050 Doomberg

[00:00:00] Doomberg: We need to get better, and part of what Doomberg is about is teaching people in the nuclear advocacy space on how to be better at marketing. Like, this matters! You’re losing. You’re not losing on the technology, you’re not losing on energy density, you’re not losing on fundamentals of economics, you’re losing on politics and propaganda and spin and lies and distortions.

And the problem is, of course, most people in the nuclear space are engineers and scientists and play by the rules and they they like right angles and so on and that’s fine, but this is not the game, gentlemen uh, and ladies. The game Is raw politics and you are being soundly beaten.

The critical path to unleashing an endless supply of carbon free power for humanity’s benefit is political public relations propaganda. In fact, let’s build that firm. We’ll call it P cubed!

[00:00:50] Intro: Just because the facts are A, if the narrative is B and everyone believes the narrative, then B is what matters. But it’s our job in our industry to speak up proudly, soberly. And to engage people in this dialogue. Those two and a half billion people that are in energy poverty, they need us. America cannot meet this threat alone.

If there is a single country. Of course the world cannot meet it without America. That is willing to. We’re gonna need you. The next generation to finish the job. Overhaul nuclear radiation. We need scientists to design new fuels. And focus on net public benefit. We need engineers to invent new technologies.

Over absurd levels of radiation. Entrepreneurs to sell those technologies. And we will march towards this. We need workers to operate a. Assembly lines that hum with high tech, zero carbon components. We have unlimited prosperity for all of you. We need diplomats and businessmen and women and Peace Corps volunteers to help developing nations skip past the dirty phase of development and transition to sustainable sources of energy.

In other words, we need you.

[00:01:54] Mark Hinaman: Welcome to another episode of the Fire2Fission podcast. My name is Mark Hinaman, and I’m joined today by Doomberg. I’m ecstatic to chat with you. It’s, I think we’ve got a great list of questions and an awesome Number of topics to talk about. So those that are just listening and can’t see you have a green chicken profile.

You are anonymous.

[00:02:16] Doomberg: Yes, indeed. Indeed. To most people were anonymous. Lots of people know who we are, but to preserve the brand. Yes, we do choose to identify as a green chicken.

[00:02:26] Mark Hinaman: It was funny. I was telling people just earlier today and last night, Oh, I gotta take off early. I’m going to interview a green chicken and they’re like, what, what are you talking about?

[00:02:34] Doomberg: So, you know, it’s funny because. It really does actually make a difference. And when we started Doomberg, like one of our marketing expressions was, you know, you can’t be remembered if you don’t stand out. And if we had just chosen to be one of us on the team, me or somebody else as the, As the head sort of moniker for the brand, it would, it would not have been as successful.

And so having achieved it, we’re going to maintain it just to protect the brand, but also because it’s just part of the fun now.

[00:03:01] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, I love it. So I imagine most people that listen to this will probably be familiar with who you are, but for those that aren’t you want to give kind of just a real quick intro what, what Doomberg is what the brand is and what kind of work you guys do.

[00:03:13] Doomberg: Absolutely, yeah. First, it’s a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Looking forward to a great discussion. Judging by the title, I think we would probably agree on a lot. And perusing some of your prior episodes has confirmed that hypothesis of mine. But yeah, I’m, I’m Doomberg. I’m the head writer for the Doomberg Substack.

We are a small team of former executives from the commodity sector that decided to build out a substack two and a half years ago, back in the early days of that platform, and we kind of caught lightning in a bottle, and it’s sort of Obviously the work of my life and, and and it’s been a real amazing journey as a team as we’ve gone from starting an anonymous sub stack to now the number one paid finance sub stack in the world, which is crazy to say, humbling to say, amazing to say, life changing to say.

And And it really has just been through, you know, hard work and disciplined execution that we’ve built this amazing business. We write about energy, finance, and the economy at large with an emphasis on energy. We’ve dabbled a bit in crypto and a few other topics that might be crossing the headlines.

Because when you put out as many pieces as we do, you know, you have, you have to keep producing. And we publish six to eight times a month on Substack. And it’s truly… What we were meant to be doing and as we advise people who who are lucky enough to have discovered what they were meant to be doing in life, for God’s sake, just keep doing it.

And that’s our intent. So,

[00:04:34] Mark Hinaman: yeah. I mean, you alluded a little bit to the benefit that being anonymous has, has helped you. I, I had a boss who opted to not be anonymous and say some very, we’ll say controversial things on social media. Yeah. And I mean, one of your guys’s taglines is uh, want to be provocative, but not polarizing.

I think that’s excellent. What can you talk just a little bit about the social piece, both with kind of the value of in the modern world being anonymous and but then also saying things with tact that you’re not going to piss people off so much that they fire you.

[00:05:09] Doomberg: Yeah you know, we’ve grown large enough now that it’s hard to imagine that any one individual could fire us or that we would say something.

You know, we try to color within the lines, I guess, to use an expression, but we’re also polite people. You know, one of the things that we don’t like about the modern discourse is this tendency to cancel people for having an opinion that some people think is offensive. And this is a very, very troubling trend in our society.

But it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t be cancelled just because we’re anonymous. And, and I can say, like, Substack knows who we are, Stripe knows who we are, hundreds of people on Wall Street know who we are. The reason to be anonymous has very little to do with our concern about being cancelled as individuals.

Primarily because I think we hold relatively orthodox views. We just we’re, we come at the, the, the topics that we. We write about from an industry perspective, which I think is what has explained most of the success of Doomberg in the sense that very few people in industry are permitted to speak and be part of the debate and part of the discourse simply because they are buffered by public relations teams and worried about being cancelled and saying the wrong thing, quote unquote.

But I don’t think that we have much in the way of polarized views. We’re pretty conservative, I would say is a fair assessment libertarian, lean right free market. Orientation with a acknowledgement that there’s an important role for government and not all externalities are property priced in by the free market and so on and so on.

But but yeah, and in the end, if we do trip up and make a mistake and get canceled, I guess that’s just life. But I think we’ll be fine. Yeah,

[00:06:51] Mark Hinaman: you mentioned several times about kind of running public companies or running companies and being in the commodities business. Was it all oil and gas or finance or kind of how is that?

