War Drums, Diesel & Debt: Doomberg on What Breaks First

0:00This has never happened before. Five players, 26 cases each, one million dollars on the line for every player. On September 25th, Yamavarizor and Casino at Sandman Well makes history with Deal or No Deal live hosted by me, Howie Mandel. Plain September for your chance to take the stage at Yamavar Theatre and answer the ultimate question. Deal or No Deal? Details at Yamavar.com must be 21. Please gamble responsibly. Welcome back to the show. Enjoying us today is returning guest, Dumburg behind the very popular Dumburg sub-stack where he covers geopolitics, energy as well as the whole financial apparatus for that matter. Dumburg, how you been? It's been a minute. Yeah, Christian, too. And great, great to be back on with you. Always good to do. Always good to have you on to hear your thoughts. And I wanted to mention to the audience, I really enjoyed Dumburg's conversation on the BTC sessions podcast. So I encourage people to check that one out. That was very enlightening.

1:01Yeah, we do a podcast together about once a month on that show. The three of us. James and Nathan, right? And yeah, it's a good show. Good time. We always have a good time. James and I complement each other pretty well. Well, the biggest thing that I'm tracking right now is, at least on the geopolitical front is this, are these wardrobes beating? You know, this, this is this rhetoric being espoused, being put out there, whether that's through the BBC news and through various other outlets, basically kind of gearing people up for a confrontation with Russia. And so I can't help but bring that up first. And we'd love to hear your take on that. We're used to seeing things situated. And then of course, we'd love to hear your take on the current financial, your current financial thoughts of what you're seeing out there. And we could we'll dive into a very rather topics, but yeah. Sure, yeah, you know, we wrote a piece this morning on diesel and how the crisis sort of always seems to rebound to Europe.

2:02And Europe is a fascinating case study. And you know, reading the propaganda, it's very pronounced, it's very obvious. It's like they're not even trying to hide it, which is an interesting observation in and of itself. The current slate of leaders in Europe are wildly unpopular. And one does worry that we might see a false flag type event to divert attention away, sort of classic, you know, way to dog moment. I hope not. I hope cooler heads prevail. We are seeing an incredible thicket of propaganda. And it's very dangerous. Look, whenever you have Frederick Merz and his party pulling below 5% in a regional election, and then he has the audacity to stand up at a podium and say he's just going to continue his policy. He's not going anywhere. I mean, when what long gone are the days when a politician would resign when they had clearly lost the mandate to lead, not that he ever really had it.

3:05I mean, all of these leaders, you know, you look at the vote levels of Stomer, you know, 30% and, you know, yes, you know, first pass the post system in Britain, but, you know, Andy Burnham did run for Prime Minister. He was selected by the party and parachuted into an easy writing, as we would say in the parliamentary system. And suddenly he's the Prime Minister. And yet, all this talk about defending democracy. I don't know. It's, um, scare times. It's, I'm glad to be over here. But at the same time, you know, we are stridently anti-war and it seems like the entire European theater is about to become a hot war zone again. And that is a catastrophe. You know, you could be indignant and you could say this is right and wrong and you could say, you know, it's treasonous to not support the country when you go to war and all this typical nonsense that people say, um, try to grow, beat everybody into supporting wars.

4:09Look, wars are always rackets. I'm a post-all of them. The main reason why we're told we need to go to war never comes true, never turned out to be true. How many times do we need to hear weapons of mass destruction? How many wars do we need to start in the Middle East that we can't get out of? Before you say, wow, you know, maybe starting a new one for weapons of mass destruction was a bad idea. And then even if you believe that has this war made Iran more or less likely to pursue nuclear weapons, what do you think? I would argue more. I think it could be foolish to argue otherwise. So I don't know. Here we are yet again, um, staring down the same old Fox News headlines. And you're supposed to just pretend like you haven't seen this before. I don't know. Would you think of Pete Higgs at speaking to the cadets going on this campaign? I guess Trump released some video. This very patriotic video I saw in X people were sharing. And then what was the other thing that was going to touch on that that I'm seeing?

