Surfing The Sea of Abundance: An Interview With Doomberg

Labor vs Capital, Climate Change, Nuclear Energy, Existential AI Risk, Doing What You Love, and more.

Not too long ago I had the pleasure of having a call with the person behind the most successful finance and energy publication on Substack, Doomberg. The publication is anonymously run by former business consultants and experts from various industries who saw the need for a clear-eyed and authentic alternative to legacy media.

During our Zoom chat I was greeted by a cartoon image of a large green chicken and the digitally modified voice of Doomberg’s head writer. I wondered how to keep appropriately composed without someone’s reactions to mirror, and I really wondered who could be behind the poultry picture, as anyone might. But as soon as it started speaking it really didn’t matter. The large green chicken came off as being around three standard deviations above mean intelligence, at a minimum, and wildly more magnanimous and passionate than most people I knew personally. Super smart, but very down to earth and extraordinarily conscientious.

I thought to myself that this was why the chicken was so successful, no one on earth can be this passionate about something and fail. We talked about this passion in our chat and I found it to be one of the most valuable bits of information Neonarrative has squeezed out of someone. And that’s only one small part of a tremendous body of ideas, which I would consider essential reading for anyone wanting to build something of their own. 

The following is an editing and distilled version of our conversation. It’s my favorite that I’ve done so far. To read more from Doomberg subscribe to their Substack here.

> On the success of Doomberg

Sotonye: You run the best finance publication online, and you do it anonymously. It’s an incredible feat.

Doomberg: That’s very kind of you to say. We're a small team, and certainly we're very proud of the work that we do. We put a lot of passion into our product, and we believe it’s what we were meant to do, which is really a wonderful thing. It certainly doesn't feel like work. It’s the “work of our lives,” which ironically is the opposite of work. If you can discover what it is that you were meant to do in life, Lord knows that you should just keep doing it.

I personally get out of bed every morning and attack each day with “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind,” to quote Jim Harbaugh, one of my heroes. To be in a position to do that is truly a special thing. It's a blessing. It’s a blessing that we don't take for granted. It's one that we have to pinch ourselves every day to remind ourselves that it’s real. We add a unique offering to the market: we bring the industrial lens to the energy discussion, and wrap it all in a finance package. It's been a good run that’s gone well beyond our wildest dreams, and we're super grateful for it.

> On Labor vs. Capital and attaining true security 

Sotonye: This reminds me a lot of a lecture given by Peter Thiel where he describes working in finance for a while, at Credit Suisse I believe. The air inside his firm was filled with a desire to break out and escape the world of finance and do something more artistic, more authentic, and all the while the general public just wanted to break in. Most people on the inside never left, maybe because of security guarantees, or maybe because of the status benefits, these things are important. So it's a very interesting thing when someone has enough initiative and risk tolerance to go and pursue something independently. And that's what this sounds like here.

Doomberg: We’ve often pondered this internally when our friends in different industries, who often feel like beaten corporate puppies, come and see us and marvel at what we've built. They have this very real and visceral desire to join us on our journey, but can't ever quite make the leap. There’s this deep addiction to certainty that I believe holds them back.

If you're in a shitty job, everyday means waking up to do something you hate doing, you're miserable. But the digits in your bank account keep going up, and so you feel like this is the thing you should be doing when, ironically, the digits would explode higher if you only did what you love all day. If you find whatever it is you were meant to do, the market rewards you handsomely. Here at Doomberg we are so far beyond what we could have achieved if we continued “successfully'' climbing the corporate ladder that it's ridiculous. And ultimately it's so much sweeter when you do it on your own that the monetary measure is the least important measure of them all. The analogy that we use with our friends who are stuck is the idea of “Labor versus Capital.” You could be very well compensated on the side of Labor, but you're still Labor. Somebody above you decides whether you have a job and how big your bonus is, and so on. If you go on the hunt as Labor and you take down a bison, Capital gets to decide which piece of the bison you get to eat. 