[00:06:59] Doomberg: We have a mix on the team. I, I did mostly science and led research teams, you know, larger research teams with global presence and but there are other members of the team that also have very strong finance background. I too have pretty decent finance training. One of the things that you learn as you try to climb the corporate ladder is You can’t just be a specialist in your narrow field and expect to reach the C suite in a, you know, a Fortune 500 type company.

And so you inevitably have some form of formal finance training, and I spent several years obtaining mine. And so we have that mix, but when I was an up and coming, you know, aspiring executive I sort of made my name by writing. about technology in a language and in a way that people who were writing checks could understand.

So helping with investor relations or internal budgeting and so on. And I, and that was sort of what I really liked doing. I liked explaining science to finance professionals. And I, I learned the finance language and then figured out how to, you know, take the science element of it and present it in the finance language.

And if you read through Bloomberg, that’s really what we do. The pieces where we focus on that aspect of our expertise. Are the ones that tend to go viral that drive a lot of conversion that bring a lot of eyeballs and and there’s a inefficiency in that market like the Mainstream media certainly does none of that and and then the science types who blog tend not to be able to Condense it in a language that is accessible.

There’s a bit of an insecurity complex among scientists Which is they enjoy speaking above people because it sort of makes them feel smart right and not everybody’s this way Always know that they’re doing it it’s either subconscious or conscious, but and a little, a little of that is fine. But we always try to start with with a deep empathy for the reader.

We’re trying to delight our readers. We’re not trying to… If our readers think we’re intelligent, it should be as a consequence of how and what we’ve written, not because we’ve spoken over their heads. And so, you know, we just gave a an hour long presentation to our pro tier on carbon capture and sequestration.

The first slide was like as basic as it could be. It was the combustion equation and, and I took the time to explain that there are two fuels in combustion, not just one. There’s the hydrocarbon and there’s the oxygen, and they both have impurities depending on how You source those fuels and just starting at that level and then talking about the various technologies and framing it within that context is, it makes for a better presentation.

And so, this is what I did well. This is what I was meant to do. And, and I think the fact that very few people speak from an industrial lens and then very few scientists present things in a way that is designed to be accessible. And look, we get some heat from scientists for simplifying a few things or, you know, glossing over some complexities.

And that’s fine. But in the end, like, the mission is to close that gap and, and, you know, we have three ambitions when you get an email from Doomberg. One we will be provocative but not polarizing. Two we will be funny without being silly. And then three, we will teach without being self indulgent.

And to the extent that we hit those three objectives, then our brand ambition becomes satisfied. And, and a brand is nothing but the gut feeling you induce in your ideal clients when they interact with your product. And our brand ambition is… When you get our email, you, the gut feeling induced in you, Mark, is Ooh, I get to read that.

And so that’s the whole design construct. It, it permeates everything we do. We’re very disciplined as you can probably… Here in my voice, you know, we do believe in disciplined execution and, you know, we have lots of lots of phrases that we use, but one of them is wake up, make the number go up and repeat.

And so, that’s the objective.

[00:10:38] Mark Hinaman: I like that. Yeah, I mean, I’ll attest you guys is writing is excellent and you do an excellent job of distilling things down to be simple and yet entertaining and kind of the word choice and cadence. And yeah, I mean, it’s obvious that you guys are great at this, so.

Appreciate it. I asked this of executives early in my career because it was always a mystery to me, like, how are people bringing information in to make decisions? And, you know, I studied engineering. It’s obvious that you, you get to a point and you’re like, well, if I just knew all the information, I knew all the, the, the had all the data upfront, then I could.

Make a good decision but it wasn’t obvious to me how people were bringing in the pieces of information that they needed to make good business decisions. So curious how you guys bring in information and which ones you prioritize and what you think is valued.

[00:11:28] Doomberg: Well, it’s an interesting question because it harkens back to my time in corporate America where the closer I would get to the boardroom, the more disappointed I would be.

In the exact mechanisms that you wondered about and I remember

[00:11:41] Mark Hinaman: You’re so far from the information that’s coming in and it gets distilled by the time.

[00:11:45] Doomberg: And, and it’s, it’s very, the people involved actually are a little underwhelming. It’s sort of weird not to be like insulting to anybody, but most board members at a Fortune 100 company, if you met them in person.

Let’s just say you would be underwhelmed having met more than my fair share. And so you assume there’s some… Never meet your heroes. Some, right, never meet your heroes, exactly. You assume there’s some oracle inside a room that you’ve not yet been in, but when you get into the last chamber, you find out that they’re just normal people making gut decisions with limited information, and ego and psychopathy and everything else comes into play.

And so that’s one of the reasons why we left. Now, how do we get our information? Well, we start with the decades of experience of having observed the world, how it works at the molecular level. And so, I, in particular, as the sort of the, the, the only scientist on the team and having spent a couple of decades really being paid to understand how the world works at that molecular level developed a pretty, extensive molecular map of the world.

And so, you combine that knowledge with a set of experiences and then what I’ve done over the decades is every time I read something that’s interesting I sort of file it away and these become the opening stories to our pieces. Many of our, our pieces begin with a story because it’s just a very effective communications tool.

It grabs the reader’s attention, it sets the stage and It gives you something to come back to at the end in a clever way when you want to close the piece. And so the way a Duberg piece is brought to life now is I’ll read something in the newspaper, online of course, the online versions of them, and it’ll trigger a story that I remember.

And then that basically becomes a piece. And then you research around it. I have an intuitive sense of what it is that I want to say. And then before we start writing anything, we pick a title. Title is the most important thing. And then once we have a title, we will write a one sentence summary of each of the paragraphs.

And then we’ll decide, do we want to say this ourselves or will we quote it from a newspaper article? Because that’s a great way to sort of break up a narrative. And then the rest of it just sort of writes itself. I do all my writing between 3 and 5 a. m. because that’s when my brain fires best. But we do spend an entire day editing.

