WBD599 Audio Transcription

Doomberg on Energy

Release date: Friday 30th December

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Doomberg. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Dominic Frisby is a British author, comedian, voice actor and musical curator. He also produces one of the top 20 financial substacks. In this interview, we discuss a range of issues highlighting how dire our current economic situation is, and if sound money and libertarianism are the solutions, the responsibilities this imposes on us as free citizens.

“Harnessing low-energy fuels is an entirely different challenge, as we’re finding out, and Germany is finding out the hard way; look, everywhere it’s tried it ends up with a more expensive grid, a dirtier grid, and a less reliable grid.”

— Doomberg

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: All right, Doomberg, hello.  It's a bit weird, I'm talking to a green chicken, but hello!

Doomberg: You get used to it!  Good afternoon, Peter; hi, Danny, great to be here.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, it's great to have you on the show.  You've become one of the most requested people to come on What Bitcoin Did.  I must get an email every week, two weeks, for somebody saying, "Can you get Doomberg on?" and I've been following you and reading your emails.  And so, yeah, it's great to get you on, appreciate you giving up some time.  Most people are on holiday at the moment, so appreciate that.

Doomberg: We like to say, when you're doing the work of your life, it doesn't feel like working, so you don't really need a holiday when you get to play for a living.  And actually, we have a pretty substantial following amongst Bitcoin fans, which is surprising, since we at least initially started writing critically about more broadly the crypto space, of course.  But they're some of our best fans and it's great to be on.  It's really great that you accommodated us as well on the technology side.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we like to do interviews in person, but sometimes it costs us because there's people you can't get to, or some people want to remain anonymous.  So, we're going to try to keep most in-person, but look, if we have to do remote ones, we'll do them.  If the content's good enough or the person's good enough, we want to do it.  And yeah, I mean look, I've seen you guys come up, I've seen the Doomberg team create a bit of a splash, especially this last year, and I think it's a lot to do with the energy markets, because energy's become this hot topic, not just for us as bitcoiners.  I mean, we consider it as bitcoiners because we get criticised a lot for it; but also, just personally.

I mean, I'm in the UK at the moment and we do have an energy crisis.  We do have people who can't afford to heat their homes and I think it's just become this real hot topic that people want to know a lot more about.  I've read some of your articles on it and we really want to dig into that with you today.  But it would be good, just for those who don't know, please explain what the Doomberg project is, the background, and I know you can't tell us who's behind it, but what is the mission here?

Doomberg: Sure.  So, Doomberg is the work of my life.  We run a Substack, we publish six to eight articles a month, as you alluded to.  We come from the energy/commodity space, so our background is, I'm a PhD scientist and I spent a couple of decades in the commodity sector in various roles, a lot of technology development roles in the renewable energy space in particular, so we know that space pretty well. 

We were a small consulting firm for several years and then we got hit by COVID like everybody else, got hit pretty hard actually, and decided to reinvent ourselves and opened up a line of consulting where we helped content creators who sold into Wall Street to run their businesses better, and that was great.  Then, one of our largest clients encouraged us to start our own, because we always joked with this person that they wouldn't listen to all of our advice.  He said, "Well, if you do your own, you'll have nobody to blame but yourself if it doesn't succeed".

So we did, we launched in May 2021, and it's been a fascinating ride.  A year later, we went to a paid newsletter.  We've had a lot of success, we've been able to put our old business basically on run-off, and now we essentially just do Doomberg for a living and last I checked, we were number one in the world on the finance category, which is a great category to be involved with, and so, yeah, it's been an amazing thrill, it's been an amazing ride, it's succeeded beyond all our wildest imagination.  So here we are, talking to you.

Peter McCormack: Awesome.  Well hopefully, we'll get you a few more subscribers, people listening to this show.  But yeah, this year for us, energy's just become this whole hot topic for bitcoiners and as I said, wider communities as well, especially in the UK.  And you sign off your emails, "Energy is life".  How do you explain what's happened in 2022; what are your overall feelings about what's happened in 2022?

Doomberg: So, what happened in 2022 actually began in 2021 really, but a crisis in Europe, which is where you are, and by the way we're publishing a piece on this tomorrow, called The Whims of Gaia.  Basically, an energy crisis in Europe spread to the rest of the world and the crisis derives from several factors, one of which is a deep opposition to fossil fuels and most importantly, nuclear power; a total reliance on intermittent renewable energy; and then obviously, the war in Ukraine added fuel to the fire, pardon the metaphor, but things got much worse after the tanks rolled over the line in Ukraine, and Europe basically was forced to pay whatever the market clearing price was for every BTU of energy it could get, regardless of its carbon footprint or its cost, and they did.

Then, thus far this winter, luckily, Mother Nature has done some favours for Europe, and the worst of the crisis and some of the worst-case scenario risks seem to have been taken off the table, which is something we cheer wholeheartedly.  But essentially, the world found out in 2022 that during times of energy abundance, it's easy to take for granted just how important energy is to the operation of our society.  And during times of energy scarcity, like we had in the middle of 2022, things can go a little haywire, and they did, and we saw prices that were unthinkable.  We hope that the weather continues, but Europe's got to turn around and do it all over again for next winter, this time without the benefit of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. 

So, things went global pretty quickly.  Europe incrementally bidding for every cargo of LNG caused global prices in the rest of the world to rise, and coal being more expensive than oil for a good period of time this year is a remarkable thing.  So really, everything just sort of went haywire, and it proves just how important energy is.  Like the old saying goes, "You really miss the electricity when it goes off".

Peter McCormack: Yeah!  So, I want to understand a little bit more about how we got here, especially in Europe.  My personal experience of understanding energy, and specifically with regards to climate change, I was definitely someone maybe five years, maybe even less, was somebody highly concerned about global warming, and highly concerned with the use of fossil fuels.  I've kind of gone on a journey where I've spent a bit of time listening to and reading a lot of the work of Alex Epstein, who I don't agree with entirely, but he did also make me reconsider a lot of roles of different forms of energy.  So, I've been trying to go down this rabbit hole trying to understand, what should the energy mix be; are renewables good for society? 

So, I kind of want to dig into a few bits of this with you.  But have you come to a point where you have a perfect energy mix; what do you think the energy mix should be?

