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As I said at the outset, very pleased to welcome back to the show, Doonberg. Why? Because I love quality research. This is exactly what they do in a variety of subjects, but focuses on energy, for example. So again, much appreciated, Doonberg. Thanks for being with us. Mike, I mean, who could turn down an invitation to a podcast that sings such high praises of its guests? I mean, really great to be back with you and I always enjoy coming and talking with you guys. And so looking forward to another great one today.
Well, and that's the show is really focused on this today in terms of quality, quality stuff that the public can see. And that's what I think we're lacking. My simple sort of approach is the higher level of understanding, the more information we get of quality and analysis of quality, the better we're all off. I mean, the better democracy is for that being informed. And I think that's why.
it was so instantly popular what you were doing because you had to look deep dive into the energy industry in so many different ways, whether it's just explaining the impracticality of energy policy, the insanity at other times of energy policy, the decision making at the government level that you sort of said, boy, if I could close my eyes and think of the wrong direction, that's the one that keep taking. So I think all of that combines.
And I think that's what's explained your success. And it brings me to a couple of things. Big story in Canada this week, and you've been writing about this. So I thought it would really, you know, ring a bell or touch a chord with you. And that is Chinese interference.
And by the way, you had one of my favorite headlines, and that's one of the reasons you're also successful is a great, great, great writing ability. But you go, Western elites can be bought and Chinese communists are limit long. Well, I love, I just love that turn of phrase.
But we had a report this week. Every Canadian probably knows now the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. Bottom line, in their words, said some MPs are semi-witting and witting participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere our politics. Now, China's front and center. We also have some India interference there. But this is something you guys have been writing about, you know, numerous times, especially just lately over the last couple of months.
Yeah, we wrote a piece called The Greater Fools, which was a follow on piece to one we wrote about the semiconductor industry called Chipshot. And maybe I'll start with Chipshot because that's something that's very important that people who don't have direct experience in industry might not understand. The Chinese, when the Chinese Communist Party, and I'm always very careful to separate the CCP from the Chinese people, you know, the CCP.
If it were just up to the people, we'd have no wars and we'd have much more prosperity than we have today. But China is ruled by the iron fist of the Chinese Communist Party. And when the CCP decides that they want to monopolize a strategic industry, they have a very clear set of tactics that they use over and over and over again. And they almost always work. Those tactics include bribery, blackmail, intellectual property theft, and so
They have found that Western industry, which is beholden to quarterly financial reports to Wall Street and the management is
with stock options that are sensitive to the price, that the short-term financial gain of the senior leaders within industry is often a point of jujitsu for the CCP that they can monopolize to their own ends. And it's not just limited to industry. They do the same thing in politics, which is what you're seeing. Canada is home to an enormous amount of natural resources. China is short many of those resources, and they have a national strategy to...
bend the political, the politics of net energy and commodity exporters to their will, which is, again, not to blame the CCP. We blame the Western elite who allow this to happen. Every country behaves in its own, you know, selfless interest.
internationally the u.s is certainly not uh innocent in this regard nor is canada we have a long history of we as in the collective west have a long history of colonialism and various other um uncouth activities that we would probably be ashamed to talk about today but the chinese are ascendant they are we jokingly said in a in a
a doom zoom presentation to our pro tier called geopolitics and war sleepwalking into the abyss that china is the new arsenal of democracy because all of the western militaries have outsourced key supply chains to the ccp and so um their their tactics are very clear and and in a chip shot we talked about how they were going to win in the semiconductor space
And anybody who doubts that, I think, is just naive about what's going on in that sector. And then the follow up piece where we talked about the greater fools, we described what I believe this report in Canada is very similar to. There's no shortage of people in the West who should know better.
