It's Not All Doom and Gloom with Doomberg

+ Full Transcript

Mary Carpenter: This is Fissionary, a show exploring how nuclear powers your world. I'm Mary Carpenter.

Jordan Houghton: And I'm Jordan Houghton. Let's jump in.

Mary Carpenter: Welcome back, Fissionaries! We're so excited to bring you season two of our now award-winning podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Jordan Houghton: I'm so excited to be back recording a second season. I felt like we learned so much in the first season, but we just barely scratched the tip of the iceberg, so it's fun to be diving in again.

Mary Carpenter: Yeah, season one was great. It was definitely a positive, upbeat, you know, exciting, these are all the opportunities we have and how nuclear can be a part of it. And we're excited to bring you another season to show the benefits of nuclear energy, how it plays into our clean energy future. And we have a really exciting guest today for our first episode of season two. And you guys are going to laugh at this, but we spent an hour talking to a green chicken.

Jordan Houghton: An animated green chicken, nonetheless, that blinked.

Mary Carpenter: It was actually really-it was a cute chicken. But yeah, you can imagine Jordan and I speaking to a green chicken that was blinking and talking to us, but they had really exciting input and I think you guys are going to like the episode. But if you don't know who we're talking about, the green chicken might give it away, but we talked to Doomberg, which is the pseudonym of the team behind the top finance publication on Substack. They started the Substack, and really kind of took off during COVID, and it's a really interesting thread, kind of how the financial world meets the energy world. And we got some really interesting insights, and a green chicken.

Jordan Houghton: Yeah, I think it was interesting because I think Doomberg had a lot of stark view of how things are going. I mean, there was a point in the interview where he said one of his hot takes was that we wouldn't decarbonize, and I think that took both of us sort of aback, just based on the conversations we had last season. And, you know, I will just say for our listeners at home, it's especially jarring to get that take from a cartoon green chicken.

Mary Carpenter: Yeah, it's a lot of doom and gloom from a cute little chicken! But I mean, it is Doomberg, it's an interesting, you know, play on Bloomberg. So it comes from the name and you know, it wasn't all doom and gloom. If you guys listen to the episode, you'll realize that, you know, there's definitely still a lot of positivity coming from Doomberg, but they bring up the harsh reality that we're in right now, right? Like we are in this critical time, we're up against the clock, climate change is getting worse, storms are getting worse, people are starting to really see it firsthand and experience it in their real lives, and, you know, it is something that people need to talk about. And, you know, Doomberg-I brought it up by asking about a hot take I saw from another article or podcast that Doomberg was on where they said that, you know, renewables can't get us to decarbonization alone and Doomberg said, you know, let's take this one step further. I don't know if we're actually going to get to decarbonization. But it's, you know, it's a great setup for the rest of this season, and I hope you guys will listen to this episode, but keep listening to the rest of our guests throughout the season because, you know, people have different perspectives. It is a big challenge. I think it's something that a lot of us can agree on, that, you know, Doomberg's right, it is a pressing challenge, but a lot of the people we talked to are creating solutions, are working day in and day out in all these different industries to to create the solution and hopefully, you know, change Doomberg's mind and get us there.

Jordan Houghton: We did-I would encourage everyone who's who's tuning in for this episode to stick around for the full interview because we did at the end, get him to sort of come back around and and back off the doom a little bit and provide, I think, some really great insight into what is possible and why there is still cause to have hope for for helping mitigate climate change.

Mary Carpenter: Yes, it wasn't all doom from Doomberg, but it was certainly an interesting conversation and a great way to kick off the season. And we hope you guys will tune in for some other episodes. We're bringing video games to nuclear, we're touching industries that you might not have thought about, kind of building off our fashion and nuclear episode last season that we hope you all loved. So, thanks for joining us and we're excited to dive in.

Mary Carpenter: Doomberg is a pseudonym for the team behind the leading finance publication on Substack. Since its inception in May 2021, Doomberg has accumulated over 180,000 subscribers. The newsletter aims to eliminate fundamental aspects absent from numerous economic and policy decisions, swiftly becoming one of Substack's most widely read finance newsletters.

