10:40 – Reactions to Global Trade Developments

14:17 – U.S. Efforts to Break Rare Earth Dependence

15:53 – U.S. Manhattan Project for Supply Chains

20:13 – Regulatory Hurdles and Mining Challenges

22:40 – Global Bifurcation and Emerging Trade Blocks

25:24 – Russia, Ukraine, and the Changing Global Order

34:13 – Media Narratives and Propaganda

38:31 – Drone Warfare and Shifting Military Power

42:16 – Venezuela, the Monroe Doctrine, and U.S.-China Rivalry

53:17 – Alaska, Energy Development, and Infrastructure Delays

Doomberg – The Gloves are off With China

Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello everybody. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast. My name is Stu Turley, President CEO of the Sandstone Group. Today is an outstanding special day. I’ve got a special guest, but first let me introduce my co-host, David Blackmon. Not just a David Blackmon, the David Blackmon of the Energy Impacts podcast. David, how are you today?

David Blackmon [00:00:27] The world is lucky, there’s only one David Blackmon. Yeah, thanks for having me, Stu. I appreciate joining you on this.

Stuart Turley [00:00:34] Oh, we are going to have an absolute blast, and without further ado, let’s introduce our special guest today, the one and only Doomberg. How are you today, sir?

Doomberg [00:00:46] I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on. We always have such great discussions. Looking forward to this one.

Stuart Turley [00:00:50] I’ll tell you what, um, I, I do want to bring this up as our favorite green chicken, uh, for our podcast listeners that have not heard of this before. When we were at NAEP, we had a line of everybody that wanted to see when David was interviewing you live. They wanted your autograph. So you are very, uh very well loved in our audience here. So as we get rolling here. So, uh, we’ve got some things we want to cover the China, uh. We want to talk about your article, the gloves off, and we want to roll into minerals and, and everything else. So, do you want to tee us up and really kind of go over your article here? First a tell us who you are and then tell us a little bit about the, this article gloves off.

Doomberg [00:01:43] Sure, yeah, the Doomberg head writer of the Doumburg Substack. We write seven to nine articles a month, and one full presentation per month for our pro tier. I’ve got a really fantastic one coming out tomorrow. And yeah, so this article gloves off. We wrote this when we saw both what China had done with respect to rare earth export controls and the administration’s reaction to it. And we have long been warning, as you know, and we’ve talked about on prior appearances, that China has selectively monopolized certain critical metals, minerals, technologies through a variety of means. And one of the most important technologies that it has effectively monopolized, although not completely monopolized, is rare earth metals. Not just their mining, but their processing into a purified metal, and then in certain instances carried forward to make magnets. And what China did is basically told the rest of the world that we have this weapon and now we’re ready to use it. And the way they did that was basically anybody who has a China-sourced rare earth metal in it. In a product of any kind, even trace amounts, needs to apply to China for an export license. So what does that mean in practicality? They won’t sell you the rare-earth metal unless you explain to China exactly what it is that you’re doing with it, and then China decides whether they’ll sell it to you. And they’ve specifically said that they will not allow export licenses for suppliers to global militaries, most notably the United States military. And this has caused alarm bells in D.C. It shocked many people. I can’t say that it shocked us. We find the timing of it interesting, most notable because as we say in the article after the cut to paid. The Chinese must feel that they are ready for a full-blown trade war, because this is a cannon that can’t be unshot. You know, we’ll probably hear about a great trade deal that has been cut when Trump and Xi meet. By the way, when we first saw this, before we published this article, we put a post out on Notes. Where we said this is economic nuclear war, the U.S. Has no choice but to beat a temporary retreat, and China is sending a strong message to the Global South that it is ready to engage in the next battle of World War III, and we have a mental model where we believe World War III kicked off in 2014, we can talk about that. And just one example of what this would mean, of course, is that China can decide whether ASML exports its lithography machines to the US, for example. Extraordinary power play could shut down the entire U.S. Assembly line in a matter of weeks. And there’s a variety of ways that China is starting to do that now, which we wrote about in the follow-up article. But as we’re going to describe in our pro-talk tomorrow, the U. S., regardless of whether a trade agreement is signed or things de-escalate from here, and they probably will, but the market today is clearly pricing it as though they will. Um, our an industry who interface with Washington are telling us they haven’t seen anything like it. And the U.S. Is about to embark on a Manhattan project-style project to basically rid itself of all China risk. That doesn’t necessarily mean made in the USA, although many things will be made in the USA. But made outside of China in friendly countries, French shoring is going to be an extraordinary wave, and there will be hundreds of… Hundreds of billions of dollars invested towards this end. We had one contact speaking with somebody pretty high up in DARPA, and DARPA is saying we want to import nothing from China in 10 years. Think about that. That’s the kind of record scratch stop something big has happened, which is why we wrote gloves off. By the way, it’s China who took the gloves off, the U.S. Has been. Flailing away at China for many years, one could argue, with semiconductor controls and all this other stuff. Only put the nice comments up though, Stu, just to be clear. And so, it was an interesting article, it kind of struck a nerve, we got a lot of feedback on it. We stand by it, of course, and yeah, so here we are. And the things that we’ve been warning about, not just us of course but for many years, you know, we wrote a piece called Geopolitical Warfare like three years ago. We laid out how China comes to dominate these critical supply chains, and they’re not doing it unless they intend to use it, but they were very careful not to use them until they felt ready. They must feel ready. Go ahead.

