WBD634 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin’s Operation Chokepoint with Doomberg

Release date: Monday 20th March

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.

Doomberg is an anonymous collective producing the world’s most popular financial substack. In this interview, we discuss coordinated action against the crypto industry being undertaken with limited congressional approval or oversight. We talk about historical precedents, what this could mean for Bitcoin and Bitcoiners, and why we need a financial bill of rights.

“Ejection from the banking system can be random. Happens for political reasons in the US all the time. It’s rarely reported about. And, in a way, it’s more devastating than being on probation for having been convicted for something, because not being able to bank in 2023 is akin to not being able to function in society.”

— Doomberg

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Doomberg, good to see you again, you big green chicken!  

Doomberg: Peter, fantastic to be here; had such a blast last time.  I'll tell you what, our emails and comments lit up after our last appearance and it was a real blast, and so, when you reached out to have us back on, we accepted without hesitation.  How are you doing on this fine day?

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I'm good, man, but with this crazy world we're living in right now, I think we could probably make a show every two or three days with all this crazy shit going on.

Doomberg: Indeed.

Peter McCormack: What is going on, man? 

Doomberg: We put out a piece this morning called Don Jerome --

Peter McCormack: I saw it.

Doomberg: -- where we compared the events of the past week to the epic final act of The Godfather where Michael Corleone takes care of all of the family business in one fell swoop, and it felt like that, especially on Sunday when we saw this almost matter of fact, "Oh, by the way, we shut down Signature Bank", as a throwaway paragraph in a Fed press release about the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank. 

Lest anyone had any doubt what this was all about, a headline just crossed as we started to hit record here that one of the conditions of buying Signature from the FDIC will be that the buyer ceases all crypto activities.  So, that was very clearly a shot across the bow against the crypto world, which is something we had predicted and warned about for many years, and of course not alone, many people thought the same thing.  But to see that play out so brutally and so coldly in black and white and the speed with which both of the major payment rails into the crypto universe were blown up, the analogy is sort of like what happened to the Nord Stream 2 pipelines; you wake up one day and they're blown to smithereens, and so it's been fascinating.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's quite interesting because it's also happening over here in the UK at the same time.  So, I've just got up here, "NatWest limits cryptocurrency transfers over scam fears"; I got an email from Gemini saying they've moved banking partner; I know Binance paused theirs as well.  So, it's not only happening in the US but it's starting to feel coordinated over here as well; I don't know if you've seen this UK stuff.

Doomberg: Yes, we're following it closely and we sort of envision a world where the US dollar-based system, which we would wrap the Five Eyes countries and Europe into that US dollar-based system, will potentially I guess operate a ringfenced-in KYC AML compliant universe of crypto, but that presents some challenges, I'm not so sure. 

Another headline early this week was Fidelity is up and running, in the US of course, but imagine if you're going to be interacting with somebody like Fidelity, you're pretty well cleansed from a KYC AML perspective, and so I don't know; this is really fascinating.  Our piece today was a little speculative to be sure, but when you have a blog, why not speculate once in a while, but it does pose some interesting questions, and so, yeah, it does seem coordinated for sure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I put out a little tweet before this, almost inspirational for the chat we're going to have; I was googling Credit Suisse's scandals because it actually came up on the radio today, had nothing to do with crypto, they didn't even mention that, but on the radio when I was driving back earlier today to come and do this interview, they were talking about their scandals.  They mentioned Mozambique and money laundering; spying on staff; human trafficking, they've got clients who are human traffickers; Venezuelans who've looted the country; just a long list of fraudulent clients they have or fraud they've been wrapped up in. 

Now, they're obviously in a, well they're calling it a liquidity crisis but whatever, they're in financial difficulties and they're immediately awarded a $44 billion lifeline; whereas bitcoiners who really are quite happy with just buying their Bitcoin and holding it are treated like they are the criminals here. 

Doomberg: Well, when you're done googling Credit Suisse, you can google Deutsche Bank and see.  I raise you a Deutsche Bank because if you want to talk about basically a criminal enterprise, in my view, with the amount of money laundering that goes through these banks, it has to be that it is done knowingly, so it is a fascinating and I think a very legitimate critique of these activities.  That's why we called the piece Don Jerome because it's not like the authorities cracking down are the angels of goodness here, this is basically one more powerful mob family cracking down on people who've got off of their desired path.

Look at JP Morgan with all of the whole Epstein scandal, they just sued a former top executive, trying to pin the blame for JP Morgan having enabled all of this illicit activity on him, on that one particular person as though the rest of the bank isn't involved in risk management somehow.  So, it is certainly a double standard, we never doubted that it would be, but at the same time, as we said in the piece, broadly speaking, most Americans, if the US says this is illegal and the banks forbid them for engaging in it, they won't. 

So, you will lose the median citizen, it'll just be like, "We're nocoiners because we have a good life and assembled some wealth and happiness and we would be willing to protect that and the juice isn't worth the squeeze for us", it is for many and for many of your listeners and we're not criticising that, but for the median American or Brit, when presented with the hassle of having to fight for a bank account's existence versus just ignoring a complete asset class, they will chose to ignore that asset class, in our view.

Peter McCormack: Well look, Doomberg, whether you guys hold Bitcoin or not, and I hold Bitcoin, as you would expect and know, we're still on the same side of this in that we both recognise the ills of central banks and what's happening within these fraudulent commercial banks, we both see everything that's happening is unfair. 

Certainly, I don't think you would agree with Bitcoin being choked out away as an option for people, so we can be entirely on the same side of this.  But when you mentioned these median people that you might lose, one of my difficulties is, I'm like you, I'm spending all day on Twitter reading about these things, reading your articles when they come in my inbox, reading things from Lyn Alden; when I try and step outside my daytime work circle into my friendship groups, I'm always struggling to try and explain this without sounding like some kind of nutter or conspiracy theorist, because I think my friends think I'm crazy.

I will show them things like the Office of Budget Responsibility in the UK, I will show them how much money the government is overspending and why this may be one of the reasons that we have issues with inflation; I will talk to them about criminals within banks, using banks to launder money; and then when I bring up Bitcoin, they're like, "No, Pete".

Doomberg: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, I have a real struggle with communicating this in a way that people actually take it as seriously as I think they should.