But if you're your own Capital and you go on the hunt for yourself, when you happen upon a bison, you get it all. Nobody gets to tell you how to portion it, how much you get to eat and how much to put aside. The decisions are yours to make as your own Capital, as your own boss. And I can tell you, having hunted big game in the corporate world, that the first small successes we snared as entrepreneurs were so much sweeter, so much more satisfying for the soul than any reward in the previous life. Once you’ve experienced it you can never go back to a job, I could never be somebody's Labor ever again. I just couldn't. 

Many really talented people are trapped by the fixation on an illusory security. In fact, they’re not very secure at all, their employers would cut them in a moment. As soon as it becomes worth two more cents a share to fire you, you're gone. There is no security, it's only perceived. The only true security is building a business on your own that you own and control. This means in part that you have to try and fail, and we failed a lot.  What seems like overnight success is really just the integral of years of trial and error and failure. But we eat, drink, breathe, sleep, live the Doomberg brand. We love what we do and I think that comes through in our product and explains why we're successful. You have to fail, and when you finally do succeed, it's life altering. So many talented people trapped in a prison of Labor could be successful entrepreneurs if only they had the courage to try finding and doing what they love.

> On the climate change debate

Sotonye: So there's a cultural furor around climate change. The most widely cited understanding of the problem is that it's anthropocentric, that our use of oil is doing unjustified, irreparable harm to nature. Alex Epstein, the author of the pro-fossil fuel work Fossil Future, rejects that framing entirely and says any value standard that places non-human life over fuel dependent human flourishing is untenable. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Is that the best framing for the environmental impacts of fossil fuels, and is there any argument to be made that they're actually good for our ecological concerns?

Doomberg: I’m a big fan of Alex Epstein's work and agree with most of it. I think a large part of the value he brings to the debate is highlighting the complete lack of interest in measuring tradeoffs as they pertain to energy policy. And he is correct in his assertion that human flourishing is left out of the equation altogether when calculating the net benefits of fossil fuels. I think it’s simply undeniable that billions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of fossil fuels. This is a benefit you can't just ignore when speculating about the negative externalities that fossil fuels may or may not bring in the decades ahead. 

Of course I don't think anybody could deny that humans impact both the environment and climate in relatively meaningful ways. We should be mindful of those negative impacts and spend some part of our energy budget to abate them if we have collectively decided that this is a problem worth solving. But, since our standard of living is defined by the amount of energy each individual personally gets to harness to impose order on his local environment, the grand equation to apply to the problem is: total amount of primary energy we produce as a society divided by the sum of our pollution and climate impacts, and the part of the fraction we need to optimize is the numerator. If you ignore the numerator entirely you’ll come up with all manner of crazy things that would be devastating for billions of people. 

Late last year we put together a presentation for our Doomberg subscribers called King Doomberg, which was about what we’d do if we were the Xi Jinping of the Western World. We think it’s reasonable to demand from industry the minimization of pollution like co2, because we would optimize the numerator in the standard of living/environmental impact equation. In this scenario developing nuclear energy makes an enormous amount of sense, utilizing natural gas with carbon capture makes an enormous amount of sense. Alex would probably argue that increasing present coal use without carbon capture makes an enormous amount of sense, because the numerator is far more important than the size of the denominator, and because negative consequences that may arise could be met with innovation and greater energy expenditure in the future used to clean up the environment, which is one of his most compelling arguments. The numerator is a focal point: How much energy you get to harness defines your standard of living, and every human being everywhere wants a higher standard of living no matter where they are on the totem pole. Getting this tradeoff equation into the discourse is an unbelievable service that Alex has done, and we applaud him for it, and in general we would downrate climate alarmism. 

> On nuclear energy

Sotonye: The comment about nuclear makes me wonder about something I was thinking about recently while reading a book called Stalin's War by Sean Mcmeekin, about Stalin’s, and ultimately Communism’s, victory over large portions of Asia and of Europe. Communist eschatology with Marx was the expectation that rising inequality in capitalist countries would become so severe that the proletariat overthrow the system, and Lenin expected the capitalist states to end by mutual destruction in bellicose competitions for land, resources, and money. But it turned out that capitalism is a much more rational order of business than anything we’ve ever seen, one that maximizes minimum gains and minimizes maximum losses even in the fog of zero sum geopolitics. But the nuclear question makes the rationality of capitalism seem a little more shaky. We would expect that Capital would want to see the staggering economic growth that a more efficient energy like nuclear would allow, but it’s been staunchly avoided. What explains this?