David Blackmon [00:07:17] So in 2021, and you talk about, you know, this has been an obvious issue for years now in 2021 Joe Biden’s handlers propped him up in front of his teleprompter and had him read a text about this very issue with China, and he declared it to be a national emergency. It said his government was going to amount a whole of government approach. A Manhattan style. To free America from the supply chains dominated by China. And as far as I can tell, and I don’t have the higher up sources that you have in the federal government. As far as can tell though, and I’ve asked the question of many, many people over the past four years, I can’t identify anything the Biden administration did to actually make that happen. I’m sure they must have done something, but I haven’t been able to identify it. And I just wonder. If in all your conversations, you have uncovered substantial progress that was made during the Biden years, because I would hate to be saying that if it isn’t true.

Doomberg [00:08:26] I’m unaware of any. I know the issue was studied and internal analyzes were done. The USGS put out various warning documents. I will say, and I mean this in a sort of apolitical, nonpartisan way, it is just objectively true that the Trump administration has far more people with business experience at senior levels embedded within it. And there’s a huge chasm between, you know, Chris Wright. Current Energy Secretary and Jennifer Granholm, a career politician from Michigan, being your Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, a serial entrepreneur, creator of a couple of unicorns I believe, legitimate unicorns, a billion dollar plus companies, and they understand how industry works. I still believe the administration was caught flat-footed. That’s one of the critiques we have of Trump. Again, just by objective analysis, is that he always assumes he has escalation dominance in every negotiation. And there are two important actors on the world stage against whom he does not have escalation dominant, and that is Vladimir Putin and Russia in a conventional war, and Xi Jinping and China in an economic war. China in this instance is flexing escalation dominance, and you can tell by the reaction of the Trump administration. Again, who knows what they’ll say the deal is that they’re going to cut with Trump touring Asia, but the Chinese would not cut a deal if it weren’t favorable to them because they have escalation dominants, and they know it.

Stuart Turley [00:10:13] When we sit there and let me introduce this next little article here that we’ve got, we’ve got an update from Scott Bessent when he was talking on, I believe it was CNBC. Let me play this just quick 30 seconds and then we’ll go into the next topic with Secretary Chris Wright.

Video Speaker (Scott Bessent) [00:10:40] Vice Premier Hui-Feng is a seasoned politician, but it’s clear that the momentum was with us. When you get the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc, when you get that deal inked, we had Japan, we had Indonesia, we have Vietnam. So, not only did we have the EU, it was a very large trading relationship with China. We also had three of their neighbors, I think.

Stuart Turley [00:11:14] That’s pretty, uh, you know, when you sit back and take a look there in Malaysia, they’ve ended another war with the neighbors over there, some, some other places, and they’re looking at this. Scott has been really working hard.

Doomberg [00:11:28] Yeah, I interpret the news flow a little differently than Mr. Besinto, I must say, is an intelligent person. Oh, I mean this sincerely, he’s clearly very intelligent, he is a successful hedge fund manager, far wealthier than I suspect the three of us combined by several orders of magnitude. Thank you. The EU is not in a position to exert leverage over China either. I’m sure that Xi Jinping is in Beijing shuddering at the prospect of Ursula von der Leyen’s Revenge Tour. When President Trump comes flying into your country like Indonesia, of course you treat him well and so on. But Indonesia is clearly in the China side of the ledger, major coal producer, major player in bricks. We note with interest of course that Indonesia joins bricks, and then suddenly there’s an attempted color revolution in Indonesia. You know, these soundbites on CNBC are precisely why we believe … many readers enjoy Doomberg because we’re capable of seeing through that. But I understand what Besant is doing, of course, and messaging is important, and he’s a very good communicator and does very well on television. That’s not to be underestimated, I just think that they’re putting a brave face on a situation that is quite urgent.

Stuart Turley [00:12:54] Well, I, uh, when we sit back and take a look at the urgency on this, I applaud, uh, secretary Chris Wright. I think he’s doing a very good job in this. And I think that president Trump has got some misnomers or misinformation on the Putin thing, because I have been very vocal about saying that president Putin showed up to Alaska to do a deal and he was going to do deal by uh doing the socklin proclamation the only way to get the war ended is not by threatening india with sanctions or china with sanctions the dart fleet is what 1600 tankers uh russia has a ballpark 728 tankers they’re doing quite fine with all the transfers going on outside of malaysia um Sanctions don’t work as intended as Irena’s lob says. Um, but I was very encouraged by president Trump in Australia. I thought it was funny that the Australian, uh, ambassador to the U S insulted president Trump. And that was a pretty interesting exchange. Um, well where, let’s go through this next question here with, uh Larry Kudlow and let’s get your opinion here.

Video Speaker (Larry Kudlow) [00:14:17] Opening up ANWR and I’ll get to that, but everyone’s asking me, everyone’s asking me for an update on the rare earths because of China’s blackmail, front page story in the Wall Street Journal, totally about that, you know, three thousand words worth. Chris, can you just tell us what is happening on our effort to develop, produce, and manufacture rare earth’s?

Video Speaker (Chris Wright) [00:14:42] It’s a big deal, Larry, as you said. It’s in all of government effort. We’re making a deal with businesses, small miners, big miners, processing companies, manufacturers. We’re bringing in larger companies that can help bring manufacturing technologies to ramp things up quickly. But China went after this industry strategically to make us and the rest of the world dependent on them, and we need to break that dependence. And during the Trump administration, we will break that dependence.

Video Speaker (Larry Kudlow) [00:15:11] Mr. Secretary, you know, I had some experience with it in the first term.