Doomberg: Yeah, so our view is that there is no path to decarbonisation that does not involve nuclear power, nuclear energy at the heart of it.  There are paths to radically reduce our energy consumption, which involve mass starvation and death and suffering, but we take the view that that's an unacceptable option.  We also read Alex's work, and I was fortunate enough to be a guest on his podcast.  He's a brilliant guy, he makes a very powerful argument, and he is certainly an extremely effective debater on the topic and comes prepared, as you probably experienced.

But in our view, nuclear power at the heart of it, there is always going to be the need for fossil fuels, especially in certain applications where electricity and batteries won't work.  Imagine diesel trucks in mines, and so on.  We laid out a policy that has nuclear power at the heart of it and if we are going to do solar, then we should re-domesticate that supply chain, instead of having China control over 98% of some of the key manufacturing choke points.

Then there is a place for fossil fuels and natural gas.  We think natural gas should replace coal, especially in home heating.  There are still parts of Europe, Poland in particular, where literally heating your homes with coal is common.  But the path has to go through nuclear, and that is the thing that is most puzzling about the Climate Change Movement, as they have rebranded themselves, is their deep opposition to what is the obvious solution.

A freshly built nuclear power plant today comes with essentially no risk, could last a century, produces carbon-free electricity effectively indefinitely, is technology we completely understand, and the energy payback period itself is less than six weeks.  So, the total amount of energy that goes into constructing a nuclear power plant gets paid back in six weeks; whereas, with solar, you're looking at a period measured in years.

So, yeah, there will come a time where we land on the same answer, only after we've tried all the stupid ones, but the proactive shutdown of much of Europe's nuclear fleet, especially in Belgium and Germany, is a scandal of epic proportions.  And the genesis of that movement needs to be investigated because I think if you do, you'll find significant foreign interference with that particular domestic policy.

Peter McCormack: Okay, you're alluding to something there.  Is there anything more you can say on that?

Doomberg: Oh, I think there's a lot of evidence that Russia's behind much of the German opposition to nuclear energy, and the former, his name escapes me, but the former Chancellor of Germany sits on the board of Gazprom, and it's just unquestionable that prior to the Ukraine invasion that the biggest beneficiary of European fallacies on nuclear energy was Russia.  In fact, as we've learned, the entire German manufacturing sector became addicted to cheap Russian natural gas, and the struggles that are going to happen in the years ahead can be tied directly to the fateful decision to roll the dice and join with Russia for something as critically important as their fundamental energy needs.

So now, what we see is a return to coal.  If you look at the carbon footprint of the German electricity grid, it's often above 500 grams of CO2 per MWh of electricity, whatever the metrics are, bested only by Poland; whereas Norway and France, which has a large nuclear fleet, which thankfully is now being run a little bit better than it had been, much, much greener.  So, the solution exists.  If you take Ontario, it has basically a carbon-free grid.  It's supplied by nuclear power and hydroelectricity, very, very little natural gas and no coal.  It can be done.  Last I checked, Ontario was a civilised society and the streets were clean and you could walk around and enjoy nature. 

This is all really just a farce.  Proactively shutting down nuclear power plants, as I said at the beginning of this answer, is a scandal.  And I think when this is done, and it will be done, like all crises, it will pass, a real hard look at how we got here I think is in order.

Peter McCormack: Where were the main objections for nuclear coming from; was it a propaganda message that managed to filter through all of Europe?

Doomberg: Yeah, especially in Germany.  And then with the Fukushima accident, that's when the opponents of nuclear power really pushed hard.  It's a fascinating thing.  Even the Californians, the most liberal part of the US, recognised that shutting down Diablo Canyon was maybe a mistake, in the middle of rolling blackouts as it is.  Diablo Canyon produces 10% of California's electricity and 20% of its baseload power, and yet they were thinking about closing it down.  This is how deep the propaganda against it has gone. 

We wrote a piece tackling this fallacy that nuclear waste is some dramatic generational condemnation of environmental calamity, it's all made up; literally, you cannot find a single death associated with nuclear waste and yet people die all the time drilling for oil and gas.  And most of the solar in the world comes from slave labour and China.  These are all trade-offs; there are no answers, there are only trade-offs, and when you measure all of the trade-offs, nuclear power is so fundamentally better that it's a joke.

Now, a lot of this too can be ascribed to what is known as the Malthusian origins of the modern environmental movement, where literally there's a strong streak of anti-human population bomb fears where they would like less people on the planet, to which we say, "You first.  Sure.  Why don't you lead by example on that one?" and surprisingly few of them do.  So, yeah, if you go back and look in the 1950s and 1960s, the main fear of environmentalists was the propagation of nuclear power, precisely because it delivered plentiful bounties of energy to what they would consider the unwashed masses, and they worried that these unwashed masses armed with bountiful energy would soak up all the other resources of the world and leave less for them.

This is true, this is at the heart of the environment movement still, and we argue because their policies today are indistinguishable from the policies that flowed from the Malthusian origins of those radical movements.  And, they have been extraordinarily effective in managing the propaganda, much to the shame of the nuclear power industry.  They've just been lapped by far more effective attorneys and PR firms and passionate guests on television, and thank God we have the Alex Epsteins of the world to finally begin to make the counterpoint that society needs to hear.

Peter McCormack: Specifically with Fukushima, that was kind of a unique scenario with where it was positioned, right, its location near the ocean; wasn't that something that people were critical of?

Doomberg: Sure.  I mean, in hindsight, yeah, probably not the best place in the world to build a nuclear power plant.  But at the same time, the world still spins.  I mean, I've been to Japan since then.  Again, how many bombs did we drop in World War II in Europe?  We literally dropped two nuclear bombs in Japan.  The dangers of nuclear power, especially freshly built ones, where you can take things like that into account, have been so widely overblown that it's borderline criminal.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.  So, with regards to nuclear, if that is to be centre to this, what's the kind of timescale on this?  We've had various people on the show to talk about nuclear and they always talk about, "Well, to have a new nuclear plant could be 10 to 25 years", I've heard those broad range of dates.  But is that all just regulation which is slowing things down?

Doomberg: Of course, yes.  Look, we wrote a piece about how crisis can speed things up.  In the Wall Street Journal, there was an article about how Germany has made this floating natural gas LNG import facility in a year, when it would typically take five.  The same environmentalists who sue to slow every new project down as much as possible, who stack regulatory agencies with their allies, who advocate for laws to be passed that totally restrict the ability to get anything done in a sensible fashion turn around and say, "It's too expensive and it takes too long".  That's a choice.