Doomberg: I would turn this on its head and say it actually proves that we are operating in anything but a capitalist system today, since the thing constraining nuclear energy is a communistic tendency toward over-regulation. There is a kind of death by 1000 cuts in energy policy delivered by radical environmentalists and malthusians who have infected the regulatory bodies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US with fear. They’ve made it incredibly expensive and time consuming for Capital to pursue nuclear energy. This is anything but a capitalist system. This is in fact a communist system, a socialist system, where unelected bureaucrats are proactively making something that should be incredibly cheap, abundant, and life nourishing, into something prohibitively expensive, scarce, and outside the bounds of optionality for society. 

Our simple counterfactual to all of the fearful and restrictive policy nonsense is: if France could safely build-out an entire fleet of nuclear reactors 50 years ago that are still safely supplying over half the nation’s power now, while generating large energy surfeits, surely we could do the same thing today here. Another example is China, which has managed to cut through its own communist tendencies to build-out reactors on a quick timeline and at a very reasonable price. The United States is one of many nations burdened by anti-capitalistic decision-making that has artificially stagnated nuclear as an option. The Hinkley Point C reactor in Somerset, England encapsulates this nonsense perfectly. Regulatory bodies and anti-nuclear environmental groups have stalled progress on this crucial infrastructure project, which has now gone years over the completion deadline and billions of dollars over budget. These are not accidents, these are proactive political choices that interfere with the function of the market. But fortunately, as in the case with China, self-imposed anti-market constraints can be wiped away rather quickly. If France could do it decades ago, if Canada could do it decades ago, and so on, the United States of America can do it, too. 

> On grifters and the green energy lobby

Sotonye: This segues really well into my next question, which is: why is the green energy lobby winning so thoroughly on the public relations and policy front? Solar panel barons, wind turbine bourgeoisie, hydroelectric aristos, how are they exerting such extensive influence over global government energy policy and international energy perspectives despite their comparatively limited capital resources? I live in California for example and my state government is totally committed to fully transitioning away from fossil fuels in only a few years time. They also want to ban the sale of new gas cars by 2035, and it's hard to believe that there isn't much pushback from Big Oil. What's behind this?

Doomberg: Before I get to the question I want to say that I’d put the three energy sources you mentioned in different buckets. For hydro, if you put aside the one time environmental damage and economic cost I think It’s actually pretty interesting and decent. For solar, I think it makes sense in some areas more than others, it’s not perfect. And wind I’d categorize as an abomination that needs to go away. If solar and wind were economically viable, their markets would grow naturally without the government subsidization you describe. I think the reason these forms of energy take the outsized spot in government energy policy and spending that they do is because of self-selection involving grifters, who often enter fields where there’s little work or value creation and high pay, and who are often much more vocal and insistent than the straight-laced, pencil-in-pocket people who tend to occupy the nuclear and fossil fuel spaces. The latter types just want to do their jobs and do good by society, but tend to get run over by grifters. 

But it’s amazing what can happen when the grifters get out of the way as in the case of Texas, where oil and natural gas are being drilled for at record amounts and driving far superior economic performance than expected. 

> On the electric vehicle market and its future

Sotonye: Going into the consumer market level of the green energy revolution, my next question is about whether electric vehicles are in or out. General Motors recently announced slowing down its EV production due to limited demand. But I'm unsure whether that's due to their cars being aesthetically unappealing to consumers, or if an EV is still just alien and inconvenient to most people, or if it’s something else entirely. What is the Doomberg take on this market and its future?

Doomberg: Our general view is that there's a real shortage of battery materials and real scientific hurdles around achieving economies of scale in the battery manufacturing process. We will never be able to displace much of the automobile market with pure EVs, and a strong confirmation signal for this position comes from the copper market, which we’ve been watching for a very long time. If the copper market believed in the electric vehicle revolution, this critical manufacturing material would not be trading where it has been for the last ten years. If we were on the verge of electrifying the fleet of tens of millions of cars built every year, certainly we would see the copper market lead with some indication, but that isn’t happening. This allows us to discount the idea that sizable automobile market-share will ever be captured by pure EVs. 