Stuart Turley [00:15:18] And when we, we sit back and we take a look, he gets into the timeline right about in here. I don’t want to take everybody’s time just by watching a Larry Kudlow interview, but when he does get into this area, he says we would like to do it in 12 months, but we think we’re going to hit 24. Uh, that’s pretty aggressive when you start looking at the investments that they’re doing. Putting the processing in Australia in the latest deal that he did last week with Australia and the billions of dollars that they were doing with the subs and things, what are your general thoughts there?

Doomberg [00:15:53] First of all, I agree with everything that Chris Wright said in that interview, unsurprising. Look we’re writing a piece potentially here on Bloom Energy and shortage of gas turbines and the data center drive and all that stuff, and the tentative title is Talid’s Law, Nassam Toulid had a really fascinating quote, which is … I’ve never seen, not all, it goes something like this, I’m sure I will get it wrong. Not all gluts lead to shortages, but I’ve seen a shortage that doesn’t lead to a glut. There will be a glut of rare earths quicker than you think because of this. In five years you won’t be able to give them away. And the reason why we’re writing about Bloom Energy and its solid oxide fuel cells which converts natural gas into electricity without a gas turbine is because. There’s a shortage of gas turbines right now, and guess what’s going to happen in five years. This is a crisis. It caught the U.S. Off guard. Regardless of the deal that has caught between Trump and Xi, the momentum behind what Chris Wright is describing is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our time interacting with Washington. And it’s not just going to be rare earth, literally there are people in DC who are writing down every American military dependency on China, and actively working to move it to friendlier shores. So China’s shooting this cannon is not necessarily in the long-term best interests of China. As we said in the Gloves Off, I believe we wrote so many pieces, I think we used the phrase that the great bifurcation has begun. The world is splitting into the Global South and the Western. G7 type, 7 billion versus 700 million type square off. So Chris Wright is the exact person you want in that chair at this time, because not only does he have a visceral understanding of what went wrong and what got us here, but he’s also got a proven track record of the ability to organize a proper response. And so kudos to him. And unlikely to be spinning things beyond what he believes to be true, because he’s not a natural politician.

David Blackmon [00:18:14] Yeah, he’s the perfect spokesman. I read with great amusement the hit piece that was done on him by Politico eight or 10 days ago now, in which Politico based on nothing but bitter people inside the white house who were, you know, giving them probably false information was saying, right is on the outs with the president and his senior people because they don’t like some of the things he said in the media. I got to believe that’s completely false. Everything he’s doing is exactly what Trump promised to do during the campaign. Uh, I wonder if you’re hearing anything to the contrary on that before I go to my next point.

Doomberg [00:18:54] It’s not something that we would be able to have an opinion on. I do know that if he were to lead the administration, it would be a significant loss. I suppose stranger things have happened. There are a lot of egos in Washington, D.C., and as far as I know, my interactions with Chris Wright, limited as they might be, didn’t strike me as a man of particularly high ego. But, we’ll see, nonetheless, the administration has many people of Chris Wright’s caliber in it. And again, the real response that we’re seeing is from the sort of defense side of the ledger, which has long been complaining about China’s leverage. They saw it. Everybody saw it, even Biden, like you say, in 2021. We wrote a piece early on in the Duemberg days called Magnesium PI, where we talked about how China had come to dominate that particular metal as well, which is critical for the automotive assembly industry for a variety of reasons. It’s used in an alloy, but I believe it was aluminum. I’d have to go back and read the piece. But that was back in the early days. Don’t go back, and read that piece, actually, because it’s hard for us to read our old work. But anyway, so if he is on the way out, that would be a shame. But I wholeheartedly agree with everything he said in that clip, that’s for sure. It won’t be a year, but it won’t five years either.

David Blackmon [00:20:13] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean it, you know, in the past it’s taken 20 years to open a new mining operation in the United States. If you can get the permits at all today, we had this news about JP Morgan putting $75 million into Perpetua Resources, who’s just trying to open a long-standing mine that was first created in 1927. Big antimony mine, another critical mineral, not a rareth, but a critical mineral. It took them 15 years just to get the permits to reopen the damn mine.

Doomberg [00:20:45] Yeah, we have an issue here, a big issue, not to be underestimated, but don’t forget, the sandbox of response isn’t limited to the borders of the continental United States or Alaska or Hawaii. Yes, exactly. There is a whole-of-earth approach, and I think the deal which … Look, the administration is … Donald Trump is everything everybody says he is, all the things, right? But he’s cut some good deals. Yes, he is. Cut some unique deals. The Australia deal was a very good deal. Even the MP deal that got so much – we wrote a piece called How It’s Done, and we were like praising that deal. The shareholders got an amazing deal – I’ll pull up on my Bloomberg terminal what the going rate is for a share of MP right now – but I believe the U.S. Got a bunch of – yeah, the U,S. Taxpayer has more than doubled its money on that deal so far. And great. It’s a win-win. The U.S. Abates a risk. Taxpayers invest in MP, they don’t grant MP, they invested in MP. They got preferred stock and warrants in exchange, struck at 30 bucks, I believe, and the stock’s at 66. So there you go. MP is a stock that was heavily shorted and we got a lot of hate mail when we wrote it. In praise of that piece, and I was like, tell me you want the stock to go down without telling me you’ll want the stocks to go. That’s one of the benefits of not. Investing in anything we write about because then we’re not emotionally tied to the direction of share price.

David Blackmon [00:22:18] Oh, here’s a bunch of hate mail in response to a piece I wrote about it, too, back then.