who accept cash contributions, find themselves in honey traps, pick your favorite blackmail technique of the CCP. And in such circumstances, people in such positions tend to make incorrect decisions. And we opened that piece telling the really amazing story of Charlie Lieber, who is quite literally, again, I'm a PC scientist and I know the research area relatively well. He was literally the most talented chemist of our generation. In fact,
in the 2000s you know from 2000 to 2010 he was the most prolific chemist in the world by publication quality and citations and he was the chair of the chemistry department at harvard university and just as covid was unfolding he was arrested and charged with basically taking money from the ccp hiding it from
the US Defense Department, who was also funding his research and lying about it on his income tax filings. He was in China and he was accepting bricks of $100 bills. If you're taking bricks of $100 bills and shoving them in your
in your luggage and not declaring them when you come across the border, like you have to look in the mirror. Like, how did you get to this point? Somebody giving me a brick of $100 bills while I'm in a foreign country, like if the red light alarm isn't glowing. So the point of that piece is we see it over and over again. It happened in Canada. I believe there's a huge scandal. And by the way, the classic technique,
of the Chinese is to accuse those who are pointing out these things as being racist or anti-Chinese or xenophobic or pick your favorite insult. That is meant to shut down debate and to keep
from being quiet. You know, we have the whole money laundering scandal into British Columbia that nobody's allowed to talk about because, you know, we're all so progressive and enlightened. I think this is a huge scandal. And I will close my comments on this particular part by saying that I'm very interested in the behavior of the Canadian intelligence services, by the way, which is pretty unique in the sense that they've been ringing the alarm bell as opposed to covering up for the administration. And I don't quite understand why their behavior is so different than, say, the, you know, the
intelligence services in the UK and in the US. But if their primary motivation is patriotism, then good for them.
Well, and we certainly saw that racist card played. I mean, now we know much more. But going back in February of 2020, this is when we hadn't locked down yet. That was coming up in March, you know, from COVID. But there was talk about, of course, the origins being in Wuhan. And we had the prime minister and the national health, whatever, I forget her official title, Theresa Tom, litigate.
literally saying, well, only racists are suggesting that, you know, some link to the virology lab in, in Wuhan. Of course, now we know where there's a link to the virology lab, our top secret one in Winnipeg, you know, but, but the, just it doesn't,
touched a nerve with me because of course, exactly right. They would call everyone a racist. Same thing with Huawei, by the way. And I know you've written about Huawei and the chip industry. Well, we had it here, a big scandal with Huawei. And again, that was the defense. You have to be a racist. And yet all of those things seem to come true in the end, you know, that the information comes out. You mentioned, of course, the fentanyl trade. Sam Cooper did brilliant work with willful blindness on that.
But boy, he suffered for bringing that forward. You know, when you guys arrested, when the Canadian authorities arrested the CFO, you know. Yeah, Ming-Huan Wu. Yes, this, of course, became an international scandal and China responded by arresting those two Canadian gentlemen, as I recall.
I think one of the key aspects of the Bloomberg success story is that we would never, ever press send on a publication if we didn't authentically believe everything that we've written at the time that we press that. That doesn't mean we still believe those things. We make mistakes. We learn. We evolve like everybody else. But the public has lost the trust in the sort of standard mainstream media that they're not actually saying what they believe or know to be true.
Yeah, and it's interesting because that's been the explosion of independent media. I'm going to talk coming up with the people here. Great service is called Black Locks. Black Locks reporter who gets the inside scoop on government stuff. And why have we turned to people like Doomburg?
Why have we turned to Black Locks, other independent sources like Sam Cooper or Terry Glavin, whatever it is? It's because we have lost trust in the mainstream and we want the real goods. And as I say right up front, I think that's why Bloomberg has exploded in popularity. And one of the things that, again, you mentioned,
wrote about, but it's now becoming better known is how many, in this case, it was U.S. colleges and university were dealing directly with the Communist Party of China and their businesses. Yeah. And to be fair, the Wall Street Journal did break that story and we covered it as part of the greater context.
But I think, look, as long as you show your homework and you're humble enough to admit when you're wrong, we have a mistake philosophy, by the way, which is they should be rare, admitted to, corrected, and learned from. And we follow that with strict adherence during all aspects of running our business. I do believe that the explosion in popularity, quote unquote, of alternative media voices is testimony to the fact that most people see through what's actually going on.