We believe that editing is not proofreading. There’s a vast chasm between proofreading and proper editing. And and that’s why the pieces are sort of as tight as they are and, and I do think, given the proliferation of Substack and People trying to write for a living, like, quality really does matter.

You have to, people can tell the difference between a properly edited piece and one that is, you know, not been proofread.

[00:14:31] Mark Hinaman: Length matters too. Yeah. How long do you have to give someone your attention, right? And how many newsletters do people subscribe to? Which ones do they read every day versus which ones do they brush off or archive or just skim over, right?

[00:14:47] Doomberg: Yeah, correct. And we, of course, since we’re a little OCD and, and scientific in our orientation, we’ve done an awful lot of experimenting and measuring. One of our many expressions around the chicken coop is if it can be measured, it can be optimized. And exactly the length of the piece, the cadence, the length of the opening story, when do we cut to paid?

Because all of our pieces have a preview that goes to our full list and then to read the rest. You know, you have to be a paid subscriber. All of these things we’ve been open with our audience about as we’ve grown this business, so it’s not like we’re, you know, there’s a fine line between sort of measuring and manipulating but we want to be aware of what it is that our ideal clients want, and most of them don’t want you know, a dissertation.

They want to, the three things that they want from every piece is they want to see the world in a slightly different way than they had before. Related to that, they want to learn something interesting and new, and then they want to laugh at least once. And I think if you satisfy all of those, you don’t need to do it multiple times.

That is hitting the dopamine. In just the right amount and you’ll notice we don’t over publish. We’re not an everyday publication We’re not trying to you know, we we want to be quality just just quality over quantity, but also Yeah, look em, there are people out there like one of the people we admire is matt levine who’s a brilliant writer for bloomberg and But each of his emails is four or five different and I don’t know where he finds he must have maybe he doesn’t have people Helping him, but I imagine he has a team of people helping him because he just produces an enormous amount of content But I find myself, never getting to the third piece, you know, he has multiple topics that he’ll address in each email, and he’s doing this, you know, four to five times a week on average, and it’s remarkable.

He’s one of my favorite authors, but I, I never, I rarely finish a piece, right, and so, but for us, we would, we would hope, of course, any content creator hopes people consume the whole thing, and so, we try to have it just right, and, and, and it’s, It’s about a seven minute read is what we have found the modern attention span has Slipped down to it used to be that people would be you know Sitting down and reading a 20 minute essay would be a normal part of the day That’s very rare today that anybody has that amount of time.

And so

[00:17:08] Mark Hinaman: Yes,

[00:17:11] Doomberg: we would prefer people would read from the home page or on the app But the vast majority of people consume us via their email, which means we’re competing No, they need to read us before the deluge of other emails drives us below the frame. And by the way, with emails there’s all these issues with spam filters and, you know, and it’s like Gmail is punishing Substack and so we’re having, you know, low open rates for a couple of weeks.

And there’s all kinds of shenanigans that people on the outside have no idea that actually occurs. When you’re running a business, that’s that’s relying on email as your distribution method for your product.

[00:17:48] Mark Hinaman: Okay. Well, that background and context is incredibly helpful.

So on this podcast, we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. So, we scripted a bunch of questions about nuclear.

[00:18:00] Mark Hinaman: It’s, it’s our favorite technology and fuel source. And just really curious on your opinion on a lot of different topics. So, yeah, you’ve spoken extensively about it and written extensively about it before, but we’ve got some specific questions that we want to get your take. So let’s start with how, how are we going to build more?

[00:18:17] Doomberg: You know, this is a political issue and one of our big beliefs is that there are no technical or even financial barriers to having a renaissance with nuclear power, and the industry and people who support it need to spend more time, energy, and money and get better at the game of politics. That’s how we’re going to build more.

Look, it can’t be that we are suddenly incapable of building more. France built 60 gigawatts of this stuff, you know, over what, a decade? 50 years ago? If the French could do it 50 years ago, surely the U. S. and the Canadians and, and other countries around the world could, could replicate that. And and so I, the, the barriers to nuclear are totally artificial, contrived by the opponents to the technology who are You know, the strongest opponents are Malthusian and, and nuclear represents their worst nightmare because it is a source of cheap, abundant, carbon free heat and electricity for humanity to harvest to better all of our lives.

And and so we need to get better and, and part of what Doomberg is about is teaching people in the nuclear advocacy space on how to be better at marketing. Like, this matters, you’re losing. You’re not losing on the technology, you’re not losing on energy density, you’re not losing on fundamentals of economics, you’re losing on politics and propaganda and spin and lies and distortions.

And the problem is, of course, most people in the nuclear space are engineers and scientists and play by the rules and they they like right angles and so on and that’s fine, but this is not the game, gentlemen and ladies. This is, the game is, Is raw politics and you are being soundly beaten. Like we said in a piece:

The industry is like a a new batch of beaten puppies, you know, hovering in fear at being slapped again by the environmentalist. It’s time we stood up and defended the technology defended the safety record defended The decades of, of safe, abundant energy that this technology has provided. And look, if fission were invented today, it would be hailed as a civilization saving technological breakthrough.

We’d solve climate change. Yeah. And as we said in the piece, you know, it was never about emissions. It doesn’t seem like they actually want to solve climate change. They just would like to have less energy. And so that’s why they attack

[00:20:32] Mark Hinaman: nuclear. So it, from my experience, the nuclear industry does not, they don’t know that they’re being beaten and I have told them explicitly, I’ve told the number one lobbying organization and their lobbying effort that the amount of resources that they have behind some of their lobbying efforts is dwarfed compared to every other energy generation sector, right? So like the American Petroleum Institute or any of the renewable lobbies that it’s just, I agree with you wholeheartedly. So how do we turn that around?

[00:21:05] Doomberg: One conversation, one piece, one podcast, one interaction at a time. Honestly, I think just like this, just like this.