Doomberg: Mary, Jordan, great to be here. Looking forward to a robust discussion.

Mary Carpenter: So for our listeners who may not be familiar with your work, can you explain what Doomberg is?

Doomberg: Doomberg is the combined effort of a group of former industry executives slash consultants who spent many years in and around the commodity sector and then eventually decided to build a consulting firm together. And then when COVID hit, we lost 85 percent of our business like many small business owners. Opposite reasons, I suppose. And as part of our rebirth, we were given a really life-changing piece of advice, which is why don't you guys go and help people who create and sell content into Wall Street run their businesses better? And we built the vertical and our consulting firm, concentrating mostly on people who create podcasts and newsletters and videos and that sort of thing, and learned a lot about the industry. We had some success doing that, so much so that our best client strongly advised that we create our own. We were good at it and we would follow all of our own advice, most importantly. And so we launched Doomberg in May of 2021, and the inefficiency in the market that we thought was there and ripe for exploitment is the fact that the industry voice is not present in the public debate around energy policy. The reason the industry is absent is because most people with knowledge to contribute are either hidden behind or hide behind public affairs teams out of necessity, and corporations are loath to get involved in controversial debates, you know, most of the time, and the vast majority of people participating in the quote unquote, energy debate, and energy is a critical part of finance and various various other things, were people who either only ever worked in government or only ever worked in universities. And so, if I could summarize Doomberg in one sentence, we bring the industry voice to the energy debate wrapped in a language that finance professionals can understand.

Jordan Houghton: Your team has prioritized anonymity. Your team is completely anonymous. For listeners that are not going to see the video attached to this, Mary and I are having a conversation with a cartoon green chicken. It's blinking. You're really blinking at us, which is-we've not had an experience like this on Fissionary yet! So I'm curious, why did you decide to go in that direction? And then my follow up question is how did you decide on the mascot?

Doomberg: When we started Doomberg, we had no social media presence associated with the brand, and we have observed how certain people grew. For example, Twitter following is very fast behind an anonymous account. And we have a pretty strong branding and marketing thread to our business, and we decided that, you know, the first rule of marketing is you can't be remembered if you don't stand out. And my face doesn't really stand out, good or bad, it's just sort of a rather 'blah' face. Additionally, if a person is going to be the face of a brand that diminishes the work of others, and we're a team, and so, even though my role as head writer and head of social media requires that I would be the one to do these podcast appearances, it's not like it is my product. It's a team effort. And then the brand exploded beyond all of our wildest imagination. We went from zero to a quarter million Twitter followers in a really short period of time because we were producing good branded content. And when you're scrolling down Twitter and a green chicken, or even a blinking one, looks at you, it makes you stop, right? It's a much stronger impression than just another middle-aged white guy in a tie. Once we blew up, we have also observed that when anonymous brands that accumulate large social media followings de-anonymize, much of the brand intrigue collapses. Now, I stake that the basis of your question, that we're, quote, completely anonymous, it's not really true. Hundreds of people on Wall Street know who we are in real life. It's a poorly-kept secret because we believe giving, for example, is infinite NPV, which is something we can talk about. And having grown as big as we have and having achieved really stunning success versus our wildest imaginations, as I said, the last thing we want to do is disrupt the momentum that we have. And so we've just decided that we will remain anonymous. We created a brand and the world is going in this direction, by the way, like, the world is going online, online personas. And so having done it, we just are very hesitant to mess anything up. It's the work of my life, but it's not the work of the lives of everyone else on the team. So, there's nothing more than we've created an amazing brand. It did stick out. It worked. And we don't want to do anything to risk ruining it.

Mary Carpenter: I love the branding. Is that something you run into often, though, that people won't subscribe because you're anonymous? Is that a pretty common thing?

