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Tribal households in the United States carry an energy burden 28% above the national average and endure 6.5 times more power outages a year, and roughly 17,000 tribal homes — housing at least 54,000 people — have no electricity at all, according to the Department of Energy. Those are the communities now first in line to absorb the next surge in demand, because Energy Information Administration concluded data center load will be the dominant driver of long-term U.S. electricity growth. Our guest this week is Cody Two Bears, founder and CEO of Indigenized Energy, and his answer to that arithmetic is tribal energy sovereignty: build it yourself, on your own terms, at your own pace. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and once the youngest person elected to its tribal council, Cody founded the organization in 2017 after the NoDAPL protests and went on to develop North Dakota's largest solar farm at Cannon Ball. It became an independent 501(c)(3) this spring and now runs energy makeover projects in four tribal communities and food sovereignty work in two more. A household that signs on returns a share of what it saves — a flat fee on one reservation, a 50-50 split on another, a sliding scale elsewhere that asks 70% from a family with a job and 10% or 20% from an elder on a fixed income. The revolving fund covers maintenance, sustains jobs, and eventually becomes collateral in places where conventional lending has never worked, because sovereign land doesn't fit a repossession-based credit model. Cody puts it plainly: tribes are asking for a hand up, and the point of the first dollar is that nobody has to come back for a second.

This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president could still fire commissioners, as the Court now permits, but if those firings broke quorum, the agency would be unable to proceed until replacements were confirmed. The guardrail would

This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.There was an issue with this only going to paid subscribers, so sending it again. Apologies to those who get it twice. I appreciate being paid so feel free to upgrade if you enjoy TWTW.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president

Summer is here, temperatures are rising — and so are electric bills. That also means many people are facing a severely overlooked issue: power shutoffs. According to a report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2024 utility companies disconnected U.S. households from electricity more than 13.4 million times due to a customer's inability to pay. When that happens, people can't turn on their lights, keep food refrigerated, or cool down the home. And regulations preventing shutoffs during extreme heat events are woefully inadequate.  But when utilities help pay the upfront costs of efficiency upgrades, the customers and utilities can both save energy — and money. How do we protect the most vulnerable people from the dangers of home power shutoffs?  Guests: Jean Su, Energy Justice Director, Center for Biological Diversity  Sanya Carley, Co-Director, Energy Justice Lab, University of Pennsylvania Tamara Jones, Co-Executive Director, Clean Energy Works Highlights: 00:00 Introduction     4:15 Jean Su on topline takeaways from nationwide data 10:04 Jean Su on why utilities don't cover the cost of non-payment  12:55 Jean Su on polices to prevent shutoffs 16:16 Jean Su on the reality of underreported shutoffs  22:17 Sanya Carley on what happens to a household when a shutoff occurs 25:15 Sanya Carley on seeking help after a shutoff 27:44 Sanya Carley on federal impact on shutoffs 29:56 Sanya Carley on what state legislatures can do  35:25 Tamara Jones on working for justice 38:09 Tamara Jones on who is impacted by energy injustice 46:14 Tamara Jones on examples of where policy gets it right 50:56 Tamara Jones on what work needs to be done in policy and regulation For show notes, related links, and episode transcript, visit our episode page at climateone.org Join Climate One for an induction cooking demonstration night on July 21, at 6 p.m. at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Come enjoy delicious food and wine, and learn about why cooking with magnets beats cooking with gas. Tickets available at climateone.org/events  *** Support Climate One by going ad-free! By subscribing to Climate One on Patreon, you'll receive exclusive access to all future episodes free of ads, opportunities to connect with fellow Climate One listeners, and access to the Climate One Discord. Sign up today. *** Ad sales by Multitude. Contact them for ad inquiries at multitude.productions/ads Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summer is here, temperatures are rising — and so are electric bills. That also means many people are facing a severely overlooked issue: power shutoffs. According to a report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2024 utility companies disconnected U.S. households from electricity more than 13.4 million times due to a customer's inability to pay. When that happens, people can't turn on their lights, keep food refrigerated, or cool down the home. And regulations preventing shutoffs during extreme heat events are woefully inadequate.  But when utilities help pay the upfront costs of efficiency upgrades, the customers and utilities can both save energy — and money. How do we protect the most vulnerable people from the dangers of home power shutoffs?  Guests: Jean Su, Energy Justice Director, Center for Biological Diversity  Sanya Carley, Co-Director, Energy Justice Lab, University of Pennsylvania Tamara Jones, Co-Executive Director, Clean Energy Works Highlights: 00:00 Introduction     4:15 Jean Su on topline takeaways from nationwide data 10:04 Jean Su on why utilities don't cover the cost of non-payment  12:55 Jean Su on polices to prevent shutoffs 16:16 Jean Su on the reality of underreported shutoffs  22:17 Sanya Carley on what happens to a household when a shutoff occurs 25:15 Sanya Carley on seeking help after a shutoff 27:44 Sanya Carley on federal impact on shutoffs 29:56 Sanya Carley on what state legislatures can do  35:25 Tamara Jones on working for justice 38:09 Tamara Jones on who is impacted by energy injustice 46:14 Tamara Jones on examples of where policy gets it right 50:56 Tamara Jones on what work needs to be done in policy and regulation For show notes, related links, and episode transcript, visit our ⁠episode page⁠ at climateone.org *** Join Climate One for an induction cooking demonstration night on July 21, at 6 p.m. at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Come enjoy delicious food and wine, and learn about why cooking with magnets beats cooking with gas. Tickets available at ⁠climateone.org/events⁠  *** Support Climate One by going ad-free! By subscribing to Climate One on ⁠Patreon⁠, you'll receive exclusive access to all future episodes free of ads, opportunities to connect with fellow Climate One listeners, and access to the Climate One Discord. ⁠Sign up today⁠. *** Ad sales by ⁠Multitude⁠. Contact them for ad inquiries at ⁠multitude.productions/ads⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin covers and discusses the following stories: this past Friday, the U.S. Labor Department released the May Jobs Report, interesting numbers compared to the "experts'" predictions; on Wednesday morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the Consumer Price Index Report; oil prices react to President Trump's comments that Iran is too slow to negotiate a deal, must pay price, retaliation for the downing of an Apache helicopter, airstrikes on Iran to continue and the U.S. Energy Information Administration's release of U.S. Crude Oil Inventories; gas prices continue to fall; Kevin has the details, digs into the data, puts the information into historical perspective, offers his insights and several opinions along the way. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kevin covers and discusses the following stories: this past Friday, the U.S. Labor Department released the May Jobs Report, interesting numbers compared to the "experts'" predictions; on Wednesday morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the Consumer Price Index Report; oil prices react to President Trump's comments that Iran is too slow to negotiate a deal, must pay price, retaliation for the downing of an Apache helicopter, airstrikes on Iran to continue and the U.S. Energy Information Administration's release of U.S. Crude Oil Inventories; gas prices continue to fall; Kevin has the details, digs into the data, puts the information into historical perspective, offers his insights and several opinions along the way. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While Democratic leaders are pledging to restore wind and solar tax credits if they regain control of Congress and the White House, some clean energy developers are questioning whether continuing to pursue those incentives is necessary or even politically wise. POLITICO's Nico Portuondo breaks down why Democrats and parts of the renewable energy industry are increasingly at odds over those credits and what the debate means for America's clean energy future. Plus, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said that global oil consumption in 2026 is expected to fall from last year, and Constellation Energy's plan to reopen the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear site is one step closer to Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval. Nico Portuondo is a congressional energy reporter for POLITICO's E&E News. Nirmal Mulaikal is the co-host and executive producer of POLITICO Energy.  KJ Cline is the video producer for POLITICO Energy. Matt Daily is the energy editor for POLITICO. Cyril Zaneski is executive editor of POLITICO's E&E News. Debra Kahn is the editorial director for energy and environmental coverage at POLITICO. Veronica Tejera is the deputy head of Audio/Video at POLITICO. Our theme music is by Pran Bandi. Follow the show on Apple, Spotify, Youtube and Instagram. Follow POLITICO here:    ➤ X: https://x.com/politico/ ➤ Instagram:  / politico      ➤ Facebook:  / politico   For more reporting on energy and the environment, subscribe to Power Switch, our free evening newsletter: https://www.politico.com/power-switch And for even deeper coverage and analysis, read our Morning Energy newsletter by subscribing to POLITICO Pro: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter-archive/morning-energy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans are pushing to suspend the federal gas tax amid rising pump prices, accelerating inflation, and no end in sight to the Iran war. POLITICO's Amelia Davidson discusses the political hurdles on Capitol Hill and whether suspending the tax would actually make a meaningful difference for Americans. Plus, the U.S. Energy Information Administration raised its forecast for next year's oil and gasoline prices, and EPA proposed allowing developers of data centers, power plants and other industrial facilities to start some construction before obtaining federal air permits. Amelia Davidson is a Congress reporter with POLITICO's E&E News. Nirmal Mulaikal is the co-host and executive producer of POLITICO Energy.  KJ Cline is the video producer for POLITICO Energy. Matt Daily is the energy editor for POLITICO. Cyril Zaneski is executive editor of POLITICO's E&E News. Debra Kahn is the editorial director for energy and environmental coverage at POLITICO. Veronica Tejera is the deputy head of Audio/Video at POLITICO. Our theme music is by Pran Bandi. Follow the show on Apple, Spotify, Youtube and Instagram. Follow POLITICO here:    ➤ X: https://x.com/politico/ ➤ Instagram:  / politico      ➤ Facebook:  / politico   For more reporting on energy and the environment, subscribe to Power Switch, our free evening newsletter: https://www.politico.com/power-switch And for even deeper coverage and analysis, read our Morning Energy newsletter by subscribing to POLITICO Pro: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter-archive/morning-energy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to the Energy Information Administration, the national average price for gasoline was $4.26 per gallon at the end of April and it was largely stable throughout last month. Not good. Certainly painful. But wholesale gas price has exploded higher in recent weeks and that means retail gas prices are about to do the same thing. The wholesale cost points to a nationwide pump price of $5. Not next month, soon.  Eurodollar University's Money & Macro Analysis--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Learn more about Augusta Precious Metals and what they have to offer - including physical gold for IRA accounts - by going to https://EurodollarGold.com or text EURO to 35052. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Just a Few Stocks Driving S&P 500 Rally Triggers Dot-Com Bubble Flashbackshttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-05/dot-com-bubble-flashbacks-triggered-by-lack-of-s-p-500-breadthRCM/TIPP Steadies In May As Stress Easeshttps://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2026/05/05/rcmtipp_steadies_in_may_as_stress_eases_1180584.htmlhttps://www.eurodollar.universityTwitter: https://twitter.com/JeffSnider_EDU