5:10I mean, I touched on earlier, you know, BBC's are we prepared for where I'm kind of paraphrasing it and having people from the from the parliament opine on, you know, some of us are going to have to die. And so yeah, I said, the poorly timed video on his part, Jacob Reese Maga, I guess, his name. If you watch the whole video, that segment is kind of taken out of context, but at the same time, I mean, could you be a greater caricature sitting in the chair with the paintings behind you and the double-breasted suit? You know, so one wonders whether that wasn't a site got to be honest with you. It becomes cynical about the whole thing. So yeah, it's, again, when I said, you know, reading across the entire propaganda sphere, you have to be careful too, like just because the Twitter algorithm is putting it in front of you doesn't mean it's going viral. Very true. In the time of AI driven clickbait and algorithms and dopamine optimization, you know, you do have to be careful.

6:13In the end, a war with Russia, you know, a hot war with Russia, not what Ukraine is, but like a legit battle to the end with Russia is going to be devastating to the entire planet. And so I don't know how anyone could otherwise hope or wish or advocate that all possible avenues towards peace or pursuit before such a war breaks out. You know, there was a deal on the table in Anchorage. There was a deal on the table in Istanbul in 2022. All this talk about, you know, which side is to blame is not helpful. This is fundamentally a former Soviet Republic civil war. I don't know why the US needs to be involved in it. But, you know, clearly in the minority view. And nobody's going to win that war. And there's nuclear weapons involved. Well, even even South of Europe, you know, over in the Middle East, you know,

7:15I've seen Iran mobilizing what a million people is with their working on right now. Again, who knows? I'm not there. Sure. And if I had my way, we wouldn't be at war with Iran. But I don't have my way. I just have to write about the world. But yeah, again, when we, you know, again, back just even that comment, like I've seen it, probably believe it would make sense of true. But we're not there. We don't know. And so you know, it's becoming very, very hard to be a sovereign thinker. And I'm always trying to be cognizant of the fact that like why is Twitter putting that in front of me or, you know, and that's where I think independent media is starting to shine a little bit like whatever you think of our views. I mean, hopefully people understand that we come at them authentically and we try to express them politely. We're wrong a lot. You know, it could be wrong on this in this instance. But broadly speaking, being against war, it's just a position that I feel firm, you know,

8:20haven't been burned so many times in prior wars, believing what I was told. You know, don't even get into like the COVID lockdowns I saw an amazing tweet. Like, probably the biggest event of our lifetime, I mean, if they're not making any movies about it, why is that? Right. So interesting observations. Anyway, it's, it's, we do try to catch ourselves and not get too cynical too. How about some other geopolitical things or even domestic matters that you're, that you're observing and paying attention to? Well, obviously you have the midterms coming up in the US, which is going to be a similar moment, assuming that the election goes off without a hitch and, you know, various worst case scenarios are avoided and there are some ugly ones for sure. Obviously, that's a big one. We have what's going on in Europe, of course, which we talked about.

9:20We have potential for energy lockdowns in Europe. I think this is a long shot risk on the board that Macron is, is agitating for and potentially positioning for. And so that's something to watch, you know, when you have to ration diesel, like we wrote about this morning, that's a foundational thing. And it is a true crisis. Now, whether the crisis was orchestrated or was allowed to fester out of ignorance or somewhere in between, history will have to judge. But we've been writing about this for many, many months between that and natural gas in Europe. Like it almost seems on purpose. It's getting, I used to swat away the, the malice hypothesis and sort of always found myself firmly in the incompetence camp. And there's no shortage of incompetent people in Europe and in the US and Washington.