We did the Manhattan Project in three years.  Germany has proven it's the exception that proves the rule, the fact that they were able to build this LNG import facility on a moment's notice; that tells you that this is basically a choice.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay, so realistically how long would a nuclear plant take?  What I'm trying to imagine is specifically with regards to the UK.  I think we've commissioned a new nuclear plant to be built but realistically, if the government wanted to push this forward, is this something that could take three years?

Doomberg: Sure.  Here's the proof; go to China.  They have 15 reactors under construction and another 100 in design, and I can assure you it's not going to take them 10 years to build these reactors.  Now, maybe we want to have slightly better standards and a little bit more regulatory oversight, we're all for an appropriate amount of oversight, but anybody who's arguing that it's too expensive or takes too long is probably part of the reason why it's too expensive and takes too long. 

So, there needs to be a regulatory shift, there needs to be an embracement, a get-it-done mentality, a crisis mentality, because we're in one.  And so, yeah, we wrote about this, I think it was a piece called Molecular Delusions, where basically because of the crisis, they could just turn around and build this thing in less than a year.  So, if the UK truly had to, it wouldn't take ten years to build a nuclear reactor.  I mean, you can buy basically pre-designed reactors today.

Peter McCormack: So, can you talk to me a little bit about what's been happening in France then, with regards to their nuclear reactors, because as I understand it, they actually have quite a lot compared to the rest of Europe.  I think, when we looked, Danny, what was it, like 50, 52, or something?  But at the same time, I heard something like half of them weren't currently operational.  What's happening in France?

Doomberg: So, France is an example of mismanaging an asset, as opposed to -- it's more a condemnation of the management of that asset, the maintenance of it and upkeep of it versus the underlying technology itself, although it is being used.  Their mismanagement of their nuclear fleet is being used to hammer nuclear power advocates so, "Let no crisis go to waste", I suppose if you're a propogandist.  But yeah, at its peak, I believe France got something like 80% of its electricity from nuclear power.

The measurement of how effective a power plant is is something called its capacity factor, which is basically the percent of time it's operating at its full capacity.  In the US and in Germany, easy to achieve 90%-plus capacity factors, whereas France this year, at the lowest, was somewhere in the high 50%.  But they're climbing back now and not a moment too soon, because Europe needs every electron it can get its hands on, coming into winter here. 

So, France is an example both of how you can design an entire grid around nuclear power, and they have done so for decades; they have amongst the lowest carbon footprints in the EU, I believe second only to Norway, which gets almost all of its electricity from hydro; but at the same time, it's also an example of how you have to invest to maintain, no matter what, no matter where you get your power from.  Windmills need to be serviced and solar panels need to be cleaned, and nuclear power plants need to be upkept.  And if you google around, you'll see that there's actually a bit of a scandal there, so we shall see. 

But the good news is that the nuclear reactors are coming back to closer to the capacity factors that they've been designed to operate at.

Peter McCormack: Is this why I've seen some people talk about, this energy crisis was probably going to last until about 2026; is this people kind of counting that it might be three or four years to fix this nuclear problem?  I maybe read that on yours!

Doomberg: Yeah, the timeline is driven by the speed with which worldwide natural gas markets harmonise, which is driven by the speed with which LNG export facilities can be built, and the speed with which LNG import facilities and the associated pipelines can be built, which is why we mention this engineering miracle in Germany that they were able to build one so quickly.  If you look at the announced projects and the speed of construction…

I should maybe explain why natural gas is so critical, because natural gas is a gas and it's very hard to ship around the world.  In order to ship it, you have to chill it to incredibly low temperatures and then put it on these highly specialised LNG cargo boats.  And to chill it at the export facility is an entirely different process than to regasify it at the import facility, which is why you need both.  So we saw, at the height of the energy crisis, natural gas in Europe actually touched $100 per million BTU while it was trading for $3 per million BTU in Canada; the exact same molecules were selling for a factor of 30 difference in price.  It's because Canada has an abundance, Europe had a chronic shortage, and the price elasticity of demand for these things is pretty steep.

So, the timeline, particularly of when the LNG import facilities are fully constructed in Europe, that's when the crisis will abate.  I think they have one more hard winter to go, but countries like the US, Qatar and Australia, especially Qatar and the US, are building out massive amounts of LNG export facilities and the pipelines to connect the fields to these exports.  And then Europe has to build out the ability to receive this natural gas, but there's still a big decision ahead for Germany.  They have three nuclear reactors that they've extended through until April.  If they choose to shut those down, first of all it's crazy, but it also means it will be all that much tougher to get through next winter.  If Germany did not have the three reactors online right now that it did, I can assure you that December would have been a far tougher experience than thankfully it has been.  So, their decision to keep it open was a wise one.

Peter McCormack: Is there any indication with what they're going to do with this though?

Doomberg: I can't imagine that they would be silly enough to shut it down; that would shock me.  I mean, at some point if they did, you'd almost have to throw your hands in the air and say, "Well, you deserve what's coming".  We have a lot of subscribers in Germany, I've visited Germany dozens of times, I have a lot of warm feelings for the country.  I don't want them to go through a crisis but at some point, if you would just stab yourself in the eye with a pen enough times, you can't complain about being blind.  So, we shall see.

Peter McCormack: I just want to go back, you mentioned earlier, you said that the payback period for a nuclear plant is six weeks, which kind of blew my mind.  Is there a rough maths on that that you can explain?

Doomberg: Sure, yeah, the energy payback period, not the financial payback period?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Doomberg: Basically, to make a nuclear power plant requires a fixed amount of cement and piping and various controls, but the uranium fuel is so energy-dense and produces so much electricity for basically free thereafter, that the amount of energy -- by the way, because nuclear reactors run 24/7 at 90% capacity factor essentially, it takes almost no time at all for these things to pay back their energy.

When you compare the energy intensity of solar, we wrote a whole piece on this because of course that is a very political number, but we wrote a piece in November called Solar Calculator, where we demystified the energy payback period of solar; to take sand and make ultra-high purity solar-grade polysilicon is one of the most energy intense processes in industry.  You need seven or eight nines of purity, 99.9999.  And in fact, most of the energy penalty comes from taking metallurgical-grade polysilicon and purifying it to that degree, because if you have any impurities at all, the cells don't operate, you get a short.