The counterargument usually involves the success of Tesla, in particular Tesla stock, and this is a controversial topic, but we believe 1) Tesla is largely an artifact of the era of cheap money and 2) that, again, the copper market never bought the dream Tesla was selling. (We try to stay out of the debate around how the company achieved the trillion dollar valuation it did, but we are very interested to see how history judges what we consider to be an enormous malinvestment in the auto sector). A more promising area for this market’s future, as we see it, lies in the middle road.  We have a far greater chance of increasing the fuel efficiency of the fleet by proliferating some hybrids and plug-in hybrids. I think plug-in hybrids in particular are a very interesting solution for many people, where you don't have to worry about range anxiety, but you get the first 30 or 40 or 50 miles of driving on the battery, which you can recharge in your garage. Cars that can abate a significant amount of gasoline usage with a relatively small battery like the Toyota Prius are pretty good when you do the analysis, they resolve the material constraint problem in a big way. We believe there’s more possibility here. 

> On capital misallocation 

Sotonye: I think the idea of capital misallocation is really interesting, it’s not something that gets mentioned often. But the era of cheap money you described seems to have displaced Capital’s interest in and need for value creation. It’s a strange situation, it’s almost surprising that value gets created at all. 

Doomberg: As Warren Buffett says, you know, when the tide goes out, you find out who's been swimming naked. When the era of cheap money draws to a close the market will unveil all the companies that never created sufficient value to earn their cost of capital-- the companies that subsisted on poor outside capital investment strategy and consistent government support. Organizations like these are present in every market cycle and represent a certain inertial paradox in innovation: progress in consumer technology is uncommon, difficult to make, and hard to predict, which is partly why these bad investments happen to begin with and why some subsidies exist. 

But these bad investments and government subsidies also make innovation less necessary by uncoupling it from future financial reward, thereby making progress again more uncommon and more difficult to make. So it is surprising when revolutionary consumer items like the iPhone and iPhone alternatives like the Android are created, they buck the inertia and totally reshape society. ChatGPT more recently is another surprising example, I use it a lot now for our work. I use it even more than I use Google, which I now use only to verify what ChatGPT is telling me. Certain innovations like these are what I call category killers, they completely reinvent product typologies; in the case of what Openai is doing, “Search” is being reinvented from the ground up around natural language. There are products that come along that make you pause and go, “I really want to own that thing or use that thing,” and it’s almost miraculous when it happens. No one needs to give you a tax break to use items like these.

> On Doomberg’s BS detecting process

Sotonye: Can you talk a bit about the straightforward five question framework you use to quickly assess whether news of major science or market advances are nothing or really something? I like the model you’ve made to appraise truth, and I think that having an epistemological standard is a sign of a serious thinker. 

Doomberg: When a claimed scientific breakthrough goes viral we usually get at least a dozen subscriber emails asking whether it’s something or nothing, and so we have a truth assessment model we apply in order to write the inevitable article addressing the question. It’s not a perfect model, but it has worked quite well for us, and it arose from our time in corporate America. Typically, C-suite executives get their major business and science updates from mainstream papers like the Wall Street Journal and wonder to themselves if they need to act on the over-hyped headlines. Our CEO would do the same, send us some story from the Financial Times that seemed important to him but was usually not worth the ink. After having been harassed by these poorly informed CEOs over a period of several years we decided to come up with a good information parsing framework of our own which we now use to respond to those emails and write those articles with a more authoritative voice. And so the five questions in the framework are actually quite simple, I’ll list them and then we’ll walk through them individually. 