Doomberg: We've probably had about a dozen people say that to us via email. We have-we're over 210,000 subscribers now, and, you know, a healthy portion of them aren't just free, they also pay us. And so it's very, very small and we don't know who has chosen not to subscribe and didn't communicate it. But let's put it this way, we have way more than enough paying subscribers that we're willing to risk losing a few. You know, it's just like everything else. Like, what kind of business do you want to run? This is the business we've chosen to run. The market is free to decide. If nobody subscribed because we were anonymous, we might reconsider it. But to most people, they just don't care. The interesting thing about being anonymous is most people have to engage with us on the quality of our ideas as opposed to too much of this personal attack. We've been very open with our subscribers about how we intend to build the business from the very beginning, and I think many of them are cheering us on, which is fun. We've met many, many, many dozens of people in real life that started as subscribers or fans of Doomberg. Again, it-people put too much weight into the anonymity part of it, as though that's something mysterious or nefarious or, you know, like, we used to joke that we're not writing these things from prison! I mean, we just decided to stay anonymous, and it worked for us, and so why would we want to change it, you know?

Mary Carpenter: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the people that follow you.

Doomberg: We have this unique product which is science-based, written in a finance language, but the Editor in Chief of Doomberg does not have a science background, which is perfect because if they can't get what I'm trying to express, I need to rewrite it. Or we need to edit it a bit more tightly. And every third or fourth piece will say, wait a minute, like, let's just take a step back and say, what are you trying to say here? Yes, it makes sense in your brain, but your brain isn't the reader, the target audience that we're going for. And so the people who follow us are an interesting mix. I'd say one third of them are finance professionals on Wall Street, for whom understanding energy in a finance language is important to their work process. I'd say one third of our subscribers are senior executives in industry, who are cheering us on because we say things they can't say. Then probably one third are individual investors slash professionals who would like to understand better how the world works. They feel that there's something wrong about the way things are presented in the mainstream media and they are seeking knowledge and understanding of really important things like energy and renewables and nuclear and finance, frankly, and are along for the learning journey. And, you know, we have three brand ambitions, which is we shall be provocative without being polarizing, we shall be funny without being silly, and we shall teach without being self-indulgent, and so there's an entertainment part of Doomberg as well that I think works. One small example, which I think drives significant engagement, is we try to make the captions of our pieces in the captions of the pictures in our pieces funny. Sort of inside jokes. And it creates stickiness with our subscriber base, which I think really works. And so that's the mix. I think Wall Street slash industry slash concerned citizen. And that's really-when we study the data and do things like build lookalike audiences, that's what really comes out.

Jordan Houghton: Can you give our listeners a little bit of background on how you see the finance and energy worlds come together, where the intersections are and why it's important?

Doomberg: So, our view is as follows: energy is life. The human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy. And in order to create a standard of living, you need to harness primary energy and waste heat in order to impose order on your local environment. And your standard of living is quite literally defined by how much energy you personally get to harness. And all humans everywhere want a higher standard of living. And so, what many economists get wrong about the economy and energy's role in it is that they view energy as a mere input into GDP, no different than other factors like labor and so on that go into the calculation of such economic metrics. In our view, energy is the economy. And the economy-we orient our economic and political systems to ensure the continuous growth in the extraction and harnessing of primary energy. And if you look over the 50 years of data that we showed in a prior piece that we just published, no matter the crisis, the real GDP inflation war, the human endeavor, requires ever more energy, and so it shall be. And so, once you put energy at the center of your economic analysis, a lot of things become much easier to understand. And so, from a finance perspective, understanding the economy, of course, is critically important to understanding how certain financial securities may trade or be valued by the public, and therefore, clarifying your understanding of the central role, it's not a derivative of the economy, it's the reverse, the economy is a derivative of energy. And once that is understood, then a lot of things that might not seem to make sense even geopolitically, economically, financially, suddenly become a lot easier to understand.

Mary Carpenter: So one hot take we've seen from some articles about Doomberg is that there's no realistic path to decarbonizing the global economy fully through renewables. Is that an accurate hot take from Doomberg?