10:21But it's getting harder to reject the malice hypothesis. I don't want to live in that world. It's kind of Pascal's wager, I guess. But I, it's getting harder. Well, I'm not going to couch myself as someone who has figured it all out. I'm learning like everyone else, but I personally have come to the conclusion that it is, it is being done intentionally. That the powers that be are far more connected than people realize through various families. Many, many of which are not the one, well, there's many different families aside from the one we always hear about that, that I suspect are. I don't know. I think in this on, I mean, I think it's a, so you have to be careful. It's, it's, it's in some ways can be a, a satisfying cope. I've been around a lot of rich people in my life and I've worked in some big corporations, you know, the classic line that I. I like to tell people because I've been in boardrooms and stuff and.

11:27There's no there, there's sometimes, you know, I've never been in a meeting where everyone gets data's around a table and said, I write, which river, we're going to pollute today, you know, like. Just doesn't work that way. I'll give you an example, a company that. It's kind of like a boogie man in alternative media. Look, we're in the alternative media. I'm not criticizing it. It's a hypothesis that I. I certainly understand exists and understand why people believe it. BlackRock, yeah, you know, they're passive owners like. BlackRock as a shareholder. They're not really affecting your strategy. They're hardly ever voting those shares when they are. They're just following whatever the institutional guidance is. You know, they're not activists. They they manage trillions of dollars, but there's not some great evil oracle at BlackRock. That is, you know, behind the war Ukraine. So BlackRock could get its hands on the fertile farmlands of Ukraine. You know, you've seen all of those hypotheses.

12:29I'll call them. I don't know, we have a lot of subscribers from BlackRock. I talk to people from BlackRock all the time. It's not how it's done. And so when you see that, then you make, makes, makes you wonder about the other stuff. Look, I get it. I'm not criticizing it. People need to. All of us are just trying to understand the world. And in order to understand the world, you have to start with some premises. And then my only caution is only keep the premises that predict. If they're not useful for predicting, then they're not really all that useful as a premise. And I just don't know how that premise is operative. Back to the whole malice thing, you know, I think in common, it explains more the variance, just us. And there's enough exceptions that are difficult for the malice hypothesis to explain. I don't know. Well, definitely something to chew on there for sure. Obviously, there's a lot of talk about the energy crisis, you know, at bay. People talk about, you know, famine and other,

13:29in certain parts of the world, delays that are to occur. This one article, this is something I just read from Hal Turner. So you mentioned the top five refiners in the entire United States are all situated at or near the goal. If an entity were to send just five attack drones and strike the Coke cracker at each refinery 90% of US gasoline and diesel supply would be instantly knocked offline for months. Sure. All kinds of point sources of catastrophe. Just to freak everybody out, I thought that Nate over at Canadian Pryper put out an interesting video this morning, 12 minute long video about a whole list of what he calls them non-nuke nuke options, you know, a couple of them that come to mind. And again, you can get lost in this kind of stuff like, sometimes you just need to go walk outside and tell yourself that nothing bad ever happens. Three gorgeous dam would probably result in hundreds of millions of people dying, starving,

14:29drowning. If it were to collapse, you could take out that dam with a few well placed missiles. He claims that I can't validate that they're like nine super high voltage transformer stations in the US that would not get rid out if you sort of pick the right ones. And there's EMP weapons and all this other stuff as well. And yes, one of the things that I've sort of settled is that humans are far more resilient than that. You know, I got by just fine without the internet before it was invented. It would be, there's certain these things would be catastrophes for sure. But the closure of the shirtover most taught me that what I assumed would be a catastrophe turned out to be pretty manageable. And I guess it's just easy to get through today assuming that people would figure it out. All I could say is Russia's been hitting Ukraine's

15:31electricity and energy infrastructure day after day, night after night, month after month, year after year with countless missiles and drones and still a lot of people living in Kiev. And things still being shipped out of there and commerce still going on. Yeah, I mean, nobody would trade. Yeah, nobody would trade, you know, wouldn't trade where I live for living in Ukraine right now. Don't be wrong. It's a total catastrophe. But it's not, you know, 5 million people starving in the streets yet either. Noted, noted. I wanted to pivot here to finance more bonds and debt. The 10-year treasury yield is near 5 percent. And long-dated yields are rising across the US, UK, France and Japan. I think the guess, the host who was interviewing you mentioned about this is a call for a new regime, not a blip. Can you? I'm just going to give you some color to that and situate people tuning in. Yeah, look, I mean, the US situation is challenging from a physical perspective.