1. Who is involved?

2. Where was the information published?

3. Where are we in the respective scientific process?

4. What is the scientific and commercial consensus?

5. What should we expect to see next?

So, first step, who’s involved. This is hugely important. If folks working at some major industry leader like Google or a renowned research university like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announce a breakthrough in computing you should definitely pay attention. Whereas, if a quantitative hedge fund run by someone thrice indicted by the SEC is making the same or similar claims, you can confidently view the news with a healthy amount of skepticism. The first step is understanding that pedigree matters. Pedigree isn’t an infallible tool of course, there are decorated research department staff at Harvard who have faked studies. But it is a great tool for gauging likelihood. For example, even despite the fact that some Harvard staff have been outed for various forms of academic and scientific misconduct, if a Harvard chemistry Nobel Laureate publishes a breakthrough finding on the catalysis of methane into some other essential molecule, you still pay attention. 

Second step, where was the information published? If a breakthrough cure for cancer is announced via press release on social media with no supporting links to research, that’s of course less impressive than publication in a peer-reviewed journal like the New England Journal of Medicine. Again these are just indicators of credibility, but they are very helpful. 

Third, where are we in the scientific (or even commercial) process? If a team of scientists reports a novel finding on room temperature superconductivity in a new material, but the finding has not yet been replicated and room temperature superconductivity has been outside the bounds of scientific viability for 50 years, the current scientific process tells us unfortunately that the new finding is unlikely to replicate. It would be different if four separate laboratories demonstrate room temperature superconductivity and a new fifth one adds to the chorus of confirmation, but that’s another story. 

And following that, in the commercial process you can have a high profile team of brilliant agricultural technology founders who just received a first round of funding for their revolutionary startup idea, but they don’t yet have any products or services, only a vision and capital. They announce a plan to change the way we eat by synthesizing meat-like proteins from bacteria and so on, but the market demand that would need to exist for them to succeed is at that point unheard of. Both where they are in the commercial process and where the market stands gives us a less than strong confidence signal about their claims. The further scientific and commercial claims are in their respective journeys the higher they’re rated on the credence scale. 

Fourth, what is the scientific and commercial consensus? This asks whether or not some claimed scientific discovery or new disruptive commercial technology turns either science or market dynamics on their heads. If a discovery in science is an incremental improvement on pre-existing models, the discovery is more believable; if a new consumer vehicle or phone or plane or laptop is a marginal but significant improvement on what respective consumers are already familiar with, claims of impactfulness are again believable. If a discovery is completely orthogonal to existing scientific consensus, or if a new, highly promoted product would need radically different and hitherto unseen consumer and social behavior for its adoption and impact, the bar of evidence would need to be raised to believe any value claims.  

Fifth and final point, what should we expect next? This tells us whether or not it makes sense to act on a new claim or get excited about it, it also tells us what a claim would need to be more compelling. Altogether this is a very powerful information analysis framework. 

> On the existential risk of strong AI

Sotonye: My next question is inspired by an interesting idea from another interview I'm conducting with blogger Scott Alexander. There's a burgeoning sense across domains--from government to academia to tech to finance--that artificial intelligence presents a non-trivial risk to humanity. Scott thinks that there's only a small chance of things blowing up,  though one worth taking seriously. But others like the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, and Elon Musk for example, think the risk is existential. So what is the Doombergian take on the risk of AI? Will it blow up in our faces? Or will it create something like Robin Hanson's vision in his book The Age of Em, where high-powered brain emulations overseeing economic decisions cause GDP to double every week, leading to boundless prosperity and a kind of socialized utopia? What’s your take!

Doomberg: We would fall firmly into the camp of techno-optimists. I do understand however that it is always and forever thus: truly transformative technologies represent a threat to every existing order. And so, therefore, the instinctive response is to try to stifle radical innovation in the name of protecting what we already have. But you can’t stifle the human endeavor to grow and expand, which is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy. And you shouldn’t try.  In general the risks we take to fight death and decay are ironically almost always life nourishing in the end. For this reason we would unabashedly embrace the consequences of building strong artificial intelligence and proliferating its use to humans worldwide. This is how we view the existential risk-camp. 