Darrell Castle talks about the war against Iran and the efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for the commerce of the world along with the unexpected results being felt around the world. Transcription / Notes SOME UNEXPECTED RESULTS OF WAR Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today's Castle Report. This is Friday the 24th day of April in the year of our Lord 2026. I will be talking again about the war against Iran and the efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for the commerce of the world along with the unexpected results being felt around the world as a result of this war. Let me start with a brief refresher regarding the history of the U.S. war with Iran before I get into unexpected results. The U.S. government back in 1953 started this long conflict by its overthrow of Mosaddegh who was popularly elect and his replacement with the Shah who was always seen as a U.S. puppet. If what I just said is true and I obviously believe that it is, then the U.S. has been in this conflict for 73 years. In 1953 the Korean War was just shutting down so maybe a new conflict was needed in the Middle East to feed the war machine, who knows. Fast forward to today and we find that often history does repeat but barely is it noticed because it will always be different this time. We have lots of propaganda coming out of the war from both sides and unlike propaganda in earlier wars today's propaganda reaches the whole world instantly through social media. In World Wars, for example, propaganda was designed only for the home populations of each side. Don't worry we are winning etc. Except for the Tokyo Rose broadcasts to the U.S. Navy and the Axis Sally broadcasts to the U.S. bomber crews the propaganda was primarily to keep the population's backs in the war effort. To that end a ceasefire is announced from time to time and that mere announcement will usually calm the headlines and the markets for a brief time. The other side quickly violates the ceasefire or denies that it exists and the whole thing starts over. President Trump says they have agreed to everything and the Iranians say no we will keep our uranium and the Strait remains closed. It appears to be just propaganda back and forth or perhaps just wishful thinking, and the confusion is exacerbated by Iran's lack of known leadership. We do know a few things that appear to be factual, however. Six or seven weeks ago, the U.S. and Israel launched a preemptive attack, surprise attack, sneak attack depending on your point of view. This attack was launched in the midst of negotiations ala Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese did it they thought and hoped it would demoralize the American people into negotiations favorable to Japan but it had the opposite effect and I submit this attack did the same to Iran. The U.S. dropped unprecedented amounts of bombs and missiles on Korea and Vietnam but neither surrendered and that fact of history seems to have gone unnoticed by the administration. The Iranians believe they are victims of an unprovoked attack which cost them dearly in terms of lives, treasure, and infrastructure. They think they are entitled to compensation for that and I submit that one way or another they will get it. In the meantime, the war is actually helping Iran by raising oil prices worldwide thus helping the Iranian export prices. They could insist on tolls through the Strait of Hormuz which they had never imposed before this war. I suspect that no permanent peace agreement will happen without compensation from the U.S. and/or Israel. Either way it would be on the backs of U.S. taxpayers. My guess is that this war will continue for a time that we could call indefinite and here is one reason why. Trump apparently started this war at the behest of Netanyahu but now he aggressively insults and attacks anyone he perceives to have said a negative word about him and that includes foreign leaders. He doesn't seem to understand that people remember the insults and foreign affairs of a great nation can't be conducted like kids jostling each other on a school ground. The problem of war in the Middle East is more than likely unsolvable as long a s Israel exists especially with its current leadership. Therefore, expect to be at war for a long time at least until it finally destroys the U.S. economy. Speaking of the U.S. and world economy let's look at some results of the war or at least some things made worse by it. This all comes at a time when rising debt levels and rising interest obligations are pushing the U.S. into a more fragile state. According to MoneyWeek U.S. debt has now exceeded 39 trillion. It has been only five months since it blew past 38 trillion. The debt has doubled since Trump was sworn in for his first term or about 10 years ago. No amount of bluster and bombast will erase certain facts such as the U.S. approaching 40 trillion amid rising interest rates, along with a coming debt crises. The U.S. has about 9 trillion of debt that must be refinanced or rolled over this cycle. Presumably short-term treasuries can be sold at about 3.5% but what if they can't and it takes 5%. That would be catastrophic and would accelerate the crash to unstoppable speed. I admit I'm no economist but that's the way it looks to me from the numbers. The disturbing thing is that Washington seems to take no notice of it at all. This fiscal year, 2026 the defense budget or war budget as its now called is about $950 billion. Trump has requested an almost 60% increase to $1.5 trillion for fiscal year 2027. That's all caused by the war right. Well, no, I'm afraid not folks because that doesn't even include the costs of the Iranian war so he's saying we need a 60% increase just to keep up. The U.S. has dropped tens of thousands of bombs and missiles on Iran and has lost a few aircraft along with great damage to bases all over the Middle East. The U.S. has had to move its military out of the Persian Gulf region and move its carriers at least 1000 kilometers or about 620 miles from the conflict to avoid missile attacks. So, one unexpected result of the war is that the U.S. multibillion-dollar carriers are very vulnerable to cheap drone and missile attack. Iran apparently has quite a stockpile of those and reportedly China is resupplying them all the time. Iran has an ace up its sleeve in this international poker game of death and that ace is the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait is a narrow strip of water that links the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. Before the war started approximately 20 million barrels of oil per day or about 20% of global production passed through the Strait along with 20% of global LNG exports according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The Strait is so vitally important to the world economy that it's a fair guess that disruption for a prolonged period would provoke a worldwide depression. Iran has spent decades accumulating the means to shut the Strait down. It has commanding geography with a thousand miles of coastline and many inlets where missiles can be stored and launched. The U.S. has discovered that even the U.S. Navy cannot police all of them. Just this week reportedly 24 Iranian tankers slipped through the U.S. blockade. If the Strait is not completely closed it is too dangerous for normal commercial shipping. Oil and natural gas are everywhere and in everything. They are the most important of all commodities that the world depends on. The Far East today is the manufacturing center of the world or the world's workshop and Middle East oil and gas keeps the Far East working. Until this war is resolved we can probably count on oil above 100$ per barrel and increasing shortages of many things we are used to having in abundance. Ultimately the real danger is worldwide food production and the increasing cost of food caused by ever lower crop yields. This threat to the world's food supply is being caused by the drastic reduction in fertilizer because so much of it is shipped through the gulf. The world needs fertilizer to grow crops and feed people and that is gradually being strangled. Once again, the unexpected results of war. Perhaps the markets of the world have just been waiting for a pin to pop the bubble so we will see that higher prices for fuel will result in higher prices for everything and that is as inevitable as night follows day. The result of all this and the result of the war will be a significantly lower standard of living for the people of the world. So, propaganda tells us the Strait will remain open and the Mullahs will never have a nuclear weapon. Neither statement appears to be true at the current time so that leaves the U.S. in a very difficult position. The U.S. could admit defeat and leave thus admitting that the Empire cannot fulfill its promises or the U.S. could resort to the unthinkable but I don't see many other choices. In any event the petrodollar world appears to be ending. I heard Marco Rubio, the Secretary of everything say that Brazil, the largest country in South America just concluded a deal with China to trade in the Chinese currency. The U.S. relies on the dollar as the world's reserve to bully and sanction other countries but if they are not trading in the dollar then sanctions are no threat. So, the world is changing rapidly and not in favor of the American people or at least that's my take on it.  Donald Trump has hung an Albatross around his neck and removing it is job number one. He might have to allow a strategic retreat to a more defensible line. The failure to reach that conclusion has resulted in the destruction of many armies and the loss of many wars. So, admit it was a mistake and find some way to reverse course no matter what Israel says about it. The longer he persists the worse it will get because he simply is not all powerful like he apparently thought he was, and neither is the United States. Finally, folks, I hope this was just a tragic mistake and not something preplanned and far more sinister but the unexpected results of it are apparently only unexpected by us normal people who are concerned about working, living, and raising our kids in a peaceful world. At least that's the way I see it, Until next time folks, This is Darrell Castle, Thanks for listening.

New data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, analyzed by the Renewable Fuels Association, shows U.S. ethanol production declined for the week ending April 17, falling 7.1 percent to an 11-week low of 1.04 million barrels per day. NAFB News ServiceSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Advisors on This Week's Show Kyle Tetting Art Rothschild Adam Baley (with Joel Dresang, engineered by Jason Scuglik) Week in Review (April 20-24, 2026) Significant Economic Indicators & Reports Monday No major announcements Tuesday Retail sales rose 1.7% in March, driven by higher gas prices. The U.S. Census Bureau said 12 of 13 categories reported higher revenue than February. The exception was miscellaneous stores. Gas station sales jumped 15.5% in a month when prices rose 24%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Excluding gas stations and car dealers, retail spending increased 0.6%. Sales at bars and restaurants rose 0.1%, following a 0.5% gain in February and two months of declines. Adjusted for inflation, total retail sales rose 0.8%, the most in a year. Retail sales represent about two-thirds of U.S. consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of the gross domestic product. Prospects for home sellers brightened slightly in March with a bump up in the pending home sales index from the National Association of Realtors. The trade group said its index rose 1.5% from February but was down 1.1% from the year before. It stood more than 26% below the 2001 index base, which the Realtors consider to be a normal sales level. The association said the monthly increase in contract signings amid rising mortgage interest rates suggested pent-up demand. It cited a lack of inventory, especially for young, first-time buyers. Among the top 50 metro areas in the country, the Realtors said the Milwaukee-Waukesha area had a 13.5% one-year gain in pending sales, second only to the Kansas City area, at 15%.  Wednesday No major announcements Thursday The four-week moving average for initial unemployment claims rose slightly for the third week in a row to remain 42% below its average since 1967. A Labor Department report suggested continued reluctance among employers to let workers go. Total jobless claims dropped 1.9% from the week before to 1.9 million, which was 2.9% below the same time in 2025. Friday Consumer sentiment declined 6.6% in April as the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran continued to weigh down expectations for personal finances and the broader economy. Sentiment overall was nearly 5% lower than in April 2025 and near its low levels in mid-2022, when inflation reached 40-year highs. According to the University of Michigan survey, consumers expect inflation to rise to 4.7% in the next year and to settle around 3.5% longer term. The latest Consumer Price Index showed inflation at 3.3% in March, well above the Federal Reserve’s long-term target of 2%. Market Closings for the Week Nasdaq – 24837, up 368 points or 1.5% S&P 500 – 7165, up 39 points or 0.5% Dow Jones Industrial Average – 49229, down 218 points or 0.4% 10-year U.S. Treasury Note – 4.31%, up 0.06 point

America's oil industry is privately lobbying top Trump administration officials — including the president himself — to block any permanent peace plan with Iran that would leave Tehran charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. POLITICO's Ben Lefebvre explains the oil industry's short-term and long-term concerns, how the White House is responding, and why this waterway could make or break the deal. Plus, a new POLITICO survey found that Europeans want more renewable energy even if it temporarily increases their bills, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration said energy consumption in the United States will remain flat through 2050. Ben Lefebvre is the deputy energy editor at POLITICO.  Nirmal Mulaikal is the co-host and executive producer of POLITICO Energy.  Matt Daily is the energy editor for POLITICO. Cyril Zaneski is executive editor of POLITICO's E&E News. Debra Kahn is the editorial director for energy and environmental coverage at POLITICO. Veronica Tejera is the deputy head of Audio/Video at POLITICO. Our theme music is by Pran Bandi. Follow the show on Apple, Spotify, Youtube and Instagram. Follow POLITICO here:    ➤ X: https://x.com/politico/ ➤ Instagram:  / politico      ➤ Facebook:  / politico   For more reporting on energy and the environment, subscribe to Power Switch, our free evening newsletter: https://www.politico.com/power-switch And for even deeper coverage and analysis, read our Morning Energy newsletter by subscribing to POLITICO Pro: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter-archive/morning-energy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A surge in natural gas prices this winter was a reminder of the relationship between fuel markets and wholesale electricity prices. In the latest episode of our Power Trends podcast, U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Energy Economist Andrew Iraola and Industry Economist Lindsay Aramayo unpack what drove the recent electricity price spikes, natural gas constraints, and what we can expect in the months ahead.Aramayo discussed recent price volatility, noting that wholesale electricity prices averaged about $70 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in New York prior to Winter Storm Fern. “By the time we released our February Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), those prices had increased to $220 per MWh,” she said. “That helps you see how volatile wholesale prices can be, and how dependent they are on natural gas prices.”New York relies on natural gas for residential heating and electricity production. Winter Storm Fern sharply increased heating demand while temporarily reducing natural gas availability. The disruptions to natural gas supply were caused in part by “freeze‑offs,” which occur during extreme cold when water and other liquids freeze and block the flow of natural gas.The reduction in fuel availability contributed to record natural gas withdrawals and a jump in gas prices. Iraola noted the behavior of the system in January and February often helps guide the rest of the year. If there is a large storage withdrawal, that can keep inventories below the five-year average, which puts upward pressure on prices. It also makes it more difficult to rebuild inventories during injection season, which runs from March through October.The discussion underscored why natural gas remains a key driver of electricity costs, particularly in regions like New York that sit at the end of the natural gas pipeline system. This can create tighter constraints during peak demand.According to Aramayo, data center buildout is a driver of electricity demand in other regions including the Mid-Atlantic and South. In New York, it's electrification of the transportation and building sectors that's driving demand.  EIA's reports note that natural gas will remain the dominant fuel for power generation and predict natural gas price increases, driven by stronger demand, will continue to place upward pressure on wholesale electricity prices in the coming years.The STEO reflects an increasingly complex and uncertain energy environment, the economists said. When evaluating natural gas markets, analysts consider volatility shaped by weather, infrastructure constraints, and fluctuating demand.Understanding these dynamics is essential for making sense of wholesale electricity prices and for planning a reliable, affordable grid.Additional ResourcesU.S. Energy Information Administration Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO)NYISO Winter Electricity Pricing Resource PageLearn MoreFollow us on X/Twitter @NewYorkISO, LinkedIn @NYISO, Bluesky @nyiso.comRead our blogs and watch our videos

