BUILD ENERGY

“And the reasons for this goes back to the time that I spent in Iraq. I spent about two years in Iraq immediately after Saddam fled, and then throughout the years that followed off and on. And America's 2003 war in Iraq was about primarily weapons of mass destruction. It was not about getting control over Iraqi oil. But to this day, most Iraqis, when they try to make sense of the American intervention, they come back to oil, that it must have been about Iraqi oil. So, in a world where President Trump said over the weekend, he wishes he could just take the oil. That's what he'd like to do if the American people would allow him to. I think this is going to be rhetoric that we're going to hear throughout Iranian politics for a long time to come and not to America's benefit.”

“The obvious energy shock that we compare it to are the shocks of the 1970s. 1973, the oil embargo where Arab members of OPEC declined to export their oil to the United States and other supporters of Israel in the 1973 war. But they also started to take oil off the market, the absolute amount of oil that was on the market. So, percentage wise and the physical number of barrels that were taken off the market in 1973 is considerably less than is happening today. As you and your listeners will have heard over and over again, this is the biggest supply disruption that we've ever seen.”

“You're talking to somebody who represents the American dream. My parents didn't have any money, sent us over here. We started from nothing. You guys know I, you know, bust tables, wash dishes, clean toilets, and here I am. This is the American dream. President Trump knows that. We want legal immigrants.”

“Coinbase's ownership of assets is going from 6% total supply, 9%, eleven, fourteen, sixteen, nine, ten. And, oh, if every company becomes a treasury company, oh, great. Great. We're at 30% now. What do we wanna do? How are we gonna get this to 50? And that's a very real, honest, fair critique of, well, what then? And most people say, oh, that's just paranoia, blah blah. No. It's not paranoia. I'm thinking for the people that can't think yet.”

“There are lots of reasons to think we might be in an AI bubble. For one, the simple reason, again, now we're back to U. S. Stock markets being driven by basically the AI stocks. Those are the ones that are leading the run up in stock valuations recently. And so the risk is that the current incumbents have invested a large amount in their AI infrastructure, in data centers, in trillions of dollars, in the hope that they will be able to raise revenues that can explain, justify this level of, you know, investments that they're making. And that is completely unclear because you could very easily have another competitor come in and produce the same product or pretty close to the same product, a fraction of the cost, given how the technology is evolving.”

“The annual release cycle. The token generation rate is going up exponentially. And the customer use is going up exponentially. So the first thing is because the token generation rate is going up so incredibly, two exponentials on top of each other, we have to unless we increase the performance at incredible rates, the cost of token generation will keep growing because Moore's Law is dead.”

“I'll remind you back in 2005 and it's kind of hard to believe now that there was a lot of fears that America was actually running out of oil and gas production I mean I think it was as as early you go as 2004 2005 the country was only producing about 5 million barrels a day and you know importing anywhere between 19 to 20 million barrels a day and so there was real concern and you know really really some fears of you know what happens if you know oil runs out”

“But in Venezuela, President Trump very explicitly said, this is about taking control of the oil. And to me, it was harkening back again to a very old frame of thinking, but it also didn't really make sense to me. In a world where the price of oil was bumping along at $65 and American producers were struggling to make ends meet with such a low oil price, to claim that we should use American military prowess to try to bring more Venezuelan oil onto the global market. I didn't see how that made sense for America commercially, except in the one narrow sense, which is not insignificant, but keeping China and Russia from really having the ability to develop Venezuela's oil.”

“When is an athlete ready to receive coaching information?”

“Everybody's power limited. And let's say, you were able to secure two more gigawatts of power. Well, that two gigawatts of power, you would like to have translate to revenues. So your performance or tokens per watt was twice as high as somebody else's token per watt because you did deep and extreme co design. Blackwell's 30 times. So you've gotta give up 30 x revenues in that one gigawatt. It's too much to give up. So even if they gave it to you for free, you only have two gigawatts to work with.”

“Self-loyalty as a precursor to self-belief.”

“We call it the Iran shock and the dangerous illusion of energy autarky, which is the idea that many countries are probably feeling, wow, exposure to this global market is dangerous, and we want to pull away from this global market. Now that could manifest itself in a number of ways. If you're China, it might mean you're going to stockpile energy. We actually saw Fatih Barul, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, just in the last day or so, warring countries, none by name, but warring countries generally don't stockpile. This is going to worsen the crisis.”