There’s another camp that sees AI as having the potential to create a matrix-style outcome where humans become functionally obsolete, and this is also not a camp we’re in. Perhaps it’s naive, but being up at night worrying about such things is also no way to live; life and risk go hand and hand. And there’s some evidence already that the human-redundancy angle of AI alarmism is wrong, it’s the same angle that was proffered by pedagogues fearing for the math ability of the youth after the invention of the calculator, the same ostensibly dissolutive angle insisted on by painters during the rise of the camera, and so on. But new technologies don’t make human actions useless, they sharpen them and make them better, and even more interesting. A great example where AI is concerned is chess. 

We’re huge observers of the game of chess, it interests us for a variety of reasons. The best chess player in the world today, Magnus Carlsen, is the Mozart of chess. He’s hardly engaged in the game at all anymore but still better than everybody by a pretty significant margin. Magnus Carlsen could play a mediocre chess engine 100 times and never get a draw, but his game has been augmented by these engines in a way that wasn’t possible before them. These computers didn’t make humans obsolete, and they didn’t take away the love of the game, quite the opposite. The game has never been more popular-- one of the top players in the world, and actually the highest rated player in the United States, Hikaru Nakamura, has built an empire around chess content. New technologies improve human action and make it even more riveting in more ways than I could count. 

The things we love to do will always be done because we love to do them. Computers can’t take that away or make us redundant, our imperfections are what open the gate of creativity and beauty. We will never lose the ability to do the things we enjoy, it’s only going to get easier and cheaper as more things are powered by transformative technologies. I've embraced this, the totality of the future and the twilight of the past. It means we all get to have a better life. I get to be on the internet all day and shoot the shit with someone smart like you and get content and give you content, and so on. This is all the product of successive economic disruptions in the wake of some new technology. Innovation is not something we should ever fear. 

> On the Work of Doomberg’s Life

Sotonye: Let's talk about the personal side of Doomberg. You guys are deeply inspired by passionate content creators like Hikaru Nakamura and have built a series of great articles around these inspiring folks called The work of My Life. Can you talk a bit about the kind of creators that move you and why they do?

Doomberg: The Work of My Life was a series of pieces we wrote when we were nobody and nothing, but wanted to become something great. We were fascinated by people who made that transition from Labor to CCapital successfully, and when you find someone who is doing what they were meant to be doing it’s always deeply inspiring. We used these people’s stories as a roadmap and would document our journey in the form of these pieces.

One person we profiled, for example, has an account called Camping With Steve on Youtube. Before Youtube I believe he was living out of his camper and working as a natural gas pipe fitter. Later on in his life he found his niche making videos where he “stealth camps” in non-traditional camping locations, like a manned parking garage or the back of a Home Depot. He’s into it, he’s being totally authentic, he’s funny and has a dry sense of humor, and he’s now making more money than he ever could’ve doing obligatory work in Western Canada where he’s from. The authenticity of someone without corporate polish wholeheartedly pursuing a personal idea or interest or goal over time resonates with those watching. It’s unfiltered, it’s something you can instantly connect with on a human level because there are no gimmicks. There’s no sense that you’re being sold something that the person doesn’t fully believe in. 

So The Work of My Life pieces were a collation of profiles on these people who’ve displayed authenticity at the highest level, but they were also an effort to embrace and display authenticity ourselves. At the end of these profiles on people like Camping With Steve we would give a totally honest update to our readers on the progress being made running and growing our publication, and we would also clearly state the mission and intention of doing so. We’d share directly and openly everything we wanted to do and accomplish: that the Doomberg project is what we were meant to be doing, and we attack it everyday with enthusiasm. That our objective is for more people to have more energy and a higher standard of living. That the information we analyze and share is an effort to make that future happen, and that we will do it through three key brand approaches that we never forget to mention--we will be provocative without being polarizing, funny without being silly, and we will teach without being self-indulgent. 

The fact of the matter is that people are wanting to read authentic human analysis on day to day news from someone they’ve grown to trust over time, and we want to deliver that product in a way that totally delights our readers. It’s what we were meant to do. I do all the writing and editing for this publication, but as far as I can tell, all of our articles appear spontaneously, they’re not work. I get up and go upstairs every night between 2 and 4 am when my brain is firing on all cylinders, have a cup of coffee at my desk, and watch the next article magically appear. It’s what I was meant to do and I’m going to keep doing it, and The Work of My life pieces were our way of transmitting our guileless enthusiasm.   