No, I mean, we have 188, 000 email subscribers and a lot of them are on Wall Street and you. As a subset of those, we have many, many thousands of people who like us enough to be paid subscribers. If you were to peruse that email list for example I’ll just do it right now live with you. If I take that email list and I search for the word capital I have 1, 483

emails in the Doomberg list that have the word capital in it. Wall Street is an important place, right? And so, in our own small way, hopefully we are contributing to the conversation. You know, piece after piece, energy is life. Your standard of living is defined by how much energy we can harness. You know, energy density really matters.

And, and we just keep… Producing content that is entertaining, that teaches people something and makes them look at the world in a slightly different way. And you know, other podcasts like Dr. Chris Kiefer and, and The Couple and, and their team, you know, it all adds up. Like, and by the way, it doesn’t take money.

It takes it takes some street smarts and, you know, you can punch above your weight and you can jiu jitsu the big organizations. You’ll notice that many of the professional environmental organizations are laying people off these days, which is kind of a curious headline. And, you know, the, the, the nuclear advocacy on, on Twitter is actually quite effective.

And we’re not on Twitter anymore, but some of our good friends are. And they seem to be punching above their weight because you have the truth behind you. And people want a higher standard of living. They don’t want to, to go backwards. And, and to lose their freedoms merely because some professional elitist environmentalists have told them they have to.

And so if you could prevent present a compelling counter vision to the climate alarmist agenda. People will latch on to it and and I think we’ve been pretty effective and I think this is the way one piece that we’ve written 227 pieces now and and probably 180 of those have been about energy and you’d think boy You must run out of stuff to write about but you really you really don’t Energy is life energy is everywhere energy is the economy.

And so if there’s endless news stories that we can write about and, and use as teaching moments for our very highly influential audience. So we have, I wonder how many gov emails that we have. I’ll just check while I have you, you know, it’s kind of fun, the modern technology. Yeah, we have 232 people with a gov email address in our database.

It’s pretty interesting. So Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:23:47] Mark Hinaman: But we’ve run into a lot of technology vendors that say, well, we just need capital and we need some capital investment. And it’s not small amounts of capital, like, in the hundreds of millions, up to billions of dollars that they think they need to develop some of these technologies.

Is this kind of lazy thinking? Do we think they actually need that much to develop some of it? And I’ll say, like, some of these new reactors are qualified different types of fuels, or could they get started with less?

[00:24:11] Doomberg: So the cost question. A lot of it is driven by a overbearing regulatory body whose true intent is to stymie the proliferation of civilian nuclear energy.

[00:24:24] Mark Hinaman: And that also scares investors.

[00:24:26] Doomberg: Correct. And so it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Nobody funds it because it’s too expensive. Which is the intent, and then the NRC is totally captured. I mean, that’s the in the U. S. And so, again, these are political choices. They have been overrun by environmentalists who oppose nuclear power and do so from within.

If you just look at the calendar of the head of the NRC and how many meetings… Are held with the Sierra Club and NRDC and so on. It’s outrageous. It’s, it’s really a scandal. And so the NRC we wrote a piece called Nuclear Waste where we called for the NRC to be abolished and, and rebuilt from the ground up.

Because I don’t think you can fix it. But nothing in government ever gets abolished. And, and so you end up with this, you know, giant bureaucracy who, who exists to do two things, to stop nuclear power and to grow. To grow itself, to grow the NRC. And so, this is again back to the original question.

You know, like, how do we get more? That’s how we get more. By but by electing candidates and, and convincing powerful people within government that, you know, things need to change for the better. And if we continue on the path we’re on and the population suffers enough pain, then eventually the political backlash will have to occur.

It’s inevitable.

[00:25:42] Mark Hinaman: Okay. So what, what kind of new business opportunities do you think might exist or, are blossoming in the nuclear industry.

[00:25:50] Doomberg: It’s the same question because in our view, there is no inventions needed to do this. And I think the can do the tech, right? Use the tech. And so it works great. We view the hype around new technologies like fusion and.

You know, super advanced 15 times redundant inherently safe designs as nothing but a distraction. And I think we should take a step back, observe and applaud what Canada is doing with the can do reactor designs. You know, way more than good enough is plenty good enough. This, this mentality that we need to somehow jump through 15 more hoops to satisfy radical environmentalists who will just create new hoops when we…

miraculously Done five backflips and you know and stuck the landing. They’ll just move the goalposts like this is an unwinnable objective. Your objective should be, as we said, 100 percent towards politics, propaganda, messaging. That is the war that’s being fought, and as you say, people in the industry don’t even know they’re losing.

That’s how out of touch they are.

[00:26:50] Mark Hinaman: The NRC is specific to the US, but when I’ve talked to people internationally, they always reference it as, oh, it’s the gold standard. It’s the gold standard. There’s this seemingly level of respect in several countries. I won’t say every country because Russia and China are eating our lunch. That the NRC is, is the perfect way to do it.

Yeah. We obviously disagree, but I’m curious on your thoughts on, if you had to pick other countries throughout the world exclude Russia, China who would be next in line? And, I mean, you mentioned Canada also, so maybe rule them out too.

[00:27:23] Doomberg: Sure, but I would say the people I think the NRC are to be held up as the model for how to do things are probably the people that are opposed to nuclear power.

I mean, I don’t think anybody… And the industry would say that. I mean, anybody can have a safety record that’s outstanding if you just say no to everything. Now, to your specific question, I think the United Arab Emirates has done a fantastic job of building out the cultural ecosystem necessary to embrace and maintain a fleet of nuclear reactors for generations.

And they’ve been very thoughtful in their, Approach. And so, if you have, I have to rule out Canada, which I, I would say is probably before Germany impaled itself on the altar of, of the Church of Carbon Canada is probably up there. Ontario in particular, I guess, if we were going to be, It’s specific, it’s the province of Ontario that is world leading.

We wrote a piece called Cheat Codes, where we talked about how Ontario basically is showing the rest of the world how it can work, the cleanest, greenest grid in the world. And I drive, when I drive through Ontario, I, I don’t see fish glowing in the ditches of the roads. And I, and I, and everybody seems happy and polite and the streets are well, well maintained and clean.