Doomberg: So, it's fascinating that you should say that, Peter, because we had this conversation in the office earlier this week.  So, the Editor in Chief of Doomberg has decided to take an extended holiday from Twitter, and the world from that vantage point is completely different than the world they had experienced in the years and months before that, because Twitter has dissolved into an even greater toxic cesspool than it has been, and it can be difficult to be on Twitter.  But when you live the Twitterverse, like we do because our livings depend on being connected and connecting to us quickly and seeing information as it is made available, nobody cares.

So, we were specifically talking about the context of whether or not bank contagion, because of Silicon Valley Bank and of course Signature and Silvergate and now it looks like First Republic is in a spot of bother to steal a British phrase, we speculated that if we went to our grocery store and asked 5 people, asked 100 people about Silicon Valley Bank, no more than 5 would have ever heard of it still today.

So, there is a phenomenon for sure that when you are entrenched in the Twitter universe, the algorithm is designed to make you feel like there's always a mania somewhere, there's always a panic somewhere; that's what drives the dopamine which drives the engagement.  So I concur, the median citizen in the UK has a distant and probably slightly negative view of Bitcoin as being "off limits" or nefarious and they just haven't spent the time thinking about it as we have, they're not afraid of the government, people still trust the government strangely enough.  They're worried about making the mortgage payment and how the price of eggs is hurting their budget, and they're not really pondering the root causes of those things, because to go there can lead to some pretty ugly answers, as we both know.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, the last five, six years of doing this, like an onion, I've been shedding my layers of supporting democracy and believing it's the best choice we have and trying to make out that, "Look, I understand politics is messy and dirty but democracy's great".  I think I shed the final skins this last week or so where I was just like, "I'm fucking done with this".

We can take Bitcoin out of the equation, Doomberg, we can take it completely out of the equation, and I know with my friends, like you say the price of eggs, I've got real world numbers.  Look, it's going to sound very privileged to explain this next point, but it is relevant.  My kids go to a school which I have to pay for, I work hard to put them in there.  Every year they put up the fees 3%, 4%; yesterday I got a letter saying they're up 11.5%, the school fees; that's going to affect a bunch of people. 

A lot of people, like my dad, sent me to a good school, he had worked every hour he could do to that.  You've got a bar I'm trying to buy at the moment, the electricity and gas prices are about to triple because they've been on a long-term contract; every single thing whether it's refuse, drinks, everything is going up.  I know people who are experiencing this and feeling the burn, but when I even try and help them connect those dots as to why it's happening, there's this kind of like aversion to going down that rabbit hole.  I think I know what will happen is we'll have a general election in two years and they'll change who they vote for.

Doomberg: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: And the same shit will happen.

Doomberg: Yeah, so first of all, what does it say about our society where you have to pre-apologise for talking about the fact that you've worked hard and have been able to do your best to provide an excellent education for your children at your own expense, but I digress. 

I'll give you an example where nobody escapes here in the United States, which is the Obamacare, healthcare exchange networks.  As small business owners, we're not part of some corporate health plan.  I know, in the UK of course, you have the National Healthcare System; but in the US, it's a perverted version of capitalism in the sense that you have to go into an open market and purchase it, but really it's an oligopoly.  Since we've started our firm, our healthcare costs have compounded at 12% annual, long before inflation was a thing, and the amount you have to pay before the coverage kicks in just keeps growing and growing and growing, the deductible.

Peter McCormack: The deductible, yeah.

Doomberg: Yeah.  So, for a family of four, in the United States, you're looking at basically on average $1,500 a month before anything kicks in and a $10,000 deductible; that's basically the catastrophic plan.

Peter McCormack: Jesus!

Doomberg: And it only goes up from there, and so the average person is out of pocket $18,000 in premiums and $10,000 deductible, so really before you get anything meaningful, you have to cough up $28,000.  And by the way, I have a relative dealing with cancer and been helping here and there over the years, and the bills that these hospital stays, if you actually look at the sort of list price, it's just astronomical.  So, you might twist a knee and be out $28,000 before you have to put out a -- it's just really staggering to me the pressure on that average person.  So in a way, it explains why they're too distracted by the technical needs of the day to think about the strategic consequences of how we got here and where we're going.

Peter McCormack: Well, the squeeze is everywhere at the moment, and we had our budget this week in the UK, I don't know if you followed the budget, I mostly ignored it because I knew there was nothing in there that was going to change my life and make it better.  I do know corporation tax is already going up, which is something that's going to be squeeze my business more today; I had to deal with a pension issue that somebody needs a pension so I have to contribute to that. 

There's a constant squeeze in my business, there's this constant squeeze on individuals, there's constant squeeze happens, but at no point in this budget did anyone come out within the government and said, "Yeah, we're going to reduce the size of government, we're going to reduce taxes, this is what we think will be a good way of stimulating the economy".  It was everything was done with taking more money off them that they think they can distribute in a better way to stimulate the economy, and I'm just like, "Look, this is bullshit.  I know how to deploy capital better than you and you're taking it away from me and you're making it harder for me on every business I have yet you, as an institution, continue to grow".

Doomberg: Yeah.  In the US again, it's something like 40%-plus of the economy now represents local state and federal expenditures, and our analogy is this is a giant game of Jenga and there are only so many bricks from the bottom that you can take to put on top before the whole edifice collapses.  Now, how close we are to that remains to be seen, but it does seem like we're reaching unsustainable levels.  Washington DC in the US, compared to the rest of the country, is this garden of opulence like you wouldn't believe; the concentration of millionaires in Washington DC would shock you, and it's all basically lobbyists and former politicians raping the public basically for ill-gotten gains and as long as you pay off the right politicians and so on…

Look, forever thus I suppose, if you go back and look at headlines in the 1950s and 1960s, you could you see similar things, but that was back when the size of government was 20%, and now that it's 40% or 45% it's becoming a real cancer; Biden's latest budget is talking about raising the capital gains tax from the low 20%s to high 30%s, nearly doubling the capital gains tax, which again punishes entrepreneurs and so it's frustrating to watch.  If you want to talk about broken politics, come to the US, it's really amazing.  I had somebody reach out to me from the former East Germany when we wrote this piece about, again crypto, which we started with poker called Pandora's Precedent.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a great article.