Oil Prices, the Strait of Hormuz, and What It Means for Your Retirement Portfolio When a geopolitical crisis sends oil prices surging, the effects ripple through nearly every corner of the economy — and that includes your retirement savings. On this week’s episode of The Financial Hour of the Tom Dupree Show, Tom Dupree Jr. and Mike Johnson broke down exactly what’s driving elevated oil and gasoline prices right now, what history tells us about these moments, and — most importantly — how Dupree Financial Group is actively managing client portfolios in response. If you’re thinking about retirement or already in retirement, this conversation is one you’ll want to understand. Why Oil Prices Are Surging Right Now The immediate cause is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which roughly 20–25% of the world’s daily oil traffic passes — approximately 8 to 9 million barrels per day. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, 89% of that oil is ultimately destined for Asia, with China receiving around 38% and India approximately 14–15%. This isn’t primarily a U.S. supply problem — but it is absolutely a U.S. pricing problem. As Tom Dupree Jr. explained on the show, American oil — West Texas Intermediate — is priced in a global market. When global supply is disrupted, domestic prices rise regardless of whether the U.S. is importing that oil. “When the world oil market goes up, our oil goes up regardless of whether we are buying it from anywhere else. So it even affects us here in the U.S., even though we are energy independent.” — Tom Dupree Jr. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve: A Band-Aid, Not a Fix A natural question is whether the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) can ease the pressure. The short answer: not meaningfully. According to the EIA’s SPR data, the reserve holds oil in 60 salt caverns along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana, with a maximum capacity of 714 million barrels. As of early March, the SPR held approximately 415 million barrels — representing roughly 125 days of supply — but its maximum release rate is only about 4.5 million barrels per day, a fraction of the daily volume bottlenecked through the strait. It also takes around 13 days for released oil to reach the market. Mike Johnson put it plainly: this is a supply chain bottleneck, not a shortage of oil. “Think about what happened during COVID with supply chain issues. This is the same scenario, maybe worse. It just happens to be with oil.” — Mike Johnson Short-Term Inflation, Long-Term Uncertainty High oil prices touch virtually everything — plastics, fertilizer, transportation, heating, cooling, and even the energy demands of AI computing infrastructure. Fertilizer inputs, including urea and ammonia, also pass through the strait, creating additional upward pressure on food costs that could affect companies like Caterpillar and John Deere further down the supply chain. In the short term, elevated oil prices are inflationary. But if the disruption causes a broader economic slowdown, deflationary forces could eventually follow. The FINRA investor education resources regularly caution that geopolitical shocks create exactly this kind of dual-directional uncertainty — and that reacting impulsively can do more harm than the event itself. The bond market is already reflecting this tension. As Tom noted on the show, the 30-year government bond appears to be heading back toward 5%, as fixed income investors price in the possibility that inflation may not be fully contained — and that the Fed may hold rates steady for the remainder of the year. What History Tells Us About War and Market Volatility Mike Johnson reviewed the historical record during the episode, and the findings may surprise you. Historically, market volatility spikes at the onset of a conflict but tends to recover relatively quickly. More instructive is what happens during extreme volatility clusters — periods when large moves, both up and down, happen on back-to-back days. The 2008–2009 financial crisis is the clearest example. Following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the market experienced a sequence of 4–8% swings — up and down — within the same week. As Mike pointed out, those kinds of moves translated to 3,000-point Dow swings, similar to what investors saw on “Liberation Day” earlier this year. “When you have these clusters of volatility, it shakes all investors to their core. It’s ultimate fear and ultimate greed, literally back-to-back days.” — Mike Johnson Trying to trade through that kind of volatility is, in practice, nearly impossible. The window to act is measured in hours, not days — and you don’t know which direction the next move will be. How Dupree Financial Is Managing Portfolios Right Now This is where personalized portfolio management matters most. Rather than riding out the volatility passively or reacting emotionally, the Dupree Financial team made deliberate, research-driven moves this week. Trimmed energy positions: The team took partial profits on two energy holdings — one exploration and production company and one large integrated oil company — that had appreciated 15–25% due to the current bottleneck. They did not sell entirely, recognizing that the situation could persist, but reduced exposure to a scenario they cannot predict. Preserved cash and optionality: The proceeds were partially redeployed into a shorter-term bond position at approximately 3.71% yield, while keeping some in cash to maintain flexibility for future opportunities. Maintained dividend-paying positions: Most holdings in client portfolios continue to pay dividends, providing income regardless of short-term price swings. Positioned for potential buying opportunities: If markets experience a capitulation event — a sharp sell-off where stocks become “stupidly cheap,” as Tom described it — having cash on hand means the ability to act rather than watch. Tom framed the profit-taking this way: trimming energy stocks that had appreciated 15–25% in roughly two and a half months was equivalent to capturing three to four years of dividend income in a single move — a perspective that reframes “selling high” as disciplined income harvesting. “You let the market tell you when it’s time to sell. We’ve had several positions that we bought at reasonable prices, and over time the market got very, very happy about those particular stocks. And finally it became a compelling thing to let the market have it.” — Tom Dupree Jr. This approach — owning things at reasonable valuations, monitoring current yield as a measure of risk, and acting when the market offers the opportunity — reflects the investment philosophy Dupree Financial has built its practice around. It stands in contrast to a set-it-and-forget-it mutual fund approach or the kind of mass-market allocation model offered by large national firms that assign clients to counselors rather than connecting them directly to the people managing their money. Key Takeaways for Investors Thinking About or In Retirement The Strait of Hormuz closure is a supply bottleneck, not a shortage — oil prices are high because delivery is disrupted, not because oil has become scarce. Duration is the key variable. The longer the blockade lasts, the deeper the economic impact. The market is pricing in uncertainty because nobody knows the timeline. Oil companies are not a one-way bet. When the strait reopens, prices could fall sharply — possibly to the $50 range, according to at least one analyst — meaning energy stocks could give back gains quickly. Volatility clusters. During high-uncertainty periods, large market moves — up and down — tend to happen in rapid succession. Trying to trade them is a losing game for most investors. Cash has strategic value. Having liquidity during volatile markets means having the ability to buy quality assets at depressed prices — an advantage a fully-invested, static portfolio doesn’t have. Income-focused investing provides an anchor. When you’re in or approaching retirement, dividends and bond coupons keep cash flowing even when prices are moving unpredictably. For more perspective on how global markets are moving, visit the Market Commentary archive on the Dupree Financial website. Frequently Asked Questions How do rising oil prices affect my retirement portfolio? Higher oil prices can be inflationary in the short term, which may pressure the Federal Reserve to hold interest rates higher for longer. That can create headwinds for both stocks and bonds. For retirees drawing income from their portfolios, sustained inflation also erodes purchasing power. A portfolio built around dividend income, short-duration bonds, and carefully valued equities is generally better positioned to navigate this environment than one relying purely on price appreciation. Should I sell my energy stocks during the Strait of Hormuz crisis? Not necessarily — but taking partial profits after a 15–25% run may be prudent, especially in a retirement portfolio. The uncertainty around how long the blockade lasts cuts both ways: prices could go higher, or the situation could resolve and oil could fall sharply. Trimming rather than selling entirely allows you to capture gains while keeping some exposure to a continued rally. Is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve enough to stabilize oil prices? No. While the SPR currently holds approximately 415 million barrels, it can only release around 4.5 million barrels per day and takes roughly two weeks to reach the market. That’s a fraction of the volume being bottlenecked through the Strait of Hormuz. The SPR is useful as a short-term pressure valve but cannot replace the full flow of international oil traffic. What should retirees do when markets are extremely volatile? Avoid making large moves based on short-term headlines. Volatility tends to cluster — meaning big down days are often followed by big up days, and vice versa. Investors who sell in panic often miss the recovery. Maintaining a clear plan, holding dividend-paying positions for income, and preserving some cash to deploy on attractive opportunities is a more disciplined approach for long-term retirement investors. Why does the price of oil affect Americans even if the U.S. is energy independent? Because oil is priced in a global market. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, trades based on worldwide supply and demand dynamics. When global supply is disrupted — regardless of where that oil was originally headed — U.S. prices rise in tandem with international prices. Is Your Portfolio Ready for What Comes Next? Moments like this one — oil supply shocks, bond market volatility, uncertain Fed policy — are exactly when the difference between a personalized investment strategy and a generic one becomes most visible. At Dupree Financial Group, our team does our own in-house research and manages client portfolios directly. You’ll always have access to the people making decisions about your money — not an assigned counselor at a call center. If you’re not certain what you own in your portfolio or why, now is a good time to find out. We offer a complimentary portfolio review with no obligation. Schedule your review online or call us directly at (859) 233-0400. → Request Your Personalized Portfolio Analysis Dupree Financial Group is an SEC-registered investment advisor. The information presented in this podcast and blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Please consult with a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions. To learn more, visit SEC.gov/investor. The post Oil Prices, War, and Your Retirement Portfolio appeared first on Dupree Financial.