And the universities look pretty decent when I, when I drive through those. And so it seems to me that you can have 60 percent of your electricity come from nuclear And none of it come from coal, and people still have a pretty decent life. And so, that’s the way to do it, and why don’t we just follow the Ontario method.

But if you push me outside of the world, and I can’t say China. Clearly India for its controversial. You know, circumvention of non-proliferation can’t, can’t be pointed to either. And so I think the United Arab Emirates is probably a great place to start. I think they just turn their third reactor critical and are, and are beginning on the fourth and have plans for at least two more if, if I’m, if I have the numbers right.

I think that’s right. And and so yeah, I think they’ve done an amazing job. Yeah. Ironically, that’s where Cop 28 is being hosted. And and that’s going to be quite a spectacle.

[00:29:19] Mark Hinaman: So if, if, if you wanted to build a company in the industry, and this is really broad, right? Like, I mean, you could be a energy provider, a technology vendor, fuel provider, be in the mining side, the conversion.

You could do anything in the industry. Which one would you choose?

[00:29:37] Doomberg: I would build a public relations firm that helps the industry navigate the halls of power better. And to the extent that that’s, you know, indirect way, what Doomberg is it would be a very successful business. None of the other things you mentioned matter.

I mean, they’re all interesting, but they’re not determinative. I see. So I, I’m a big believer in attacking the critical path, micromanage your critical path. The critical path to unleashing an endless supply of carbon free power for humanity’s benefit is political public relations propaganda. In fact, let’s build that firm. We’ll call it P cubed!

[00:30:24] Mark Hinaman: I like it. It kind of feels like that’s what Titans of nuclear tried to do to educate but then didn’t I don’t know maybe it wasn’t far enough along with the Advocacy and lobbying, and, and then they just kinda said, well, actually, we, we are engineers. We wanna actually go build something

[00:30:43] Doomberg: and that’s fine.

But you asked me what I would do. That’s, and, and again, you know, this is, and I, I, you know, I, I may have to go raise money in that concept. Now that we’re talking about it. I bet we can pretty, pretty effective in that

[00:30:54] Mark Hinaman: regard. I like it. I know Ryan Pickering will help you out.

[00:30:58] Doomberg: I’m sure. I’m sure we could reach out to the community and get some help.

[00:31:02] Mark Hinaman: Okay, so what, what are some of the best new teams that would come to the industry. I mean, we’ve already kind of hashed on the nuclear industry, having some blind spots, but do you think there’ll be opportunities for management teams from other industries to step in and start new companies?

[00:31:20] Doomberg: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think until you solve the political problem I would advise people to avoid the industry because it, it, it is going to destroy a lot of capital.

You’re fighting formidable forces here. As much as you have the power of nature behind you you are fighting. Government and professional environmentalists who have been doing this for decades and are backed by armies of lawyers. So if, if you you know, ruled out my public affairs idea, my public relations firm idea the next idea would come to you is I would start a law firm.

Defending the nuclear industry from this assault because there’ll be no shortage of work for that business as well. And so, I don’t think that, I mean, again, I don’t think that new businesses in nuclear are what’s needed. What’s needed is a total reshaping of the public perception of nuclear.

And then the world is your oyster. You could start any business and make money. But until that point, most businesses. working on the wrong problem.

[00:32:21] Mark Hinaman: So reshaping public opinion doesn’t happen fast, though. It’s this, the feedback loop for these things takes a long time. I mean, I think back a decade ago, how the climate narrative was progressing, and I never would have imagined it had gotten as far as it, as it has.

Realistically, if, I mean, if you got funded and we, we continued with the advocacy piece and or lobbying nonstop and changing hearts and minds, how. How long does it take to swing the pendulum back the other way?

[00:32:52] Doomberg: You know, less than a decade, for sure. Probably five years if you do it really well and you’re well funded.

These are very solvable problems. Look at what Chris Kiefer’s done in Canada, you know, on a shoestring budget. I do think that it certainly can be done quickly. And and the, the The funding should come from industry. I mean, and of course people who believe in the technology can support it as well.

But but this is, this is, they are right. They have the power of physics behind them. And so this is truly the missing constraint. But yeah, I think it could happen much quicker than you think. And I think we’re at a real watershed moment here in this carbon crisis news flow. And we’ve been really drilling down on environmental opposition to carbon capture and sequestration because it’s truly, as one might say, the exception that proves the rule.

You know, there, we wrote a piece where the social preview was carbon capture and sequestration is about to get the nuclear treatment because environmentalists are attacking it so violently because it is, in fact, a potential solution to the emissions problem. So much so. That we are observing and the listeners can see for themselves now as they read.

The mainstream press there’s this concerted effort to shift people’s focus away from emissions derived from fossil fuels and towards the burning of fossil fuels, regardless of whether those emissions are captured and sequestered because they do not want energy production. And so in, to the extent that carbon capture facilitates the continued use of fossil fuels while solving the emissions problem, then it must be destroyed.

And I think once what we call the soft left, the people who are environmentally inclined, but not necessarily in the alarmist camp, see that the alarmists are hyperventilating, hyperventilating over what is clearly A pretty prudent interesting suite of technologies that could meaningfully reduce our emissions that they’re opposed to that will lift the veil we hope and we think it provides a unique opportunity for nuclear because by the way It’s the exact same set of reasons why they’re opposed to nuclear and nuclear is better than fossil fuels with carbon capture.

So that’s the opening for the nuclear industry. And I think it could happen quickly, especially if it’s done well. And so if we were to start such a business, we wouldn’t want to do it unwell. We would, we would try to figure out how to do it in the very best way possible.

[00:35:17] Mark Hinaman: You mentioned the funding coming from the industry.

I’ve heard many of the utilities will sometimes say, well, you know, we can’t necessarily. Pick one technology and be pro nuclear and really the nuclear industry right now in the United States exists only under utilities. I mean, they sell power. They make money off of selling the power by creating fission.

And therefore there’s not really another other private market that exists versus, you know, for oil and gas. It’s a commodity business still, and there’s the number of commodities that are traded and transacted is significantly higher. How do we get around that? I’ve kind of struggled with that, you know, so I just want to dig in a little more on your recommendation of, you know, the funding comes from the industry.