Doomberg: There's an even hotter take, which is the world is simply not going to decarbonize.

Mary Carpenter: Oh.

Doomberg: So, it is impossible to decarbonize without having nuclear energy as the forefront of your energy policy. But beyond that, we created a phrase called Doomberg's Postulate, which states that every molecule of fossil fuels produced in the world will be burned by somebody, somewhere, and local restrictions against such activities merely relocate who gets to enjoy that privilege. If you look at the BP Annual Statistical Review of Energy, all primary energy developments are additive. So, we could add wind and solar to the energy mix. People are still going to burn every ton of coal we produce, every barrel of oil, reproduce every million BTUs of natural gas we produce because energy is life. And for the five to six billion people in the Global South who live on a fraction of the BTUs per GDP that we enjoy in the West, they're not going to take no for an answer. And we showed in this-in a recent piece about coal, for example. We tell ourselves that coal is on the decline and that the world is going to stop using coal-80 percent of the world's coal is burned by six countries: China, India, US, Japan, Indonesia and South Africa. Four of those countries are in the Global South. And while the U.S. is slowly declining its coal use, Japan is reengaging with it in the aftermath of the European energy crisis, so we just take those two and cross them out. China is building coal plants at an unbelievable rate, historic rate, the world has never seen such a coal build out. India is building coal at an unbelievable rate, there was an article in the Financial Times this morning, talking about how Indian coal companies need to step up their production to meet demand, and we will adapt to the consequences, either catastrophic or mild. But the jury's in it, by the way, Europe and Germany in particular, you know, regions that have been the strongest proponents of renewables, are responsible for much of this because the last energy crisis, they returned to coal rather rapidly, and the rest of the world watched what they did instead of listening to what they say. And if coal is what bailed you out of the energy crisis of '21-'22, then why can't we have coal? And so Europe doesn't produce any fossil fuels to any meaningful extent. And so what they do actually doesn't matter. All fossil fuels produced will be burned. The world is going to produce an enormous amount of fossil fuels. And this is why we believe that we've not entered a recession.

Jordan Houghton: Some of the countries that you mentioned in the Global South and also in Europe have either expressed interest in getting nuclear energy for the first time or increasing the supply of nuclear in their countries. So, how do you see that fitting in with what you've just said?

Doomberg: Two parts. First, we are embarking on a nuclear renaissance. Climate is the headline reason, but there's a physics reality that I think underpins it, which is, there's no cleaner, safer, higher energy-dense source of energy than nuclear power. It's a shame that we haven't proliferated it more. There's a reason for that, which we probably need not get into. But nuclear plays a far too small role in our energy suite today, and we believe that we are embarking on a period of renaissance in the industry. It won't displace any carbon, unfortunately, because the countries who build nuclear and therefore forego the incremental cargo of LNG are just making it cheaper for the Global South to take advantage of that cheap energy. But if nuclear power were invented today, it would be hailed as a civilization-saving development, and we would be rushing to implement it, you know, post haste. We have this amazingly powerful negative propaganda machine around nuclear that has been extraordinarily effective. We have to tip our hats to the other side. They have been successful temporarily, but nuclear has to be part of the global energy suite. It will be. It is by far the most superior form of energy we have available to us today, and that we have forgone it on a relative basis and focused instead on coal and oil and natural gas and even renewables, I believe is a is a real detriment to the planet. And so-but again, if Doomberg were king, we'd be doing different things. But Doomberg is not king. Doomberg is just an observer of reality and trying to document it for our subscribers.

Jordan Houghton: Where and how do you see nuclear having the most impact?