> On surfing the sea of abundance 

Sotonye: You have a great line from a Work of My Life post about using positive-sum thinking and open handedness to grow your publication. Here’s the quote: 

“We believe a key part of our success is our willingness to promote other aspiring independent writers and content creators. We do this by highlighting, building on, and linking to great work in our own pieces, retweeting material on Twitter, and freely exchanging tips and best practices for growing an audience in private conversations and direct messages. Our belief is that the rising tide lifts all boats, and the exponential growth in demand for good content means there’s more than enough audience for everybody who puts serious effort behind their work. We’re playing a positive-sum game.” 

Can you go a bit more into detail about this? You’ve cracked the code for explosive growth, how big a part did this openhandedness play? 

Doomberg: So we characterize the idea presented in that quote as “Surfing the sea of abundance,” and “resisting the temptation to give into the disease of More.” If you have more than enough, what could the increment of excess possibly bring you, and how much negativity are you willing to invite into your life to achieve it?

A great example of what I mean comes from what’s probably one my top five favorite pieces of ours where we describe the “disease of More.” It’s titled after a song from one of our favorite musicians, David Berman, called Strange Victory, Strange Defeat. In the article we profile Tom Brady’s involvement in the FTX scandal. Here we have a seven-time Super Bowl winner and five-time Super Bowl MVP married to a supermodel and worth north of a quarter billion dollars, who somehow saw it fit to sell his reputation to become what amounts to a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme operator. In another Berman song he has a quote that goes, “How much fun is a lot more fun? Not much fun at all.” After a certain threshold of success and abundance adding more would likely mean stooping beneath your own value as a human being. At a certain point the goal metric needs to shift away from what more you can gain and toward what more you can give. 

As another illustration, the Doomberg team and I used to run a consulting firm, we know how to do that well. We are no longer in that line of work now that we have several hundred thousand Doomberg subscribers, but many of our subscribers, a great proportion of whom are in the finance sector, will reach out to us from time to time asking to hire us for consulting work. If we were victims of the disease of More we would gladly accept these opportunities to raise our bank account balances a little higher. But surfing the sea of abundance is part of our business ethos and lifestyle. So instead of indulging an unquenchable greed, we reply to each and every one of these requests saying we are more than happy to jump on a zoom call and help for free. I’m not going to be a contract employee —which is one of the perks of surfing the sea of abundance, you get to set the parameters of your participation according to your comfort and conscience—but I’m happy to be a sounding board and help without any expectation of a return of the favor. 

A farmer reached out to us to ask whether or not they should lease or sell their land to a solar developer and we jumped on a call with them. What are your true objectives, we asked? What are you trying to figure out? Following these inquiries, we then gave them some of the risks of leasing versus outright selling, and offered our advice. They took it and it worked out well. And guess what we didn't do? We didn't send them an invoice. I’m already wealthy beyond any monetary measure. I have friends, beautiful children, a wonderful family, the best business partners in the world, and I make enough to live a life I dreamed of by doing what I love everyday. What more do I need? The saddest people I know are millionaires and billionaires who would never give their time outside of satiating their own greed. And it sounds like hokey altruistic woowoo stuff but really if you give generously and contribute toward the happiness of other people, all the money you could want will find its way to you. This also includes doing what you were meant to be doing, since providing authentic value for people is also an amazing form of giving. This is how you lead a fulfilling life. At the end of the day, on my tombstone it will say “That MF lived well.”

> On the role marketing played in building the Doomberg brand

Sotonye: Can you describe the importance of marketing for your brand? It's a big issue. A lot of writers, including myself, have trouble focusing on ideas and material beyond the core product. It’s hard to see branding material as something consumers demand, and maybe it isn’t entirely. What role has marketing played for your brand so far? 

Doomberg: Totally authentic or totally open answer for you.