Permitting reform negotiations on Capitol Hill may be gaining new momentum after weeks of stalled talks, and now the White House is stepping into the mix. POLITICO's Kelsey Brugger breaks down why negotiations restarted now, how rising energy prices and electricity demand are raising the political stakes ahead of the midterms, and whether lawmakers can finally overcome years of failed attempts to pass a sweeping permitting deal. Plus, the Energy Information Administration sharply raised its forecasts for oil and gasoline prices for 2026, and a new report says that U.S. solar capacity is now expected to nearly triple by 2036. Kelsey Brugger covers energy and climate politics on Capitol Hill for POLITICO's E&E News. Stefan Todorovic is the video producer of POLITICO Energy. Nirmal Mulaikal is the co-host and executive producer of POLITICO Energy.  Matt Daily is the energy editor for POLITICO. Cyril Zaneski is executive editor of POLITICO's E&E News. Debra Kahn is the editorial director for energy and environmental coverage at POLITICO. Our theme music is by Pran Bandi. Follow the show on Apple, Spotify, Youtube and Instagram. Follow POLITICO here:    ➤ X: https://x.com/politico/ ➤ Instagram:  / politico      ➤ Facebook:  / politico   For more reporting on energy and the environment, subscribe to Power Switch, our free evening newsletter: https://www.politico.com/power-switch And for even deeper coverage and analysis, read our Morning Energy newsletter by subscribing to POLITICO Pro: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter-archive/morning-energy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When oil prices spike nearly 30% in a matter of days and a weak jobs report hits on the same Friday, the word on every investor’s mind is stagflation. On this episode of The Financial Hour of the Tom Dupree Show, host Tom Dupree, James Dupree, and Mike Johnson break down how the Middle East conflict is rippling through oil markets, what it means for interest rates and inflation, and why personalized investment management matters more than ever when volatility takes center stage. Whether you’re thinking about retirement or already drawing income from your portfolio, the current environment is a powerful reminder that how your money is managed — and who manages it — can make the difference between weathering the storm and watching your principal erode. How the Middle East Conflict Is Driving Oil Prices and Market Turbulence The most immediate market impact from the conflict between Israel, the U.S., and Iran has been felt in energy prices. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude surged from roughly $72 per barrel to touch $92, according to data tracked by the U.S. Energy Information Administration — a move of nearly 30% in just days. Mike Johnson explained the supply dynamics at play: “Kuwait — they’re cutting oil production. And this is because the Strait of Hormuz is cut off for all practical purposes. These big producers are running out of storage for the oil. They’re essentially closing up the wells.” The Strait of Hormuz handles approximately one-fifth of all global oil shipments daily. With roughly 90 million barrels of crude produced worldwide each day, shutting down that corridor has massive supply implications. Tom Dupree noted the physical challenge: “What keeps an oil well going is the oil flowing through all the little capillaries. When that gets turned off, it starts to sludge up.” Restarting shut-in wells can take days to weeks, and operators risk losing pressure and production permanently. For those tracking market commentary on gasoline prices, Mike pointed out a critical consumer threshold: “When you get to about $3.50 a gallon, that’s when you start seeing an impact on spending in a more meaningful way. And then $4 is when things start getting much worse in terms of consumer spending.” Stagflation Fears: Why One Jobs Report Has Investors on Edge The Friday jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics came in weaker than expected, and the combination of rising commodity prices with a slowing labor market triggered immediate stagflation concerns across Wall Street. As Mike explained: “The market’s immediate knee-jerk reaction was that terrible S-word — stagflation. If we have a slowing economy with higher commodity prices, you have inflation and a slowing economy.” Tom was quick to add perspective: “One jobs number does not stagflation make. It’s a trend. But the fact that oil’s going up is gonna be considered inflationary, and then you get that jobs report on top of it.” Despite the volatility — with the market opening down 1.5% on Monday before recovering, followed by a sharp Tuesday sell-off — the broader indices showed resilience for the week. Mike observed: “We’ve essentially declared war. You’ve got oil prices up 30%. The market’s only off a little bit for the week. It’s been resilient as a whole.” This kind of choppy, bifurcated market is exactly why a disciplined investment philosophy matters. When risk-on and risk-off signals get scrambled day to day, reactive investors often make the wrong moves at the worst times. AI and the Job Market: Disruption Is Real, But It’s Not All Bad The conversation turned to how artificial intelligence is reshaping the employment landscape and what it means for market sentiment. James Dupree offered a nuanced take on the weak jobs data: “The AI stocks — they don’t really tie that to the economy because AI is going to replace jobs. So it might actually be good if there’s a bad jobs report for those AI stocks.” Mike broke down where the disruption is hitting hardest: “Some of your more tenured and senior workers — they’re benefiting from AI. What it’s impacting are the entry-level jobs. The number crunchers, entry-level analysts — those are the type of things that are able to be AI-ed away.” Tom drew a historical parallel: “AI is obviously the big thing right now. It’s the same way that the dot-com stuff was 20-something years ago. There will be winners and there will be losers, but I happen to believe that AI may actually create jobs because there will be more things that people can do.” For investors, the takeaway is that AI-related stocks occupy a unique space in the current market. James pointed to NVIDIA’s forward P/E ratio of 22 — below the S&P 500’s five-year average of roughly 23 — as evidence that some of the market’s fastest-growing companies are actually reasonably valued despite the broader market looking stretched. Sequence of Returns Risk: The Retirement Danger Most People Don’t See Coming Perhaps the most critical segment of the episode focused on a concept that every person in retirement or thinking about retirement needs to understand: sequence of returns risk. This is the idea that when your returns happen matters just as much as what they average over time — especially when you’re withdrawing money from your portfolio. Mike walked through a clear example: “Let’s say you have a million dollars and you’re drawing 4%, which is $40,000 a year. In the first year, the market goes down by 10% — your million dollars is now $900,000 plus you took out $40,000. So now you’re at $860,000. The next year, another 10% drop — down another $86,000 plus the $40,000 you withdrew. You have to get massive rises in the stock market to get back to even.” He continued: “There comes a point of no return where you’re forced to lower your withdrawal. If a million dollars is now $700,000 and you’re taking out $40,000, that’s now a 5.5% withdrawal rate. It’s negative compounding.” This is one of the core reasons the team at Dupree Financial Group structures retirement portfolios around dividend-paying investments. Tom explained the logic: “Sequence of returns is one reason why we invest for dividends — so that if the sequence of the return is negative, we may not have to be in a position to sell stocks in a down market. We can draw from the dividends.” For anyone approaching retirement or already drawing income, understanding this risk is essential. Resources from FINRA’s investor education center offer additional background on managing withdrawal strategies and retirement income planning. Berkshire Hathaway Under Greg Abel: Culture, Buybacks, and Alignment The episode also covered Berkshire Hathaway’s transition to new leadership under Greg Abel, who took over from Warren Buffett. Abel’s first annual letter to shareholders ran 18 pages — longer than Buffett’s typical letters — and signaled a leadership style rooted in operational detail and cultural preservation. Mike highlighted two significant announcements. First, Berkshire is resuming share buybacks for the first time since May 2024. Second, Abel is investing 100% of his post-tax salary — roughly $15 million per year — into Berkshire stock personally. “It’s all about alignment with shareholders,” Mike said. “It fits the Berkshire culture to a T.” The team also discussed Abel’s emphasis on corporate culture as a lasting competitive advantage. As Abel wrote in his shareholder letter, “Culture is our most treasured asset.” Tom connected that philosophy to Dupree Financial Group’s own approach: “We’ve worked to earn the trust of our clients and we have to keep working to keep that.” Historical Market Returns After Geopolitical Events Mike shared data that puts the current conflict in long-term perspective. Looking at one-year returns following major geopolitical events, the numbers are striking: 11.2% after the Korean War, 27% after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13% after the Six-Day War, 10% after the Gulf War, nearly 27% after the invasion of Iraq, 19% after the Brexit vote, and 43% in the year following COVID-19. However, Tom added an important caveat for retirees: “What about the 30% drop that came before that? Individuals have to look at sequence of return, not just the long-term averages.” This distinction between how a static portfolio and a retirement portfolio respond to volatility is central to Dupree Financial Group’s investment philosophy — building portfolios of quality, dividend-paying companies in separately managed accounts where each client owns their individual stocks rather than being pooled into a mutual fund. Key Takeaways from This Episode Oil prices have surged nearly 30% due to Strait of Hormuz disruptions, with WTI crude jumping from $72 to $92 per barrel, creating ripple effects across the global economy. Stagflation fears are rising as weak jobs data combines with inflationary energy prices, though one report alone doesn’t confirm a trend. The $3.50 gas price threshold is where consumer spending starts to contract meaningfully — and $4 per gallon is where it gets significantly worse. Sequence of returns risk is more important than average returns for anyone in retirement or approaching it — early losses combined with withdrawals create negative compounding that can be devastating. Dividend investing provides a buffer during market downturns by allowing retirees to draw income without being forced to sell stocks at depressed prices. AI is reshaping the job market, benefiting senior workers while displacing entry-level roles, and creating a unique dynamic for tech stock valuations. Berkshire Hathaway’s Greg Abel is resuming share buybacks and investing his entire post-tax salary in Berkshire stock, signaling strong alignment with shareholders. Diversification across sectors — including energy exposure — helps portfolios weather geopolitical shocks through negative correlation benefits. Frequently Asked Questions How do rising oil prices affect my retirement portfolio? Rising oil prices can trigger inflation, which erodes purchasing power and can hurt broad market returns. However, portfolios with energy sector exposure may benefit from higher commodity prices. The key is having a diversified, actively managed portfolio that can adapt to changing market conditions rather than being locked into a one-size-fits-all approach. What is sequence of returns risk and why does it matter? Sequence of returns risk refers to the danger that poor market returns early in retirement — combined with portfolio withdrawals — can permanently damage your nest egg, even if long-term average returns are positive. A $1 million portfolio losing 10% while withdrawing $40,000 drops to $860,000 in year one, making recovery increasingly difficult. This is why income-focused strategies using dividends can help reduce the need to sell during downturns. Should I be worried about stagflation? One weak jobs report alongside rising oil prices raises the question, but stagflation requires a sustained trend of economic stagnation paired with persistent inflation. The current market has shown resilience despite the volatility. That said, having a portfolio strategy that accounts for inflation protection — through dividend growth stocks and diversified sector exposure — is prudent regardless of the economic outlook. How is AI affecting investment opportunities right now? AI-related stocks are trading somewhat independently from broader economic indicators. Companies like NVIDIA are showing strong earnings growth with forward valuations actually below the S&P 500 average. AI is displacing some entry-level jobs while creating opportunities for more experienced workers, making it a complex but potentially rewarding area for long-term investors. What did Berkshire Hathaway’s new leader announce? Greg Abel, who succeeded Warren Buffett, announced that Berkshire would resume share buybacks and that he would personally invest 100% of his post-tax salary — approximately $15 million annually — into Berkshire stock. His 18-page shareholder letter emphasized operational detail and cultural preservation as his top priorities. Don’t Let Market Noise Derail Your Retirement When oil prices surge, jobs data disappoints, and geopolitical uncertainty dominates the headlines, it’s easy to feel like the ground is shifting beneath your feet. But reactive investing — selling in a panic or chasing the latest trend — is one of the biggest threats to a retirement portfolio. At Dupree Financial Group, every client gets a separately managed account with direct access to their portfolio managers — not an assigned counselor at a call center. Your portfolio is built around your retirement timeline, your income needs, and your risk tolerance, with quality dividend-paying companies that provide income even when markets get choppy. If you don’t know what you own in your portfolio, you need to. Call (859) 233-0400 or schedule your complimentary portfolio review online to find out how a personalized approach could help protect — and grow — your retirement income. Listen to the full episode and explore more market insights on The Financial Hour podcast archive. Hear from clients who’ve made the switch to personalized investment management. Dupree Financial Group is a registered investment advisor (RIA) registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. The information provided in this blog post and podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Please consult with a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions. For more information, please review our firm disclosures on SEC.gov. The post Oil Prices Surge 30%: What Rising Market Volatility Means for Your Retirement Portfolio appeared first on Dupree Financial.

Project 2025 began not with a bill in Congress, but with a 900‑plus page playbook assembled by the Heritage Foundation and allied conservative groups, billed as a roadmap for the next Republican president. Heritage calls it a plan to “take back our government from the deep state,” while critics describe it as a bid to, in the words of the National Federation of Federal Employees, “destroy the administrative state” and replace it with loyalists.At the heart of the project is a personnel revolution. The blueprint urges reinstating and vastly expanding “Schedule F,” a Trump‑era job category that would let presidents reclassify tens of thousands of career civil servants as at‑will employees. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, one architect of the original order, James Sherk, projected roughly 50,000 positions could lose civil service protections. Advocates argue this would “ensure the President's policies are faithfully executed.” Opponents warn it would allow mass firings based on ideology, undermining neutral expertise in law enforcement, public health, and regulation.The document does not stop at staffing. It zeroes in on independent agencies that Congress designed to be insulated from day‑to‑day political pressure. In Project 2025's own terms, these are “so‑called independent agencies.” Chapters urge giving the president power to remove commissioners at will and subject their rules to aggressive White House review. Analysts at the Center for American Progress note that this could let a future president pressure the Federal Communications Commission on media licenses or keep the Federal Trade Commission from issuing rules like its recent ban on most noncompete clauses.Concrete agency changes are spelled out in vivid detail. A chapter on the Department of Energy recommends outsourcing core analytical work of the Energy Information Administration to private contractors, a move Boston Review warns could turn basic energy data into an ideological battleground. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Project 2025 proposes ending the role of career staff in awarding hundreds of millions in grants and handing that power to a single political appointee. The Health and Human Services chapter calls for steering teen pregnancy prevention funds toward abstinence‑only programs, reversing a decade of evidence‑based grantmaking.Running through the plan is a view of presidential power sometimes called the “unitary executive theory.” According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Project 2025 would concentrate control of the Justice Department in the White House, prioritizing an attorney general “above all loyal to the President” and easing the removal of officials who resist politically driven investigations.Supporters frame these ideas as a long‑overdue correction to an unaccountable bureaucracy. Critics, including nonpartisan legal scholars, warn that neutral guardrails like Senate confirmation, independent data, and protected civil servants are what keep any president from becoming an “imperial” figure.With the next election cycle underway, Project 2025 now functions as both a governing manual and a political litmus test. Candidates are being pressed to endorse, amend, or reject its proposals. The real test, though, will come if a future administration tries to turn this blueprint into executive orders, agency reorganizations, and real‑world firings.Thanks for tuning in, and come back next week for more.Some great Deals https://amzn.to/49SJ3QsFor more check out http://www.quietplease.aiThis content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI

The Energy Information Administration reports record daily ethanol production and increased stocks. Geoff Cooper with the Renewable Fuels Association says Congress is feeling pressure to act on E-15 legislation to help increase corn demand. 

Flags have been ordered at half staff in California as the state and the agriculture community nationwide mourns the loss of Representative Doug LaMalfa.  The Energy Information Administration reports ethanol represented over 11 percent of the nation's gasoline supply in October. Trade officials say China has purchased additional soybean supplies this week. 

As the global demand for clean energy intensifies, nuclear power is enjoying a resurgence not seen in decades. However, this renewed interest has exposed a critical vulnerability in the U.S. energy sector: a massive disconnect between uranium consumption and domestic production. As a guest on The POWER Podcast, Thomas Lamb, president and CEO of Myriad Uranium, discussed some of the complexities of the nuclear fuel cycle and how junior exploration companies are racing to secure America's energy future. The Great American Supply Deficit To understand the urgency of the current uranium market, one must first grasp the sheer scale of consumption. A single large-scale nuclear reactor consumes approximately 400,000 to 500,000 pounds of uranium oxide concentrate (U3O8) annually, depending on design, capacity, and operating efficiency. The U.S. operates 94 commercial reactors today, resulting in a national consumption of roughly 37 million to 47 million pounds of U3O8 per year. The domestic production figures, however, paint a starkly contrasting picture. “The United States consumes, for very round numbers, 50 million pounds of uranium per year, and produces a million pounds of uranium per year,” Lamb explained. To be more specific, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that domestic production of U3O8 was 677,000 pounds in 2024, and it's been much lower than that in the not-too-distant past. This imbalance creates a precarious reliance on foreign imports. Lamb noted that Kazakhstan alone produces more than 40% of the world's uranium. More concerning for U.S. national security is the country's reliance on Russia, where a surprisingly high percentage of U.S. reactor fuel bundles are sourced. “You have a worldwide supply deficit, and then you have an enormous domestic production deficit in the United States relative to consumption. That makes the U.S. vulnerable,” Lamb said. “What if Kazakhstan, China, [and] Russia kind of work together? What if they cut off the United States? What if some other things happen? The U.S. could be short of uranium.” Revitalizing History: The Copper Mountain Project Myriad Uranium is positioning itself to fill this gap by revitalizing past assets rather than starting from scratch. The company's flagship asset, the Copper Mountain Uranium Project in Wyoming, was a focal point of Union Pacific's energy subsidiary in the 1970s. Union Pacific invested approximately CA$117 million (in 2024 dollars, US$84.7 million) into the site, planning a large-scale mine to fuel reactors in Southern California that were ultimately never built due to the post-1979 nuclear freeze. Because the project was abandoned due to external market forces rather than a lack of resources, it represents a “brownfield” opportunity. “In our case, we already know it's there because a lot of the work was done,” Lamb said. “Now, we just have to … bring the information current,” he added.