Doomberg: Nuclear could have way more impact than we have today. So there's what's possible and what's likely. Let's start with what's possible. For example, 10 percent of the world's energy right now is used to create steam. Most people don't know that. But we burn mostly natural gas, but also a lot of coal to boil water and to make steam at industrial-grade temperatures for use in heavy manufacturing. And our carbon emissions tied to the production of steam, roughly 10 percent is greater than the combined carbon emissions of our transportation and aviation sectors. And most people don't realize that. We spend probably 80 percent of our time talking about the electricity grid and many people confuse electricity with energy. It's a form of energy, but it's a minor one, when in reality electricity is probably only 25 percent of our total consumption of fossil fuels. We do all manner of things with primary energy. Heating our homes, creating steam, all these other types of industrial activities. And so, for example, the latest generations of nuclear technology are capable of operating co-generation facilities that produce both electricity and a reasonably good industrial grade steam that could knock a serious wedge off the current carbon emissions, or at least put them in play. We could power our cargo and container ships with small micro nuclear reactors, the US Navy has done this with great success and an excellent safety record for decades. We could certainly power all of the world's electricity grids, the majority of them, with nuclear power today. And this, again, is-no technical or even really financial barriers to doing this, it's all political. So, when you hear somebody say nuclear takes too long and is too expensive, those are both political choices. We have chosen to make it expensive by drawing out permitting processes and clogging the court system with nuisance lawsuits and and so on, and forcing industry to create seven, eight, nines worth of safety design that no other industry is held to. We have this crazy fear of very small doses of radiation, even though we all get on airplanes or eat bananas and get exposure to radiation. There has never been a single human in the history of planet Earth that we can find that has been injured by nuclear waste. Not one. We've had people fall off of wind turbines! We've had entire dams in China collapse and kill up to a quarter million people, we're not going around the world and outlawing hydropower! The response to nuclear is so disproportionately out of whack with the scientific realities that it's just going back to the propaganda campaign. So, we could do all of these things with nuclear, but the propaganda against it is so strong. What will we likely do with nuclear is a different question, which is, it will be a growing share of our electricity grid as it becomes apparent that wind and solar destabilize grids, and absent some storage breakthrough which is not on the horizon, we will need the baseload power with 95 percent capacity factors, 90 percent capacity factors, I should say that nuclear provides. And once these plants are built, they can be run safely for 50, 60, 70, even 80 years. And we like to say, if France could do it in the 70s, Canada could do it in the 70s, certainly we could do it today. The rest is just sort of political barriers and all these things that would be wiped away in the face of a true energy crisis.

Mary Carpenter: So you mentioned steam, transportation, are there other sectors or industries that you think should be turning to nuclear?

Doomberg: I think that the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the need to have amazingly stable and abundant sources of energy slash electricity to run these data centers is going to be potentially the enabling technology that normalizes nuclear again. And one of the things that we need an enormous amount of energy for is to continue to power this amazing computer, this giant, societal level computer that is just really the catalyst of exponential growth in technology. And so we will do what is necessary to power those data centers. And one of the things that we think will be necessary is small modular reactors, for example, and I think you're beginning to see the sort of tech crowd, the Silicon Valley types, pushing really hard for change in regulatory regimes that allow them to proliferate smilers, and that could be the catalyst that gets it done. So, if you give an engineer an enormous amount of high energy-dense fuel, there's nothing they couldn't do.

Mary Carpenter: I want to hear more about what you mentioned on the tech types pushing for SMRs. What do you mean by that?

Doomberg: So, in the US in particular, the venture capital slash Silicon Valley world is very powerful. They have created an ecosystem where enormous wealth has been created and where enormous political influence that comes with such wealth is wielded a lot. And if they come to the conclusion, which we suspect they will, that the only way-or the best way, the most efficient way-to power, literally power, the AI revolution is through nuclear, then they will wield that political force, in order to get that done, because they have a track record of doing so. You know, we have all manner of political changes today that were driven by the need to power the computing behind the amazing technologies that the world has grown accustomed to. You know, I mean, the power of an iPhone today, I mean, it's almost cliche to say it, but when I was growing up, and going through college it was unthinkable. Whatever is the constraint to feeding that big machine has to confront an even more powerful force than the propagandists behind the anti-nuclear movement. And I think to the extent that the nuclear industry can slipstream behind that force.