Doomberg: This person said, "I'm reminded of before the Wall came down, about how, as things got worse, citizens retreated to the comfort of their own home garden, like you created a local environment that was peaceful that you could be happy in and you did your best to close your brain to what was going on outside".  She said, "Your article makes me suspect that this is beginning to happen in places like the US, where we have all of these tropes about freedom and all this stuff, but in reality, good luck trying to get a lot of US dollars out of the US dollar system if you wanted to move somewhere".  We talk about capital controls in China --

Peter McCormack: Or the exit tax.

Doomberg: You got the exit tax and so on, and so I guess there's got to be some silver lining in here somewhere and I'm sure we'll find it over the next few minutes, but it does seem like things are coming to a head.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, revolution is probably coming.  Okay, so let's talk about this Pandora's Precedent because Nic Carter himself, you've probably seen what he's written about Operation Chokepoint, and it's become very, very clear what's happening.  Before we get into what you talked about what happened with the poker industry, which I've got an interesting anecdote by the way, do you separate crypto and Bitcoin or do you consider them separate in this?  I can see a much larger argument, even though I don't agree entirely with it, I can see a larger argument for choking out parts of the crypto industry; whereas I think I always consider, naturally, I've got a Bitcoin show, I consider Bitcoin slightly different.

Doomberg: Sure.

Peter McCormack: I do consider Bitcoin, it consider its utility, I've seen how it's been used, I use it, it serves multiple purposes for me.  I've never really bought or used any other crypto since 2017 when I first discovered crypto because I have no use for any of it, and most of it is bullshit or it's scams or a way for people to maybe launder money.  I'm not interested in NFTs, DAOs, tokens or anything, but I do have a very significant interest in Bitcoin.  Do you separate the two in your head and do you separate the two when you're considering this kind of choking out?

Doomberg: So, a three-part answer: yes, we do separate Bitcoin from crypto for the following reason, which is the US Government does today as well, because it is regulated as an asset, and as long as you dutifully report your gains and losses to the IRS, it is totally legal to hold.  So, not only do we distinguish it but the US Government does as well.

What we hinted at in Pandora's Precedent and what we said overtly in Don Jerome this morning, is when you go to that intermediate world where the US had choked off crypto but Bitcoin is still free and fully legal, it's difficult to imagine a world where money launderers don't take advantage of the fact that Bitcoin can be sent with basically no friction peer to peer to circumvent the newly installed anti-money laundering guardrails of the crypto world, and then eventually they'll come for your Bitcoin too.  We're not saying that that's a good thing, we're saying that that's likely if you follow the train of logic.  So, the point of Pandora's Precedent is how dangerous it is, and in fact we quoted Nic Carter's piece quite extensively in Pandora's Precedent.

As an aside, by the way, one of the things that's lacking from our discourse is people assume that if you're sceptical in Bitcoin you would never talk to or engage in a conversation with Nic Carter or vice versa; we've written sceptically about crypto and originally neutrally about Bitcoin and maybe even slightly favourably because we're sympathetic to the arguments for it and why it exists.  We can have a discussion where we agree to disagree and we try to learn something; that's very, very lacking in our discourse today.

So, of course we read Nic Carter's piece, and of course it made us uncomfortable, and while we think he minimised by absence the sheer volume of fraud in the crypto world, the broader points he was making are, I think, very much front and centre for anybody who cares about personal freedom and liberty.  The US Government has weaponised access to the banking system to achieve political means, and with each passing episode, that median person that you and I wonder about, becomes dull to the outrage. 

So, one of the points we made in Pandora's Precedent is when they originally did this of course, and for those who aren't familiar with the original Operation Chokepoint, this was done during the Obama presidency where they illegally leaned on regulated banks to choke off excess to banking and therefore destroy those businesses potentially, for politically disfavoured groups but still totally legal groups, like gun shops and payday lenders, and when that was uncovered it was a huge scandal.  There were congressional hearings and there was outrage and the FDIC backed down and the payday industry successfully sued where the FDIC settled on favourable terms to that industry. 

None of that's happening today because that's yesterday's scandal and we've been dulled by it, we're numb to it now.  Now everyone just expects, of course, it's perfectly natural that the US Government, without even having to have due process, even fake due process, can just shut you or kick you out of the banking system.  We said in the piece, if you're even tangentially associated with crypto in the US, you'd best be prepared for lengthy calls from your bankers doing background checks and, "What's your business; what are you doing?"  You will very quickly find that the digits that you see on the screen that allegedly account for the dollar value of your deposits, those don't belong to you.  You get to spend those if the government decides you're allowed to spend those, which is exactly opposite of how the country was meant to be created and run.

We start that piece with a story; we have a very good friend who was rolled up in the poker rollup of more than a decade ago, and the man did nothing wrong, got totally wiped out, was nearly bankrupted and literally is still losing bank accounts 12 years later; it's incredible.

Peter McCormack: I remember what happened in the poker industry because I used to a play a lot of online poker, I used to play the six-seater Sit and Go tournaments.  I can't remember at the time whether it was Victor Chandler or PokerStars, I used to play on them, there were a lot of tables, they were always full; I remember going on one day and it was just there weren't very many players there anymore and I didn't know why at the time.  Then obviously, later on, I heard about the crackdown on offshore poker websites, but do you want to tell the story so people understand the precedent?

Doomberg: Sure.  So, it was called Black Friday in the poker world, and in the US with the boom of online poker, there was no clear regulatory regime in place, and this is all going to sound very familiar to crypto enthusiasts or Bitcoin enthusiasts listening.  In fact, a fair reading of the laws is that the Congress never intended for online poker to be illegal, it was specifically not named in a piece of legislation that passed in 2006, called Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and the real challenge was, is poker gambling or is poker a game of skill?

Now, you've played poker, I've played poker, skill is the ultimate determinative in who plays poker well.  So, these three large companies, like PokerStars, Ultimate Bet and Full Tilt I believe, at the time, an aggressive prosecutor in the southern district of New York, Preet Bharara, he found an old misdemeanour, a law in New York that made it a Class A misdemeanour punishable up to a year in prison to run a game of chance where bets are placed within the state.  Now, again, is poker really a game of change?  I suppose there's some luck involved, but integrated over time, poker is a skill game. 