Tariff juggling - just moving them around - no studies, no rationale Big Moves - One of the worst Novembers since 2008 The Big Short - End of a Era? PLUS we are now on Spotify and Amazon Music/Podcasts! Click HERE for Show Notes and Links DHUnplugged is now streaming live - with listener chat. Click on link on the right sidebar. Love the Show? Then how about a Donation? Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter Follow Andrew Horowitz on Twitter   Warm-Up - Last Few Days for IBIT CTP - Closing Price This Friday - The Big Short - End of a Era? - What is happening to Bitcoin? - THC laws changing - interesting loophole closed Markets - Tariff juggling - just moving them around - no studies, no rationale - Big Moves - One of the worst Novembers since 2008 - Hindenburg Omen - Fed Losing Cred WHY? - If tariffs are not inflationary and this administration has brought down prices on groceries.... - President Trump signed an EO Friday lowering tariffs on beef, tomatoes, coffee and bananas, according to Bloomberg - So , just shooting from the hip on all of this are we? --- Seriously, where is the plan, where is the analysis, where are the results? Total horseshit More Tariffs - Switzerland and U.S. agree to trade deal; U.S. will lower tariffs to 15% from 39%; Swiss companies are planning to make direct investments in the USA amounting to $200 billion by the end of 2028 - Switzerland will reduce some import duties on US Imports - For other US export interests, a solution was agreed that takes Switzerland's agricultural policy interests into account: under the agreement, Switzerland will grant the US duty-free bilateral tariff quotas on selected US export products: 500 tonnes for beef, 1,000 tonnes for bison meat and 1,500 tonnes for poultry meat. - Furthermore, Swiss companies are planning to make direct investments in the USA amounting to $200 bln by the end of 2028. - What did we accomplish here? - Just going back to what it was with a slightly higher tariff on Swiss goods than before...BECAUSE WE WERE GETTING KILLED WITH FOOD COSTS Fed Update - Markets no longer view December as a sure bet - Lots of Fed speakers out with commentary that is hawkish - Currently, there is a 46% chance of a rate cut by 0.25% - a month ago it was at 95% - AND, they should not cut in the absence of all data (Stephan Miran looking for 0.50%, but he is a total tool) More Horseshit! - Former Federal Reserve Board Gov. Adriana Kugler broke the central bank's rules regarding stock trading, according to a report released by the U.S. Government Ethics Office. - Now we know why she abruptly resigned a few months ago - That disclosure shows two kinds of violations of Fed rules regarding financial transactions by senior officials at the central bank: purchases of stocks of individual companies, as opposed to mutual funds; and purchases of securities during so-called “blackout periods” leading up to and after Federal Open Market Committee meetings. - Oh - Supposedly her husband did it - but come on! - Fed losing more credibility - this is not the first time.... StampFlation - The Postal Service filed notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission for Shipping Services price changes to take effect Jan. 18, 2026. The proposed adjustments were approved by the governors of USPS this week. - The change would raise prices approximately 6.6 percent for Priority Mail service, 5.1 percent for Priority Mail Express service, 7.8 percent for USPS Ground Advantage and 6.0 percent for Parcel Select. BIG - Michael Burry, the investor whose successful bets against the U.S. housing market in 2008 were recounted in the movie "The Big Short," is closing his hedge fund, Scion Asset Management. - In a letter to investors dated October 27, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Burry said he would liquidate the funds and return capital, "but for a small audit/tax holdback" by the end of the year. - "My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets," Burry said in the letter. - Put on a big OPTIONS short on NVDA and PLTR - We checked and his Registration expired.. Has about $155 million under management - not so much.. - He hinted that he will be back doing something and will announce on November 25th... Softbank - We know that they CUT all of their NVDA holdings - Looking at the 13F, also cut ORCL - New position in INTC - Looking to raise significant cast to outlay to private companies over the next couple of months. - Stock is up 120% YTD, DOWN 12% last week - Did you know He had for many years the distinction of being the person who had lost the most money in history (more than $59 billion during the dot-com crash of 2000 alone, when his SoftBank shares plummeted), a feat surpassed by Elon Musk in the following decades. THC Blues ??? - A new ban, tucked into legislation ending the longest shutdown in history, outlaws products containing more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. == Industry executives said that threshold will wipe out 95% of the $28 billion hemp retail market when it takes effect in a year. - 300,000 jobs could be effected ($28 billion annually) - Possible that state laws will win out, but clearly Federal laws are not going the way of the industry. - Concern that the blackmarket will grow again - However, this can be seen in several ways as it may be cleaning up some of the selling of things like Delta-8 those weird knock-offs seen at gas stations) UK Tax Scrap - British government bond yields rose sharply on Friday morning as investors react to reports that Finance Minister Rachel Reeves will scrap an expected increase in income tax. - The moves came as investors reacted to a report from the Financial Times of an income tax U-turn. - Remember that they did a similar plan a few years ago that caused major havoc with markets and currencies until they withdrew the idea. How Does This Work? - House Republicans drafting legislation that will redirect Affordable Care Act subsidies to individuals and away from health insurance companies, according to Politico Some Eco ...?? - Employment Situation for September 2025 that was supposed to be released on Friday, October 3, 2025, will now be release  Thursday, November 20, 2025 8:30 AM ET - What about October? White House says it may NEVER be released Hindenburg Omen - There was some excitement in the world of technical analysis the past two weeks as we saw 5 separate signals fire for something called the Hindenburg Omen. This is a warning signal of trouble, but trouble does not always come. What is fair to say is that Hindenburg Omen signals have appeared at every major stock market top going back several decades. - According to Tom McClellan: The current count of 5 signals is not as big as some other clusters. But we got 4 signals in a cluster at the end of 2021, ahead of the 2022 bear market. So 4 is enough, if the market is inclined to live up to this warning. And 2 signals were enough back in December 2024 and March 2025 to tell us about the trouble in the market which unfolded in the April 2025 tariff reaction minicrash. But 5 is better. Pied Piper - Losing Followers - OpenAi plans to invest $1.4 Trillion over the next 5 years or so - Biggest beneficiary - Oracle - Stock went from $250 to $340 overnight - now a $220 (Full Round-trip) - Oracle is looking to raise $38 billion in debt sales to help fund its AI buildout, according to sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the information is confidential. Bloomberg reported on the planned debt raise last month. Disney Earnings - Hmmmmm...... - Shares fall 8% as revenue misses - Digging in for a prolonged flight with YouTube - The company also missed quarterly revenue expectations as the cable weakness overshadowed strong growth in the company's streaming and parks businesses central to its growth. - Family of 4 - Trip to Disney - A  3-night trip with tickets and dining is estimated to be between $6,000 and $9,000 Starbucks - Can it get any worse for this company? - Starbucks Workers United launched a strike in more than 40 cities and 65 stores on the day of chain's Red Cup Day sales event. - NY incoming Mayor Mandami says there should be a total boycott of the stores - The union is pushing for improved hours, higher wages and the resolution of hundreds of unfair labor practice charges levied against Starbucks. Buffett - Berkshire - Berkshire Hathaway revealed a $4.3 billion stake in Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL), and further reduced its stake in Apple (AAPL), detailing its equity portfolio for the last time before Warren Buffett ends his 60-year run as chief executive officer. - They also sold more Bank of America - *6% reduction - although still the thrid largest stockholder - Sold homebuilder DR Horton - Bought position in Domino's Pizza and Chubb ---- DPZ chart looks terrible Over to China - Economy not getting any better - Fixed-asset investment contracted 1.7% for the first ten months of the year, steepening from a 0.5% decline in the January-to-September period. - Retail sales climbed 2.9% in October from a year earlier, softening from a 3% year-on-year rise in September. - Industrial output expanded 4.9% in October, a slowdown from a 6.5% rise in the prior month. - The last time China recorded a contraction in fixed-asset investment was in 2020 during the pandemic, according to data going back to 1992 from Wind Information, a private database focused on the country. Electric Prices - We know that the new wave of data centers are requiring HUGE amounts of energy to keep them running - Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In this episode, we dive into what is driving the recent downward pressure on oil prices. The Energy Information Administration released their October short-term energy outlook with a projection that caught our attention. They're forecasting that oil prices could fall to $47.77 per barrel in 2026—a 26% decrease from recent levels. That price sits below the $50 per barrel mark that industry analysts often cite as a critical breakeven point for shale profitability. For those of us who own mineral rights or receive royalty payments, this forecast has real implications worth understanding.  Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn our take on what oil prices are likely to do in 2026 and how this could impact future drilling and your oil royalties. As always, links to the resources mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at mineralrightspodcast.com.

A day on the job includes hundreds of quarters, giant balls of lint, and fishing weird stuff out of machines. Zachary Crockett throws in a load. SOURCES:Jordan Berry, owner of Laundromat Resource. RESOURCES:"Appliances in U.S. homes, by housing unit type, 2020," (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2023)."How the Washing Machine Liberated The Masses," by Allen Therisa (Culturescape, 2023)."Industry Overview," (Coin Laundry Association). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A bullish long-term outlook for rising natural gas demand and pricing has partially mitigated the current deep concerns about the steep erosion of oil prices. However, short-term gas pricing has proven very volatile, as the near-month NYMEX price has yo-yoed dramatically in October and the Energy Information Administration recently cut its January forecast. In today's RBN blog, we present a new metric that calculates the gas price sensitivity of major U.S. producers.

The Energy Information Administration said the U.S. is heading toward a record amount of ethanol exports in 2025. NAFB News ServiceSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When gas prices skyrocket, do station owners get a windfall? And where do their profits really come from? Zachary Crockett pulls up to the pump. SOURCES:Garrett Golding, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.Jeetander P. Sethi, founding member of the American Petroleum and Convenience Store Association.Kai Trimble-Lea, owner of a B.P. gas station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. RESOURCES:"Top Numbers Driving America's Gasoline Demand," by Lem Smith (American Petroleum Institute, 2022)."Electric Cars Are Coming. How Long Until They Rule the Road?" by Brad Plumer, Nadja Popovich and Blacki Migliozzi (The New York Times, 2021)."Petroleum & Other Liquids," (U.S. Energy Information Administration). EXTRAS:"In the 1890s, the Best-Selling Car Was … Electric," by Freakonomics Radio (2022)."Is it Too Late for General Motors to Go Electric?" by Freakonomics Radio (2020).  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Electricity bills are expected to go up this Winter. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts an average electricity bill rise of approximately 4% from November until March 2026, reaching about $1,130 nationally. What are you doing, if anything, to mitigate the impact of those increased energy rates? 