Stuart Turley [00:22:26] We love Dave Walker, shout out to Dave Walker. Uh, he is a cool cat. Also got a David Forsberg sending out a shout out and he’s watching as well too. So we’re keeping the comments positive for you. Oh, mighty Doomberg.

Doomberg [00:22:40] Well, Dave Walker is a long-term subscriber of Doomberg, and a frequent commenter, and so we love ourselves and Dave Walker as well.

Stuart Turley [00:22:49] He is cool cat. It is a lot of fun. So when we sit here and we take a look at Russia and we take a. Look at the I wrote an article just recently about the bifurcation of the world into new trading blocks and the new trading block because I see it and I could be totally wrong. I’m seeing net zero as a total failure. And deindustrialization and you’re going to either going to go down the net zero path of Canada, the EU and the UK, and you are going to have more trade with China and you going to keep your deindustriallization on or you’re gonna go into the new trading blocks and I see India, Asia and Russia and the US in that new green, not green, but financially fiscally responsible, using all the right forms of energy that don’t need subsidies in order to move forward.

Doomberg [00:23:53] Yeah, there’s a deal to be made here. I think Trump is frustrated with the Ukraine war, correctly so, I suppose, from his perspective. But the thermodynamics of the situation calls for the U.S. To cut a deal with Russia and cut a deals with China, split the world in three, and go about doing your thing in your own sphere of influence, which Trump is doing in the Western Hemisphere. We’re happy to talk about that, but we wrote a pretty interesting piece, and much of what we’ve predicted has since come to pass. Um The stumbling block is that he just can’t bring himself to meet Russia’s demands in the war in Ukraine. Whatever you think of them, and any time we talk about it, of course, you get both sides. Because there’s so much propaganda around this issue. By the way, the worst in the world, we read everybody’s propaganda, the world’s worst propaganda is British propaganda, by far. And so, we wrote a piece called Mosaic Theory, describing what we believe Trump would do. In the Western Hemisphere, and we predicted that he might have to bail out Malay. And so, I’ll read you directly from this piece, which came long before the bailout. When did we publish this one? September 10th. We said Trump could help his beleaguered friend by leaning on Buford Capital. We have this lawsuit with YPF, but the Trump administration may soon feel compelled to mount a rearguard action in Argentina on behalf of loyal ally Malay.” This is. Came on the heels of electoral setbacks by Malay. We know that with interest this surprising. Well, you know.

David Blackmon [00:25:24] As we set off. Better than expected.

Doomberg [00:25:26] Well, we’re a little suspicious, you know, a little bit paranoid around it. We posted on notes this morning, sub-stack notes, that we saw that Facamorta won the elections in Argentina. It’s funny when Chevron gets involved, how the election tends to go, and the same thing we noted with interest how the president of Guyana won a landslide re-election, Exxon won that election. So yeah, we look at the verbal attack on Colombia, the armada forming around Venezuela, The energy potential of the southern half of the Western Hemisphere is enormous.

David Blackmon [00:26:09] Enormous.

Doomberg [00:26:10] We think there’s 10 million incremental barrels per day of oil production that could be had, when you look at Venezuela, Mexico, Vecamarta becoming a Permian, Guyana, Colombia, Brazil with the salt deposits. And so, there’s huge potential, and already the Western Hemisphere out-produces the in oil and vastly outproduces the Middle East and natural gas. And so I think Trump would like to do that, but he’s not in a political position to take the L with Russia, unfortunately.

David Blackmon [00:26:48] I’m taking the L involved with Russia. Do you think?

Doomberg [00:26:52] Uh…

David Blackmon [00:26:54] Other than the Donbass.

Doomberg [00:26:56] Putin has laid out Russia’s demands, the Four Regions, and a few other demands. Zelensky has dismissed them out of hand, perhaps rightly so, who knows, it’s not our country. And the Europeans have dismissed them, out of the hand. And the European’s are playing a game of extend the war until Trump is gone. One of the things that we find mysterious about Trump is his desire to please people who clearly hate him. Oh, I know the neocons in Washington and the European leaders every European leader All of them, hoping Harris would win the election, and yet he has a productive meeting with Putin in Alaska, and then suddenly all the Europeans are in the White House and he changes his mind. Again, it is what it is. You can’t talk about this situation without triggering a bunch of people, but we try to look at it objectively. We followed the war very closely, starting in December of 2023, because of its impact on energy. I hadn’t really looked at the issue too closely because I don’t care who rules the Russian-speaking part of the Donbass. I just don’t. It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’ affect my family. It doesn’t affect my country, my state, my county, my hemisphere. But I started looking into it and started following the mapping projects day-to-day and you could just see. The big challenge with following this war is that people in the West are measuring this war in kilometers and this is not how Russians fight war. This is a war of attrition. And wars of attrition end suddenly, who knows when it will end, but when it does, it will be sudden. And Ukraine was never going to be able to win a war of attrition against Russia. And NATO has spent $100 billion in weapons, another $200 billion in support for the Ukrainian government, which I think you wanted to talk about the forcing function which we just published. And so, now here we are, right? And it’s very clear that Russia’s … By the way, that demands that Russia … We’re making are going to get easier from here. But anyway, I digress. Yeah, forcing function, yeah. So do you want me to just launch into this?

David Blackmon [00:29:01] Yeah.

Doomberg [00:29:01] Yeah, we the West is 400 billion euros into this project, go down to the next page. They need, Ukraine needs 160 billion for the next few years and that’s basically…

Stuart Turley [00:29:16] It’s basically brilliant between friends.