So, there's a lot of controversy about what that payback is, because the lower the payback period, the more attractive it looks for solar, so a lot of science becomes propaganda.  And the devil is in the details, but the assumptions that you make really drive everything.  But don't forget for solar, since the sun doesn't shine at night and it's often cloudy, the stated -- this is sort of standard sleight of hand of the pro-solar propogandists, is the stated capacity versus the actual capacity factors are two worlds apart. 

I mean, for a very good commercial solar facility in the southern United States, you might get a capacity factor of around 30%.  In Germany, where you have long periods of basically very little sun, and they're far more north than say California, you could go and look at the data, the capacity factor for German solar is 11%.  So, if you have 10 GW of solar power installed, on average you're producing 1 GW, which is a remarkable thing.  So, when people talk about, "Look at how much solar we have installed", you actually have to say, "How much energy is that producing, and when?"  Then you have to deal with the challenge of intermittency.

So, you have this enormous amount of energy that goes into making solar power, which does eventually get payback.  In our piece, we landed somewhere between one and five years, probably closer to one in the US, four or five in Germany; but for nuclear power, I can send you afterwards with very detailed calculations, it's roughly about six weeks, which means it doesn't take much energy to create energy versus solar.  Let's just say the payback period for solar is two years, if you want to convert 10% of your existing energy mix to solar, you need to invest 20% of it upfront right away, which means that you have to divert it from things that we use it for today, like sustaining life.  Whereas with nuclear power, if it's six weeks, with 1% of your energy, you could install 9% of the baseload that you need.

The maths is literally 20 to 30 times better and that all comes down to the fact that nuclear power is a very high energy-dense source.  Energy density is king.  If you give an engineer energy density, they can work magic.  Harnessing low-energy fuels is an entirely different challenge, as we're finding out, and Germany's finding out the hard way.  Everywhere it's tried, it ends up with a more expensive grid, a dirtier grid and a less reliable grid, whether it's New England, which just went through a standard winter storm, it basically was burning oil for 40% of its electricity at the peak of that storm; how is this green?  California, rolling blackouts.  Eventually we'll come to our senses.

But yes, the energy payback period on nuclear is surprisingly small.  People hate it when we say it because it goes against the narrative, but the answer is nuclear in all calculations.

Peter McCormack: So unironically, or ironically, depending on how you want to look at it, the green activists, their policies that they've encouraged have actually led to a dirtier grid?

Doomberg: Well, yes, again because they would like a world where fewer people have a high standard of living and most people are opposed to that, and so you get this impasse.  And then the population panics and politicians panic and they do what Germany has done, which is restart old coal plants, buy every ton of coal they can get their hands on, open up new coalmines, or re-open up old ones that had been shuttered, buy natural gas from anyone who will sell it, including Qatar which, with this World Cup and all of the associated controversy around that, it didn't stop Germany from signing a long-term deal with Qatar.  You have to plug your nose and forget your ethics at some point, or you starve your populace, and it just doesn't work.

Even going against Bitcoin miners, we wrote a piece which was relatively pro-Bitcoin mining in the sense that if you're going to introduce all this intermittency, then you need to have peaker power plants.  The economics of peaker power plants don't work if they're only on a certain percentage of time.  So, if you could let them make some money by mining for Bitcoin, while also agreeing to swiftly toggle in and out of the grid, you could be part of the solution.  But of course, New York has effectively passed regulations to shut that down; and the one publicly traded miner is now in a bit of hurt.

Peter McCormack: When you said earlier, I just need to pull you up on the point, you said, "These people want people to have a lower standard of living", do you mean that directly or indirectly that they're causing that?  Look, I know green activists, I know people who consider themselves environmentalists.  I don't believe these people want others to have a lower standard of living.  I think they believe they're right; I think they believe that there is a problem with fossil fuels and we need to curtail it.  Maybe they're naïve or they've received bad information, but I don't believe these people actually want people to have a worst standard of living.

Doomberg: In the US, there was an article that just come out in the New Yorker, which we're going to write a piece on, they don't like urban development, for example, or suburban development, like these big homes; McMansions, they call them.  They believe, especially in the US here, and I can't say how it's articulated in the UK, that the big SUVs and the homes and all of the niceties of making it in life are obscene and need to be curtailed.  This is a many tens of thousands of words long essay in the New Yorker and when you read it, it's pretty clear. 

They think the way in which we heat our homes, and even the way in which we've built our homes and the way in which our homes are sized all needs to come down.  They're talking about radically reshaping the way humans live.  And actually, there's many in the environmental movement are anti-vehicle, for example.  If you live in the United States, the vast majority of people who don't live in the city couldn't get by without their vehicles.  And even many in the city still commute to work because our infrastructure is not nearly as developed as it should be.

But yes, they are anti -- and beyond that, of course, the Malthusian origins that we referred to earlier are real.  And whether or not the marginal environmentalists believe that, they have been impacted by it.  As we like to say, "If you think nuclear waste is an issue, you're either a victim of propaganda or a knowing creator of it".  The fact that the origins of the movement were decidedly anti-human, that the policies of today are consistent with that origin, and the physics dictate that a full implementation of the proposals would result in significant pain and loss to humans means that, whether or not somebody consciously is Malthusian is a distinction without much of a difference.

If you are for policies that are provably terrible for humans, it's pretty hard to argue that you're pro-human.  Alex Epstein makes this point quite convincingly in his last two books.  Many people in this movement view humans as apriority and in all scenarios, damaging to nature, which must be protected.  So, people can be upset by it, but it's plain as day if you read what they actually say, if you go back and read the old books, if you read what they still say today.  There is a degrowth movement that is very closely tied to the anti-fossil fuel movement and we have to recognise that, I think.  To ignore it is to be naïve, frankly.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'll dig out that New Yorker article, I want to read it and I want to read your response to it.  I've also noticed, specifically with Alex Epstein, there has been a kind of concerted effort to try and discredit him.  And a question I have for you actually, I wonder if you find this, so similarly with Bitcoin, trying to explain why Bitcoin matters to people, we'll come to what your opinions are on it now, maybe it's changed, and I think we'll agree with you because we're not crypto people, we're just Bitcoin; but sometimes, in trying to explain it to people, why Bitcoin's important, why we care about it or the issues that we have with the traditional financial system, trying to explain it in a way sometimes without sounding like some nutjob, because sometimes when you try and explain these things, I mean some of my friends absolutely think I'm some weird, Alex Jones style conspiracy theorist, and I try and explain things in the most rational way.