The average cost of gasoline nationwide is hovering near the $3 mark and could soon dip below it, that's according to industry experts. That should be good news for our wallets and the overall economy. When Americans are using less of their income to fuel up their cars, they can be using that cash on other things, especially the rapidly approaching holiday shopping season. Unfortunately, however, home energy bills are expected to rise this winter, according to a report released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration this week Phil Flynn, a Senior Market Analyst at the Price Futures Group and Fox Business contributor, speaks with co-host of "The Big Money Show" Jackie DeAngelis about what's behind both of these trends, and what they tell us about the economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The average cost of gasoline nationwide is hovering near the $3 mark and could soon dip below it, that's according to industry experts. That should be good news for our wallets and the overall economy. When Americans are using less of their income to fuel up their cars, they can be using that cash on other things, especially the rapidly approaching holiday shopping season. Unfortunately, however, home energy bills are expected to rise this winter, according to a report released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration this week Phil Flynn, a Senior Market Analyst at the Price Futures Group and Fox Business contributor, speaks with co-host of "The Big Money Show" Jackie DeAngelis about what's behind both of these trends, and what they tell us about the economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The average cost of gasoline nationwide is hovering near the $3 mark and could soon dip below it, that's according to industry experts. That should be good news for our wallets and the overall economy. When Americans are using less of their income to fuel up their cars, they can be using that cash on other things, especially the rapidly approaching holiday shopping season. Unfortunately, however, home energy bills are expected to rise this winter, according to a report released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration this week Phil Flynn, a Senior Market Analyst at the Price Futures Group and Fox Business contributor, speaks with co-host of "The Big Money Show" Jackie DeAngelis about what's behind both of these trends, and what they tell us about the economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ethanol output recently jumped to the highest level in a month, while inventories declined modestly, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. NAFB News ServiceSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Trump administration is warning of looming power shortages just as electricity prices rise in the country. But it's also moving to cancel $8 billion in clean energy funding meant to boost power generation and modernize the grid. POLITICO's James Bikales, Kelsey Tamborrino and Josh Siegel discuss what these cuts could mean for the country's energy supply, electricity prices, and how both parties are preparing to message around the issue ahead of next year's midterm elections. Plus, U.S. oil production hit a record high in July and is increasing quicker than expected in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  James Bikales is a reporter for POLITICO.  Kelsey Tamborrino is a reporter covering clean energy for POLITICO. Josh Siegel is an energy reporter for POLITICO and the host of POLITICO Energy. Nirmal Mulaikal is the co-host and producer of POLITICO Energy.  Alex Keeney is a senior audio producer at POLITICO.  Ben Lefebvre is the deputy energy editor at POLITICO.  Matt Daily is the energy editor for POLITICO. For more news on energy and the environment, subscribe to Power Switch, our free evening newsletter: https://www.politico.com/power-switch And for even deeper coverage and analysis, read our Morning Energy newsletter by subscribing to POLITICO Pro: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter-archive/morning-energy Our theme music is by Pran Bandi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sustainable Stock and ETF Picks September 2025. Includes reviews of solar, wind, green and sustainable stocks, dividend stocks, and ETFs. By Ron Robins, MBA Transcript & Links, Episode 159, September 26, 2025 Hello, Ron Robins here. Welcome to my podcast episode 159, published on September 26, 2025, titled “Sustainable Stock and ETF Picks September 2025.” This podcast is presented by Investing for the Soul. Investingforthesoul.com is your go-to site for vital global, ethical, and sustainable investing mentoring, news, commentary, information, and resources. Remember that you can find a full transcript and links to content, including stock symbols and bonus material, on this episode's podcast page at investingforthesoul.com/podcasts. Also, a reminder. I do not evaluate any of the stocks or funds mentioned in these podcasts, and I don't receive any compensation from anyone covered in these podcasts. Furthermore, I will reveal any investments I have in the investments mentioned herein. I have a great crop of 15 articles for you in this podcast! Note: Some companies are covered more than once. ------------------------------------------------------------- Can Solar Power the AI Boom? Top Stocks to Watch This podcast edition is going to be heavy on solar stocks. And for good reason! I'm beginning with this article titled Can Solar Power the AI Boom? Top Stocks to Watch on finance.yahoo.com. It's by Ethan Feller and originally published on zacks.com. Here are some quotes. “It's hard to overstate how attractive solar stocks look right now, even without considering the potential AI infrastructure catalyst… the stocks highlighted here have already shown powerful momentum year-to-date. 1. SolarEdge Technologies (SEDG) With shares trading at depressed valuations and demand for utility-scale inverters likely to rebound, SolarEdge Technologies offers contrarian upside if execution improves. Though it isn't yet reflected by the Zacks rank, SolarEdge Technologies currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) rating, it has experienced some significant revisions higher to its earnings estimates… Sales are also projected to grow by more than 24% both this and next year. 2. Nextracker Inc. (NXT) As the leading provider of solar trackers, Nextracker directly benefits from the shift to utility-scale projects. Its technology boosts panel efficiency and lowers costs, making it a natural winner as large-scale solar buildouts accelerate. The stock has moved significantly higher this year, up 85%, yet the company still trades at just 16.6x forward earnings. 3. Sunrun (RUN) A pure play on residential solar Sunrun has struggled under higher interest rates. But as financing conditions ease and consumer adoption of solar-plus-storage grows, Sunrun could be positioned for a strong recovery. Based on recent revisions, earnings are expected to inflect meaningfully positive over the next year. 4. Array Technologies (ARRY) Like Nextracker, Array builds solar tracking systems that enhance utility-scale efficiency. With a global footprint and strong backlog, Array offers solid exposure to the utility-scale solar buildout at a reasonable valuation. With earnings projected to grow 21.6% annually over the next three to five years and a forward earnings multiple of 14.2x, Array boasts a Price/Earnings to Growth ratio of 0.66. The combination of strong growth and reasonable valuation offers a compelling risk reward opportunity. 5. Shoals Technologies Group (SHLS) Shoals specializes in balance-of-system components — wiring, connectors, and infrastructure that every solar farm needs. Its recurring demand base and high margins make it a steady, less flashy way to play the solar boom. Shoals Technologies Group is in an especially advantaged vertical and is the only name in the group with a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) rating, reflected by upward trending earnings revisions. Solar's Role in Powering the AI Revolution If AI data centers really do scale toward hundreds of gigawatts of demand, solar will almost certainly claim a portion, and potentially large share of that market, making now an opportune time to consider exposure to the sector before the market fully prices in this growth.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- 3 Stocks to Buy as Solar Power Set to Drive 50%+ of New Capacity Continuing on the solar power theme is this article. It's titled 3 Stocks to Buy as Solar Power Set to Drive 50%+ of New Capacity on finance.yahoo.com. I had to include it as the author is a favourite on this site. Her name is Aparajita Dutta. Here are some quotes on her picks. “Positive projections from the Energy Information Administration show solar powering over half of new U.S. electricity generation in 2025, signaling a rebound. While headwinds remain, growing demand and installation trends should sustain U.S. solar industry momentum. 1. Sunrun (RUN) Based in San Francisco, CA, the company develops, owns, manages and sells residential solar energy systems… The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Sunrun's 2025 revenues indicates an improvement of 11.2% from the prior-year reported figure… The company currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). Sunrun Inc. (RUN): Free Stock Analysis Report. 2. Shoals Technologies (SHLS) Based in Portland, TN, the company manufactures a diverse portfolio of solar balance of systems products, including combiner/re-combiner boxes, disconnect boxes, custom harnessing solutions, junction boxes, wire, in-line fuses and racking and monitoring solutions… The stock boasts a long-term (three-to-five years) earnings growth rate of 24%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2025 sales indicates an improvement of 15.3% from the prior-year reported figure. The company currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Shoals Technologies Group, Inc. (SHLS): Free Stock Analysis Report. 3. Tigo Energy Inc.(TYGO) Based in Campbell, CA, the company is a provider of intelligent solar and energy storage solutions. On Sept. 2, 2025, Tigo Energy announced that its three-phase Tigo EI Residential solution has successfully completed mandatory compliance testing with a Slovak distribution system operator. This certification confirms that the solution complies with local grid requirements and Slovak regulatory standards, ensuring safe, efficient, and innovative solar energy management… The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2025 sales indicates an improvement of 91.9% from the prior-year reported figure… It currently carries a Zacks Rank #2. Tigo Energy, Inc. (TYGO): Free Stock Analysis Report.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- Green ETFs 2026, Best Sustainable ETFs USA, Top Environmentally Friendly ETFs This next article is a useful compilation in chart form of the top sustainable ETFs. It's titled Green ETFs 2026, Best Sustainable ETFs USA, Top Environmentally Friendly ETFs on garadesud.md. It's by Barrett Schaefer. “The sustainable investing ETF list below highlights the top funds known for eco-conscious selections and healthy returns. ETF Name Focus Area Expense Ratio 1-Year Return (%) Carbon Footprint Reduction (%) Dividend Yield (%) iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN) Renewable Energy 0.42% 18.4 45 1.5 Vanguard ESG U.S. Stock ETF (ESGV) ESG Broad Market 0.12% 15.7 38 1.8 SPDR S&P 500 ESG ETF (EFIV) Low Carbon Footprint 0.10% 14.8 50 1.9 Invesco Solar ETF (TAN) Renewable Energy - Solar 0.69% 22.2 48 0.3 iShares MSCI USA ESG Optimized ETF (ESGU) ESG USA Market 0.15% 16.0 40 1.6 First Trust NASDAQ Clean Edge Green Energy ETF (QCLN) Clean Energy Tech 0.60% 19.0 43 0.0 BMO Clean Energy ETF (CLNR) Renewable Energy 0.55% 20.1 46 1.2 Xtrackers MSCI USA ESG Leaders Equity ETF (USSG) ESG USA Market 0.10% 15.2 42 1.7 Global X Renewable Energy Producers ETF (RNRG) Renewable Energy 0.68% 21.5 47 1.0 iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF (ESGU) ESG Broad Market 0.15% 15.9 39 1.6 “ End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- A few Top Sustainable Dividend-Paying Stocks for September 2025 1. Why United Parcel Service is a Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock (UPS) on nasdaq.com. By BNK Invest. Quote. “United Parcel Service Inc (Symbol: UPS) has been named a Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock by Dividend Channel… [with] a strong 7.4% yield.” End quote. 2. PFG Named A Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock on theonlineinvestor.com. By The Online Investor Staff. Quote. “Principal Financial Group Inc (NASDAQ: PFG) has been named a Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock by Dividend Channel… [with] a strong 3.9% yield.” End quote 3. TXN Named A Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock on nasdaq.com. By BNK Invest. Quote. “Texas Instruments Inc. (Symbol: TXN) has been named a Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock by Dividend Channel… including a strong 3.2% yield.” End quote. ------------------------------------------------------------- Renewable Energy Dividend Stocks: A Double Win of Green Investment This last article is titled Renewable Energy Dividend Stocks: A Double Win of Green Investment on nai500.com. It's by Sunlight Xiang. Here are a few quotes on the picks. “1. Brookfield Renewable Partners (NYSE: BEP) With a market cap of $7 billion and a dividend yield of 5.89%, it is one of the world's largest renewable energy platforms. It operates over 5,300 power generation facilities across four continents, with a total generation capacity of nearly 40 gigawatts (GW). While it is a leader in hydroelectric power, it is actively expanding into wind, solar, and energy storage. In July 2025, it signed a 3 GW hydroelectric supply agreement with Google's parent company, Alphabet, setting a record for corporate hydroelectric procurement. The company expects continued cash flow growth and has a project pipeline of 24 GW. Its investment-grade balance sheet and conservative dividend payout ratio support its expansion capabilities. Combining its dividend yield and growth potential, its expected annualized return is around 15%. 2. NextEra Energy (NYSE: NEE) Although its subsidiary XPLR Infrastructure suspended its dividend, the parent company maintains a strong dividend track record: it has increased its payout for 30 consecutive years, with a compound annual growth rate of 10% since 2007. Its dividend yield stood at 3.2% in mid-2025, roughly double the S&P 500 average. This Fortune 200 company, which owns the largest utility in the U.S. (Florida Power & Light), added 1.1 GW of solar, wind, and storage capacity in the second quarter of 2025, with capital expenditures reaching $2 billion. Despite policy headwinds, it added 3.2 GW to its project backlog during the quarter, bringing the total backlog to approximately 30 GW (compared to 38 GW of operating capacity). 3. Clearway Energy (NYSE: CWEN) Boasting a market cap of $3 billion and a dividend yield of 7.52%, it owns nearly 12 GW of renewable energy capacity, in addition to operating 2.8 GW of natural gas generation facilities and district energy systems. Long-term PPAs ensure stable cash flow, and its annual dividend is expected to grow by 5% to 8% in the coming years. Although it paused a 200-megawatt solar project in Hawaii due to wildfire risks, it reached a deal in April 2025 to supply power to Microsoft from its planned 335-megawatt Mount Storm wind farm project in West Virginia. Thanks to its close ties with project developer Clearway Energy Group, it has access to a 30 GW project pipeline. A reasonable dividend payout ratio and ample liquidity underpin its resilience.” End quotes. ------------------------------------------------------------- More articles with Sustainable Investment Picks for September 2025 from around the world. 1. Title: Sempra Named Top Socially Responsible Dividend Stock with 3.1% Yield on ainvest.com. By BNK Invest. 2. Title: 3 Alternative Energy Stocks to Watch Amid Impacts of Policy Shift on finance.yahoo.com. By Aparajita Dutta. 3. Title: Boston financial group launches tool to promote Biblical… on wng.org. By Christina Grube. 4. Title: Is Ethereum's $5,000 Breakout a Sustainable Investment Opportunity or a Market Overextension? On ainvest.com. By BlockByte. 5. Title: GE Vernova (GEV) Gets Price Target Boost Amid Stronger Outlook on msn.com. By Neha Gupta. 6. Title: ESG lives on: Sustainable fund picks for every investment style on trustnet.com. By Emmy Hawker. 7. Title: Solar Stocks: Trump Guidance Offers New Dawn. This Is The Next Growth Driver. On investors.com. By Kit Norton. 8. Title: Top Wind Energy Stocks to Consider For Solid Returns & Portfolio Growth on finance.yahoo.com. By Avisekh Bhattacharjee. ------------------------------------------------------------- Ending Comment These are my top news stories with their stock and fund tips for this podcast, “Sustainable Stock and ETF Picks September 2025.” Please click the like and subscribe buttons wherever you download or listen to this podcast. That helps bring these podcasts to others like you. And please click the share buttons to share this podcast with your friends and family. Let's promote ethical and sustainable investing as a force for hope and prosperity in these tumultuous times! Contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for listening. My next podcast will be on October 24th. See you then. Bye for now. © 2025 Ron Robins, Investing for the Soul