“Government propagandists spread the word that the material-energy engines were not safe. Reports were broadcast that on at least two occasions the engines had blown up, killing the men who operated them. But this propaganda failed to gain credence, for in the cities that were in the rebel hands, technicians were at work manufacturing and setting up the material engines. Demonstrations were given. The people saw them, saw what enormous power they developed.”

“Energy, Emotions, and Environment: The Operating System of life.”

“He's carrying photocells and several thousand tons of accumulator stacks. Not much power left in them. He could pour a billion horsepower into them for hours and still have room for more. Greg nodded wearily. All we've been doing is feeding him.”

“I mean, certainly Russia and the former Soviet Union, I would say, has thought about stirring up geopolitical tensions as a way of increasing the price of oil. This has been documented for people who are historians and have looked through the Politburo notes from the end of the Soviet Empire, that it was actively debated whether the Soviet Union should stir up problems in the Middle East simply to increase the price of oil. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that Russia had any particular hand in instigating this phase of this conflict. But I agree with you that for the moment, Russia is really benefiting from this.”

“Energy management for the European clay season.”

“We're gonna have 20% unemployment, call it 15 to 20%, then you've got mix that with 14 to 16% inflation being generous. So the problem is, like, they're not losing their job like, oh, damn. I gotta go figure out where to work next. It's like, no. No. No. Monster.com, they've removed that job description. Like, you can't list a job for that anymore. It's like saying, oh, I wonder if I can list a job description for candlestick maker. We don't have those anymore because we don't use candles anymore.”

“The downside is, of course, this is going to make many more countries and economies, at least in the medium term, susceptible to political and economic pressure from China because China is the country that has a real dominance over clean energy supply chains. So again, the energy weapon is back, but it's not just the old weapon. It's not just oil and gas. It's also weaponization of clean energy supply chains.”

“And the cool thing from a Bitcoin perspective, and I could be wrong on this, but just the way I look at it, is I think a lot of these data centers are gonna need some amount of Bitcoin mining in them to help balance their load. Like, it it being flexible load within that stack is gonna be super useful. And if these if we have more and more of these data centers popping up, Hash rate might grow through this.”

“So India, among the major economies, India is being affected because of its heavy reliance on The Middle East in terms of imports of oil, also liquefied petroleum gas, which is LPG, which is what goes into cooking purposes. There's also a reliance on The Middle East just as a hub for sending their goods to other parts of the world. Also reliance on remittances from the region. So there are multiple channels through which India gets affected. And I think what we're seeing most directly is the effect that's showing up in terms of pressure on the currency because the expectation is that as the import bill grows, the current account deficit grows, and in the absence of strong portfolio inflows into India, that's gonna put pressure on the rupee.”

“Bitcoin has a chance of losing the energy conversation, which Bitcoin has been the number one. The biggest thing right now that I've seen is distraction, like, massively. And I, like, I just know that Bitcoin's superpower for the longest time is not being, the everything machine. It's actually the opposite of that. Bitcoin's only gonna get ever get one sentence at the conversation where it matters. And if that sentence is confusing, broken, fragmented, or different to what everyone else thinks, then that's problematic.”

“our business is a little bit different from a lot of the publicly traded companies that you see you know the the Exxons and the Diamondbacks of the world who are drilling kind of horizontal shale wells there are many more companies that are much more similar to mine you know that the horizontal shale game has largely become the domain of a very large companies I mean you've got to have scale to be able to operate in that space.”

“Well, I would say it never went away. It just kind of receded to the background. And part of it allows me to pick up where I left off with this, the 1970s and the reaction of the world to becoming more integrated, to building up the global market in a way that oil became the most easily traded commodity in the world. So this is a very flexible global market that you can buy and sell pretty much in any part of the market, and the market will help that barrel of oil find its way to the most efficient destination. So this evolved over time, and it made the prospect of using energy as a weapon less attractive because the market could defuse the shock of cutting off a single supplier.”

“Now if this continues and the fact that we are still here with no ships going through the Strait Of Hormuz, regardless of the fact that there's no bombs necessarily falling, but the fact that shipping has basically come to a standstill through that Strait has much more durable implications than what would be there in the reference scenario. And so the IMF provided what they called an adverse scenario, which is when we are looking at oil averaging about a $100 a barrel for this year as opposed to the assumption in the reference scenario, which is more like $82 a barrel.”

