Azeem Azhar

And I think this creates an opportunity for community builders, for people who develop a sense of taste, a sense of perspective, the experience that they can bring together, things that are difficult, because difficulty plus authenticity will turn into scarcity and value.

And Ben Thompson at Stratechery has written a piece just in the last few days that sort of reflects on this as well, the idea that imperfection becomes the

premium, the rambling podcast, the slightly rambling Substack Lives, the things that could only come from that person.

A quick note.

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So let's get to part three.

So here are the foundations.

What's underpinning all of this?

Well, it's energy and it's whether the capital, whether the economics can hold.

First part of this anchor is about what's happening with solar power.

This is super important, you know, because all of these things I've talked about require energy.

And there is a crunch in the US, which is why we're seeing a lot of gas turbines being reused and moved from the aeronautical industry to power data centers.

This will be a short-term thing.

The reason is that a gigawatt data center is probably worth tens of billions of dollars or $10 billion of revenue, reckon semi-analysis, over its lifetime.

So you don't really want to sit around waiting for a grid connection.

And you're happy to pay for natural gas, which is more expensive now than solar in most parts of the world.

But it's a blip against the overall paradigm, which is that

Electricity is turning into a manufactured technology because of the learning curve that attaches to solar and why we are seeing this dramatic growth in solar deployment, not just in the rich parts of the world, but also in places like India.

India's coal consumption in 2025 was lower than in 2024, in large part because of the growth of solar.

And we've obviously know the story in Pakistan and we see what's happening in sub-Saharan Africa.