The Great Bottleneck

I’ve spent my life building engines.

First, on the research and trading floors of investment banks, building financial engines to generate alpha. Then, as a tech investor, building engines of growth inside portfolio companies. Now, at my family office, we build AI engines to solve problems and create opportunities. I understand how to forge raw ambition and raw capital into a weapon.

But an engine, no matter how powerful, is useless without fuel. The most perfectly designed system is just a museum piece if it has no energy to power it.

This is the state of human civilization.

We are building god-like engines of compute with AI. We are designing robotic systems that can reshape the physical world. We are on the cusp of rewriting biology itself. We have a species-level engine capable of unprecedented creation and progress.

And we are running it on fumes.

We are arguing about the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. We fight wars over pipelines. We engage in massive geopolitical chess matches over refinery capacity. We get tangled in endless, unproductive debates about the incremental trade-offs between a dozen different mediocre energy sources.

It’s tactical nonsense. It’s like arguing over which brand of gasoline to put in a Formula 1 car while ignoring the fact that the fuel line is clogged and the tank is almost empty.

The single greatest bottleneck to human progress, the one variable that governs the speed limit of our entire species, is the cost of energy.

This is the only problem that matters.

Everything else we want to achieve, everything we dream of building, is downstream of this one master input. You want to create wealth? Lower the cost of energy. You want to provide first-world medical care to every person on Earth? Lower the cost of energy. You want to power the AI data centers that will cure diseases, the robotic factories that will build our future, the IoT sensors that will make our cities intelligent?

You need to lower the cost of energy. Radically. Aggressively. Systematically.

This isn't an environmental issue. That’s a framing that has led to a decade of stalled progress and political infighting. The climate benefits of abundant, clean energy are a massive, welcome byproduct. But the primary strategic objective is economic. It’s about performance. It’s about unleashing the full productive capacity of our species.

Energy is the base layer of the civilizational technology stack. When it is expensive and scarce, everything built on top of it is constrained. When it becomes cheap and abundant, everything on top of it is supercharged.

So why aren’t we speed-running this? Why isn’t this humanity’s Apollo Program, our Manhattan Project, our singular obsession?

Generation, Transmission, Storage

When I look at a problem, I don't see the noise. I see the system. I see the leverage points. In the energy equation, there are three. You don’t get to pick one.

You have to solve for all three.

Generation: The Raw Powerplant

This is about creating electrons. For decades we have been fighting a low-wattage battle of inches between legacy systems. The game is no longer about incremental efficiency. It’s about a step-function change in output. The future of generation rests on a few key technologies we should be funding as if our survival depends on it. Because it does.

Fusion: The Holy Grail. For fifty years, fusion has been "thirty years away." This is a failure of ambition, not physics. We know it works. The universe is powered by it. Recent breakthroughs at labs like Lawrence Livermore have proven net energy gain is possible. Now is the time to pour capital into the commercialization problem. We need to be building dozens of different experimental reactor designs from companies like Helion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. We need to be funding them with blank checks and telling them to move faster. Fusion offers limitless, zero-carbon, waste-free energy. It’s the strategic endgame.

Winning here means we solve the energy problem for a thousand years. It is the single greatest investment opportunity in human history.

Next-Gen Fission: The Workhorse. The fear of nuclear fission is based on 1970s technology and 1980s propaganda. It is the most potent, reliable, and safe form of power generation we have, and we’ve let it stagnate. The future isn’t massive, billion-dollar light-water reactors that take twenty years to approve. It's Small Modular Reactors (SMRs, as the cool kids say) and advanced designs using Thorium or molten salt. These systems are walk-away safe, can be mass-produced in factories, and can be sited exactly where power is needed, reducing transmission loss. China is not afraid of nuclear. They are building new reactors at a speed that should terrify the West.

We are being lapped because of bureaucratic sclerosis and irrational fear.

Enhanced Geothermal: The Unsung Hero. Solar and wind are fine. They have a role to play. But they are intermittent. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. The center of the Earth, however, is always hot. Next-Gen Geothermal Systems use advanced drilling techniques borrowed from the oil and gas industry to create geothermal power plants almost anywhere on Earth. This is baseload power. It is always on. It’s clean, reliable, and has a tiny physical footprint.

We should be providing massive tax incentives for every major energy company to pivot their drilling expertise from pulling carbon out of the ground to pulling heat out of it.

Transmission: The Logistics of Electrons

Generating a trillion watts of power in a desert is useless if you can’t get it to the cities where it’s needed. Our power grid is an antique. It’s a fragile, inefficient, balkanized system built for a different century. It is the single largest piece of machinery in the world, and it is a performance bottleneck.

The solution is a national, and eventually global, high-voltage direct current supergrid. HVDC lines can move massive amounts of power over vast distances with minimal loss. Imagine a continental grid where solar power from Arizona can power New York at midnight, and wind power from the Great Plains can power Miami during a heatwave. It smooths out the intermittency of renewables and makes the entire system more resilient and efficient. Building this is a logistics and construction problem, not a science problem. It requires will and capital, nothing more.

Storage: The Buffer

The final piece of the puzzle is storage. The ability to save energy when it's abundant and release it when it's scarce is the key to grid stability and unlocking the full potential of all generation sources. The lithium-ion battery in your phone or your Tesla is just the beginning.