Once you have a law that's broken, if you've used a bank in any way, shape or form to do that, there's a plethora of felonies to choose from to hammer people with if a prosecutor wishes to.  In fact, this raid came in April, I just want to make sure I've got the date right, yeah, 15 April 2011, tax day ironically.  Just the prior December, Congress was debating passing legislation that would have overtly legalised online poker and regulated it.  It would have created a tax stream, it would have created a new industry, there were all kinds of innovative things going on in that space.  It failed largely because the rumour at the time was that the National Football League was opposed to it, so that got killed at the last minute, and then this prosecutor in New York decided to crush the entire industry, and he did so on very flimsy means. 

So my friend, who was an investor in one of these companies and was a famous poker player, a talented poker player, and he had a whole series of investments in poker companies and others that I would guess probably were worth about $100 million on paper, and he got rolled up and he was wiped out, he was on the verge of bankruptcy and the Fed said, "You will settle this civil complaint that we will draft.  You won't have to admit guilt, but if you don't, we're going to take you to the mat and we're going to put you in jail".

Peter McCormack: Okay, so they blackmailed him.

Doomberg: Essentially.  Well, the quote in the piece from him, because I suspect it's part of his consent decree, he's not allowed to deny having done anything wrong even though he didn't have to admit it; he said, and I quote, "When the US Government decides that it wants to put you out of business, the specifics of the law aren't nearly as important as the intent of the prosecutors", and here's the money quote, "The amount of leverage they can bring to bear against you is formidable and vastly outweighs the protections of due process"; there was no due process here. 

His net worth was destroyed and they were making him an offer he can't refuse, to pull a quote from The Godfather, "You sign on the dotted line, or if you think this hurts, wait until you see what we'll do if you don't", and this not due process and this is not how America was founded and it's not how most people think the country operates.  It's easy to say, "Poker's kind of sketchy, I'm not involved in poker so I'm not going to really worry about it.  As long as I don't play poker, I'll be okay".  Well, that's not really how things go because there's ethical incrementalism; once something is normalised, it only gets a little bit more aggressive, like we're seeing now with Operation Chokepoint 2.0.

Peter McCormack: Aren't the three branches of government meant to prevent this from happening?

Doomberg: Well, I remember when I was in the corporate world and a wise mentor once said something to me, "There's a vast chasm between having an argument and having a case", and, "Sure, your rights are being violated, write a letter to your Congressman.  In the meantime, you've got 24 hours to sign this civil charge resolution that we've drafted for you or we'll see you in court; this is your deadline.  Go ahead and call your Congressman.  Thursday at 9.00am, this offer expires".  So, what do you do?  Again, what are the consequences to the prosecutor in this case?  Nothing.  In reality, months later, much of the legal underpinning was overturned in the courts, but that doesn't mean that my friend isn't still losing bank accounts; where does he go to get his reputation back? 

Peter McCormack: When you guys are discussing this internally or you're thinking about this and why it's happened, do you think this is coordinated, some kind of group oppression, or do you think this is just how the organism of government will naturally evolve towards?

Doomberg: Yeah, I would say the latter.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Doomberg: There are evil people in the government who -- power structures distil psychopathy, let's be very clear; it's the same in corporate America, it's the same in government.  If there are levers of power to be had, psychopaths tend to distil into those positions, they self-select for them.  And if you have any doubt, just read the Lyndon Johnson biographies by Robert Caro and you'll be shocked to see the type of behaviour that he went through during his entire career to achieve the apex of political power in the United States. 

So, part of it is consequence of the design and then there's another really important factor in play here, which is the primary purpose of a bureaucracy is to grow.  Having been in charge of large bureaucracies that I have decided, or our team has decided, needed to shrink, boy is it hard to do, and the purpose of a bureaucracy is to grow.  This is why it's almost impossible to fire a federal employee in the United States; good luck.  So, if you look at the number of people employed by the federal government, it never goes down.  Corporations still have restructurings because they have investors to be accountable for, but the best place to be in a recession is on the government dole.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is what Erik Voorhees said to me very early on; I don't know if you know Erik, he's a crypto guy, early bitcoiner, is a staunch libertarian.  One of my very first interviews with him always stuck with me, he said, "The problem with the government is it always grows".  I'm not here saying let's get rid of all of government, let's shrink it by 1%.  You can go back to COVID, and during the time of COVID, I definitely interpreted some bits wrong, but when they locked us down and they locked down businesses and people lost their incomes and did lose their businesses, everybody in government still got paid.

Doomberg: Yeah.  Look, we lost 85% of our business from apex to trough in 60 days, and there wouldn't be Doomberg if it wasn't for COVID because we had to reinvent ourselves, and we did, and we ended up going into the content space, and then we eventually succeeded and then launched Doomberg.  So in a way, COVID was a blessing, but that's sort of the entrepreneurial spirit that we have, but there's no question that we had a record month, I believe, in April for revenue and a record month of June for all the wrong reasons; it happened that quick.

Then, you still had a lot of uncertainty, when would we reopen; what do we do?  Luckily, we had saved for a rainy day and we were able to make it through that period of crisis and we didn't go to zero and we were able to tighten our personal budgets and then regrew our business in a different vertical within a year, but that was a huge blow, as you say.  But also, if you were an employee or a big corporation and you managed to keep your job, very similar, but it really did crush small businesses and entrepreneurs, disproportionately so, and I still think we're seeing the aftershocks of that to this day.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and definitely a widening wealth gap that's come off the back of that, and all these other just ongoing issues that people are still having to live with.  Just going back to the poker story and what happened there, how did it all end; was it just a complete shutdown of the poker industry in the US?

Doomberg: No, in fact, I may get some of the details wrong because I wasn't in the poker roll, I only know this because of my friend, but ultimately I believe Full Tilt Poker was forced into a shotgun marriage with PokerStars.  So, PokerStars had survived Black Friday and had made US customers hold; there was an extra scandal at Full Tilt because they had lost access to banking and the CEO, I believe, unbeknownst to the board, was still making players hold even though they didn't have the money and so there was a hole.  

Eventually, Full Tilt was merged into PokerStars, I believe, and it took a few weeks or months or perhaps even years for people to be made whole, but most people were made whole.  I'm unaware of what regulations are in the US today, but I do know that online poker is still widely played around the world and people are enjoying a good game of skill and risk.  And I did mention earlier, I do believe that the legal underpinnings for the original warrants were tossed out of court, but that doesn't matter if you've signed -- so, take my friend, and again, I don't want to give away too many details because he did ask for anonymity, which I totally understand, but if you have a bank account and they do a spot check on you and they see that you've settled with the DOJ, to that bank, your business, it's just not worth it to them. 