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently unveiled a new industrial policy -- Buy Canadian – as the Washington and Ottawa try to sort out their trade tensions. It's a protectionist move that mirrors the Trump administration's Buy American strategy and comes as President Donald Trump's tariffs have hit Canada's manufacturing sectors. POLITICO's Zi-Ann Lum breaks down why this policy is coming now and how it impacts energy, trade, and U.S.-Canada relations. Plus, the share of disposable income U.S. drivers are paying for gasoline this year will likely fall to a 20-year low, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Tuesday.  Zi-Ann Lum covers Canadian federal politics and energy and environmental policy for POLITICO.  Nirmal Mulaikal is the co-host and producer of POLITICO Energy.   Alex Keeney is a senior audio producer at POLITICO.   Ben Lefebvre is the deputy energy editor at POLITICO.  Matt Daily is the energy editor for POLITICO.    For more news on energy and the environment, subscribe to Power Switch, our free evening newsletter: https://www.politico.com/power-switch    And for even deeper coverage and analysis, read our Morning Energy newsletter by subscribing to POLITICO Pro: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/newsletter-archive/morning-energy    Our theme music is by Pran Bandi.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In almost every part of the country, the amount people pay for electricity has gone up faster than the rate of inflation and it will likely continue to rise, according to the Energy Information Administration. So what's ballooning your utility bill? We'll talk with energy and policy experts about the increasing demands posed by data centers, the aging electricity infrastructure, and the new barriers to expanding renewable power plants. But the picture isn't all grim; we'll explore the steps we can take to make California's electrical grid more sustainable. Guests: Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, trustee professor of civil and environmental engineering and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University Michael Wara, policy director for the Sustainability Accelerator at the Doerr School of Sustainability, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program and senior research scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin covers the following stories: The National Association of Realtors reported June Existing Home Sales; President Trump announced a trade framework with Japan; Kevin has the details sorts through the data, puts the information into perspective, offers his insights and offers an opinion or two. Kevin interviews Tim Wullenweber, Vice President Sales and Marketing, Coolants Plus/StarFire. They discuss lower viscosity lubricants, new API specs for heavy duty motor oil and heavy-duty antifreeze. Oil and gas prices react to U.S.-Japan trade deal. expectations ahead of EU-China summit and U.S. Energy Information Administration data on crude oil inventories.

Kevin covers the following stories: The National Association of Realtors reported June Existing Home Sales; President Trump announced a trade framework with Japan; Kevin has the details sorts through the data, puts the information into perspective, offers his insights and offers an opinion or two. Kevin interviews Tim Wullenweber, Vice President Sales and Marketing, Coolants Plus/StarFire. They discuss lower viscosity lubricants, new API specs for heavy duty motor oil and heavy-duty antifreeze. Oil and gas prices react to U.S.-Japan trade deal. expectations ahead of EU-China summit and U.S. Energy Information Administration data on crude oil inventories.

We begin on a positive note by welcoming a “doer,” citizen extraordinaire, Jon Merryman, who couldn't stand the trash, especially old tires, being dumped in his neighborhood. So, he took it upon himself to clean it up and has now expanded his efforts across the country. Then co-president of Public Citizen, Robert Weissman, joins us to explain how spending in the recent bill passed by the Republican controlled Congress prioritizes the Pentagon and deportation enforcement at the expense of the social safety net, essentially trading life for death.Jon Merryman was a software designer at Lockheed Martin, who after retiring found his true calling, cleaning up trash in every county in America.When I first started looking at the environment next to my place of work, one of the things I did uncover was tires. And they were definitely there from the '20s, the '30s, and the '40s, they've been there for decades. And then just after a while, the soil and the erosion just covers them up. And you just discover them, and you realize this has been going on forever.Jon MerrymanNature is innocent. It really doesn't deserve what we've given it. And I feel like someone's got to step up to undo what we've done.Jon MerrymanRobert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. As the Co-President of Public Citizen, he has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations, and the wealthy have over our democracy.The best estimates are that the loss of insurance and measures in this bill will cost 40,000 lives every year. Not once. Every year.Robert Weissman co-president of Public Citizen on the Budget BillPeople understand there's a rigged system. They understand that generally. They understand that with healthcare. But if you (the Democrats) don't name the health insurance companies as an enemy, as a barrier towards moving forward. You don't say United Health; you don't go after a Big Pharma, which is probably the most despised health sector in the economy, people don't think you're serious. And partially it's because you're not.Robert WeissmanNews 7/11/251. This week, the Financial Times published a stunning story showing the Tony Blair Institute – founded by the former New Labour British Prime Minister and Iraq War accomplice Tony Blair – “participated” in a project to “reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” This project would include a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”. To accomplish this, the investors would pay half a million Palestinians to leave Gaza to open the enclave up for development – and that is just the tip of the harebrained iceberg. This scheme would also involve creating “artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives…and low-tax ‘special economic zones'.” The development of this plot is somewhat shadowy. The FT story names a, “group of Israeli businessmen…including tech investor Liran Tancman and venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg,” who helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in February 2025. GHF has been accused of using supposed aid distribution sites as “death traps,” per France 24. Boston Consulting Group, also named in the FT story, strongly disavowed the project, as did the Tony Blair Institute.2. In more positive news related to Gaza, the National Education Association – the largest labor union in the United States – voted this week to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL, once an important group safeguarding the civil rights and wellbeing of American Jews, has completely abandoned its historic mission and has instead devoted its considerable resources to trying to crush the anti-Zionist movement. The NEA passed a resolution stating that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics,” because, “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.” Labor Notes writes that the ADL “has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for forty years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities.” One NEA delegate, Stephen Siegel, said from the assembly floor, “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change.”3. Another major labor story from this week concerns sanitation workers in Philadelphia. According to the Delaware News Journal, AFSCME District Council 33 has reached a deal with the city to raise wages for their 9,000 workers by 9% over three years. The union went on strike July 1st, resulting in, “massive piles of trash piling up on city streets and around trash drop-off sites designated by the city,” and “changes to the city's annual Fourth of July concert with headliner LL Cool J and city native Jazmine Sullivan both dropping out,” in solidarity with the striking workers, per WHYY. The deal reached is a major compromise for the union, which was seeking a 32% total pay increase, but they held off on an extended trash pickup strike equivalent to 1986 strike, which went on for three weeks and left 45,000 tons of rotting garbage in the streets, per ABC.4. Yet another labor story brings us to New York City. ABC7 reports the United Federation of Teachers has endorsed Democratic Socialist – and Democratic Party nominee – Zohran Mamdani for mayor. This report notes “UFT is the city's second largest union…[with] 200,000 members.” Announcing the endorsement, UFT President Michael Mulgrew stated, “This is a real crisis and it's a moment for our city, and our city is starting to speak out very loudly…The voters are saying the same thing, 'enough is enough.' The income gap disparity is above…that which we saw during the Gilded Age." All eyes now turn to District Council 37, which ABC7 notes “endorsed Council speaker Adrienne Adams in the primary and has yet to endorse in the general election.”5. The margin of Mamdani's victory, meanwhile, continues to grow as the Board of Elections updates its ranked choice voting tallies. According to the conservative New York Post, Zohran has “won more votes than any other mayoral candidate in New York City primary election history.” Mamdani can now boast having won over 565,000 votes after 102,000 votes were transferred from other candidates. Not only that, “Mamdani's totals are expected to grow as…a small percent of ballots are still being counted.”6. Meanwhile, scandal-ridden incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams has yet another scandal on his hands. The New York Daily News reports, “Four high-ranking former NYPD chiefs are suing Mayor Adams, claiming they were forced to retire from the department after complaining that his ‘unqualified' friends were being placed in prestigious police positions, sometimes after allegedly bribing their way into the jobs.” Former Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who was already forced to resign in disgrace amidst a federal corruption investigation, features prominently in this new lawsuit. Among other things, Caban is alleged to have been “selling promotions” to cops for up to $15,000. Adams is running for reelection as an independent, but trails Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani and disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo.7. Turning to the federal government, as the U.S. disinvests in science and technology, a new report published in the Financial Times finds that, “Almost three-quarters of all solar and wind power projects being built globally are in China.” According to the data, gathered by Global Energy Monitor, “China is building 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind projects… [out of] 689GW under construction globally.” As this report notes, one gigawatt can potentially supply electricity for about one million homes. This report goes on to say that, “China is expected to add at least 246.5GW of solar and 97.7GW of wind this year,” on top of the “1.5 terawatts of solar and wind power capacity up and running as of the end of March.” In the first quarter of 2025, solar and wind accounted for 22.5% of China's total electricity consumption; in 2023, solar and wind accounted for around 14% of electricity consumption in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.8. Developments this week put two key rules promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission under former Chair Lina Khan in jeopardy. First and worse, NPR reports the Republican-controlled FTC is abandoning a rule which would have banned non-compete clauses in employment contracts. These anti-worker provisions “trap workers and depress wages,” according to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who has introduced legislation to ban them by statute. Perhaps more irritatingly however, Reuters reports the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis has blocked the so-called “click to cancel” rule just days before it was set to take effect. This rule would have, “required retailers, gyms and other businesses to provide cancellation methods for subscriptions, auto-renewals and free trials that convert to paid memberships that are ‘at least as easy to use' as the sign up process.” A coalition of corporate interests sued to block the rule, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a trade group representing major cable and internet providers such as Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications along with media companies like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. Lina Khan decried “Firms…making people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription, trapping Americans in needless bureaucracy and wasting their time & money.”9. In another betrayal of consumers, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to break promises and speak out of both sides of his mouth. A new report in NPR documents RFK Jr. speaking at a conference in April, where he “spoke about the health effects of exposure to harmful chemicals in our food, air and water…[and] cited recent research on microplastics from researchers in Oregon, finding these tiny particles had shown up in 99% of the seafood they sampled.” Yet Susanne Brander, the author of the study, had gotten word just an hour earlier that “a federal grant she'd relied on to fund her research for years…was being terminated.” Brander is quoted saying "It feels like they are promoting the field while ripping out the foundation." Ripping out the foundation of this research is felt acutely, as “regulators are weakening safeguards that limit pollution and other toxic chemicals.” So Mr. Secretary, which is more important – stopping the proliferation of microplastics or slashing funding for the very scientists studying the issue?10. Finally, in Los Angeles masked federal troops are marauding through the streets on horseback, sowing terror through immigrant communities, per the New York Times. President Trump mobilized approximately 4,000 National Guard members – putting them under federal control – alongside 700 Marines in response to protests against immigration raids in June. As the Times notes, “It has been more than three weeks since the last major demonstration in downtown Los Angeles,” but the federal forces have not been demobilized. While some have dismissed the shows of force as nothing more than stunts designed to fire up the president's base, Gregory Bovino, a Customs and Border Protection chief in Southern California told Fox News “[LA] Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon.” As LA Mayor Karen Bass put it, “What I saw…looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation…It's the way a city looks before a coup.”This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Every left winger should have their eyes held open and be forced to watch this on repeat until it sinks in. BONUS EPISODES available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/deniersplaybook) SOCIALS & MORE (https://linktr.ee/deniersplaybook) WANT TO ADVERTISE WITH US? Please contact climatetownsponsorships@gmail.comDISCLAIMER: Some media clips have been edited for length and clarity. CREDITS Created by: Rollie Williams, Nicole Conlan & Ben BoultHosts: Rollie Williams & Nicole ConlanExecutive Producer: Ben Boult Editor: Laura ConteProducers: Daniella Philipson, Irene PlagianosArchival Producer: Margaux SaxAdditional Research & Fact Checking: Carly Rizzuto & Canute HaroldsonMusic: Tony Domenick Art: Jordan Doll Special Thanks: The Civil Liberties Defense CenterSOURCESAccounts, T. C. of P. (2023). Wind Power: Energy is Good for Texas. Comptroller.texas.gov.Alsaleh, A., & Sattler, M. (2019). Comprehensive life cycle assessment of large wind turbines in the US. 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Natural Gas Intelligence.Drilled. (2018, September 11). S1, Ep3 | Weaponizing False Equivalence. Drilled.EIA. (2024, October 9). How much oil is consumed in the United States? - FAQ - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Eia.gov.Eliq. (2024, June 5). The complete Dynamic Pricing guide for energy retailers - Eliq. Eliq.Erickson, P., & Achakulwisut, P. (2012). How subsidies aided the US shale oil and gas boom. Stockholm Environment Institute.Fox News Clips. (2018, November 29). “That Was Me, People”: Obama Takes Credit for Oil Production Boom. YouTube.Gardiner, B. (2019, December 19). The Plastics Pipeline: A Surge of New Production Is on the Way. Yale E360.Green, M. (2021, December 7). Your socks are made with plastic and could be loaded with dangerous BPA. San Francisco Chronicle.Guardian News. (2019). “I never understood wind”: Trump goes on bizarre tirade against windmills [YouTube Video]. YouTube.Guezuraga, B., Zauner, R., & Pölz, W. (2012). Life cycle assessment of two different 2 MW class wind turbines. Renewable Energy, 37(1), 37–44.Haapala, K. R., & Prempreeda, P. (2014). Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines. International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, 3(2), 170.Harris, J. (2024, November 28). Scene from Billy Bob Thornton's New Show Goes Viral as His “Landman” Character Savages Green Energy. The Western Journal.Hartke, K. (2017, July 5). “The Sideways Effect”: How A Wine-Obsessed Film Reshaped The Industry. NPR.Hookstead, D. (2025, January 14). “Landman” Goes Viral With Scene Crushing Woke Environmentalists | OutKick. OutKick.Imperative Podcasts. (2022). Boomtown - Chapter 3: Dust to DustInternational Energy Agency. (2024). World Energy Investment 2024. YouTube. Jack, S., & Masud, F. (2025, February 26). BP shuns renewables in return to oil and gas. BBC.Krauss, C., & Penn, I. (2022, June 7). Shell, the Oil Giant, Will Sell Renewable Energy to Texans. The New York Times.Kreil, E. (2024, March 11). United States Produces More Crude Oil than Any country, Ever - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Www.eia.gov.Malewitz, J. (2013, October 14). $7 Billion Wind Power Project Nears Finish. The Texas Tribune.McEwen, M. (2024, November 18). API runs ads to challenge “Landman” oil industry portrayal. Midland Reporter-Telegram.Murray, C. (2023, June 30). The McDonald's Grimace Shake's Viral (And Gruesome) TikTok Trend, Explained. Forbes.Nelson, J. (2024, November 27). “Landman” clip goes viral slamming renewable energy: “There is nothing clean about this.”. Fox News.NW, T. C. for R. P. 1300 L. S., Washington, S. 200, & info, D. 20005 telelphone857-0044. (2025). Oil & Gas Lobbying Profile. OpenSecrets.Oklahoma Oil & Natural Gas, & OERB. (2022, July 19). Petro Pete's Adventure - Big Bad Dream - OERB. OERB.Paramount Plus. (2024a, November 27). Landman | Tommy Explains Why Even Wind Turbines Depend on the Oil Industry (S1, E3). YouTube.Paramount Plus. (2024b, December 3). Landman | Q&A with Billy Bob Thornton. YouTube.PBOG. (2017, October 12). The Well That Launched the Permian - Permian Basin Oil and Gas Magazine. Permian Basin Oil and Gas Magazine.Peach, S. (2021, June 30). What's the carbon footprint of a wind turbine?. Yale Climate Connections.Pitsel, P. (2021, February 26). What about Wind Farms?. LinkedIn.Plastic Pollution Coalition Editor. (2024, September 17). Fracked Gas is Now a Growing Share of the Fossil Fuels Being Turned Into Plastics. Plastic Pollution Coalition.Rapier, R. (2024, December 26). U.S. Oil Production Shattered Records Again in 2024. OilPrice.com.Rassenfoss, S. (2023, August 16). Shale Wells Producing More Early On, Then Declining Faster Than Ever. JPT.Schechter, D. (2020, February 16). VERIFY: Does conservative Texas actually lead the U.S. in green energy?. WFAA.Science Daily, & Taylor & Francis Group. (2024, May 16). Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years. ScienceDaily.Statistia. (2019, September 3). Infographic: Wind Turbines Are Not Killing Fields for Birds. Statista Infographics.Texas Monthly, & Wallace, C. (2019). Boomtown Podcast. Texas Monthly.The Climate Denier's Playbook. (2023, July 11). You Owe Your Life to Oil & Gas. Spotify.The Joe Rogan Experience. (2020, September 2). Joe Rogan Experience #892 - Greg Fitzsimmons. JRE Podcast.The Joe Rogan Experience. (2024, January 4). Joe Rogan Experience #2083 - Taylor Sheridan. JRE Podcast.TotalEnergies. (2024). Wind, Solar and Hydro Power: Our Renewable Energy Activities in France at a Glance. TotalEnergies.com.Twitter, & @bonchieredstate. (2024, October 24). Every left-winger should have their eyes held open and be forced to watch this on repeat until it sinks in. X (Formerly Twitter).U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2025, May 6). U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels per Day). Www.eia.gov.Valle, S. (2023, April 4). Exxon says its decarbonization business could outgrow oil, in multi-trillion market. Reuters.Wallace, C. (2019, May 29). The Permian Basin Is Booming With Oil. But at What Cost to West Texans?. Texas Monthly.Wikipedia Contributors. (2024, December 29). Stephens, Arkansas. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation.Williams, R. (n.d.). Scrolling through Tiktok in his parents' bathroom [Feculent Fact Finding].Zadrozny, B. (2025, January 8). Zuckerberg's fact-checking rollback ushers in chaotic online era. NBC News.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