16:33And I was running some math since that podcast appearance you mentioned on the Bitcoin sessions. And I don't quite haven't done all the math yet historically to see how much of an artifact it is. But it's an interesting calculation to look at the 40 trillion in debt that the US has. And then take a 1 percent move in interest rates, just say 1 percent more to service that debt. What percent of receipts does that 1 percent move represent? So a 1 percent change in interest on 40 trillion is 400 billion. And receipts are like 4.5 billion. Government receipts at the federal level. So we're at the point now where there's like a 10 to 1 gearing ratio on the interest servicing the debt 9 to 1, let's say. Yet, now there's only got 9 times coverage of total receipts for a 1 point move in the debt. And so when people say, you know, hey, 5 percent, you should always be, that's normal.

17:375 percent on the 10 years normal. Well, it was normal before you had 110 percent of GDP and you were running 7 percent of GDP as a deficit every year. You know, 110 percent of GDP is debt. And then you're adding to that, you know, each year. And so I don't know how it resolves. I don't know that history has ever observed the global reserve currency hyperinflating. You know, and the sort of risk asset being incredibly risky. The risk free asset being incredibly risky. So again, we know far less about interest rates and fiscal policy than we do energy. And we have to sort of understand it. The best of our ability like everybody else. You know, there's another observation from the conversation that you had on that show was there's no flight to safety into treasuries despite global conflict yields are up across developed nations and other. Yeah. Yeah, this is fiscal dominance.

18:45This is sort of what happens in emerging markets, right? Where the government debt is not like we're considered safe. And so one of the reasons why flight to quality is not occurring could be that the neutrality of treasuries has been removed. They were never really neutral beginning once you start opening the sanctions journey. But the season of the Russian assets and the operation economic outcast that Bessent is doing against Iran. These are counterproductive in the long term because it teaches. Well, especially when you mix in the fact that Trump is going to war with Canada. When historical friends are not immune from the neutrality of US treasuries and every marginal holder of US treasuries in the world has to wonder whether

19:51this is a risk that has been property priced in. So if Canada could come under the microscope of all countries, do you think I don't know Singapore is not worried about the neutrality of of US treasuries in the sense that they could just be canceled seized frozen. And so we're headed to sort of the grand conflict. You know, was you coming to Washington this week? You know, to Chinese decide that that game is over, it's over. And the US cannot actually, in a way, China has acquiesced to this for a very long period of time. China could end all of this nonsense rather quickly. And we're surprised they haven't. They might this week, we'll see. I'm an expert on this, but I presume that that would also have some blowback for them too if they were to do that. Sure. But this is the thing that even likes getting into war with Iran,

20:53which side has the higher pain tolerance. You know, the quasi-authoritarian communist party with lifetime appointments or US political leaders with a two-year cycle. And the entire US economy, debt structure, fiscal situation is very precarious. It wouldn't take much in the way of paying the tip the whole thing over. I mean, I think the part that gives people anxiety and spins us up and to wondering whether it's malice or incompetence is just how out of control everything seems. Right? So China could probably absorb a lot more pain than we can. And that's, you know, a factor you have to consider when you enter a conflict than you're pondering who has escalation dominance. It's not just who can inflict the most pain, or is there one by those who could absorb the most pain? This has never happened before. Five players, 26 cases each, one million dollars on the line for

21:56every player. On September 25th, Yamavarizor Enkassino at Sandman Well makes history with Deal or no deal live hosted by me, Howie Mandel. Plain September for your chance to take the stage at Yamavar Theater and answer the ultimate question. Deal or no deal? Details at Yamavar.com must be 21. Please gamble responsibly. And just to play, just to address some of the audience tuning in, where they might say, well, you know, with respect to the midterms, with respect to these politicians that are voted in and out that they are but puppets that, you know, some speculate that there is a transnational click that is, you know, really, really running things. So, yeah. Can't, can't have it both ways though. Sure. This is where I go back to Trump's sure behaving like the midstreams matter to him. You know, and Merch had to stand up in front of that podium and look at 5% result in the face. If they truly had the power to ignore elections then