And it gives me great hope. And if you just look at the growth of Substack, which is a platform that we're on and we're investors in, by the way, I should disclose, we participated in the author-led investor round of Substack. Substack has a very strong free speech policy. We'll see how long they can persist in that given the pressures of the
internet censorship overlords and their ever-changing definition of mis- and disinformation. That which has been misinformation is suddenly true. Not always, of course. There is legitimate external disinformation, legitimate toxicity, harmful content. Nobody disagrees that such things don't occur.
I think the disagreement is what should be done about it. But one of the things that I wanted to mention early on when you were talking about Bloomberg is we are big, big believers in civilized discourse. And I think that is actually a key part of the brand. We will take all critiques. We will debate anybody anywhere on any topic. If somebody convinces us that we were wrong, we will change our views. But we won't interact with or tolerate trolls. And I think
you know you'll never see a swear word in the doomberg piece um civility is uh an admirable attribute of society that we should all aspire to achieve and the best way to achieve anything is to lead by example and so um we are always polite we go on any podcast that will have us um
And we are not afraid to defend our views because in the circumstances where we're incorrect, then that's just a learning opportunity. And so we need to get back to that. You know, I was perusing some old footage of the CBC for a piece that we've been thinking about writing about Pierre Trudeau and the difference between Pierre and Justin. We're not really a political periodical, but occasionally we like to go down some rabbit holes. And you just look at the way in which, you know, parliamentary question period used to be
compared to the soundbite gotcha journalism of today. I think that the people are hungry for a return to meaningful debate where all opinions are welcome, not all are believed,
And the most important thing is we just show our homework. Like every Doobrook piece is replete with 20 or 30 links to how it is that we came to these conclusions. And the comment section, which is closed to paying subscribers only, which has been a great decision, is just a wealth of information. Hey, you got this wrong or have you thought about this? You should look at that. And we've built this network effect where experts give us ideas and validate our pieces before we publish them. And that just adds to our credibility. Yeah.
Everything you've said there, though, is the antithesis of how we're operating in politics. I mean, we're not operating with respect, you know, and certainly we're not operating by entertaining alternative views, whether, you know, and I think COVID was an extreme of that. Or maybe it wasn't an extreme, but it was the typical where we didn't want to hear from other experts that challenged the government narrative. But what a dangerous way of approaching things. I mean, that's the most anti-scientific way I think you could possibly come up with.
you know, the, the push towards censorship, another, uh, you know, hallmark of that. It's just interesting to hear you describe how you're approaching it. And that is the antithesis of how we're approaching politics today. And I would lean very heavily in favor of following what model you guys are putting out there. And I'd like to think we try to on money talks ourselves, but just interesting to hear that juxtaposition with, with politics today. Uh,
I won't go further on that, but there's so much more to follow here. I want to just quickly, I'll leave the China thing in a second, but I want to get to the business side because they have a very specific sort of formula of influencing business. I want you to sort of reiterate that again so we can be more aware of it. So we told the story in Chipshot.
And we started the piece by saying, stop us if you've heard this before. So typically what happens is the West has a big technological advantage over an area that China wants to get into. And suddenly at global conferences,
Companies from China that you've never heard of start attending these conferences and the attendees are very inquisitive and they take pictures of posters and they ask all kinds of questions of people. And then what happens next is they entice typically the sort of bottom quartile of the market who is looking to grow and maybe struggling to come into China. And in so doing, they mandate that they form joint ventures with state-owned enterprises and as a part of that joint venture formation process,
key technology has sort of escaped from the West and finds its way into China. And then a fear of missing out happens and all of the other major players in the industry see this mirage of growth in China. And they have quarterly pressures and mark to market accounting and all the other things that are wrong with the sort of modern
free market capitalistic system, which has, of course, many, many positive attributes. But one of the flaws is this short term mindset. And the market can break down on things, for example, that are in the national interest, especially for multinational corporations whose national interest is really definitive in this regard. And then you see all these other joint ventures showing up. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a fully state owned enterprise appears on the scene.