We need to be investing in a portfolio of storage technologies. Solid-state batteries that are cheaper, safer, and more energy-dense. Flow batteries that can store massive amounts of energy for long durations. Pumped-hydro storage, compressed air, and green hydrogen production.

Each has a specific role to play.

Grid-scale storage is the shock absorber for the entire system, allowing us to run our civilizational engine at maximum RPMs without fear of it breaking down.

We’ve geeked out pretty deeply about mechanical batteries in a previous article.

The Investment Thesis: A Call to Arms

So why is this not happening faster?

The answer is a catastrophic failure of imagination and a misalignment of incentives.

Venture capital, for the most part, is playing a different game. They are looking for capital-light software businesses with 18-month paths to a 10x markup. They aren't structured for 20-year, deep-tech, hardware-intensive infrastructure plays.

No judgment. It’s just not their model. Let’s look further out the capital structure and into different vehicles where capital + people live.

The public markets are driven by quarterly earnings. They reward companies that optimize existing systems, not those that try to build entirely new ones.

And governments? They are bogged down in a swamp of political gridlock, regulatory capture, and a paralyzing fear of picking winners. They subsidize the old systems and put up endless regulatory roadblocks to the new ones.

This leaves a gap. A massive, civilization-defining gap. And that gap is where real builders and real investors need to step in. This is the domain of family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and visionary long-term capital. The kind of capital that thinks in decades, not quarters.

The kind of capital that is willing to fund the hard things.

At my family office, which I have cleverly named: McDonagh Family Office, we are actively looking for these opportunities. We see this not as a risk, but as the only logical allocation of capital for the coming century. The returns won't be measured in quarters, but in the transformation of society. The upside isn't a 10x, it's a 1000x for the entire human enterprise.

I am youngish and very healthy. God willing, I will get to play this game for a long time and build beautiful things for my family and friends. But one day, I won’t be in a place to help my friends (or maybe in this place at all). That’s why I am focused on catalyzing the maximum rate of change on the most important surface area and levers that control the future we are collectively headed toward.

This is my call to action.

For Investors: Stop chasing the tenth-best social media app. Stop funding another food delivery service. Start allocating a serious portion of your capital to the energy problem. Find the scientists and engineers working on fusion, on SMRs, on geothermal, on grid-scale storage, and give them the resources they need to win. This is how you will build true, generational wealth. You will be building the picks and shovels, the railroads and power plants, for the next industrial revolution.

We need to get minerals out of the ground. Fund that.

We need to build chips in America. Fund that.

We need to build robots. Fund that.

For Government: Get out of the way.

Your job is not to be the operator. Your job is to be the catalyst. Create a simple, brutally effective incentive structure. I propose a single, powerful policy: a 50% tax credit for any and all private investment into the research, development, or commercial-scale deployment of next-generation energy technologies.

No picking favorites.

No complex rules you can create lobbying and consulting gigs to engineer around… sorry. That shit is done.

You invest a dollar in building a fusion reactor, a small modular reactor, or a new battery factory, you get fifty cents back. Period. Unleash the animal spirits of the market. Let a thousand experiments bloom. The winners will create more tax revenue in a decade than this credit will cost in a century. Cut the red tape that prevents new nuclear plants from being approved in less than a decade. Streamline the permitting for transmission lines.

Declare that cheap, abundant energy is a national security imperative and act like it.

Because it is.

In fact, energy now directly transmutes into intelligence thanks to AI, and that is an entirely new dimension in this discussion.

The Final Objective

This is not just about keeping the lights on.

It’s about what we can do when energy is too cheap to meter.

AI and robots and bitcoins are great but they rely on watt power.

Think bigger about what this means. It means desalination plants that turn deserts into farmland. Vertical farms in every city, ending food scarcity. AI data centers powerful enough to simulate complex biology and cure cancer. A fleet of robotic workers to build our infrastructure and explore our solar system. It means a world of material abundance that will lift every single human into a state of prosperity we can barely imagine today.

We are at a decision point:

We can continue to fight over the scraps, shackled by the high cost of power. Or we can decide to solve the one problem that unlocks all the others.

We need to stop tinkering with the carburetor and start building a new engine.

A planetary-scale engine of power and prosperity.

The schematics are on the table. The capital exists. The technology is within our grasp. All that’s missing is the will.

Let’s get to work. I am. I think roughly 25,000 other people are.

Where’s everybody else?

Our future (literally) depends on this.

Friends: in addition to the 17% discount for becoming annual paid members, we are excited to announce an additional 10% discount when paying with Bitcoin. Reach out to me, these discounts stack on top of each other!

Thank you for helping us accelerate Life in the Singularity by sharing.

I started Life in the Singularity in May 2023 to track all the accelerating changes in AI/ML, robotics, quantum computing and the rest of the technologies accelerating humanity forward into the future. I’m an investor in over a dozen technology companies and I needed a canvas to unfold and examine all the acceleration and breakthroughs across science and technology.

Our brilliant audience includes engineers and executives, incredible technologists, tons of investors, Fortune-500 board members and thousands of people who want to use technology to maximize the utility in their lives.

To help us continue our growth, would you please engage with this post and share us far and wide?! 🙏