23:01results like that wouldn't be of much concern. They would just make up the results. Now, those people who will say they have, but it can't be that Trump had the election stolen from him and it's just a puppet of these same forces, right? It's an awfully long con, as we would say. So, yeah, I, again, I understand why people believe that. And I'm not judging them. It's a useful cope. It might even be correct. I just don't happen with me. It's not a premise that predicts at a sufficient hit rate for us to use. You know, another interesting comment that you made on that show was, was or in the conversation I should say is, is pertaining to AI hyper scalers issuing large amounts of debt and that they are competing with treasuries for long duration buyers. So, that's an interesting wrinkle there. Yeah, not our idea, of course. I read it somewhere and it seemed to make sense. And so, I just repeated it on the show, but this is a finite universe of

24:04people who need to buy debt. And there's an awful lot of debt coming to market. And if you think that AI is the future and you could pick up a few points, you know, because if you're or a fixed income investor, you know, getting 5% yield is not 1% better than getting 4% yield. It's a 25% better. Right. So, that's the way you need to think about it. And so, like anything else, an investing its risk reward. There are no shortage of people who think all that debt is toxic and they wouldn't touch it. And yet it still clears this endless demand for it. But it does crowd out, you know, other debt as well. And so, I think that is certainly a factor. Now, whenever you have lots of flows into and out of a particular instrument, any individual flow and isolation could be viewed as germative. Gee, China stop buying or offshore hedge funds are buying

25:10more because, you know, the government incentivize them to capture that spread. You know, Japanese are selling or who knows, they're going to make the banks buy more. So, that particular sort of observation that there is an entire suite of debt offerings available that offer a pickup to treasury does mean that, you know, treasury yields have to yield more to attract that incremental investor potential. No, didn't. Wanted to pivot over to a private credit. I have down private credit firms have bought insurance companies and fill them with their own debt at favorable marks and that you see some echoes of 07. OE. Again, if you're looking for echoes of 07. OE. And that's an interesting thread to pull. Again, quoting other people's work in that instance, we've not done the work ourselves. I saw somewhere between 10 to 15% of insurance

26:11companies are owned by private equity now. I don't know the exact number because I haven't done the work. But it is an interesting and potentially cynical thing to do, right, is you have somebody who is sort of a captive buyer of your toxic paper and the classic expression is a rolling loan gather no loss, right? And so there's one thing that Wall Street has proven over the generations, is it's a game like that to be played, it will play it to the max. And in order, you know, letter of the law matters more than spirit of the law. And then if they have to letter of law, it doesn't matter either at some point, given the stakes. And so I just think, again, history has taught us that's not be naive about what Wall Street will do if it's left unfettered.

27:14There's also mentioning about the housing and that it's not a 2008 repeat because home owners hold large equity cushions. It's locked up rate differences, not the stress. Yeah, that was James's point. I haven't studied the real estate market all that closely. It's just not what we do. There are people who do, of course. And I would certainly recommend people go read them. The housing situation could also just be a byproduct of a debasing currency. You want to own real stuff. I always try to remember that prices were looking at our nominal prices, not real prices. So what is a house worth of an ounce of gold, for example, is it? I think a more instructive view, but I just haven't plotted it. And then circling back to energy in Europe, I found your four horsemen, they're in Europe's diesel supply are where we're very interesting points that you made. So could you could you unpack that? Yeah, we put on a piece today as bad as a diesel crisis is,