Doomberg [00:29:19] Yeah, well, I mean, to be fair, because of this proxy war, Ukraine has been destroyed. The country, the infrastructure, by the way, and I say this as no friend of Putin, I think like the wanton destruction of their natural gas grid and their water heating facilities and their electricity grid, they’re war crimes. These are predominantly civilian targets. But I. At the same time, we find the phrase war crime to be a bit oxymoronic. All wars are crimes, which is why we are so heavily against them. But they need $160 billion. The U.S. Is not going to pay. Trump’s made that clear. He’s been very consistent. As erratic as he has been, he meets Putin, he’s with Russia, then he meets the Europeans, and he’s back and forth, and suddenly he’s laying sanctions down and threatening tomahawks and all this stuff. He’s been very consistent on one thing, the U.S. Taxpayer is not paying. If you want weapons for Ukraine, you’ve got to buy them, and Europe can’t afford it. And so, there’s a giant prize that Europeans have been eyeing for the four years of this conflict, which are the infamous frozen Russian assets that are sitting at EuroClear. And when we started writing this article, it looked like they were going to basically approved. What we would call the seizing of those assets. The Europeans might disagree on illegal technicality. Essentially the plan was to loan Ukraine the 140 billion euros that they need 160 billion dollars. And then only make Ukraine pay them back if Russia pays Ukraine reparations, and that’s never going to happen. This is an example of what bankers would call a bad-faith loan, you’re loaning money to somebody that you know can’t and won’t pay it back. And so EuroClear, where these assets are sitting, is this really important custodian back office. They hold people’s assets, they settle trades, they move money around, sort of the gears that make the modern economy work, just competitors to EuroClear, Chinese have version of it. But there’s $38 trillion in assets sitting at EuroClear under their custody, and if their impartiality suddenly becomes in doubt, you could see some serious challenges. So as we were writing this piece, it looks like the Belgians have said, no way, EuroClears is based in Belgium, by the way, just in case you aren’t following this as closely as we are. So, that’s been kicked into the long grass, as they might say in Britain. They postponed the decision to December, but by December, Ukraine is going to be in a pretty sticky wicket and $60 billion a year is a lot of cheese, as you might say.

David Blackmon [00:32:16] Yes, it is.

Doomberg [00:32:17] And the Russians have made very clear that they view this as theft, that’s Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov. One of the things we find fascinating about this whole situation is how few people in the West even read what Russia is saying. They put out English language versions of all the things that matter, and when you you read their propaganda, you read the Ukrainian propaganda, the British propaganda, and ours, you get a more holistic view of what’s actually going on. And if you just read our propaganda, then you have no idea what’s going on! No idea. The last thing I’ll say, the interesting thing that we calculated in this piece was I had a feel for this, I had good feel for numbers the value uplift because of gold’s appreciation. That just take Russia’s gold reserves at the time of the beginning of the war, so at the end of 2021, it perfectly offsets the loan amount that’s being discussed right now, which as we say, there’s no coincidences. But the last point I’ll say about this is, next time you see a big news event, take the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines, or who knows. Let’s say Russia uses a wave of Russian missiles and blows up all the bridges that cross the Dnieper River in Ukraine, or whatever’s dominating the headlines. Find eight different countries and read their official news service description of what occurred and you’ll be shocked, just at the way in which the same event is covered 360 degrees of difference. And once you do that once, it’s impossible to see the news as it is presented in the West in the same way ever again.

David Blackmon [00:34:13] Well, especially if you if you take the realistic viewpoint that our propaganda media is no more credible than that of Britain or Russia or China or anywhere else. I mean, it’s all propaganda.

Doomberg [00:34:28] Ours is way better than Britain’s.

David Blackmon [00:34:31] Well, yeah.

Doomberg [00:34:31] Yeah, Britain is a Britain is an outlier, but I get your point. Yeah, I agree in substance, but Britain my god Britain is not

Stuart Turley [00:34:38] Boy, I got blasted when the war came out. I was on a podcast and I said, the war will end with Russia having a land bridge to Korea. I said that that is what he’s going after because he wants those bases and he wants the ports. And I said everything else is just going to be handed off and he’ll he’ll end the war when he gets that.

David Blackmon [00:35:00] Well, didn’t Crimea go back to the reason you believe World War III started in 2014?

Doomberg [00:35:06] Yeah, in the aftermath of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, the U.S. Placed sanctions on Russia in a way that shocked the Russians, and Putin declared that U. S. Treasuries were no longer neutral as reserve assets, and so he dumped them, and he started buying gold. And China had been developing physical gold markets, and you could see the beginning of the end of U.S. Treasuries as the predominant neutral reserve asset and a replacement of gold to a role that it had served for forever, basically. And this, of course, is the big threat, I mean, as Gaddafi. And so, that’s when we think World War III hit up. That’s that chart that we show in that piece of value uplift of the Russian gold assets. In other words, what they have lost by seizing. By being seized, they have gained an appreciation of gold. And then, of course, Russia has 200 to 300 billion worth of European assets locked inside its country. We read over the weekend that Germany alone has about 100 billion in assets, and if the EU goes forward with this plan, they’ll just go ahead and help themselves to that. Thank you very much. And so. We wrote in, speaking of getting heat, we wrote in April of 2022 a piece called Crazy Pills, where we said these sanctions not only are not going to work, they’re going to fail. They’re going to backfire. And you can imagine the heat we got from writing that in the middle of Ukraine flags all over Twitter and unprovoked attack and all this stuff. By the way, the reason we started looking into this is because, again, I was like, You know, it’s not really our thing. But I saw this clip of John Kerry repeatedly describing the war as unprovoked war of aggression by Putin. And since nothing coming out of John’s Kerry’s mouth is the truth, I started to wonder, like let me go read the history of this. How did this war actually…

David Blackmon [00:37:08] Yeah, that’s when you know it.

