying essentially what Brian Armstrong just said is that there's no risk of insolvency here at Mt. Gox. And that was, uh, that was the theme last week was like yeah this brian armstrong thread is eerily similar to that that roger vera video right before mount cox went bust and the hoopla that ensued after that thread last week i can confirm has led to a material amount of of bitcoin leaving that exchange uh just from people which could cause you know real issues down the road and it's um and we do know the montcox story fairly well we had a good friend um who lost a fair amount of wealth in that collapse and is

still waiting for the ultimate resolution. We had a section of the piece that we ultimately cut out, didn't survive editing, but at least the victims of Mt. Cox have seen the value of their claim and appreciate substantially while they're waiting. While their huddling may have been forced, at least it is probably going to be accretive Because Bitcoin was selling for $4,000 back then, and now it's selling for $30,000 and change. $28,991. Yeah, in that range of $30,000.

So even though, let's say, seven-eighths of the Bitcoin has been lost, the multiple of the appreciation over that time period makes it accretive to get that money back. And it's not probably going to be the case if we see something as big and as structural as Coinbase failed. And again, I want to be very clear. We're not saying that Coinbase is insolvent or that it has a meaningful risk of bankruptcy, but no company with debt that is struggling to grow has no risk of bankruptcy. And for him to go on Twitter and say that was really the height of irresponsibility. Yes. I mean, and Coinbase is the archetype of the crypto scam in one large company. the fact that it's funny you say that because we were again we're still learning about the sort of various tribes in this space and this is the first time that we've written about crypto somewhat skeptically where we had no or almost no negative comments or feedback from the crypto world and it kind of surprised us in fact many people supported us for writing it because they tend to believe

what we wrote which is interesting which goes to show you can find common ground with people despite different basis sets and different sets of beliefs. Yeah. What do you think about the intersection of Bitcoin and energy via proof-of-work mining as somebody who comes

from an energy background? So that's one thing that's made me more confident and given me more resolve in Bitcoin. I sit on the board of a Bitcoin mining company. I have my own Bitcoin mining operations that I personally own.

And I've gotten more resolve over the last four years, particularly because I've gotten closer into the mining industry and have observed the merging of the energy sector and the Bitcoin mining industry. I think they're actually going to be one and the same by the end of the decade. We have probably a slightly different view. So first of all, I'll take a step back.

If I'm given the choice between flaring natural gas or just emitting natural gas, which is sort of the worst thing that you could do. So on the sort of scale of what to do with excess natural gas at a shale oil field, for example, where you don't have the pipelines to move it, the worst thing you could do is to just release it into the air. Methane is an extraordinarily unwelcome greenhouse gas.

um the next worst thing or the next you know the least worst the less worst thing you could do is just burn it it's better to burn it and to release co2 into the atmosphere than to release methane directly um and then to the right of that are a series of potential things you can do that are better than that and i would argue that there's no doubt that because the world has decided Bitcoin has value, that burning natural gas to generate electricity to run a mining rig to create value for the mining company is better than just burning it and putting it into the atmosphere. What we would do in the ideal state, because energy is life, is we would create polysilicon from stranded natural gas, because at least with polysilicon, you get more energy

down the road and so like if you are thinking about your energy investment as an mpv calculation you know the long-term future energy flows are superior if you convert that otherwise stranded or useless energy source into something that creates and harnesses more energy down the road but i do understand that if a project is economically unviable absent a way to monetize the stranded energy and if you can mine something that has a reasonable value that you can convert back into fiat um it might make sense for these companies to do that because if it pushes the development economics of a of a of a oil field from slightly break even or or value destroying to value creating then i can understand why people would do that is that nuanced enough

does that make sense very nuanced but i would argue like why not both like you could like what bitcoin does it incentivizes or since you have that alternative accretive revenue stream that can bolster profits and decrease or increase certainty when it comes to drilling and exploring like you could actually have the best of both worlds where you go and you drill more and you drill quicker and you use the associated gas up upstream to mine bitcoin for a time while you wait for a natural gas pipeline to get built out to that well pad and then when it is built out miners just pop up go somewhere else and you send that natural gas to market to be made into the polysilicon the sort of challenge they could mine any proof of work coin

right and um obviously bitcoin is the most liquid and probably the most viable and um but you know like it doesn't create future energy flows now again if it is a valuable bridge that enables a project to occur that you could eventually make and and that is certainly one advantage is the the modular nature of these mining rigs and their ability to quickly deploy them for sure is advantageous excuse me but you know you don't want to let perfect be the enemy of the good but in a perfect world um we would be looking to harvest that energy for um for more life-giving future energy flows um you know the payback period on on solar is five years and so that means you're going to get basically free energy after the fifth year assuming you could figure out a way to have

it not to stabilize the grid because it's intermittent which is things we've written about um but i like i can unique i said not unique different than most crypto skeptics i can plausibly understand the bridging use case of monetizing otherwise stranded or wasted energy and if that monetization enables the production of more energy that wouldn't have otherwise been produced and i'm all for it because energy is life and the more energy we produce the more life we can we can share with the world another example for you nuclear small modular reactors There's companies out there that want to bring small modular reactors to small communities or far out communities that are currently using diesel generation. They'd like to bring these reactors to these towns to help drive down their cost of electricity and give them a more reliable energy source.