Jordan Houghton: I'm curious, how do your subscribers receive your nuclear energy pieces? Because you mentioned the propaganda campaign that has existed, so there are people who are still very hesitant around nuclear, and I'm wondering what feedback you've gotten from-because obviously you are able to well communicate the benefits of nuclear.

Doomberg: The funny thing about modern discourse online, which goes back to the original question about anonymity and so on, is it tends to segregate itself into communities. And while we try really hard not to create an echo chamber, the vast majority of people aren't open to new ideas. And so, there aren't a lot of anti-nuclear environmentalists signing up for Doomberg. We try our best to express our views politely, as I said, we want to be provocative without being polarizing so that we don't have people just shut us down and never listen to us, but it is incredibly difficult to break through the social media algorithm-driven camps that we've all been divided into based on what the software thinks you want to hear. Confirming your biases is an incredibly difficult thing to resist. And so we have a few of our subscribers who enjoy writing in the comment section why they think we're wrong, and we always welcome such people so long as they do so politely, but since we've closed our comments to paying subscribers only, we don't have many of them. And that's a shame, but that's reality. And so-but we do have people forwarding our work to open-minded people and they say, wow, you know, that resonates, let me find out more and so on, and so, you know, we don't think we alone are going to be able to change this stratification of our culture into various camps of strong beliefs.

Mary Carpenter: Speaking about climate, I want to go back to something you said a little earlier in the conversation, that the climate angle is the headline for support behind nuclear but not the real driver or selling point. What do you think would get the financial community excited about nuclear energy?

Doomberg: I think the first thing that needs to happen is the artificial political barriers to it need to be removed. Capital goes where capital is welcome. And for decades now in the Western world, capital was simply not welcome in the Western world. If you look at the speed with which China is building out nuclear and the relatively cheap price associated with it, you see what is possible. That's not possible in most of the West today because we have a legal system which makes it quite easy for well-funded professional anti-nuclear organizations to gum up the gears. And they do, very effectively. And we are-when I say we, the nuclear industry-for too long has brought engineering to a political fight. You win on the engineering, all points. But if you lose on the politics, you just lose. But, reality is such that if the government is going to pay you to do solar and guarantee you in return, money will go to that. And if the government is telling you it's going to take 15 years to get a nuclear power plant built and you're going to lose money on it, nobody's going to invest. That's just the sad reality of where we are.

Mary Carpenter: So, we're talking a little bit about AI. I feel like I have to ask about increasing power demands that come with mining digital currencies. What are your thoughts on powering crypto?

Doomberg: We've actually saw-we have an interesting relationship with the Bitcoin maxis in particular. We're not owners of Bitcoin, so when you say crypto let's just talk Bitcoin because that's the big one and that's the one that uses a ton of energy, and so on. And in fact, we've written somewhat supportively of the role Bitcoin miners could play in abating at least some of the negative consequences that renewables bring to the grid. So, let me explain how that might be. In order to bring renewables into the grid, you need to basically create an entire backup fleet of fossil fuel reactors to come online and save the day when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. These are known in the industry as peaker plants. While it makes no economic sense to own and run a peaker plant, if you could only run 20 percent or 30 percent of the time. And so nobody wants to do it, which means you end up putting all this wind and solar into the grid, and your peaker plants are losing money and generally subsidized by the government, or so on. You could actually use those plants all the time to mine Bitcoin when the grid doesn't need it and therefore make some money, but then to stop mining Bitcoin when the wind doesn't blow, and to provide-they sort of act as an on time battery for the grid. Now that's not the best way to do it, but it's a plausible explanation for why you would probably be interested in having a fleet of Bitcoin miners at the ready, because they don't need to mine Bitcoin at any particular time, and so they can make some money when the wind is robust and it's a bright sunny day by mining and selling Bitcoin and then they're ready to take over that loss of capacity when needed. And so, there's a role for Bitcoin miners theoretically; it's never going to happen. I mean, you think the environmentalists are opposed to burning of fossil fuels to create electricity, they're certainly going to be against the burning of fossil fuels to mine Bitcoin. And that has basically played out. It's practically impossible to do it in many states already, including New York. And so, in theory it would work, but there are better ways to do it, one of which is to install solid baseload power like nuclear instead of renewables. But I digress.