Even recently, we were talking about government debt, and I was showing the Office for Budget Responsibility, I was literally showing the data on the government's website, explaining how they're consistently overspending year after year, but I still come across people who think I'm some kind of nutter!  Do you have a similar thing where you try and explain this to people, that may be outside of Doomberg privately, when you're talking to friends, that it's hard to try and explain this without sounding like you're some conspiracy theorist?

Doomberg: Interestingly, I find the opposite.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Doomberg: There's a lot of people who are quietly uneasy about the way in which our energy policy is unfolding, especially in our demographic.  I would say that my children, who have been taught to hate fossil fuels from a very early age in school, think I'm a big orthogonal to what they would expect, although they're not bragging to their friends that we write Doomberg, if you know what I'm saying.  But your allusion to what transpired with Alex Epstein is a perfect point, which is they tried to cancel him, effectively, and he was powerful enough and had a big enough social media footprint that he was able to snuff that out pre-emptively.  They dug out some old writings that he had done when he was a college student and tried to put a nasty spin on it, were the typical tricks.

We have found, when we explain energy to people, they say, "Aha, thank you!" because ultimately, two things.  One, we are first-principled, based on physics; and two, we have relative experience in the area and education in the area, so we can speak to it credibly; and then three, one of the attributes of Doomberg is our ability to explain things in a way that non-experts can understand, and we try to do that in our private lives as well.  But in our demographic, which is I would say age 40 and above, sometimes much higher than 40, we're considered as a breath of fresh air because we take the time to explain these things, and this is what our audience believes anyway.  So, that's been quite good.

The issue around Bitcoin, maybe we can save that for when we want to talk about Bitcoin, but I can understand why that would be slightly different.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we will get to Bitcoin, because I do want to find out your position on it now, especially as you've attracted a Bitcoin audience.  I mean, you recently moderated the chat between George Gammon and Michael Saylor, so I definitely want to get to that.  I just still want to do a few bits on the energy side of things.  I can't remember this from reading the emails that come through, but has Doomberg taking a position on climate change and what the relative risks are?

Doomberg: I would say that we are closer to Alex Epstein and Michael Shellenberger; we are certainly not climate alarmists.  Our view is that it's fine to try to reorganise society around the following equation: the highest standard of living we can give to the most amount of people divided by our carbon emissions.  That's a fine goal.  But I do think that we're more than capable of handling any potential disruptions to the climate that may or may not arise in the next 50 years, because of our consumption of fossil fuels.

But we're more critical of the path function of minimising the carbon emissions than we're concerned about -- and by the way, in a sense that's a lost debate anyway, so why waste your time?  And one thing we can do is affect change in the policies that replace our current structure.  But I would say that I don't lie up at night worrying about the planet I'm leaving behind for my kids.

Peter McCormack: Good.  All right, just going back to the renewables, because I've obviously been a proponent of renewables, a fan of both wind and solar; I've looked at what's happened specifically in Texas, because Texas is usually a case study for Bitcoin miners; but if everything you're saying is correct about nuclear, what argument really is there for wind and solar; what part can they actually play; and is it just a total waste of time and should everything be moved to nuclear?

Doomberg: I would say we are more opposed to wind than we are to solar for the following reason.  Solar is very seductive, because we get eradiated with many orders of magnitude more energy than we could ever possibly use on an ongoing basis.  Fractions of a percent, I think it's something like 1% of the solar energy's captured in the form of photosynthesis and a very small fraction of that is used to feed us.  There's just so much energy basically for free hitting the earth every day, and it's a problem that's always worth investigating, always worth studying, always worth developing.

Our position on solar is that the West, Europe and the US, need to reclaim their manufacturing ability in the space because right now, it's basically outsourced to China, which is using dirty coal and slave labour to produce the panels that we all proudly put on our homes.  I own a fair bit of solar technology, mostly as a backup, and so solar, if we could crack the intermittency problem, which again Bitcoin mining could potentially help, it could play a significant role in our energy future and we would be certainly for its continued development.

Wind on the other hand is really just an atrocity.  Giant amounts of concrete, of epoxy, of high-end magnets in the motors, a lot of damage to the wildlife, a lot of damage especially offshore.  For people who are supposed to be pro-planet, to be for wind and against nuclear is just absurd on its face.

Peter McCormack: And that's because we know a lot of birds are killed by flying into the blades or flying into the units?

Doomberg: And whales and marine life and the construction of these things.  And they're an eyesore, let's be honest.  I drive through the rural parts of the state that I live in here in the US, and they blot the landscape, and they never seem to be moving; they seem to have an awful lot of downtime.  It's the same issue, intermittency, same issue with extended energy payback periods.  Most of these projects are just tax loss harvesting for rich people.  I mean, these credits get bundled into financial vehicles that allow wealthy people to avoid paying taxes, so there's a whole other scandal invented there.

Danny Knowles: I was just having a look at energy on the grid right now in the UK, and the amount of wind is at 56%.  So, that's obviously a huge part of our grid now.  So, convincing people that that's not been a good investment is going to really hard, surely.

Doomberg: Well, let me correct you though.  Not that long ago, it was next to nothing, and it's that intermittency, that instability that it brings into the grid; because, when it's not 56% but it's 4%, that other 52% has to come from somewhere and it's usually a natural gas peaker plant that is filling the void.  So, you are correct that today, in Germany and in the UK, it's warm and it's windy; great, the power grid is expected to be on all the time. 

Wind is even less predictable than solar, because you know solar's not going to happen at night and you can predict the weather seven or eight days out.  But wind is a whole different matter.  And if you look at that percent of the grid that is coming from wind over time, you will see a very chaotic line.  An electricity grid is a very fine balancing act between supply and demand.  And so when people turn on the switch, they expect the light to come on.  So, the wind volatility is the issue, not so much the amount that it can produce at any particular time.

Danny Knowles: But presumably, that wind has taken over from, even if it's intermittent, in that intermittent period, it's taken over from coal or gas, I would imagine.  So, even if it's intermittent, is that better for the time that it's up and running?