[00:36:00] Doomberg: Yeah, those are all, again, political constraints that could be changed. And and so, I do think it is high time for operators of the grid to get more focal, for example, in their opposition to intermittent weather dependent renewables that destabilize the grid and increase The price and reliability of electricity to the point where it meaningfully damages our collective standard of living, and I think their cowardice, which is the word I would use to stand up to such nonsense is one of the reasons why it has been allowed to proliferate.

Beyond all beyond all imagination. I just couldn’t have imagined that we would be so silly. You know, the people that left us this grid.

[00:36:37] Mark Hinaman: They were having blackouts in the United States

[00:36:39] Doomberg: people who built and left us this amazing energy infrastructure. I mean, they would be ashamed to see what we’ve done with it.

And, and it’s really remarkable. And I do think that yes, operators of grids need, they know. What what it means to lose, you know a nuclear power plant from their infrastructure, but they’re all afraid they’re cowards You know, they’re not I guess Sufficiently motivated to take such career risk back to the discussion that we had earlier and they hide behind the niceties of public affairs teams and so on, but this is, this is truly, again, would be part of our, you know, campaign, like, to get these people to speak up, because they know.

And, you know, it doesn’t take many to start a movement. There’s a great viral TED talk video on this, you know, I’m not sure you’ve seen it, but how one lone nut starts dancing in a park that’s not enough to start a movement, but as soon as, as somebody… The second person comes up and starts dancing alongside this lone nut, that’s the social signal to everyone else to come and join the party and pretty soon not dancing will make you the outcast.

And, and, you know, I, I do think that there’s, there is a path forward and it does involve everyone in the industry from uranium miners to, you know, government officials who are held accountable for the, the, you know, the operation for gridlock. There’s a reason why Joe Biden panicked and emptied the strategic petroleum reserve ahead of the election is because he knows as a sort of long time.

You know, Joe Lunchbox man of the people, blue collar worker, union type politician that the price of gasoline at the pump would control his political future. Well, it’s the exact same phenomenon with, with the electricity grid. You know, it doesn’t take but 1, 2, 3 percent unreliability to destroy far more than 3 percent of the value of the grid.

You know, manufacturers need far more certainty. Integrate than that. And so, yeah, I think this is this is the way. So the exact people who throw their hands up and say, well, we can’t pick between technologies are the reason we’re in the predicament. We’re in.

[00:38:39] Mark Hinaman: Gotcha. Okay. So shifting gears a little bit.

LMT, Linear No Threshold Theory I, I imagine, maybe I don’t want to assume, but I imagine that you and I share an opinion about this.

[00:38:49] Doomberg: Yeah, come on, this is again, this is a, a science barrier that has been constructed out of nothing in order to stunt the nuclear power industry, let’s be real.

[00:38:57] Mark Hinaman: So let’s, let’s riff on this.

How, how do we get rid of this? How do we convince,

[00:38:59] Doomberg: Well, the, the, the brilliance of the propaganda of our opponents is understanding that zero is an emotional number. And I would be a very effective propagandist for the other side, because I understand the tools of the trade, but I have too much ethics to do that, but but yeah, so they have convinced people, so they have conflated.

Radiation with nuclear weapons. Successfully. This is a really, really, really amazing result that they have accomplished. I give them full credit, by the way. Like I if your objective is to stop nuclear power, the team that has done it has done an unbelievable job. But by conflating radiation with with nuclear weapons, they have succeeded in turning the industry into a, you know, a bunch of beaten puppies.

And, and it’s really an amazing thing, and, and this actually comes down to a very important psychological phenomenon which is when risks are highlighted, nothing less than zero will do. And so the trick is to get people to focus on a particular risk and then nothing is acceptable. But like, again, like, we.

We all drive in cars and there are tens of thousands of people who die in automobile accidents every year. Lots of people like to have a glass of wine at night. I’m among them. Even within driving cars, there are thousands of people who die because of drunk drivers on the road. Have we made alcohol illegal?

Have we made the automobile illegal? No, because we’re not focusing on it and we have decided that we can manage those trade offs. The Individual liberty and the I drive therefore I am And so on and so on are all on one side of the scale And the tens of thousands of people who die every year are on the other side of the scale.

You find me a single person on the planet who has ever been injured by nuclear waste doesn’t exist It doesn’t exist and yet certainly not a member of the public and yet this is Like the industry thinks if they just design a slightly safer yucca mountain that they will circumvent this problem

[00:41:25] Mark Hinaman: Maybe if we just put it in horizontal well books.

It’s

[00:41:30] Doomberg: It’s truly incredible, right? And so we actually wrote a piece called frame of reference where we talk about Just give you another example in China because of shoddy construction A giant dam collapsed in 1975 because of Typhoon Nina. And it is estimated that between 26, 000 and a quarter million people were killed.

Did we set about the task of raising all the hydroelectric dams around the world because of one mismanaged dam and one freak of nature storm event in China? No. So then we have an earthquake off of Japan, which creates a truly historic tsunami, which floods.

Nobody died as a result of radiation on that day. Now, in the years afterwards, they have found one person who has died from cancer resulting from their exposure to radiation, and that is a tragedy. Why Germany decided to shut down all those nuclear power plants, because one person died four years after Fukushima?

Look, I get it. People are scared of radiation. They have no way to contextualize it. And in this piece, we talk about how… There was a rail car that went through a small town in Quebec that blew up, was carrying oil, and I think something like 40 people died. Do we still, does Warren Buffet still move tankers of oil around the US every day?

Of course he does. A campfire if we use forest, right, , if we use this fear of radiation, this focus on zero the campfires would be prohibited. And, and parents who allow their children to roast marshmallows over them would have their children. swept up by Child Protective Services. Because we’re focusing on, if you did a molecular composition of smoke from wood, from a campfire, you would find all manner of toxins and carcinogens and if you focused on those, and it was in the newspaper every day, campfires would be illegal.