So, ejection from the banking system can be random, happens for political reasons in the US all the time, it's rarely reported about, and in a way it's more devastating than being on probation for having been convicted for something, because not being able to bank in 2023 is akin to not being able to function in society.  As psychopaths still enter positions of power in ever-growing bureaucracies, they see the power of this tool.  And it didn't take long, of course, for partisans to realise that, and so in the piece, after we talked about crypto and we introduced poker, we talked about crypto, we talked about the battle over fossil fuels and global warning and ESG and how activists on both sides realise that this is quickly becoming a game about who can convince the banks to do something.

We have a picture in the piece about environmental protestors sitting outside of a Chase Bank lobby with signs that say, "Chase funds death", because they underwrite the development of natural gas or oil fields and so on, and so the environmentalists were quick to realise that if they could choke off the fossil fuel industry, they could kill it.  And now the Republican side, the conservative side, the oil and gas companies are fighting back by revoking banking and investment management fees from firms that disproportionately defund or debank the fossil fuel sector.

So, now we have this tug of war, instead of a strategic discussion around what's legal and what should happen.  It is a tactical extra-legal brawl where, one of the things that didn't make it into the piece but we speculated, there might come a point where the CEO positions of banks are appointed by the President and must be approved by the Senate, no different than the Supreme Court battles that we have, recognising that the power of a CEO of a bank is, in many ways, more powerful than a local politician.

Peter McCormack: So, is this why you think not only are they bailing out the banks, but also stepping in early with the likes of Signature, because they want complete control of the banking sector?

Doomberg: I think they are ejecting crypto from the UK banking system, that is what's going on.

Peter McCormack: Well, that as well.  But then also I guess, in seeing in all that, is that where you're kind of like, even if it's mild but rising, sympathy for Bitcoin is coming from?

Doomberg: Well, my sympathies for Bitcoin predate this; since I'm a bit of a gold bug, I understand.  If you look at the rationale for Bitcoin and the rationale for owning gold, there's a lot of overlap in those Venn diagrams.  To the people who enjoy gold, like us, gold is 5,000 years' worth of historical money, all other fiats are imposters, and in a way, as we said in the piece this morning, Bitcoin has been shoved around as a digital version of gold, a new and improved one that you can operate online and you don't have to worry about weighing your gold and whether it's pure and so on and so on. 

But at the same time, as we said in the piece, look, the US outlawed possession of gold in the 1930s and it wasn't legalised again until the 1970s, and they could do the same thing with Bitcoin.  They won't be able to kill Bitcoin, but they can make monetising it within the legal system of the US extremely difficult.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I'm with you on the analogies to gold.  Wikileaks is one of the first great examples; they went through their own central Operation Chokepoint when they were debanked by all financial rails, whether it was Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and it all happened very quickly.  You talk to or you see the interviews with Julian Assange and he will say Bitcoin saved Wikileaks, Bitcoin was the thing that allowed them to still function, receive donations and continue to function, have an operational business.

Doomberg: Two points: (1) that's precisely why we think Bitcoin will be a target, and (2) forget about the financial system, they were deplatformed from the servers, the webpage was not hosted.  The perfect example is what happened to Parler after the 6 January affair in Washington DC, they say, "If you get kicked off of Twitter, just invent your own Twitter".  Okay, you go try and do that and Amazon, AWS, doesn't host it and the Apple Store and the Google Play Store kick out the app, and basically Parler got parlered, it's actually a verb now.  Regardless of what you think of Parler and whatever your political views are --

Peter McCormack: It doesn't matter.

Doomberg: -- there's no question that that social media site was killed with no due process for political reasons, and Wikileaks was deplatformed from the internet.  Again, what due process has Julian -- it's actually quite a scandal.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  He's been deplatformed as a human within functional society.

Doomberg: And for engaging in the act of reporting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Doomberg: Reporters in the United States have long gotten classified leaks that became the sources of great stories that blew up into scandals, that's what the press is meant to do; not anymore, that has been shifted to the alternative press.  One of our fears, of course, is that Substack, by allowing the proliferation of all manner of reporting of various types and talents and so on, but being a relatively open platform, will make them a target eventually, and so we shall see, we're eyes wide open on that, which is the name of one of our pieces that touches on this.  I do think more and more people are waking up to it, but we've got a long way to go; we're early, Peter, by a lot.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just look, my hope is there is enough independent media now, whether it's yourself, whether it's a Joe Rogan, whoever it is, is out there just trying to expose this a bit more to the point where enough people care.  I feel like the fracturing of society, the fracturing of the financial system, I feel like we're at a time where we have an opportunity now to make enough people care.

Doomberg: I would say your example of Joe Rogan is both hopeful and also a little depressing because he is undoubtedly the biggest of the big alternative voices and he is beloved by tens of millions of people.  I guess the only one bigger than him that I can think of is Mr Beast, but they're executing completely different business models, but they also tried to cancel him, didn't they?

Peter McCormack: Of course they did.

Doomberg: Very specifically.  So, luckily, he managed to persist and how could that not shape his discourse, even subconsciously; how does that not at least make him have doubts about whether he should go as hard on a certain topic as he might have prior to the attempted cancellation?  In many ways, it achieved several desired effects.  So yeah, it's an open question, but he is certainly a very big voice and I hope he keeps it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, we were talking about Operation Chokepoint 2.0 essentially, which might become a rolling Operation Chokepoint, but can you talk a little bit more in detail what happened with the original Operation Chokepoint, what happened back in 2013 because I'm not sure people are exactly sure what happened?

Doomberg: So, at its essence, the FDIC illegally put pressure on regulated banks to stop doing business with payday lenders, gun shops and maybe a few other --

Peter McCormack: Was it sex workers as well?

Doomberg: Yeah, sure, pick your favourite loosely associated with vice-type industries; the US back then was still a pretty conservative place.  But the manner in which it was done was all informal which was what made it illegal.  So, here's the challenge, the banks in the US are quasi-public-private partnerships and it's very lucrative to be an executive at a big bank, I mean look at Jamie Dimon's net worth.  So, if the government basically controls your charter, as Signature found out this weekend, what the government says to you, even informally, can have devastating consequences if you don't pay attention.