Doomberg: Well again, it depends on how you calculate it.  So, the cost of being ready for the intermittency is never included in the cost and the payback period of wind.  And, what is the point if you can't just use it?  So, this is where storage is such a big deal.  If you could run full throttle and store for when you don't have this intermittency, that would be great, except storage is not ready for it yet, contrary to what people say.  And so, when it's windy, wind can produce a lot of power.  Nuclear power produces the same amount of power all the time, it's very predictable.

Peter McCormack: So, what about batteries?  Again, this is another technology that people talk about, but it seems to be the one part of society where we don't seem to have technically advanced with the pace of other technologies.  For some reason, battery storage seems to just be something that, I don't know, it seems like to me, batteries are pretty much the same technology we've had for the last 20, 30 years.  Has anything been done in that area?

Doomberg: So, battery development is extraordinarily challenging and very, very incremental percents of improvement a year, at best.  And batteries for hybrid electric vehicles make a lot more sense than batteries for full electric vehicles, we can talk about that, and make almost no sense for grid storage.  I'm not sure if you saw it, Joe Rogan had a guest that went viral this week --

Peter McCormack: Yes, I did.

Doomberg: -- talking about child labour and what they call "artisanal mines" in the Congo.  It's a scandal of epic proportions.  The issue with batteries is we do not have enough materials in places we are willing to mine to satisfy the projections for electric vehicles, let alone electric vehicles plus storage.  The amount of batteries you would need to store an hour's worth of the UK's grid is unfathomable.  The very same people who are for battery storage are opposed to the permitting of all these new mines that will be needed, and all the diesel fuel that will go into the trucks that will do the mining to get this job done.

Our view on batteries is, since batteries are a constraint, we should prioritise to that constraint.  If you have one full battery electric vehicle today, Peter, there's probably an 80 kWh battery pack in there.  For that 80 kWh battery pack, we will abate your fossil fuel use of one person.  If you split that battery pack in four and produce four plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, where the vast majority of people can abate 90% of their fossil fuel use; 4 times 90 is 360 which means plug-in hybrids are 3.6 times better for displacing fossil fuels than full battery electrics, but the governments around the world are basically prioritising full BEVs over plug-in hybrids.  That's an example of a stupid policy that we could change today that we would be all for.

Plug-in hybrids are great, they solve a lot of the problem, they don't come with range anxiety and the first 40 or 50 miles that you would drive on a 20 kWh battery are carbon free essentially, well depending on where you get your electricity of course, but certainly fossil fuel free, and then the engine would kick in once the battery is depleted and you can charge it again overnight.  And so, the equation we should be optimising for batteries is: gallons of fossil fuel abated per kWh.  The one vehicle that has done the most to abate fossil fuel use in the world is of course the Toyota Prius, which has a much smaller battery pack than that, and you get 40 mpg to 50 mpg versus a fleet average when they were rolled out in the low 20s.  So, those are the types of things that we should be prioritising.

But storage for the grid is incredibly hard.  Our good friend, Dr Chris Keefer, who runs the Decouple podcast, had a brilliant guy, Mark Nelson, who's a nuclear power expert, they did a show called Masterclass on Storage, and I would encourage everybody to listen to it, it was really brilliantly done.  Battery packs for storage is probably the dumbest of the suite of very bad ideas being put forth today, and that's being kind.

Peter McCormack: So, would you say that the electric car market itself is a bit of a scam the way it's been sold to us?

Doomberg: Again, we are for the proliferation of technologies that could abate the amount of gasoline that we use to power our vehicles.  So, to the extent that the explosion and the development and the interest of electric vehicles has caused the auto makers to radically reconsider how the car of the future will be made, that's unabashedly a positive thing.  We would be for plug-in hybrids and hybrids as a pathway to when battery technology gets to the point where we could completely abate the need for gasoline.  The technology and the bear materials aren't quite there yet, as you've highlighted, and so we're big believers in that you don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.  We have technologies that can rapidly increase the fuel efficiency of the modern vehicle with minimal sacrifice to standard of living, to go back to the same topic, and we should deploy them in a smart way.

So, I wouldn't say that it's a scam.  I think there are an awful lot of fishy start-ups in the whole SPAC boom, and all that stuff, that turned out to be scams, but the concept of partnering smaller and smaller internal combustion engines with bigger and bigger batteries is one that we think is intelligent and we would support.

Peter McCormack: I'm just going to reiterate what you said as well about that Rogan show.  It's with Siddharth Kara.  If anyone listening hasn't listened to that show, they should.  That is a massive scandal, what's happening with the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  It kind of blew my mind.  He's got a book coming out, which I'm very interested in reading, but we will put that one up in the show notes.  I'm not sure if Danny's listened to it.

Doomberg: It's funny you should say that, because we know the mining industry well and have consulted in the space and again, come from the mining sector.  This is widely known, this is common knowledge in industry, that 70% of the world's cobalt which finds its way into basically all of the rechargeable batteries on the planet comes from some of the most horrendous places on earth, as measured by the treatment of labour and child labour, and the conditions under which these people are forced to work.  This is widely known. 

It's interesting to me that it's gone super-viral all of a sudden.  I guess Joe Rogan can do that, but it's the same thing, these Apple iPhone cities in China.  We call them cities, but they're pretty indistinguishable from forced labour camps, if you think about it.  The euphemisms that these public affairs teams have used at these big companies, even just the word "artisanal" sounds so sweet and harmless, but artisanal is code for slave labour in the Congo, literally hammering away with primitive tools to get the cobalt out of the ground that is then processed by China and stuck into every device that is critical to our lives today.

Again, this is a choice.  We could invest to develop our own cobalt mines; there's cobalt around the world, it's just not economic.  So again, the fact that we have decided that price matters more than the lives of these people is a choice; it's not put in anybody's face, but it's real.  And to the extent that Joe Rogan and his guest begin to put it in people's face, I think that's an important thing.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm wondering what pressure will now come on the likes of Elon Musk and Tim Cook.  You would hope a lot of pressure to the point where they actually have to do something about this, because my assumption is the likes of Tesla and Apple are going to be some of the biggest buyers of cobalt.