Jordan Houghton: I'm wondering-and I'm looking for a small spot of optimism here, because I feel like you have definitely put the 'doom' in Doomberg-so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about a positive direction that we could move in.

Doomberg: Yeah, and I should say Doomberg is a bit tongue in cheek, we're actually quite optimistic in our hearts and souls. We are pro-human energy optimists. We do believe that we are in a particularly dark period politically and culturally and geopolitically. But our belief is that the human spirit is strong. We will figure all these things out. I think it is easy, especially given the stratification of social media, to be worked up into a frenzy and to think that the world is coming to an end. I think when you have such feelings, you should go outside and touch the grass a little bit, and just walk around in nature and remember that we are a very small part of this planet. The planet was just fine before we arrived, and will be just fine long after we're gone, and ultimately, we live in an incredible time. I mean, we live in a time where a green chicken can leverage readily available and mostly free internet tools to create a business from scratch that has altered the lives of several families and has allowed us to live an amazing life of what we call optimized, get to-have to ratio. So, I wake up every morning having helped build this amazing business from nothing, I look at my calendar and it's filled with things I get to do. And it has almost nothing that I have to do. And if everybody thought that way-we have the capabilities to do it, we have an abundance of food, of energy, of internet access, of knowledge. Just think of the stories, the drama, the success, the failures, are what make the human experience uniquely human. And I think the advent of supercomputing and AI and all of this other nonsense that we hear in the news, it's just a temporary blip of anxiety that will be washed away as we get to enjoy the fruits of the integrated labor that got us here.

Jordan Houghton: Okay, so we are asking our guests this season. We're ending by asking what their favorite restaurant to visit in their city is.

Doomberg: I could tell you my favorite restaurant because I personally am not a foodie, even though I have friends who are, my personal favorite thing to do is to go to the bar at Buffalo Wild Wings and ironically, eat chicken wings.

Mary Carpenter: Oh my gosh, chicken wings!

Doomberg: And I will say that I enjoy doing it alone. It's-nobody knows who I am. And I just sit at the bar and I enjoy some chicken wings and scroll through the comments to our latest piece, or scroll through some ideas that I have on my notes app on my phone about what we should write about next.

Jordan Houghton: That's great. Thank you so much.

Mary Carpenter: Yeah, I love that a lot of the Doomberg content was created at Buffalo Wild Wings.

Doomberg: What a way to live.

Jordan Houghton: Mary, I think we need to adopt this strategy. I think this is-I also want an animal persona for the meetings we do have to have.

Doomberg: Find your favorite meat dish and become that!

Mary Carpenter: Yeah!

Doomberg: Jordan the fish.

Mary Carpenter: I would be a lobster.

Doomberg: Yeah! Just don't pick a crab, whatever you do.

Mary Carpenter: Well, thank you Doomberg so much for joining us today, it's such a good conversation. We really appreciate it.

Doomberg: Mary, Jordan,the pleasure is all mine. And happy to come back anytime you'll have me.

Jordan Houghton: Awesome!

Mary Carpenter: Thank you.

Jordan Houghton: What an interesting conversation! I did not expect that on our season premiere, we would have a cannibal on the show.

Mary Carpenter: We certainly have firsts for everything!

Jordan Houghton: Chicken wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, solid answer, though I realize he's a chicken.

Mary Carpenter: I do love chicken wings.

Jordan Houghton: That's a spoiler alert, I guess, for our listeners, we're going to be talking a little bit about food to round out these episodes as the season goes on, so stay tuned for that as well. If you want to learn more about Doomberg and subscribe, we've linked their Substack in the show notes.

Mary Carpenter: Yes. And for more episodes on nuclear energy, our clean energy future, and possibly some food recommendations in your town, don't forget to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us! See you next time.

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