28:15good news, it could get worse. And there are at least four ways in which it is likely to get worse, at least for the rest of the world and in particular Europe. One is that Trump is under enormous pressure to halt diesel exports or toggle them at least or put taxes on them. Why? Well, the U.S. produces way more than enough diesel for its own domestic needs. And yet, because of manufacturers, including Ukraine blowing up Russia's refineries, there's a shortage of competitive diesel barrels in the seaborne market just to put some numbers. You know, if there's a hundred million barrels a day of oil, let's say 27, 28 is used to make diesel. Most of that diesel is consumed in the countries where it's produced. And so really you have seven million barrels a day of diesel available to be auctioned to the rest of the world on a daily basis. And Russia used to be about 800,000

29:22barrels of that and they stopped exports for obvious reasons. You know, you blow up their refineries, they're going to prioritize their domestic needs first, which we've argued Trump ought to do or will do. The U.S. of those seven million, the U.S. was about 1.3 before all this went down. And now, of course, given global prices are moaning, refineries are running at 100% capacity and trying to grab as many of those export barrels as they can. And so the U.S. last I saw was up to like 1.9 million barrels of diesel exports a day. Well, that's all fine and good for the refineries, but what about U.S. farmers who are paying 680 gallon for diesel as we head into harvest season. And Russia was quick to curtail their exports and so was China after the straight-of-our-move close. Why does the U.S. have to prop up the rest of the world? So in a world where it's even signaled that that's coming,

30:25I think you'll see diesel prices in the rest of the world in the moon. So that's one. Two is this Lindsey Graham sanctions bill kind of seems to tie Trump's hands. And the two obvious targets of that bill, Bill requires Trump to put 100% sanctions on countries who consume Russian oil. The two big ones are China and India. China, as we said, probably will ignore it, but India might not. India probably doesn't want to run a foul of U.S. sanctions. And India is a huge provider of incremental diesel to Europe. So what happens if India says fine? We'll stop buying Russian crude. We'll only buy enough crude to make enough diesel for our own home markets and sorry, rest of the world. The third is Middle East could escalate. They could close the Red Sea. They could really close the strait. They could pull up all of the sensitive assets. In the Middle East,

31:27that would be a true energy catastrophe. And so when you stack it all up, things get pretty tricky, pretty quickly. I'm just going to pull up the article real quick to remind myself what the fourth one was. It was pertaining to overworked refineries. Yes, of course. Yes, yes, last one. Right. So at 100% refining capacity, you know, 108 in India, they blow up sometimes and you don't even need sabotage or cyber attacks. Look, the refining business is a crappy business. You make thin margins. Everybody hates you. Stangers work. Nvidia gets to have 90% margins. But if Chevron makes nine on its refineries, people call them, you know, greedy, big oil companies who wants to be in that business if you can't capture outsized gains when the market needs it, which means nobody wants to invest in that business. And so now when you have a real crisis,

32:32like they'll only ever make money now. So they run really hard. But because these are big, dangerous chemical facilities that handle explosive gases and liquids at high pressures and temperatures, they blow up sometimes, especially when you've skimmed on the maintenance over the years, because I don't know you sold out to private equity and private equity has been bleeding the facility dry and doing dividend recaps is investing in maintenance capital and all the things that private equity does. You don't need much in the way of refineries blowing up to add to the fourth sort of four horsemen of the diesel uppockups. And then the last point that we made in that piece is they're synergistic. Like if one happens the odds of the others happening go up. And so you really are quickly approaching a full tilt moment. And these was just, it's not a regular commodity. It's like law commodity, right? Long haul trucking tractors, you know, heating oil,

33:37coming into the winter season in Northeast, it's all diesel and it's all middle distillates. And and it's a real challenge. And it's kind of like watching us slow motion train wreck. Now what comes out on the other side of this is diesel will be free and they'll be you know, abundance of everything because industry always overreacts to these outsized gains. It doesn't feel that way now. We like to say you never want to draw a tangent line to a sign curve. It's going to bend. This crisis will pass one way or the other. It might be particularly painful. The great irony is the more painful it is the greater the staff back eventually will be. It's like pulling on a rubber band. So long as the band does it break when you let it go, it snaps with violence. And this will happen here as well. It's hard to see now. But it will. It always does. So, you know, I love the quote that you also mentioned on that is energy energy. Everything money is a