with all of the internal trade secrets of all of the Western companies, the best of the best culled into one spectacular product. And this product is amazing in its positive attributes and even more stunning in how cheaply they can produce it and basically in infinite supply. And so then this new company rolls up the domestic market
you know, works out all the kinks and then they start exporting overseas. And I lived this directly in the, in the solar industry, polysilicon in particular and ignits and, and, and wafer formation and cell mounting. They decided they wanted to own the solar industry and they just did like they stole all the IP and,
They cut every environmental corner they could. And they put the Western companies out of business. And it works. And this whole concept that there was some S-curve of innovation that drove the price of solar down is just nonsense. Nobody who actually worked in the industry would say that. China flooded the market with artificially cheap supply in order to drive everybody out of business, and they succeeded.
And isn't that what we're thinking about with EVs at this point? Yeah, I mean, no wonder there's a big concern. And hey, look, like BYD just put out a $9,800 car, US. A little more expensive if you're in Canada. Yeah. So they put out a $10,000 EV that goes 200 miles. Now...
The US and Germany can throw up trade barriers and Japan can throw up trade barriers. But GM and Toyota and Audi or Volkswagen, they're all capitalized to compete globally. And I can tell you the 7 billion people not in the G7 will happily take this dirt cheap, amazing product that is more reliable from BYD than to pay four times as much for a car from Tesla. And I've seen this pattern so many times, which is why we wrote about it.
Because nobody in the industry wants to say it because they're afraid of getting kicked out of the market, right? Like China will retaliate. And so we have no such, you know, I suppose who knows what they could do to us, but I'm sure we're not even on the radar. Hopefully, knock on wood. Well,
I'll come back to what you're saying a moment ago about the chip industry, too. If I'm in Taiwan, I'm worried because that's got to be one of the big deterrences. Of course, they're the chip makers of the world. If China catches up on that and they don't need any input from Taiwan, I worry geopolitically. Of course, that was the point of writing that piece. Once this barrier has been removed.
China is not looking to dominate the global semiconductor industry in the way that they are solar and EVs and other. This is much more serious to the Chinese. They are looking to become self-sufficient because once they become self-sufficient, this gives them maximum military flexibility. And in fact, if they are self-sufficient and they take out the Taiwanese semiconductors, what's the West going to do?
It's a very, very dangerous situation. And we see this pattern playing and we rang that bell in that piece because like, and still people in the West are so naive about it. Like, oh, they're still behind us. No, they're not. That's just what they're allowing you to see. Like the horse is out of the barn. Like, let's get ready for when the door is going to get slammed shut.
Let me change gears here because right now there's the European Union election, you know, for the European Parliament. I guess it runs right through till Sunday. Just fascinating that you've just written about this though. And I love it because this is obviously another pertinent subject, whether in the U.S. but or Canada especially, because we like to follow that European model.
And I look at the energy policy, and you've written a great piece that talks about, hey, is this going to be the actual energy policy? Is it going to be the undoing of the EU? And maybe you could elaborate a bit on that. So the core of that piece is the, I think, undeniable observation that the green energy transition, quote unquote, is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. And what does that mean? Well, if you disconnect from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, it is fundamentally
Very difficult to deny that this necessarily means that the population will experience a substantial drop in its standard of living. Democracies are popularity contests, and nobody wants to voluntarily live a poor life.
And so the green energy transition, when executed, as the architects of that transition ultimately intended to be executed, never mind their polishing of the propaganda around what they think is going on. Deep down, they know what this means. It means less wealth for fewer people, fewer people on the planet in some cases. None of that is popular with people. And democracy is one vote per person. And ultimately, elections are popularity contests. And so taken to the extreme, which it inevitably must,
the proponents of the green energy transition who genuinely, some of them at least, believe that the world is legitimately going to end if they don't succeed and that justifies all manner of means considering the end they're trying to avoid, they very quickly slip into totalitarian instincts. And we see that in the EU and we'll see how Prime Minister Trudeau handles what looks like to be an election wipeout if he ever has the courage to call one. This is a very dangerous time.
the elite in Brussels think they know better. And the population in the EU, the population in Germany, the population in Slovakia, the population in Serbia, the population in Hungary, European countries, not all of them are in the EU, of course, but there's a partitioning between
sort of the left and the right that is leading to political violence. We just had an attempted assassination of a European head of state for the first time in two decades. Europe is a powder keg. And the elections are happening. Who knows how they'll turn out. We've seen two stabbings in Germany of what the media would call far-right politicians of the AFD.