So, if you whisper into Jamie Dimon's ear and say, "Look, you should probably stop banking with gun shops", and if they do so after one of the many unfortunate and countless numbers of mass shootings that we have in the US where the political pressure is high and there's a lot of sympathy for such a course of action, whatever your views are on gun control, it is at the moment constitutionally protected, but if you're a gun shop owner and Bank of America decides they're not going to …

So, here's a perfect example.  As a fallout of Operation Chokepoint, once people realised that this was a possibility, anti-gun groups have been pressing the payment processers to put a new and unique tag on gun sales as opposed to let's just say general merchandise, I don't know what it's tagged at today, but they want a special tag on it; and the gun industry has been lobbying against that, because once you have that tag, it's very easy with a flick of a switch to suddenly, overnight, PayPal, Strike stop processing payments for anybody involved in the industry.  So, there's no question, not just banking, payment processers are a point source of power as well. 

So, with Operation Chokepoint, the FDIC essentially put the word out to the banks that they should stop processing payments for these industries, and many did, and that's what caused the uproar.  Much of that was overturned, as I said, they were sued and the payday lenders effectively won that lawsuit, but over time, they keep coming back for another bite at the apple and another bite at the apple, and that's where poker was really the next big thing after that series of events, and so on.

So, poker led to Operation Chokepoint which led to Operation Chokepoint 2.0, that's the sort of chronology of it, and now we see 2.0, and it's crypto.  Okay, you could say I'm a nocoiner and I've always answered, "No", on that IRS, "Do you have any digital currencies?" on my taxes correctly, and so maybe I just don't worry about it.  Hey, as long as I don't do crypto, "I'll be fine", but that's not how this goes.  Pretty soon, it'll be, "Hey, your views on the solutions to climate change, we think that's disinformation, and so we think banking with you represents an unnecessary risk for our franchise.  Here's a cashier's cheque for your account balance and your account is closed", and you have no recourse; that is totally possible.

Peter McCormack: Well, look, I can give you two examples from the UK.  My personal bank, about two years ago, I banked with Lloyds, I'd been with them for 21 years and I got a call from customer services asking me to run through some of my transactions and I said to them, "Do I have to?" and they said, "No".  I said, "Well, I'm not going to.  I'm a grown up and I don't know who you are.  Why am I talking to some random person in a call centre about what I spend my money on?  This is my money, if I've done anything illegal, then you have due process".  And I received a letter and my accounts were closed down two weeks later.

Then, separately, I'd moved my business account to a company called Wise, and Wise were very specific in their terms and conditions saying that you cannot send your money to exchanges, to crypto exchanges, to buy and sell crypto, that's what it said.  I had an invoice paid because we're a podcast where one of our sponsors is a crypto company, it's Gemini.  So, I received a payment from them, I'd received lots of payments, by the way, over the years for sponsorships, but when this one came in, they questioned it, and I said, "It's a sponsor for my podcast, it's a Bitcoin podcast and they're a crypto company".  And even though there was nothing in their terms and conditions, they immediately froze my bank account, froze access to my funds.  There was no way I could have made payroll that week; I did, eventually, through personal money. 

I had to open up a new bank account, which took time, and transfer the funds across, but there were no reasons given on either of them, it's, "We no longer want you as a customer", in both scenarios where all I'd done is ask for some privacy on a personal level and they didn't like the company I was doing business with.

Doomberg: Yeah, so we, in the piece, Pandora's Precedent, we said if your business has crypto in its name or you're considered a high-profile individual associated with the industry, prepare for possible ejection from the traditional banking system, and prepare for that.  It's scary, because again, it's not actually your money and there's no way to operate outside of the banking system.  It's the equivalent of telling people to build their own Twitter because they don't like the political nature of the censorship that happened before and after the last election.  Well, good luck with that if the servers aren't going to allow you to do it or if the app stores aren't going to list your app.

We live in a world where we need ultimately a new bill of financial freedom, new bill of financial rights.  It should be much, much harder for a bank to close an account on somebody.  Look, they have a legitimate right in many ways to ask about transactions, we've had those calls.  We have a client from overseas, and when they pay our retainer, more often than not it's probably too strong, but occasionally we get a call from a compliance officer at the bank asking for more details and, "Can we see a copy of your contract; is this person a real thing?"  They're not actually worried about us, they're worried about being accused by their regulators of not doing enough. 

I don't know if this is the way it is in the UK, but in the US, this is a different example but I think it's a similar incrementalism; if you go buy a bottle of wine in the US today, they have to check your ID, they have to make sure that you're over the legal drinking age, which in my state is 21.  Well, I can tell you  that at the grocery store, there's a little button on the computer where the person, because it's all self-checkout now of course too because they've gotten rid of all of those jobs, it used to be about two years ago that the button was, "I acknowledge this person is over 30", and they didn't even have to look at your ID, it was incumbent upon the person looking at you and saying, "Oh, this person's not under the age of 21". 

Last year, that button got changed to, "I acknowledge this person is under the age of 40", and now that button has been elevated to, "I acknowledge that this person is under the age of 50", and every time I buy a bottle of wine, which is more often than not when I'm at the grocery store, they literally take my licence and scan it in now.  So, it used to be you just showed your licence and they looked at you and they knew you weren't any issue, but now it's become -- and why does a grocery store do that?  They're not actually doubting that I'm over 21, they're definitely afraid of losing their liquor licence on a technicality.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  With the licensing laws, we don't have the same here, and it's different places, "Do they look over 21 or 25?" and that's a buffer, and they don't get in particular big trouble when they make mistakes.  I mean, it happens, but it's not like the US where I still get asked for ID to buy alcohol.  But what we do have, we do have a very similar thing in the banking sector, and what it is is that the government has outsourced financial surveillance to the banks.

Doomberg: Yes, 100%, and by the way, it's a nuisance for me, and because I'm sensitive to such things, I always get mildly annoyed when it happens, but I give the person my driver's licence and I buy my bottle of wine because I have guests coming over and I don't want to go through the pain of going to a store that doesn't yet do that.

So, this is the perfect example of incrementalism and accepting an ever-encroaching surveillance state, and when you apply that very simple but powerful analogy, I saw it with my own eyes, in the past 18 months it's gone from 30 to 40 to 50, and soon they'll just wipe that out and say, "You must scan your driver's licence to buy alcohol", that's what's coming.  Then, after that it's, "Don't you think you've purchased enough alcohol, Mr Doomberg?"  It's coming, back to central bank digital currencies and all of these things converging on the Eye of Sauron, as Ben Hunt correctly describes the intent of the US Treasury.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's this kind of surveillance singularity that's coming which freaks me out as somebody who thinks they live in a fairly free society and tries not to be a conspiracy theorist, but at the same time, is sympathetic to conspiracies because so many of them have come true.

