The Prof G Pod

"Go Woke, Go Broke"? Texas Runs on Renewables Now

If you were to put a dollar of gasoline in your car, only around 20 cents of that actually go towards turning the wheels and getting you from A to B. 80% of that is completely wasted as heat and friction and stuff that's actually not serving you or giving you what you need. With electrification, that's basically flipped.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The economic system that we all inhabit is basically a way of turning energy and ideas into goods and services. And if you think about what's possible when both of those inputs are effectively infinite, I think the world totally changes.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an inflection point where the thing that's going to matter the most is the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy, and I think both of those are going to come down dramatically. And if you can make intelligence and energy cheap and abundant, then I think all other scarcity starts to dissolve.

TED

Our Last, Best Chance to Cool the Earth | Bill McKibben | TED

We live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we are at the very beginning of a transition to a world where intelligence and energy are not the limiting reagents anymore. And if you just think about what humans could do if those were both cheap and abundant, I don't think the world has ever experienced anything like that before.

The Business of Tech

Factor’s electrifying, $35 million exit

I don't think you can kind of underestimate the value of that experience going into a new venture. So we in our first business, we were part of the team at Flick Electric, which was a cool Wellington energy retail startup, and we built our own retail business, so we got to know what it took to actually be a retailer. We've done it ourselves.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The thing that I sort of think about a lot is that the history of human progress is really the history of energy and intelligence. If you think about what gets better over time, what increases quality of life, it comes down to how much energy and intelligence we have access to. And we seem to be on the cusp of not running short of either of those things.

Founders

#427 How Raymond Plank Built a $50 Billion Oil Company

Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think the thing I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two fundamental inputs to the universe, and if we have basically unlimited intelligence, we can hopefully also get to basically unlimited energy. And then, from those two things, you can just make so much.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The economic system of the world is roughly a zero-sum battle for existing resources, and the story of the next hundred years is making the transition to a world where there's enough for everyone and we're no longer fighting each other for pieces of a very slowly growing pie. I think there's a chance that AI and cheap energy together create a qualitatively different world where we have enough resources that it's not a zero-sum game anymore.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think most people alive today could, in expectation, live to be 150 years old. I think we could have far more energy than we can possibly use. I think we could have radical abundance of food and all material goods. And if we do that, and if we give people the tools to understand the world and affect the world that they want, I think we'll have a lot less conflict.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to the economy, and if you have basically unlimited intelligence and energy, you can make almost anything. And we may actually be on track to get there.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we may be approaching a moment where most physical goods become quite cheap. The reason for that is if you have abundant clean energy and you have robots that can do most of the tasks, then physical goods get very cheap. And then the question is what do you do with your time, and do you have good social systems in place?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation. And we have, in AI, a way to potentially radically expand the amount of intelligence available to humanity. If we can do that, and if we can find a way to get cheap, abundant energy, I think the world looks totally different in 20 to 30 years than most people are imagining.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The United States is on the verge of a natural gas shortage so severe that it could undermine the AI boom, strain the electric grid, and trigger the kind of energy crisis that Americans haven't experienced in decades.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

Starting in 2028, AI data centers and LNG exports will need more gas than the country can produce and deliver. By his math, the US could exhaust its working natural gas storage by 2030. In his words, the upside risk to prices becomes unbounded and convex.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

The bottleneck isn't in the production of natural gas — there's plenty of gas in the ground. The bottleneck is in the infrastructure to move it, process it, and export it. And that infrastructure takes years to permit, finance, and build.

The New York Times

Why Thousands of Cubans Are Migrating to Guyana

Cubans are desperate to come here in part because the economy has been supercharged by the same thing driving people out of Cuba: oil.

The a16z Show

Samo Burja on Growth, Energy, and AI

AI is not just a software story but a demand shock that will ripple through energy, manufacturing, construction, and global supply chains.

The Prof G Pod

Scott Galloway: Stop Demonizing Billionaires and Start Taxing them | Office Hours

AI's capex boom is the second largest share of use GDP in history. bigger than the railroads, second only to the I think the Louisiana purchase... unlike past tech booms, Facebook, Instagram, Door Dash, it's fundamentally a supply side story about making chips, building data centers, and powering them. It's money creating demand for energy, not the reverse.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Gavin Baker - Watts and Wafers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.473]

the two physical constraints that in Gavin's view will dictate the next phase of AI. On power, he thinks the near-term shortage starts to ease in 2027 and 2028 as new sources of energy come online, and that orbital compute solves it in the long term. On wafers, he explains what is different this time from the dotcom bubble and why TSMC's capacity decisions may be the single most important variable to watch.

The a16z Show

Energy, Minerals, and the Physical Stack Behind AI

With the US more than 50 years behind China in critical mineral supply and grid infrastructure built on systems designed a century ago, they examine where the real bottlenecks are and how to move faster.

Prof G Markets

Is the Oil Crisis About to Break Global Supply Chains? | Prof G Markets

Energy is upstream of everything and more importantly food the the fertilizer production coming out of that region. Um and it's planting season so it's a very bad timing for the world's agricultural supply chains.

The a16z Show

The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare

As the battlefield becomes more distributed and electronics-heavy, the Army's legacy power infrastructure, built around diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, is struggling to keep up.

TBPN

FULL INTERVIEW: Alex Epstein on The Oil Market’s Biggest Geopolitical Threat

roughly 20% of the world's oil production is flowing through that every day and so whether you're looking backward or looking forward there is no replacement whatsoever for opening that strait and keeping it open.

The Origins Podcast

(New Science News Feb 2026) Fusion Dark Matter, String Theory in Biology, and Rapid Evolution

if we ever have a nuclear fusion reactor why not give it a try you know it's uh it makes a lot of sense to me

The Tim Ferriss Show

#856: Jim Collins — What to Make of a Life and How to Maximize Your Return on Luck

I really do feel that I have more energy. I had a lot of energy at 37. I had a lot of energy at 17. I have more energy at 67 when I wrote that, 68 now. I need less sleep. My clarity, if anything, I think is higher.