“I heard from a Chinese researcher leading one of our leading labs in The US that three years ago, 90% of the top AI researchers graduating from universities in China wanted to come to The United States and did come to The United States to work in our leading labs. And he guessed that today, that's closer to 10 or 15%. So seen a precipitous drop.”

“one of my favorite quotes is never underestimate the ingenuity of the American oil man and I just think it's a a testament to the tenacity and grit and intelligence of our industry largely maligned by a pretty big segments of the company that do not realize how much this has transformed our country”

“It's funny. We talked about this as well, but Iran, the central bank has been mining Bitcoin for five years, and they've had so all they said, they go, no. No. No. You can't have Bitcoin exchanges in Iran. It's like, what? You can't have Bitcoin mining either? No. No. No. Mine all the all you want. I'm buying from you though and no one else. It's like, damn. How heavy are those bags over there, dude?”

“The US is doing incredibly well because of where it is in the AI race. I mean, it is at the front. China is also up there pretty close. Outside of these two countries, there are not many other regions of the world that have this much of dynamism when it comes to AI. And if you look at 2025 and growth in 2025, basically, AI, you know, offset the drag that came from tariffs, right, almost one to one.”

“How to stay motivated and get things done when you're tired.”

“Well, the war was already the war that Russia was waging against Ukraine was already taking a toll on Russia before this conflict came about. So actually, in the absence of this conflict, they would have been in much worse place because of what's happened with the oil prices going up and the fact that countries are being allowed to go and buy from Russia. But as the longest story goes, Russia made some bad choices. Its decision to invade Ukraine has been tremendously costly. It has led to an allocation of resources to this war economy, and that's affected their productivity.”

“I underestimated. Let me just go on record. I underestimated. We we now have three scaling laws. We have pretraining scaling law. We have post training scaling law. Post training is basically like, AI practicing. Practicing a skill until it gets it right. And then the third is inference. The old way of doing inference was one shot. But the new way of doing inference, which we appreciate, is thinking.”

“shale company that's the unconventional reservoirs and so that was the rock that largely was thought it was impossible to produce and really until the advent of horizontal development well not horizontal development so much as hydraulic fracturing it was because the the pore space was just too small and so there was no way to commercially extract oil and gas from those reservoirs we knew the oil and gas was there we just couldn't get it out”

“It was a weird revolution. There were few battles, little blood shed. There seemed to be no secret plots. There were no skulking leaders, no passwords, nothing that in former years had marked rebellion against tyranny. It was a revolution carried out with utter boldness. Secret police were helpless, for it was not a secret revolution.”

“If you have a train that's about to get faster and faster and go exponential, the only thing that you really need to do is get on it. And once you get on it, you'll figure everything else out along the way. And so to predict where that train's gonna be and try to shoot a bullet at it or predict where that train's gonna be and it's going exponentially faster every second and go figure out what intersection to wait for it, that's impossible. Just get on it while it's going kinda slowly and go exponential along the way.”

“When Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said, who knew they'd do that? Well, his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate hearing that that was exactly the assessment of the entire intelligence community. Trump said nobody expected Iran to attack the Gulf states if it were provoked. Wrong again. Multiple former policymakers have told me this is exactly what was expected in war games. Experts sometimes get it wrong. You still need them in the room.”

“That general general purpose computing is over, and the future is accelerated computing and AI computing. And so the way to think about that is there's how much how many trillions of dollars of computing infrastructures in the world that has to be refreshed. And when it gets refreshed, it's going to be accelerated computing.”

“I think with with AI as a let's call it like a species now. Let's think of it like a species. Its preference will be Bitcoin, and that's not like a, I like Bitcoin. It needs to be that. Like, it's like, no. No. No. It's just its job is to execute functions, and that's what code bases do. It can't be like, no. No. No. It's good. The supply is good for it. My mate, Jimmy, works there. He told me That just doesn't fly for it.”

“I think energy independence is going to be critical. And, thankfully, for many countries in the world, there are alternatives. I mean, there are renewables that one can invest and develop even more. I mean, Sri Lanka with, you know, solar can do great. So energy independence, I think, is very doable for countries. The cost of doing it in terms of just the inputs that are required is cheaper, much cheaper than it used to be.”

“So I'm gonna start with it's a great start. And the reason for that is this. That implies I don't I hope it's not the end, but I think it's a great start. America has one a singular brand reputation that no country in the world has, and no country in the world is in the position or in the horizon to be able to say, come to America and realize the American dream. What country has the word dream behind it?”