Doomberg [00:37:10] Right, that was a tell.

David Blackmon [00:37:12] That was a definite tarot, yes.

Stuart Turley [00:37:16] No, Carrie should not be trusted with a paper opener. I mean, a letter opener. That man is absolutely disgusting, but we’ll leave that alone.

Doomberg [00:37:25] We’ll give him a ball of ketchup

Stuart Turley [00:37:28] Well, that was a great one, sir. I do appreciate that. When we sit back and take a look at, at ending the war, I believe the war will be ended sooner than later. I’m just being optimistic. I think president Trump by listening to the warmongers and I am not a Lindsey Graham fan. I think Lindsey Graham needs to retire as with 95% of Congress needs to tire. So, um, Brett Baker has a funny line here. Maybe Trump has decided the fourth horseman of the energy dominance is the guy is helping Ukraine hit the Russian oil transport. Oh, mighty Doonberg. I usually say that Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum and secretary Chris Wright are the three horsemen of the Energy Apocalypse. Of energy dominance. And so that’s where I’m sure this is coming from.

Doomberg [00:38:31] Let me take that quote and point out something interesting about just how we view the world. With interest that Ukraine is not attacking Russia’s crude oil production, just its refining. And China has excess refining capacity, 18 million barrels per day of refining capacity. Last year, they averaged about 14. So just by hitting the refining, which clearly this means, by the way, the U.S. Is planning this and telling Ukraine what they can and cannot hit still. By focusing on the refing, of course, that’s good because it doesn’t spike the price of crude. Refining just means that China is going to be the contract manufacturer for Russia. It’s not going to affect Russia’s society, gasoline shortages, diesel shortages. It’s like Russia can’t go secure cargos of diesel and tankers of diesel in gasoline on the open market. And so it’s an interesting observation that they’re not hitting crude oil production. They’re just hitting the refineries. Why? Because they make big booms and great for media victories and things like that.

Stuart Turley [00:39:36] Wow. That’s why you get paid the big bucks, sir.

Doomberg [00:39:42] You know, it’s a free market and so we get paid as well as our subscribers feel we deserve.

Stuart Turley [00:39:47] There we go. And we got Brian here. Brian is a cool cat. Drones have made the current war unwinnable similar, similar to the world war one stalemate. What will break it? No one knows. I agree. Brian, you are always spot on a lot of these things, but I feel that the end of the war is coming. Um, and I think that, um, Zelensky really is not the best leader at this particular moment.

Doomberg [00:40:16] So on the drone stuff, I agree with half of that statement. Drones have radically changed the nature of the war, but it doesn’t make this war unwinnable. Russia is vastly out-producing Ukraine and NATO in powerful drones, helped by the Chinese, and the Chinese have cut off Western drone makers of critical supplies at just the right time for Russia. So, we’re seeing 600, 700, up to 800 drones in a single night soon, if you believe. Again, you believe the propaganda that the Russians will be able to launch a thousand drones a night, overwhelming Ukrainian air defense systems. I agree with you that there will be no end to the war so long as Zelensky is in power. One wonders whether one of the things agreed upon in Alaska was that Zelenski needed to go. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to see that through, perhaps under pressure from the Europeans. I’m guessing, we’re all guessing, because we don’t know what was agreed to in Anchorage. And last thing I’d say is your comment about Lindsey Graham. One of the things we find about the Neocon crowd is they always assume nobody ever punches back. And this is how you end up in Afghanistan and Vietnam. And war after war in Iraq, Libya, we like to say Granada doesn’t count. And so, but here we go with Venezuela. I think this is the grand compromise. Marco Rubio comes from the Neocon wing. And can’t really do the whole Ukraine-Russia thing much longer, but we can, as we say in the Doom .

David Blackmon [00:42:05] Open another front.

Doomberg [00:42:07] Well, at the Doom zoom, we’re publishing tomorrow. We’re going to pick on somebody our own size. We’re gonna go down to Venezuela, Okay. Crack some heads, you know.

Stuart Turley [00:42:16] Let me ask this for you, Almighty Doomberg. And, um, when we sit back and take a look at Venezuela and the Monroe doctrine, I wrote an article, uh, and said basically that everybody was saying, well, what in the world’s going on with Venezuela? Why do we have B ones rolling by? Why do have B 52s? Why do, we have an aircraft carrier parked out there? And I said, because it is basically China has really stepped up. I mean… We still, it kind of went away. China still owns through the Singapore, uh, outlet each end of the Panama canal. That’s still there. They have not finished that issue. And I think president Trump quietly is blaming the narco terrorists as he blows them up and go, look, it’s about narco terrorism in the cartels, but it’s actually about him playing more hardball with President Xi saying, get out of my Monroe Dock.