Doomberg: Well, you know the origin of that phrase, of course, right?  It was concocted by the CIA after Kennedy's assassination.

Peter McCormack: I didn't know that.

Doomberg: Yeah, it never existed in the vernacular before then, and it was created to take credibility away from whose who were challenging the official narrative of President Kennedy's assassination.  I find it so intellectually lazy when people are quick to dismiss interpretation of events as a "conspiracy theory"; that's always a flag for me, that the person dismissing the hypothesis as a conspiracy theory has done very little intellectual work on the subject.

Peter McCormack: I think it's hard though sometimes for people, I think especially maybe more so here in Europe than the US.  I think the US, there's a certain political arm that is a little bit more distrusting of government, wants to be a little bit more independent, but I think in the US, you do a better job of distrusting government and questioning; whereas I think the UK and Europe, we're a little bit more like we just kind of accept everything, "Yeah, that's fine". 

For me, it's taken me a few years, like I said to you earlier, to shed these layers like an onion to the point where I was just like, "Look, this is bullshit, none of this makes sense".  Trying to get enough people to do that is very, very hard because, well actually I say "because", I don't actually know, I can guess ideas, I think maybe some people just don't want to face this, they just want to get on with their life; some people just find it too hard to believe that we're steamrolling towards Chinese surveillance state-style operations.  I think there are a number of reasons, but I keep coming back to, Doomberg, what do we do or what can I do about this, because something has to change because we know where this heads and it's not good?

Doomberg: So, the analogy I would use over here in the North America is Canada's very similar to Europe in that regard, very polite country, I know the country extremely well, I have friends and relatives in the country, and you're correct in that the founding of the US occurred as a rebellion, of course; ironically, it was a rebellion over taxes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know.

Doomberg: The ultimately irony; here we are, two centuries plus later.  But the thing that unites Canadian and British culture is state-sponsored national broadcasting; the vast majority of Canadians get their news from the CBC, and I'd bet in the UK, BBC is a very powerful influencer of culture and we don't have that in the US.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, they've lost a big battle this week; I don't know if you were following it.

Doomberg: No.

Peter McCormack: There's an ex-professional footballer called Gary Lineker, he's one of England's most famous-ever players; he was a striker; until Wayne Rooney, he was our highest-ever goal scorer; much loved across the country, not by everyone but the majority of people love him; he works on a show called Match of the Day on BBC.  So on a Saturday, after all the games are played in the evening, it's an hour-long show, him and two pundits, they watch highlights of the games and talk about them; it's a hugely popular show, massive cultural importance to people who love football in the UK.  He came out and criticised the Government; he said their language with regards to immigration reflects the kind of language you heard in 1930s Germany. He got massively criticised by the government who said, "Look, the BBC is meant to be independent, it's meant to be an independent broadcaster". 

So, a lot of pressure came on him for these tweets, and then it was announced that the BBC said he would be stepping back from broadcasting this weekend.  He came out and said, "No, I didn't, I've been removed", and what happened was the two main pundits, Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, two ex-footballers as well, announced, "Well, we're not going to do it".  Then, every possible person who could have been somebody who could have replaced him on the show said they're not going to do it either.  So, all the professional sportspeople came back and said, "We're not getting involved in this".  Then they ran the show but they ran the show with no intro, no commentary because all the commentators pulled out, no interviews with the players.  So, the show ended up being 20-minutes long and it was basically the goals without any commentary; it was really weird. 

They were forced into a corner because everybody backed Gary Lineker and said he should be able to have this speech because there are other people within the BBC who do make political comments, but it's kind of ignored because their political comments maybe support the current party in power.  So, the BBC has now had to back down and he's retained his position, and so it was a big defeat and an important defeat for free speech in the UK which is flimsy at best already.

Doomberg: It's funny, a loose analogy, or perhaps a bit more controversial, is in Canada, of course, it's hockey, and the national pastime is Hockey Night in Canada on the CBC, and famously a commentator with a very chequered set of comments in the past, by the name of Don Cherry, I don't know if that's a name that you're familiar with, and he was ultimately fired from Hockey Night in Canada in 2019.  He's been cancelled, I guess, in Canadian culture; there was a backlash, for sure, but it wasn't effective I guess.  I don't know all the details, because again I live in the US, but it's just funny how the cultures have very similar -- Hockey Night in Canada is your football. 

So, yeah, it is a fascinating time, it's a scary time, and as you said, we both know where this goes.  People think, "It hasn't happened to me yet so it's not a big deal", and to be fair, it hasn't really happened to me yet, and I think it's a big deal; I think that's the difference.  Sometimes I wish I could turn it off, life's pretty good, why don't I just swim with the current for a while and see how that goes, but it's not just our intellectual makeup.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I used to be a big fan of the BBC, because being a state-sponsored broadcaster, there was a lot of suspicion around it, and therefore, in some ways, it was highly regulated, there were various committees or whatever that would ensure that it is being as impartial as possible.  Look, you always knew there was a slight bias towards government that did exist, but at the same time corporate media itself has its own biases; Rupert Murdoch, Sky News, has its own biases, whether it's Sky News TV or The Sun or The Times, which he owns, they would pick which party they're supporting.

So, whether it's independent or state sponsored, you always knew there were different biases, and there are parts of the BBC I do still like; they do do some good reporting and do do some good TV work.  I don't know what the correct answer is to all this, but I just think itself was a very important win for free speech in the UK, and what I hope is we're going to get more of these wins, but anyway, listen, I'm going off on a tangent here.  I want to go back to the point, it's like what do we do, man; what do you think we do?

Doomberg: Well, you have two choices.  You do nothing, swim with the current and hope it gets better or goes away, which is probably what most people will do; or you use your platform, however big or small your platform might be, to politely engage in debate, which is what we try to do through the Doomberg platform.  So, we don't shy away from these controversies, we have our opinions, we write about them, sometimes that annoys our subscribers. 