This is not positive, right? This is not healthy, civilized discourse like we talked about earlier. That's missing. There's we know better and you should shut up and take our policies mindset amongst the Trudeaus of the world, which was on full display during the COVID lockdowns as has been covered widely. So our view is something has to give.
And one of the things that might give is the nature of the European Union itself. And we might see a partitioning of countries who care about what their population wants and those whose leaders don't. And that could get ugly pretty quickly. Now, we don't want that. That is not our base case. But it's a risk on the board that people need to be aware of.
Let me add just, and I know time's short, so I'm going to finish this one thing. One of the things that I've really enjoyed in Doomburg is the technical and practical understanding of what that whole energy situation really required. But you've just recently written about, you know, if you want to do this stuff,
you realize how many kilometers of cable you have to add, you know, the transmission, all of those kinds of things. And I think, again, that still isn't very prominent. It's more so maybe, you know, than it was a year ago, but that's still not near as prominent as proponents should make it because if they think this is the way to go, they got a lot of questions to answer.
Well, one of the things that we've observed is that the copper market never really bought the hype. So if we were truly going to outlaw internal combustion engines and force everybody onto electric vehicles and electrify everything and heat pumps instead of furnaces, pick your favorite propaganda du jour from the progressive environmental left,
Copper would not be trading where it is. And many people have wondered what that means. And we've interpreted it as saying, you could either believe Tesla's market cap or the price of copper. And one of those two is more susceptible to market hysteria than the other. The copper market is sleepy. Almost no retail trades it. The price of copper in the last five years
tells us that nobody actually believed this would come to pass. And there's just no way copper would be trading where it is if we were truly going to go down this path and the market believed it. And so one of those two things isn't right. I'd argue one of those two things isn't still right, still isn't right. And they're not like tradable insights. They're just observations. Like we believe that when the market is,
not in sync with the narrative, the market is A, probably right, and B, trying to teach you something. And the price of copper never moved. You look at the 10-year chart of the price of copper and you point out where the green energy transition was believed by the market. It's not there. And by the way, then go ahead and adjust that chart for inflation. Mm-hmm.
The inflation-adjusted price of oil today is $23. People don't realize that. But based on 1980s money, which is what Bloomberg uses for its inflation adjustment indices, which if you use the Bloomberg terminal, then that's sort of how you measure these things. But in 40-year-old money, the price of oil is the same price as it was when Reagan was president. And in 40-year-old money, the price of copper is pretty dirt cheap.
And given the fact that we have no real major new mines coming online and no major discoveries of high-grade copper like we used to find a century ago, the market just doesn't believe it. And I think Toyota is sort of the ultimate proof point where their hybrid strategy is now suddenly they're thriving in this market as we've come to realize that perhaps
you know 80 kilowatt hour batteries that only abate one driver's um gasoline use not their carbon emissions to be clear because electricity is still predominantly coming from fossil fuels today this was never going to be the the panacea that saves the planet
I'll make sure that the members of the Liberal cabinet federally hear that. By the way, that is a fascinating way of observing it. And that's, I think, typical of how Doonberg approaches a variety of subjects. In this case, I think that gives a great illustration of looking at it from just a little bit different lens than we're hearing more often. And that's why I enjoy it. I'm a subscriber. I enjoy it. I go to Substack. You just go to Substack and
and type in Doomburg, you'll get the information there. But Doomburg, let me just say thanks so much for finding time. You know, it's always a pleasure for us. Same here, Mike, and looking forward to the next appearance. Great stuff. Thank you.