Doomberg [00:43:15] Yeah, we wrote a piece on Inauguration Day, January 20, called Misreading the Room. And the social preview for the piece was, if Greenland is the appetizer, Maduro’s Venezuela be the main course. And so this has been on our radar for a long time. And again, when you see through the patterns, we call them mental models. Luke Groman and I were texting a couple of weeks ago. And he wondered whether. The trade in Alaska might have been Venezuela, China gets Taiwan, Russia does what it does in Ukraine, and the U.S. Gets Venezuela. Who knows? It’s hard not to be too cynical these days. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is when we develop a mental model like that, it need not be true, it just needs to work. And if it works to explain events, we keep it, and once it stops explaining events we discard it. But we’ve had… You know, Madura on the top of our leaderboard here for quite a while. And again, it’s hard not to be cynical when you could write something like that in January and fast forward to October, and we have the armada. But as we said in that piece, the history of strongman dictators on the critical path of the development of oil, once the supermajors show up next door, is not a glorious one. And we advised Maduro, I believe, in that piece that he should refrain from flying on a private jet anytime soon, because that tends to be a fateful way to rub such people out, if history is any guide. Again, these are all very serious things, and we shouldn’t be joking about them, I suppose. Nobody’s, just the three of us, right? Nobody can hear.

Stuart Turley [00:44:58] Just yeah, we’re talking between us girls here since we’re all like I’ve got my green chicken wannabe outfit My wife goes, why are you wearing that Doomberg costume again? That’s like I love do So, you know when I show up to the dinner table wearing my Doomberg custom, you you know I had to look like Barney for a little while till it got

Doomberg [00:45:21] It’s serious stuff of course, but look, Venezuela is sitting on the largest hydrocarbon reserve base in the world. They used to produce four million barrels a day, they barely produce one now. Same with Mexico, it’s cut in half with the cartels all up in Pemex’s business. When they say cartel and drug war, what they mean is oil and gas and energy. We all know that.

David Blackmon [00:45:44] We’re not supposed to say it.

Stuart Turley [00:45:47] Well, what, what do you see coming around the corner for the bifurcation and the new trading blocks are you really, uh, am I barking up the wrong tree or do you see that that is where net zero is total deindustrialization as we see Germany blowing up perfectly good cooling towers.

Doomberg [00:46:08] Yeah, well I think the only flaw in that analysis is the permanence of the net zero leadership class.

Doomberg [00:46:16] And I think once the war in Ukraine ends, in the way that we think it’ll end, that entire class of European leaders are going to get swept out of power. Which is why they’re so desperate, I think, to keep the war going. They bet it all on this adventure. And when you lose, decisions have consequences, right? And so. The rise of populism in Europe is a result of unpopular It’s called populism, for a reason. Macron and Stammer and von der Leyen and Kayakalis and Friedrich Mertz and Daniel Tusk, all of these politicians will be swept aside in political revolution. And if they continue to resist the political revolution, then there will be a physical revolution, which is why they’re cracking down on tweets and censorship and digital IDs and all this stuff. And so It’s a race for. Europeans and I would call them sovereignists, the Hungarians as a country, the French as a country and the Brits as a countries, the Germans as a county the sovereignty within those countries who are fighting a civil war essentially with Brussels and the EU Quagmire that Bill ended up in.

David Blackmon [00:47:50] Yeah, they all signed up for it.

Doomberg [00:47:52] If you look at the history, it was pretty illegitimate actually. A lot of referendums against it were just ignored, and they just kept doing the votes until they got the result they wanted, and when they never got the results they wanted they just discarded it and did it anyway. They’ve done so much more than the treaties ever envisioned or were sold to their people. So I would say that the European Union itself is an illegitimate entity. Illegitimate political entities generally don’t persist. They’re well past their sell-by date in our view. We wrote a piece called Final Countdown. One of the problems is that we tend to be early on these things. And so when the news flow goes against you for three to six months before things really unravel, people say, Hi, you were wrong. And then, when it happens, that’s one of the challenges of what we do.

Stuart Turley [00:48:51] Yeah, that’s that’s almost like Secretary Chris Wright and the cutter minister sending a letter to the EU saying, this is a huge deal. And saying, by the way, that the CSDDD mo USC is absolutely going to be stupid. And we don’t want to adhere to it. They kind of didn’t word it very Like we’re not going to play by your game. You can get cold in the winter. I would have been a little more abrupt, but do you think that the diplomatic letter, it was very diplomatic. I would’ve been like, have a great life and enjoy freezing.

Doomberg [00:49:31] Yeah, so again, we wrote about this back in January, a piece called Labor Laundering, How a New EU Law Could Rattle Global Supply Chains. We mentioned Qatar’s response to this, and at the time, the Qatar Energy Minister said they would basically stop shipping LNG to Europe then, and good luck. And so, again, it’s one of these things where, one thing I find really fascinating, many things I find fascinating about doing this and observing the world professionally now. Four years, I’m not sure, four and a half years, wow, four-and-a-half years, crazy. Like, people assume they have the leverage when they desperately need what you’re selling them. Qatar could just not sell to Europe, just keep it in the ground. The price will go up and the stuff they do sell will get the higher price. It’s baffling to me, again, this is why we always go back to this amazing stat about the European Union. The Statistical Review of World Energy, which is our Bible, comes out in June. They’ve begun separating out the European Union as an entity across all of these magical spreadsheets that they put out. And you could just count it up. Europe consumes 38 exajoules of hydrocarbons and it produces five. Struts around like it has any leverage. It’s baffling to me. Europe is a flaccid energy vessel. By the way, 33 exajoules is roughly the size of the entire U.S. Natural gas market. I think in 2024, U.S. Natural gas producers generated 37 hexajoules of natural gas. Europe’s industry tab is the cost of capital of every entity that touches every molecule of hydrocarbon that it imports. If you’re going to build your data center in the Permian, that’s one thing, you’d probably get paid to take the natural gas today. Maybe a buck a million BTU on a 12-month strip. Um hand somebody to drill it in the U.S., a midstream to pipeline it, to an LNG export facility, to a LNG cargo ship, to LNG regasification facility, pipelines to your cement factory, your cogeneration plant, everybody who touches that molecule of methane is getting their cost of capital covered. And so you’re starting out at $11.00, compared to $1.00 or $2.00 in the Permian, and you’re not going to win. And so, of course, Germany is de-industrializing. The fact that it’s blowing up perfectly good nuclear plants is bizarre. Eugippius was out with a fighting piece on this subject this morning on Substack. But again, we’re long past trying to understand what Germany’s up to.