Doomberg: Yeah, I mean all the automakers now.  I mean, don't forget BYD is a much bigger electric vehicle operator than Tesla.  In the last week in China, I think I saw some numbers where Tesla sold 9,000 vehicles and BYD sold 56,000 vehicles.  There's a whole lot of people that have a lot of explaining to do.  Now, it should be said that one of the largest, most heavily invested-in research projects in the world is developing lithium-ion batteries that don't need cobalt, and that's going to be a challenge.  There are other battery technologies that Toyota's been developing as well on the horizon. 

So, to the extent that this scandal motivates people to develop technologies that move away from cobalt, that too will be a good thing.  But this is widely known.  It's surprising to me that this suddenly becomes around-the-clock news and so viral, because ask anybody; all the western mining companies got out of there years ago just to get away from the taint of it, left very valuable concessions and resources behind that the Chinese swept in and basically took over.

Wherever we have outsourced major, dirty manufacturing like this to China, like the piece we just wrote on solar, most people don't realise that almost every solar cell in the world is comingled with polysilicon that was made by forced labour; and the US has this crazy policy where we are incentivising demand and stopping the importation, because the stuff comes from the Uyghurs.  So, it's out there, everybody knows it, and suddenly we start caring about it.  So, I'm all for it, it's just an interesting phenomenon.

As a person in the media, you could probably understand what makes things go viral and what gets people interested as something we're endlessly fascinated by.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I'd heard previously about these child mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I think I went onto the Tesla website and they had a whole section, maybe on their website, or in one of their prospectuses, but explaining how they ethically source their cobalt.  Obviously now listening to this show, I know that was complete bullshit, but it would just be interesting to see what pressures are put on the likes of Elon Musk, because he's the kind of person that if the pressure does come on it, he will have to do something about it, and probably can do something about it.

Doomberg: I think Tim Cook as well though.  I mean, Apple in particular is at risk here.  And by the way, it's not just cobalt in the Congo; the same polysilicon that goes in to make solar finds its way into all the chips in the world.  So, many of the key choke points in the entire economy are -- this is the natural consequence of NIMBYism.  If you do not want to have mines operating at home and you outsource them, you also outsource the oversight and the environmental impact that those mines will have.

Again, we wrote a piece about magnesium.  Magnesium is absolutely critical to the auto industry.  When Dow shut down its last magnesium plant on the Gulf Coast, China basically took over that entire industry.  Magnesium is incredibly dirty to make and tough on the environment.  And yet, in the US or in the UK or in the EU or in Australia or in Korea, we had environmental controls.  It's more expensive to hold companies up to standards and to make sure that they're not polluting local rivers and that they're properly permitted and inspected, and companies are fined if they break their permits and they release too much pollution.  None of that goes on in China, so we're just scarring their environment to make ours seem artificially better.

We really have to have a sort of come-to-Jesus moment, where we talk about the trade-offs here.  We wrote a piece about a lithium discovery in Maine, a really amazing hard rock lithium discovery in Maine that will never get developed, because Maine has basically outlawed the permitting of new mines in its state.  And yet, the same environmental groups that were behind the law and cheered its passage, this law that bans permits of new mines, are for the mandate of electric vehicle penetration in Maine. 

We make the joke in the piece, "This new mine is 10 miles away as the crow flies from one of the best ski resorts in the Northeast.  And I can assure you that if you went into that parking lot, you would see many Teslas.  And yet, the lithium that's needed, never mind just cobalt, lithium is a very dirty process too; the lithium that's needed is right next door but won't ever be developed, not in our garden, but maybe in yours".  So not only is there not enough of it, the way in which it's being made today allows us to turn a blind eye to the environmental damage that's being done.  Do we care about the planet, or do we care about the ski hill in Maine?

Peter McCormack: I think you're right, a come-to-Jesus moment's needed.  All right, we can't let you go without talking a little bit about Bitcoin.  You said when you first wrote about it, you were critical of it, you are critical of the wider crypto industry.  We're a Bitcoin-only podcast, we very rarely talk about anything else.  We're obviously proponents and supporters of Bitcoin, but where are you at with it now?  Obviously you've become more exposed to it by the fact that you've got an audience that comes to you who are bitcoiners; where are you guys with it now?

Doomberg: Yeah, so let's take a step back and start with where I'm sure you and I and Danny all agree, which is there is a need for insuring against the debasement of fiat currencies.  I think that government spending and government printing is out of control.  I'm a big proponent of gold and I think in the rationale for gold and Bitcoin, there's an awful lot of overlap in the Venn Diagram, and I think as an asset, amongst the digital currencies, if we were to buy one, it would be Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: If!

Doomberg: If we were to buy one, yeah.  And we might.  I had a conversation with Lyn Alden about it that if the crypto world explodes to the point where it drags down the price of Bitcoin to an attractive enough level, I would toss a few percent of my net worth towards it.  And I jokingly said to her, when I had that private conversation, that me just asking you how to buy it might mark a bottom, because I was getting ready for much lower prices.  This was shortly after the FTX SBF implosion occurred.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, just to jump in, what's an attractive price for you?

Doomberg: I told her that I'd be a buyer at $5,000.

Peter McCormack: And when would you be a seller?

Doomberg: I would just buy and hold.  So, I should explain my personal investing philosophy.  We earn money and we transact in fiat, because we're law-abiding citizens and that's the way the world works and it's convenient; we save money by buying real assets, like gold and land and collectibles; and then we invest privately where we could affect the outcome with our own skills and network, and we sort of call that "sweat alpha".

We don't speculate in the stock market, but we do save by buying real assets and if we were to buy Bitcoin, that would be an allocation, were it in that category of allocation that we would make it.  We would never buy crypto, we think all crypto are Ponzis.  To the extent that Bitcoin is an asset, Bitcoin does have some useful properties.  I just don't know how it will ever be -- our critique of Bitcoin has always been twofold.

One, the regulatory regime will not allow it and they will crackdown on it and it will be used as a bridge to central bank digital currencies, which we think are a surveillance nightmare.  And then, two, that the price of Bitcoin was being artificially manipulated by the crypto world, vis-à-vis Tether and other stablecoins.  We think that a bottom won't be in for Bitcoin until the Tether situation is resolved, and that's why I was talking to Lyn about learning how to actually buy and store in my own hard wallet, or cold wallet, or whatever you guys call it.