And yet, who, who doesn’t like a bonfire on the beach? Because that’s what it means to be human. You, you assess risks and you take them. But if you can focus people’s attention on the risk. Like, I could write a very compelling piece that would call for the banning of campfires for children under 18.

By death, by comparison, the nuclear industry couldn’t be safer.

[00:44:01] Mark Hinaman: It’s the safest in the world, which I don’t think is a consequence of the revolution. Oh,

[00:44:06] Doomberg: and by the way, a campfire on the beneficial side, it’s nice, it’s a good sound, it, it, it, it plays to our reptilian instincts and of, you know, generations of yesteryear.

That’s on the benefit side, on the benefit side for nuclear power. safe, abundant baseload electricity for 80 years. It’s so insane. It, it boggles the mind how we have so turned upside down our priorities.

[00:44:30] Mark Hinaman: So just pragmatic, honest conversation calling out the hypocrisy. I mean, what’s the word I’m looking for here?

[00:44:38] Doomberg: You know, provocative, provocative, funny, and teaching. That’s the secret. And you just keep going and anybody who hears our campfire analogy will look at people who are hyperventilating about radiation risk in a slightly different way. I ate a banana this morning. I exposed myself to some radiation. I got on a flight a couple of weeks ago.

Like, I got an x ray when I went to the dentist because somehow I’m supposed to have one every year, which I think is just a scam. But I, I submit to it anyway because, you know, why not? And so find me a single human on the planet who’s ever been injured by nuclear waste. And if we shoot these, these things underground, who’s ever going to get injured from them?

I, I, I certainly think that’s part of it. But that, that irrational fear is exploitable amongst humans, doesn’t excuse our inability to fight back. And I think you know, there’s lots of things that humans can’t see. For example carbon monoxide. Can’t smell it, can’t taste it, can’t see it. And how many people die each year from carbon monoxide poisoning?

Definitely more than radiation. Definitely more than radiation. And I happen to have, you know, because I’m a scientist, I have carbon monoxide detectors at every level of my home. And I’m a little OCD about the safety and well being of my family. But yeah. This

[00:46:30] Mark Hinaman: came up on one of our team calls. Who has a fire protection plan in their house?

[00:46:35] Doomberg: Oh, well, I have a plan for everything.

[00:46:38] Mark Hinaman: Well, I meant, but the public in general. Yeah,

[00:46:41] Doomberg: very few people do.

[00:46:45] Mark Hinaman: So, Dinberg, who, I mean, you already mentioned Chris Kiefer, and I alluded to the Titans of Nuclear guys, I’m a big fan of both of those folks but who else is, is telling it like it is in the industry? Who are some of your favorite

[00:46:57] Doomberg: voices? I think Mark Nelson, obviously is, is a big force on Twitter and, and somebody that we We look up to and collaborate with and I think Michael is actually on our team.

Oh, awesome. Yeah. Mark’s great. We text regularly. He you know, we, we speak on the phone. I think Michael Schellenberger has done a lot of great work in the area and he. Does a very good job of, of the marketing side of it as well. And, and of course he’s since diversified into, into a variety of other politically somewhat polarizing fields, but good for him, you know, he, but nobody can look at his body of work and say that he isn’t courageous I mean, he, he certainly is willing to express an opinion and, and they’re usually pretty well researched.

So, yeah. I, and I, and I think. Over time, you know, the, I do think that we have a lot of momentum the wind is in fact in the sales of the nuclear industry. So

[00:47:51] Mark Hinaman: who isn’t talking right now that should be?

[00:47:56] Doomberg: Yeah. Well, we already talked about the utilities I think senior executives at a commodity and energy companies.

I, I would applaud. I saw an interview with the CEO of Dow who’s doing this. SMR collaboration with X energy at one of their sites in Texas. He went on CNBC and he talked about how nuclear power was critical for their decarbonization agenda and he frankly didn’t see a path forward without it. I think well, I think a lot of people on Wall Street.

So we’ve poked a lot of fun at Larry Fink, who has gotten himself in a spot of bother by expressing. Sort of environmental slash you know, ESG agenda in a way that was off putting to many of the CEOs who were the recipients of his annual letter and the sort of informal threats that were embedded within those.

I think BlackRock in particular, and Larry Fink specifically has an opportunity to pivot out of the crisis by focusing on nuclear energy and by saying that this is in fact The technology that can satisfy all needs our standard of living and, and our energy needs while reducing emissions. So I, I think that we’re beginning to see the pushback on the defund fossil fuels movement and, and so on on Wall Street.

So I think those who work on Wall Street could be doing more. But, you know, there’ll be plenty of people crowding into this belief ecosystem once it’s safe to do so. Or. It just takes a few people dancing. It just takes a few people dancing. And so, you know, Mark, you were, you were a low nut and we just started dancing beside you and you know, and others will join and, and I do think that ultimately, we have to get to there eventually.

Like, people aren’t going to tolerate. Substantially diminished standards of living. They’re just not. And so, that, that’s, and this is in fact, as anybody who has gone through the full journey of worrying about the environment, to dissecting the alternatives, to weighing the tradeoffs, Anybody with any intelligence who’s done that in an honest, authentic way ends up at nuclear power.

Period.

[00:50:02] Mark Hinaman: I mean, that, that’s why we’re here.

[00:50:05] Doomberg: That’s why we’re talking to you.

[00:50:08] Mark Hinaman: You had an incredible chart and you mentioned standard of living right now. An incredible chart in one of your recent pieces that overlaid consumer price index and the cost of diesel over time. I was floored personally. This is a bit of a deviation from nuclear, but it’s kind of, of high interest to me that seemingly standard of living and rate of inflation correlated so closely with cost of distillate.

[00:50:36] Doomberg: Like, why? Diesel is one of those technologies that is so widely taken for granted that it’s incredible. And so, the piece that we, we included that amazing chart and look correlation and causation is a standard, you know, standard trap if you’re not careful, but in this case, we not only see the correlation in the data, but we have a pretty definitive mechanism to understand why it is that that correlation is so tight.