According to a recent forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, solar panels and batteries will account for more than 80% of new power capacity installed in the U.S. this year.  The record growth of these technologies is hastening the decline of coal power in this country. Solar power alone will account for more than […]

Freezing your gas off! Weather is in the news affecting travel and crude oil and LNG pipelines. A new unique method of cargo theft, Kevin explains. Two tort reform bills introduced in Georgia are welcomed by the trucking industry, Kevin offers his insights. Oil reacts to supply disruptions in Russia and the U.S. awaiting clarity on sanctions as Washington tries to broker a deal to end the war in Ukraine; a 30-40% disruption to a pipeline from Kazakhstan - due to a drone attack; cold weather in the U.S. threatened oil supply from North Dakota and refineries in Texas and awaiting U.S. oil inventory data from American Petroleum Institute and the Energy Information Administration.

U.S. Commerce Department released the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, what does this inflation gauge tell us about the direction of inflation. The Conference Board released the consumer confidence index for December, Kevin offers his perspective on the report. Initial holiday sales numbers are in, how do they compare to prior years? Oil prices react to the dollar's strength, hopes for addition fiscal stimulus in China, American Petroleum Institute reporting that U.S. crude oil stocks falling and expected confirmation of those declines by the Energy Information Administration. 

—Here are 3 big things you need to know—   One — Donald Trump is nominating TV's Doctor Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  CMS oversees Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and Healthcare-dot-gov, which currently provide coverage to nearly 50-percent of Americans. Two ---- President Biden has approved sending antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine in its war against Russia.  Multiple reports said Tuesday that the U.S. expects Ukraine to use the mines in its own territory in a region where Russian troops have made significant advances.   And number three — Most U.S. households will spend about the same or less on energy this winter, but some states may face higher costs due to colder weather. According to the Energy Information Administration, states like Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas might see natural gas bills rise by 10 to 15 dollars per month. Electric heating may see a 2-percent increase, while natural gas prices will vary, with some areas dropping and others, like the Midwest, expected to rise by 11-percent.

In 1953, the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, “From Here to Eternity” won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. And on May 24 deep in the  education section of The New York Times, there was a short piece titled “How Industry May Change Climate.” In the years after, scientists went from writing about the possible impacts of pollution on climate to warning U.S. presidents. And energy policy expert and scholar Jay Hakes says there's much more to the story. From scientists who quietly worked to address growing environmental threats, to lawmakers who deliberated in Congress and the White House over what to do about them, Jay says there's a history that hasn't been told. In his new book, Jay looks at these early climate change pioneers and asks about the challenges they faced.   What was it like trying to influence the White House? What solutions did these pioneers offer? And how can their stories further our discourse around climate change today?  This week, we go back to a conversation from August between host Bill Loveless and Jay Hakes about his book “The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush.”  Jay is a scholar and author on U.S. energy policy. From 2000-2013 he served as the director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. He also served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, including a seven-year stint as director of the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  Jay's other books include “Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s” and “A Declaration of Energy Independence.”

In 1953, the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, “From Here to Eternity” won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. And on May 24 deep in the  education section of The New York Times, there was a short piece titled “How Industry May Change Climate.” In the years after, scientists went from writing about the possible impacts of pollution on climate to warning U.S. presidents. And energy policy expert and scholar Jay Hakes says there's much more to the story. From scientists who quietly worked to address growing environmental threats, to lawmakers who deliberated in Congress and the White House over what to do about them, Jay says there's a history that hasn't been told. In his new book, Jay looks at these early climate change pioneers and asks about the challenges they faced.   What was it like trying to influence the White House? What solutions did these pioneers offer? And how can their stories further our discourse around climate change today?  This week, host Bill Loveless talks with Jay Hakes about his book “The Presidents and the Planet: Climate Change Science and Politics from Eisenhower to Bush.”  Jay is a scholar and author on U.S. energy policy. From 2000-2013 he served as the director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. He also served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, including a seven-year stint as director of the U.S. Energy Information Administration.  Jay's other books include “Energy Crises: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Hard Choices in the 1970s” and “A Declaration of Energy Policy Independence.”

Our president promised to “end fossil fuels,” yet the train keeps-a-rollin' at record speed. Dr. Merrill “Buddy” Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation has the proof, fresh from the federal Energy Information Administration.  The U.S. has set yet another record in oil & gas production, once again disproving the “green” doomsayers who tried to discourage investment, claiming these would be “stranded assets” by now, having become obsolete in the “green” energy transition… that never was.   X: @JackiDailyHost TruthSocial: JackiDaily Rumble: TheJackiDailyShow YouTube: TheJackiDailyShow Instagram: JackiDaily Facebook: The Jacki Daily Show

Donate (no account necessary) | Subscribe (account required) Join Bryan Dean Wright, former CIA Operations Officer, on today's episode of The Wright Report, where we dive into the crucial headlines shaping America and the world. It's our Friday Headline Brief, heavy on news and light on analysis, setting the stage for the weekend. Domestic News: Energy Prices Surge: Natural gas prices are on the rise, leading to higher electricity bills this summer. The Energy Information Administration predicts the U.S. average monthly residential power bill to reach $173, a 3% increase from last summer, with regional differences varying widely. Federal Budget Deficit: The federal budget deficit is set to spike to $1.9 trillion this year, largely due to President Biden's student loan forgiveness plans. This increase pushes the national debt to $35 trillion, with interest payments now surpassing the entire military budget. Immigration Crisis: Cartels are offering VIP packages for illegal immigrants to travel from Panama to the United States, costing around $15,000. Despite executive orders aimed at curbing illegal immigration, thousands continue to cross the border. Women in the Military: Senate Democrats propose requiring women to register for the draft, sparking a heated debate. The proposal's future remains uncertain as it faces opposition in both the Senate and the Republican-controlled House. International News: Indian Ocean Tensions: India faces disputes with Sri Lanka and the Maldives over valuable underwater mineral nodules, potentially increasing China's influence in the region. Middle East and Eastern Europe: Updates on Israel's operations in Gaza and potential shifts towards a ceasefire, alongside discussions about the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and potential peace deal timelines. Health and Science: Parkinson's Disease: AI advancements in Germany may predict Parkinson's disease up to seven years before symptoms appear, offering new hope for early treatment. Dementia Research: Certain prostate drugs show promise in reducing the risk of dementia with Lewy bodies by up to 40%. Natural Immunity: Studies confirm the long-lasting power of natural immunity from childhood flu exposures and its implications for other diseases, including COVID-19. New research suggests that regular walking can significantly relieve lower back pain, providing a simple yet effective solution for sufferers. Tune in for these stories and more, plus deeper analysis available on Substack. Don't miss this essential episode of The Wright Report. "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32

The U.S. produces more crude oil than any other country, but the number of active oil rigs has fallen by nearly 70% since 2014, the Energy Information Administration reports. How can that be? The answer is a combination of innovation and financial pressure. Plus, the non-alcoholic beverage market booms, the U.S. Patent Office decides AI can’t be credited as an inventor and household debt burdens are on the rise.