I'll give you an example where we wrote a piece that we knew would probably upset some of our subscribers; this was the piece that we wrote and made free to the public about the train derailment in Ohio.  The complete and total hyperbole around that incident was off the charts, and it had quickly evolved into a political weapon to hammer the Biden Administration, especially his Secretary of Transportation who has become sort of a perennial target of the right. 

People would probably characterise Doomberg as a centre-right libertarian publication, and we would concur with that, and so we knew that by saying, "Look, here's what's really happening here, and this is not an issue that should be used to hammer the Biden Administration", effectively, if you read between the lines, we got scores of infuriated emails, people that were just infuriated that we would stand up to this mania. 

For example, the time that angered people the most was we said, "We actually think this document that the EPA put on their website is correct", which listed the contents of all the railcars and what happened to them.  The reason why we said we were trusting our analysis on that document is because it was published before this become a controversary, it was online at the EPA website before this blew up, before this mushroomed into this political controversary.

The piece was called Railroaded and we systematically went through each of the railcars and explained what was in them and what the likely consequences of either the spill or the fire was, and said correctly, "This is a very big deal locally, it is something to keep to an eye on regionally, and it is not a very big story nationally; these things happen all the time and we shouldn't overreact".  Immediately, people put it into their team sport game of Gotcha!.

This was the glasses through which they read that piece, not everybody, not even the majority, but a very loud minority cancelled, we lost many subscribers for it, you'd be amazed.  But we knew that when we wrote it, we committed to ourselves that we would do it, and decided that the brand ambition of Doomberg can withstand -- we'd built up enough credibility with our readership.  As we said, if there was true doom here, we would have written about it because this is in our centre of expertise, we come from the commodity sector, this is what we know.  I had at least this many outpouring of support from executives in those industries saying, "Thank you for bringing a bucket of sanity to this fire of hyperbole".

Peter McCormack: But the thing is, it makes you more of a trusted source; we talked about Rogan earlier, well I think that's why he's become a trusted source, because whether you agree with him or not, he isn't partisan and you always believe what he says is what he actually believes, whether you agree with him or not.  There is too much audience capture now, I think, within independent media because it suffers from the same incentives, but if you're willing to go out and go against what your readers are expecting and you're willing to lose readers and subscribers to tell the right story, ultimately, it makes you more of a trusted source.

Doomberg: Yeah, our role is we would never write anything we don't believe in the moment that we wrote it, period; that's rule number one.  And then, rule number two is, if we can't defend, it, we shouldn't write it.  Look, we've been very fortunate, we've grown a large audience, we've been able to be successful on Substack and so it's easy for us to say, "Oh, we'll wiling to withstand the several dozen people that angrily unsubscribed and let us know about it on the way out", but Joe Rogan could take the easy way out too, and he doesn't. 

So, we would much rather be smaller and more trusted than larger and have less durable engagement with our audience.  I could tell you that if we started a completely new Twitter account today, after everything we've learned on Twitter, not associated with Doomberg whatsoever, we could grow that account to a million followers in less than a year, very systematic formula to do that, and intellectual integrity would not be a key element of that recipe.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, look, it's the same doing a podcast.  If you said to me, "Look, Pete, I want you to have a record month of 2 million downloads", I know how to do it, I know which guests to get, I know which topics to cover, I know which opinions to hold, but I always think you've got to try and maintain that personal integrity, even in the fact of people criticising.

You go onto my YouTube, my comments are largely criticised for being a little bit -- I don't consider myself on the left, but I'm sympathetic to people on the left, and I get the same.  But look, I think it's important to push through that kind of inertia that comes with holding intellectual honestly, so I commend you for it, and it's one of the reasons I'm a subscriber, because I don't actually see a political persuasion in what you're doing, I see alignment but I don't see it as a bias.

Doomberg: Yeah, well, the ultimate example is my wife and kids are far to the left of me and I love them and hopefully they love me; we coexist in a home where I can assure you that my wife and I have never voted in the same way, and one of my children just became of voting age, and now I'm outnumbered two to one.  I used to be able to joke that at least I got to cancel my wife's vote, that's no longer the case, but again, we can have politically disagreements and be a family.  One of the best decisions we ever made is we closed comments on our Substack to paying subscribers, even for the free pieces that we put out.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Doomberg: By the way, the discourse is elevated, we still get criticised and the first thing we do when we get a politely expressed criticism is thank them, of course, and then explain why we have a different position than them.  But we have a joke here, it's like, "You control us all you want but you have to pay for the privilege now".

Peter McCormack: I love it, man.  All right, listen.  Is there anything I've not asked you about today with relation to this that you wish I'd have asked you?

Doomberg: No, I think we covered it pretty good, just like last time; always enjoyed the conversation with you, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, love it, man.

Doomberg: Thanks for having me on again.

Peter McCormack: No, you're always welcome.  Just continue what you're doing.  I love the emails; I think they're great.  All of us here at What Bitcoin Did, there are seven of us who work on the show, we're all big fans of what you do.  Where do you want to send people listening?

Doomberg: We would prioritise people heading straight to Substack, do not pass Twitter, do not collect $200.  In all seriousness, yeah, our work is at doomberg.substack.com; we're very proud to partner with Substack, it was a really, I think, courageous startup and we do hope they succeed and we're doing everything we can to help them succeed, in big and small ways.  We are still on Twitter, of course, @doombergt; Twitter is a bit more challenging these days and we've kind of pulled back from it a little bit just for our own mental safety, I told you about our editor earlier. 

We are publishing six to eight pieces a month; we live and die by every piece, our goal is that the latest piece is our most favourite always.  Genuinely, we were excited to publish Don Jerome this morning, and the day where we're not excited to publish a piece is the day we won't publish a piece, and that's our commitment to our audience.  Once again, Peter, really appreciate the opportunity, loved chatting with you and best of luck to you as things go forward.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, no worries.  Listen, we'll share that all out on the show notes.  I advise anyone listening to subscribe, the emails are brilliant; like I say, we love them, we read them all here, I certainly read them all.  Yeah, and keep doing what you're doing, good luck, and congratulations on the success; I hope you continue to grow.  I think you're a really important news source, especially on the energy side of things, it's just been really helpful to me because a lot of my thoughts or understanding of the energy sector has shifted over the last year or two and your work there's been very helpful, so thank you; keep going.  I'm sure we'll talk again in a few months.

Doomberg: Thanks, Peter.