And so, as a, as a scientist, I feel slightly less dirty. Putting it in a piece because, you know, as somebody who enjoys to make a charter too, you can you can tell virtually any story if you have a Bloomberg camera, but I digress. There isn’t a single package or product consumed in the developed world that at some point in its journey from factory to store shelf doesn’t find itself in the back of a diesel powered long haul truck.

And freight and passenger rail rely almost exclusively on diesel power and in the U. S. Northeast, many homes are warmed in the winter using heating oil, which is, of course, as you know, a product very similar in composition to diesel and it just differs mainly in its sulfur content and additive packages that are used to create the final product and one of those additives is just a dye so that people, you know, don’t put it in the wrong vehicle mostly because, dirty little secret, literally dirty, pun intended, is that, home heating oil has much higher sulfur content than is currently allowed in automobiles and why that is the case is, is beyond me mostly because of the strength of the Union in the Northeast. But that’s a whole other topic that we can talk about. So all of these things are what we would call, You know, difficult to substitute.

It’s very difficult to substitute long haul trucking, home heating in the Northeast, freight and passenger rail. And in fact, we’ve exacerbated the problem by implementing more enhanced pollution controls on our shipping. Tankers and so on, and so they’ve switched from the dirtier versions of, of the steel bottoms of a refinery to traditional diesel to power the engines that drive these cargo ships and so on.

And so, since none of these applications have ready substitutes. The price of diesel is truly a leading indicator of inflationary prices inflationary pressures in the economy. And interestingly, as we pointed out in the piece The Great Backpedaling is Upon Us was the name of the piece that the global stocks of this all important commodity are at dangerously low levels as we head into the winter.

And this is, of course, because a lack of refining capacity and environmentalists have steadfastly opposed the creation of new refining capacity in much of the developed world and we’re left to relying on how much China and India and other countries have built out and that’s fine enough when there’s plenty of it but right now there just isn’t and so, yeah as the rest of the world, Emerges into the middle class their demand for diesel only grows and oh, by the way, the entire green quote, unquote, renewable energy revolution is powered by diesel because you can’t mine copper.

lithium, nickel, cobalt without it. Anybody who’s ever visited a mine site sees the enormous size of these trucks and shovels and all of the diesel that’s being consumed. To take 2 percent of a metal out of a giant piece of rock requires an awful lot of energy, as it turns out. Energy is life. And so, diesel is…

If you asked us… If, if you limited us to one chart to assess the economy, it would be the price of diesel. When will it be displaced by nuclear? I don’t know that it ever needs to be. There are certain things that fossil fuels are just superior than any other fuel source and you know, I, In order for diesel to be displaced by nuclear, you would have to run all these machines on hydrogen.

And I’m not sure that the, the power, I mean, I don’t know, this is where you’re stretching my knowledge, but for sure you couldn’t do it with batteries and so you couldn’t do it with electricity because there’s just not enough battery materials in the world to do it. Yeah. And so I guess you could use hydrogen combustion where you have a nuclear power plant that runs an electrolyzer that produces hydrogen that gets pipelined out to the mines where it’s needed.

I don’t know what that would entail, but that, that would be the only. If we, if the world had no diesel, that’s what we would do.

[00:55:07] Mark Hinaman: Robert Hargraves had a really good piece on this synthetic fuels that we’ve thought a lot about for a long time. Well,

[00:55:13] Doomberg: we wrote a pretty fun piece on synthetic fuels ourselves recently.

[00:55:20] Mark Hinaman: Okay. Doomberg, this has been great. We’re coming up on our time. So I, I think we’ve answered most impactful step that people can take to build more nuclear ASAP. That’s kind of a standard question that we’ve gotten. What I heard was a political, political sport. Garner change, change the political regime and we’ll change how easy it is to build

[00:55:36] Doomberg: some of these things.

Absolutely. Yeah.

You know, you may have just seeded a startup that we’ll fund. Love it.

[00:55:43] Mark Hinaman: If people that are listening to this want to help, I mean, is it emailing senators contributing to a Doomberg’s lobbying startup?

[00:55:49] Doomberg: I think the very best way they could help. is to head over to doomberg. substack. com and become a paid subscriber because then they would have the education and the humor and the entertainment needed to bravely go forth and attack the problem. But no, in all seriousness of course if the problem is political, then political advocacy must be the answer. Write a letter to your congressperson.

Get involved. Get educated. Participate in debates. Convince a few friends at parties. You know, one conversation at a time is truly the way this is going to happen. And and so I do think. If anybody’s listening and is truly passionate about about creating that abundant energy for humanity to thrive while doing the minimum amount of damage on the planet, then, then they need to get involved.

And and you know, every conversation counts. That would be my advice.

[00:56:37] Mark Hinaman: So leave us with your most positive view on the future.

[00:56:40] Doomberg: We will eventually be powered by nuclear technology in a way that minimizes damage to the planet and provides, you know, one of the great trends that I’m seeing and that I’m, that we’re probably right a piece about is this explosion in AI, which I believe is real, by the way, if you’ve played around with these tools, they are pretty remarkable.

That’s going to drive the next leg up in the exponential growth of technology. So for all of the talk of the carbon pulse and how dangerous it is that we’re You know, extracting all these resources so quickly from the planet, the technology pulse is even, is even steeper, and AI consumes an enormous amount of energy, and we’re already seeing the Microsofts of the world contemplating using SMR technology to power the computing centers needed to pull all this off, and I think a backdoor way for nuclear to suddenly become acceptable is through the recognition that the computing needs of society are going to be met which, by the way, are basically energy needs are going to be net by nuclear, met by nuclear, and, and this is going to be the big aha moment for the industry.

And so that is, I think, a very positive way to look at it. Innovation is not suppressible. The Malthusians will lose. All humans everywhere want a higher standard of living. And, and I think the AI revolution might come with a nuclear kicker. That’ll be pretty sweet.

[00:58:04] Mark Hinaman: I, I couldn’t agree more. Just this week, Microsoft had a job posting for Principal Program Manager for Nuclear Technology.

Exactly. So, it’s, it’s happening. I agree. Doomberg, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us.

[00:58:20] Doomberg: Absolute pleasure. Thank you.

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