But the problem they have is they can build these reactors and they could potentially bring them to these towns, but then they have to wait 18 months for transmission lines to be built out to the local utilities to then begin to actually serve that electricity. And that 18 months of no revenue just makes it unviable economically. And so it's similar to the upstream. Yeah, bridging T equals zero cash flow abatement. Yeah, I mean, I would rather that the transmission lines be built out concurrently, of course. But yeah, I could see that use case. I could share the Cathedral annual shareholder letter with you. I'm not going to pump my own bags here.

But I think, I don't know if I'm allowed to say that. Not investment advice at all. But I think in that annual letter, the vision of bringing about the abundant energy future that you're describing, I think Bitcoin is a key mechanism to drive that. And that is why I'm so adamant and focused on Bitcoin specifically. So in your world, you would want to see all of the Ponzi grifters, the altcoins, the staking. um there's some aspects of defy they're very interesting but it's just so polluted with drifters and venture capitalists looking to drop bags numbers so you would want to see all that washed away right we would agree on that yeah not only do i want to see it washed away but i think

just the economic reality of bringing a sound monetary good to the market just naturally does that because you have a store of value which you can lower your time preference and save capital for the long run where that chase for yield is rendered unnecessary in a lot of extent. People can just save money and accumulate capital. Well, the chase for yield is not about saving. It's about speculating, of course, as you know. It's greed.

Yes, but it has also become a part of savings, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's been sold in that way, unsuspecting people who then get rugged. Yes. So, yeah. I think there's probably, you know, if we sat down over beers, it'd be a lot more that we agree on than we disagree on as,

as evidenced by this conversation. I don't think we disagree on much. I mean, yeah. It's okay to disagree too. That's another thing. Like people talking about like civil, polite conversations, um, like civil discourse needs to make a comeback as well. And Twitter is so disturbing. Yeah. That like, you know, I'm sure you'd probably get catch some heat for having, having us on, you know it's um i don't think so i think you i think uh i think you'd be surprised at how many

people actually really respect the work you're doing and are okay that you're a bit skeptical towards bitcoin um i think the overarching theme of what you guys are doing is extremely important i think most bitcoiners would recognize that we're just a somebody who's possible to convert and so you know we're still in the oh yeah did you take the orange pill yet no but i think like if bitcoin is going to succeed the themes particularly energy that you talk about but energy is below bitcoin you need that electricity to produce those hashes to sustain the ledger and so if we're talking about a path to success for bitcoin you need to secure what is below the the technological aspect of it which is energy

say how many bitcoins you own in shanghai is not relevant to you right now you know and it might become relevant once they're sort of freed from the prison that they're maybe maybe there's some stories in shanghai where people are bribing officials with bitcoin who knows could be could be yeah it's not you know really sad story up there for sure so cool that's terrible well this has been fascinating yeah happy to do it anytime marty i was glad when you reached out and um you know again i'm happy to talk to anybody who has authentic views politely expressed and then i think we both fall into that category so it's great it's incredible what uh let's tell people about the sub stack a bit you guys just um you've been writing for over a year now more

recently you've like you said you're making this your life's work that you're how you make um your bread and butter how you butter your bread um i highly recommend if you're listening to this to subscribe i subscribed for the paid subscription yesterday and the value that you get for um 30 bucks a month or 300 bucks a year is uh is very high very well worth it in my opinion we like to say 82 cents a day um no like it's truly a unbelievable it's life-changing that we were able to create this this brand and to create this outlet for our creativity and our thinking and our writing and our editing and our photoshopping and our humor and our pattern recognition skills and It's truly the work of our lives.

We're a very, very small team, very tight team. We have an enormous privilege of waking up every day with a giant smile on our face because we know we get to go to our office and do what we love doing all day. And we've carved out a way to make more than enough money for our families to prosper. And so it's an extraordinary privilege.

We're extremely grateful to all subscribers. Thank you very much for subscribing. The launch of Doomberg has been an incredible success. I mean, between us, we're the second, number two on the paid finance Substack leaderboard in the world already after only 45 days of launch. And it's succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. Could be more humbled by the outpouring of thousands of people subscribing. And we can be found at doomberg.substack.com. We are a fully paid sub-stack now, but we have 105 free articles that we wrote before we went behind the paywall.

If people want to sample our writings, they're all there. You can search them. We love every one of those pieces. We're also on Twitter at DoomburgT, as in teen. And it's really great to be here. Really enjoyed the conversation, Marty, and looking forward to doing it again. I can't wait for that day either. thank you for all the work that you're doing to get this information and to more people's minds

i think it's imperative and the optimist in me does think it will have a difference and has the potential to prevent um to bring about less suffering than otherwise would happen if if you weren't doing this that's the hope all right well hope you enjoy the rest of your day can't wait to do it again that's all we got today freaks peace and love