David Blackmon [00:52:36] It’s like trying to understand California.

Stuart Turley [00:52:40] Oh, California. That’s a whole nother animals are, um, David and I talked about, uh, Alaska a bit this morning and when you, when you sit back and take a look at Alaska, that’s all I’ve, I wrote a piece and said, basically we are going to be watching who actually buys the leases up in Alaska because of its capital rich environment in order to drill up there. And my grandfather was one of the, uh. Chief geologist who discovered the North Slope. And I’ve gotten to hear over the years how all that turned around. And so it is expensive up there.

Doomberg [00:53:17] Again, we’ll think that Alaska is on its way when the Ambler Road finally gets built. And we’re 55 years in waiting on the construction of one single – they’re literally mandated by Congress in 1980. So that’s 45 years, I suppose. I can’t do simple math.

David Blackmon [00:53:38] Not quite half a century.

Doomberg [00:53:41] And so, when that road gets built, again, that’s sort of like a milestone on the board. We wrote about it. By the way, if you’re on newsletter.Doomberg.com, you just hit the search function, you can see if we’ve ever written about anything. So you just type in Ambler, that piece will probably come up. I believe it had to be called Road to Nowhere. But I’m just kidding.

Stuart Turley [00:53:59] That’s a good pun, I like that one.

Doomberg [00:54:01] I’m going to guess, let me know, but let’s see what it was. Let’s see how my memory is.

Stuart Turley [00:54:05] Uh, while you’re looking for that, sir. Uh, I love Rodney McGinnis, uh, road kill, Rodney, McGinniss is a cool cat. Uh, it would be interesting to build a roadmap of the influences. We’d said that, but I love what he said in the follow-up comment. The public needs to understand those influences. And I agree with you. That would be an interesting chart to put together.

Doomberg [00:54:31] Yeah, there’s, you know, having been in the corporate world, there are sort of clubs you’re forced to join as an executive because the company’s already in it and who knows why, and you go to these events and suddenly you’re linked to the WEF. You could be, my point in saying that is, if there is some inner brain, it’s probably a much smaller number of people than any map in the public domain is going to let you see.

Stuart Turley [00:54:58] Well, we’re winding down here, Mr. Doomberg, what are your last thoughts here as we start rolling out of this?

Doomberg [00:55:05] Can I plug a new project that we’ve been doing? Absolutely. So besides Doomberg.com, you can also go to classicsreadaloud.substack.com as the name implies. And one of the Doomberg co-founders and its editor-in-chief has started a fantastic new substack, classic literature, short stories, novels, novellas, produced in the same Doomberg quality. And there’s a surprising overlap in the Venn diagram of people who like Doomberg and people who liked high quality. Classic literature and have well-rounded education with a very brilliant audience. If you find yourself in the overlap of that diagram, head over to classics readaloud.substack.com. I expect to see Stu Turley and David Blackmon. Yes.

David Blackmon [00:55:48] To be there this afternoon.

Doomberg [00:55:50] And it’s great talking to you guys as always and can’t wait for the hate mail.

Stuart Turley [00:55:56] And, uh, almighty Doomberg, we will always have your show notes in there and tag in and get the, get this out there. Your, your YouTube views, even though we, we’re, we are now well past 19.5 million transcripts read this year off of our podcast and 2.3 million downloads off of either Spotify or Apple. I have to get my, my numbers, but. Your YouTube, and I’m not real well liked by the YouTube folks, it goes off very, very well on YouTube, so.

Doomberg [00:56:28] Yeah, I always enjoy speaking with you guys, and I think people enjoy hearing us shoot the breeze like we just have, so good deal.

Stuart Turley [00:56:35] Mr. David, any last words?

David Blackmon [00:56:38] No, I just appreciate Doomberg for being here. Thank you so much and look forward to tomorrow’s piece that you’re gonna have up.

Doomberg [00:56:45] Yeah, that’s a pro-talk, so you’ll have to upgrade. You’ll have reach for that wallet and break open the spider webs. Oh, yeah, we do have a premium tier. It’s a little more expensive than just the articles, but we do produce some good ones. This one tomorrow, I’ll give you a little commercial on it. It’s called Mental Model Six Axioms that Explain the World As It Is, brackets, for now. And we walked through our six operating mental models, which are just axioms that we graduate to that status, because they seem to be working well at predicting current and future events, and so it’s a good one. It’s probably my favorite. I think it’s about 60 slides long. It clocked in at just under 50 minutes, and we’ll be publishing a free preview to our paid subscribers, and then our pro-subscribers get the full presentation right away.

Stuart Turley [00:57:33] Well, I hope you haven’t absolutely. And I look forward to our next one. When we start coming up with some more world problems for you to solve, since you are a great mind and you’ve got a great team working with you there. So we do appreciate you.

Doomberg [00:57:45] Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Talk to you next time.

Stuart Turley [00:57:47] See you guys.

Got Questions on investing in oil and gas?