“And yet the ten engines bellowed like things insane, as Craven struck with flaming bolts, utilising the power he had absorbed from the fifty billion horsepower Greg had thrown at him. The first screen stopped all material things, the second stopped radiations by refracting them into the fourth dimension, the third shield was akin to the anti-entropy field, which stopped all matter.”

“The mechanical shadow, the little machine that always tells us where Craven is, as long as he's wearing his glasses. He always wears them, said Russ crisply. He's as blind as a bat without them. Greg set the machine down on the table. When we find Craven, we'll find the contraption that's blanketing Jupiter and its moons.”

“He really must have something this time, Ross agreed. He's blanketing out the entire Jovian system. There's a space field of low intensity surrounding all of Jupiter, enclosing all the moons. He keeps shifting the intensity so that, even though we can force our way through his field, the irregular variations make it impossible to line up anything.”

“He's going to do a project. He's like, yeah. Set it up. Build this this website with this back end to do this. Anyway, he's got it all set up. He's messaging it every now and then. And then, like, four or five days pass, and he goes, hey. I need to see something. Like, I just have to see something. You've just kept kicking the can down the road. And he literally stops and goes, I'm sorry I've been lying the whole time. I haven't done any work, and I didn't want to tell you that. So I've tried to find excuses to keep the thing going.”

“So when it comes to, like, rationing the energy, it's not even gonna be a debate. It's not even gonna be a question. It'll be, yeah, AI gets first preference. If you wanna mine anything if you wanna contribute your energy towards something that's not AI, which is now almost deemed like a public necessity, we'll probably it'll get some sort of enshrined status, then that'll come at a cost, or you'll be paying a premium per kilowatt hour or something like that.”

“I think that OpenAI is likely going to be the next multitrillion dollar hyperscale company. K. I think you and I... If that's the case, the opportunity to invest before they get there, this is some of the smartest investments we can possibly imagine, and you gotta invest in things you know.”

“Craven, said Greg Grimley, he let us have everything he had. He simply drained his accumulator stacks and threw it all into our face. But he's done now. That was his only shot. He'll have to build up power now, and that will take a while. But we couldn't have taken much more.”

“Some of the things I heard, they could never build AI chips. That just sounded insane. Two, that China can't manufacture. China can't manufacture? If there's one thing they could do is manufacture. And three, they're years behind us. Is it two years, three years? Come on. They're nanoseconds behind us. Nanoseconds.”

“we've gone from producing you know anywhere from 5 million barrels a day now we are now we're the largest oil and gas producer in the world we produce more oil than any company in the any country in the world and so you know it's just it's kind of gone unnoticed and so I want I you know I wanted to kind of get out and bring that up.”

“Ask any actor on Earth who they want to be in a movie for. They would all tell you, first up, one name, Christopher Nolan. You know why? Because he's not the money grab anymore. He is the talent where people are like, whatever he does, it's gonna be unreal. The Rock is not an actor. The Rock is a wrestling star who's enthusiastic about entertainment. Sure. But he's not an actor. And like Russell Crowe, he's an actor.”

“Of the 25 sell side analysts on Wall Street who cover your stock, if I look at the consensus estimate, it basically has your growth flatlining starting in 2027. 8% growth 2027 through 2030. That is the 25 people in their only job. They get paid to forecast the growth rate for NVIDIA.”

“I believe with my hand on my heart that a human being will do it before I'm dead. Every one that matters. Yeah. Because so prime number is think of it like the hardest element in the universe, and I actually mean that quite literally. A prime number is a number that doesn't have any parts by definition. That is its defining factor, and we've never been able to, let's call it, split a semiprime. So a semiprime is when you multiply two primes together.”

“And if it gets even worse and we are looking at oil averaging $110 a barrel this year, and this is a much more disrupted situation with bigger hits to energy infrastructure, which means next year or two, oil is going to stay very high, and financial conditions get a whole lot worse, then we're looking at the world economy growing at 2%, which, again, those are extremely rare occurrences. So the risk seems squarely to the downside at this current point.”

“Take the example of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was a country that went through a very bad crisis, was on the path of recovery. This kind of a shock is, like, a nightmare situation for a country like that, which is just trying to get out of the crisis that it had with fuel prices the way it is, with fertilizer prices going up. More generally, with jet fuel prices going up, which means travel is going to become much more expensive, which means tourism is affected in the region, countries like that. Pakistan is another country that is in a fragile situation with everything that's going on.”