34:43promissory note on energy. I just I yeah, it's true. You can't eat tea bills. And corn is just, you know, stored energy, cost energy to produce corn. The purpose of currency is to efficiently allocate energy. People don't think of the economy that way, but that's the way the economy works. And we're finding out now that that observation, which of course we've been making since the early days of Bloomberg is only prominently true during times of energy shortages. So that's the problem with energy. Shorges don't last when there's a huge amount of abundance people can forget. You know, it's like storing your gold and somebody else's vault. Most of the time scale helps you because you shave a few cents off of storage. But possession is 90% of the law. How about as far as your personal strategy goes?

35:46Yes, same as always. Three pillars of my personal strategy. I earn in fiat and live in the fiat world. I have plenty of fiat. Save by buying real assets, acres, ounces, collectibles, and then invest privately where I can affect the outcome. Where I help the management team select the management team, use skills in our own personal networks to help that team succeed. I found that sweat alpha is easier to get than competing for alpha in a hyper efficient market. And one thing, well two things, and then related. Whatever your personal strategy is, it has to have a set of rules that you can implement without a motion. And such strategies only work if you follow them. And the two are very related. And so I have a gold strategy. I just follow it. Whatever the price of gold is doing is the strategy doesn't change. It's a savings vehicle.

36:50I don't need that money. I dollar cost average and over time. I like to have a certain mix of land and gold and collectibles in my savings. That's not investing. Investing is different than saving. So I don't look at gold as an investment. I don't look at my home as an investment. I look at those things as savings. I have to live in a home so you might as well own one. But investing is the private stuff. Yeah, running Bloomberg better, growing our business. That's an example of investing. So the test of a strategy is whether you can implement the tactics tied to a junior crisis. And I plan to just keep living that strategy. No, don't. Is there anything else I should be asking you? And also any positive message or quote that you'd like to share in partying? Yeah, this too shall pass. Ultimately, I'm long-term optimistic on the human endeavor. This slate of terrible political

37:52leaders will get washed away. To take an extreme case, the US dropped Newk's on Japan in the 40s. And it was the manufacturing powerhouse 30 years later. Nothing is forever. We are still quite bullish to the human spirit. Even the time of AI, I would say that the value of authentically human is about to soar. And so yeah, I think we've covered pretty much enough for one podcast for sure. But no, it's always great to catch up with you, Christian. And just talk about the cynicism, just enough to survive. Yeah, I have very alternative viewpoints on how things operate in the world. But I'm that's that's not for this podcast. But you know, I'll borrow from Michael Yann. I don't know your personal thoughts are on Michael Yann. But you know, he has a quote that he's not a quote. He has shared something in the past and I shared on the last episode. He was someone in that we are all a byproduct of people that have survived multiple wars, famines, genocides.

39:01I mean, you name it. So you know, we find a way to survive as a species. And I know a lot of the messaging that at least I cover on this platform, can seem kind of very alarming at the very least. I think it's a great world out there. And you know, you can't make it a great day. 100% go get it today. What are you going to do today to make today great? I try to ask myself that. You know, it's only ever going to be one today, Christian. And I just spent 40 minutes of it with you. So what what's good go wrong? There you go. Doonberg, how can people learn more about you as well as any other things you'd like to share? Yeah, doonberg.com. That's it. Keep it simple. That's how you find us. Doonberg.com. Thanks, Christian. Love it. Thank you for making the time. You bet. Yamabah Resort and Casino at Sandman Welles bringing the biggest laughs to the stage. Break taboo is with Ali Wang on August 28th and 29th. Enjoy Ralph Barbosa's dry humor on September 18th and 19th. And don't miss Nikki Glazer's unapologetic comedy November 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theatre dot com. Only at Yamabah Resort and Casino,

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