Up until the end of 2023, we have spent less than $10,000 developing the entire Doomberg Project. In the three years since starting this publication all of our growth has been achieved through sweat equity, thousands of hours of work have been spent on this. We have spent zero money on customer acquisition. But objectively zero is the wrong number. We’re proud of what we’ve built through sweat equity, but Facebook and Google exist because advertising works if done correctly, and the addressable market for Doomberg is several orders of magnitude larger than what we’ve been able to capture thus far. 

So we are in the beginning stages of experimenting with this exact question. There’s some possibility that we won’t be able to acquire customers within a short payback period in a way that’s consistent with our brand, and if that’s true we’re more than happy to stay where we are, since we have an internal commitment to never deviate from the brand. But we’d be foolish not to try and crack the code for exposing more eyeballs to our work. We’re going to invest some time and resources to explore this thoroughly. Our approach will be systematic and data driven, and we’re currently engaging with a few firms to see what the possibilities look like and it’s very exciting. So far one of the only financial investments we’ve made on marketing is the green chicken we use as our logo. So yes, we think this is an essential intellectual question that we’re working on right now. 

> On Doomberg’s departure from Twitter

Sotonye: Next question for you is about your departure from Twitter last year. The app was a big part of the initial traction of Doomberg until the sale of the company to Musk resulted in new vague and adverse rules against posting Substack links. Can you talk a bit about the role Twitter played at the start of Doomberg and what the future looks like with greater content investment into other mediums? 

Doomberg: I would say Twitter served its purpose for us, and if there’s anybody currently starting out with nothing, I would encourage them to consider using Twitter. But for us, just as the ownership changed, the app began to pay out diminishing returns on our time. In large part that’s because of what you described, the new owner began punishing Substack links, and so we’ve switched over to Substack’s alternative to Twitter called Notes. This has likely hurt our business a little, but we’ve been fortunate enough to bring a lot of our followers over to the new platform with us, and when you’ve achieved enough success you should draw lines in the sand and make sacrifices for your principles. 

The other side of why Twitter reached diminishing returns for us is that there really isn’t a significant difference between 100,000 followers and a million insofar as other important business growth mediums like podcast invites are concerned. The real growth effector for us has been podcast appearances and at a certain follower number these stream in continuously; growing a Twitter itself becomes less important or pressing than now growing your business with the connections you’ve already made. For a content creator the most powerful user engagement tool is going on someone else’s podcast, so a text-based platform like Twitter can only really be a stepping stone toward this much more valuable resource. 

During our peak on Twitter we would average roughly 45 million impressions a month, and hardly any would convert to paid subscribers. The same can’t be said any time a podcast we’ve appeared on publishes--within hours paid subscribers roll in. So the future is focusing more on these kinds of content opportunities, and also working with Substack since we believe in their team and what they’re doing. Time will tell about Twitter. If the platform ever decides to stop punishing Substack and other outside content platforms we would certainly return.

> On podcasts being a primary engine of business growth 

Sotonye: Ok so the idea that podcasts are a primary engine of growth for non-podcast content is probably the most novel idea about content creation I've ever heard. How big of a role did podcast appearances play in the early traction of Doomberg?

Doomberg: Well, 100%. Our motto is, “If you can measure it you can optimize it,” so this is all empirical. We’re very data driven, and we could see the growth in the data. In the early months of turning on paid subscriptions for our publication we measured around 45 data points a day, and the people who arrived on our platform after listening to us on an hour long podcast were extremely likely to pay for a subscription. People who arrive from an engagement as strong as the listening to you for an extended period of time are far more likely to say they want to support you as a creator. For us the engagement at the time was more valuable than an impression from a paid ad. 

One thing that Substack has done which is brilliant is allow new subscribers to explain why they subscribed in the first place, and the sheer volume of people who say they found us through a podcast appearance is astounding. The other side of exposing ourselves to our ideal audience through audio and video content is that we get to help the creators we speak to, who in turn help us; they’ll talk and write and post about us, share our work with those they think might be interested, even on places we don’t engage with anymore like Twitter. We surf the sea of abundance, to go back to what we spoke about before. If there’s one principle I could convey to anyone reading this, it’s this: give without the thought of getting in return and watch the sea of kindness that returns to sweep you up and carry you forward. 

To read more from Doomberg subscribe to their Substack here.