But I understand the attractiveness of it and I understand that the Bitcoin Network itself is a pretty interesting phenomenon and the decentralisation of it is attractive to me.  I just don't think the government's going to let me spend it, and look what they did in Canada.  We wrote a piece, called Just Watch Me, that roasted Justin Trudeau, who I think is the intellectual weak link of a pretty pathetic set of leaders in the G7 today as it stands.  But the first thing they did was they slapped sanctions on these wallets that were donating to the Bitcoin fund.  I think the sanctioning of Tornado Cash is a real troubling sign, we wrote a piece on that.

Peter McCormack: But hold on, the Canadian Government also sanctioned donations which were made in fiat as well, it wasn't just Bitcoin.

Doomberg: Correct, exactly.  Right, but when it mattered, you couldn't spend your Bitcoin.  And so the whole point is, you still have to operate within society.  I had a great conversation with Marty Bent on this.  Ultimately money is what the government says it is, and so the solution to our money problems isn't a new currency, it's a new government.  This is probably where we disagree a little bit.  It's hard for us to envision where you could legally use Bitcoin as a currency in the US if the government didn't want you to, which is what we saw in Canada in a very small way.

But look at how they sanctioned Tornado Cash.  Yes, Tornado Cash is used for money laundering, but there are also legitimate uses for it, like wanting to make a private donation that can't be traced back to your main asset.  Criminals use highways; we wouldn't tear up a highway just because criminals happened to use it, but they sanctioned a piece of software, which we think was a very dangerous precedent as well.

But back to Bitcoin.  When Tether is resolved and Binance is resolved and Bitfinex is resolved and all of this is washed away, that's when we think the bottom of this secular bear market in Bitcoin will be in, and that's a point where we will make a multiple percent allocation of our net worth and stick it in a safe somewhere and give it to our children someday, like the gold coins they'll get when I die as well.

Peter McCormack: What if we are at the bottom though and you miss it?

Doomberg: Then I will have missed it, yeah.  This is why I'm don't play on the stock market, I'm not good at predicting prices.

Peter McCormack: So, what is your fear with Tether, because this is a rumour that's come up for years and years?

Doomberg: I just think that this is the part where I perhaps disagree with many in the Bitcoin community, to not acknowledge that this phenomenon is affecting the price of Bitcoin, or that there are an awful lot of red flags around the organisation.  I mean, the biggest user of it was Sam Bankman-Fried, literally.  So, I simply don't believe they have the assets they claim to have to back the stablecoin that they've issued, in contrast to Circle, who I do believe, and USDC. 

We made a prediction in our sort of year-in-review that when the dust settles, USDC will be the stablecoin of choice in the digital currency world, and it will be fully approved by the US authorities for that purpose.  I don't believe Tether's story, I don't believe Binance's story, I don't believe Bitfinex's story, so I think they're all going to get washed out.  And once they do, the price of Bitcoin will be a real price, in my view, and if it's up from here, great, congratulations; and if it's down from here, interesting, it might be a buying opportunity.

But I think the failure to acknowledge the cancer of Tether is to the detriment of the Bitcoin community.  Many people that I respect on almost all other issues have a different view to me, and that's fine by the way, it's totally fine.  You and I can disagree on something, like you said with Alex Epstein, I don't agree with everything that he says, but he's intelligent, he expresses his views politely and he makes me think, and those are three wonderful attributes of any human and I'm happy to talk to Alex any time, and I'm happy to talk to most polite Bitcoin proponents as well, because I've found many of them to be intelligent, to have strongly-held views that they express politely, and that's fine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you also get a few that will share them not so politely!

Doomberg: Sure, and I get trolls all the time on Twitter from the renewable crowd, from the anti-nuclear crowd, from the Bitcoin crowd, from the anti-Bitcoin crowd.  We have a saying that, "If a troll tweets something bad about you but you have them on mute, did they even type?" because it doesn't really matter.  But that's not my audience.  So, we have an ideal client, we know who they are, and that's who we cater to; we don't cater to the trolls.

Peter McCormack: Okay, just a final thing for me, what are you looking at for 2023; what should we be thinking about; what do you think our audience should be thinking about?

Doomberg: I think the resolution of the European energy crisis and how well January and February are with regard to weather and gas use is a big one obviously; we believe that Tether, Binance and Bitfinex will be resolved; I think SBF is going to turn state's evidence and roll up that whole ugly side of the industry; we'll get a true price for Bitcoin, which is great; and I do think that China's reopening is really a 180-degree change literally overnight and we have many friends in China, I used to lead a large team that was based there and travelled there four times a year for the better part of a decade.

The 180 in China is going to shock people.  COVID is probably in 70% to 80% of the population right now, and the thing is, they did this just ahead of Chinese New Year, where they have this mass migration, so it's going to be in everybody.  And then when they come out of New Year, the Chinese economy is going to be roaring hot.  It's going to look bad for the next two or three months, because there's going to be missing workers and supply chain issues and all that stuff, but look out world because China's coming back in 2023 in a big way.

Peter McCormack: All right.  Well, listen, tell people where to go and find out more and where they can subscribe.  Do you know what a funny thing was, actually, I'd been getting your emails and reading them, and I only found out today I wasn't actually a subscriber.  I am now, I have a paid subscription, but I didn't realise that from the emails.  But tell people where to go and subscribe.

Doomberg: Yeah, so our free subscribers do get a pretty healthy preview of all of our pieces, so that's why you were reading some of our words, but hopefully not getting all the way to the end because otherwise there's something wrong with our software!  Yeah, so all of our writing can be found at doomberg.substack.com.  We are 100% subscriber supported, we accept no ads or sponsorships.  There's nothing wrong with those business models, but we believe we have complete editorial freedom running the subscription model. 

We're also on Twitter @doombergt, T as in Twitter.  Somebody is squatting on the handle @doomberg, which is unfortunate.  But @doombergt is where we are, as long as Twitter is still a thing, and yeah, predominantly at Substack, which has been great.  Like we said, we publish six to eight times a month.  Our objective is to delight our subscribers and we work every day to do so.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  Well listen, it's great to have you on.  Hopefully we can do this again some time next year, have another catchup, find out what's going on.  I just wish you a Happy New Year, and yeah, hopefully we'll see you in 2023.

Doomberg: Same to you guys, it was a great pleasure and I'll tell you what, if Tether does get resolved, we'll come back on to talk about it!

Peter McCormack: All right, we'll do that.  Take care, have a great New Year.