15 · Jul 18, 2026
15 — YIMBY — How does “luxury” housing become ordinary housing?
Filtering, moving chains, and why market-rate supply and subsidy solve different problems.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
14 · Jul 17, 2026
14 — YIMBY — Does building housing really lower rents?
How supply absorbs demand, starts moving chains, and changes rents across a market.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Evidence and further reading
13 · Jul 16, 2026
13 — Energy — Is permitting an energy technology?
Why process design can change deployment as much as a better turbine, reactor, or well.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
12 · Jul 15, 2026
12 — Energy — Why build the next nuclear plant at an old coal plant?
Reusing transmission, industrial land, power-sector workers, and community relationships.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
The impetus
TerraPower at a closed Wyoming coal plant ↗The project makes the energy transition look less like replacement and more like reuse. The question is which parts of an industrial place—grid connection, workforce, land, and trust—retain value.
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
11 · Jul 14, 2026
11 — Energy — Why is nuclear expensive if the technology already works?
Nuclear cost through construction finance, project delivery, standardization, and repetition.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
10 · Jul 13, 2026
10 — Energy — What changed in geothermal?
How oil-and-gas drilling capabilities may turn underground heat into scalable clean power.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
The impetus
Fervo’s 70% reduction in drilling time ↗The drilling result suggests a sharper question than whether underground heat exists: can oil-and-gas learning curves make much more of it economically recoverable?
Evidence and further reading
09 · Jul 12, 2026
09 — Energy — Will AI break the grid—or finance the next one?
How data-center demand could shift costs, bypass the grid, or underwrite new supply.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
08 · Jul 11, 2026
08 — Energy — Why can’t new power plants just connect to the grid?
Grid studies, upgrade costs, project withdrawals, and the interconnection queue.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
The impetus
Jesse Jenkins on the interconnection queue ↗The deceptively simple problem is that hundreds of gigawatts of proposed clean power cannot connect. The episode asks what the queue is actually doing—and why projects keep falling out of it.
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
07 · Jul 10, 2026
07 — AI Technical — Can an AI model stand in for a customer?
What synthetic consumers reproduce, what they miss, and why aggregates hide segment failures.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
06 · Jul 9, 2026
06 — AI Technical — Why will AI costs feel more like cloud costs than software seats?
Why tokens create variable infrastructure spend—and what finance teams need to manage.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
The impetus
Ramp’s emerging pattern in enterprise AI spend ↗The pattern connects the cloud-cost analogy to a wider market shift: AI spending spreads into monitoring, integration, and use-specific infrastructure rather than staying a predictable software seat.
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
05 · Jul 8, 2026
05 — AI Technical — How do you know an agent works?
Task evals, trajectory inspection, production monitoring, and business outcomes.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
04 · Jul 7, 2026
04 — AI Technical — What belongs in the model, the context, a skill, or a tool?
An architectural rule based on change rate and authority.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
03 · Jul 6, 2026
03 — AI Technical — Why does Claude Code feel different from chat?
How repositories, tools, tests, and reversible diffs close the agent feedback loop.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Evidence and further reading
02 · Jul 5, 2026
02 — AI Technical — What is an AI agent, actually?
The model, tools, state, permissions, feedback, stopping rules, and ownership inside an agentic loop.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
01 · Jul 4, 2026
01 — AI Technical — How does a language model learn anything?
Tokens, prediction error, parameters, gradient descent, attention, post-training, and inference.
Available in the private feed.
Sources, impetus & excerpts
Source audio in this episode
Evidence and further reading
Trailer · Jul 3, 2026
Welcome to the learning podcast
A short setup trailer for a private feed about AI systems, energy, and housing.
Available in the private feed.