Ten31 Timestamp: The American Century (?)

**Marty Bent** (0:00)
I'm running late, I'm running late, I'm sorry, I'm running late, John. Happy, I mean, late at 4th of July, to all of our listeners out there and to you, Mr. Arnold. I hope you had a great weekend.

**John Arnold** (0:09)
I did. Great to be an American, happy 4th. Let's do 250 more, at least.
Very, very bullish on the US recently, despite many, many, many issues that we talked about on the show that we need to work through, but I think good position to be in. I'm disappointed you didn't open up with Proud to be an American or Grand Old Flag. I was trying to figure out what you were going to start the show with.

**Marty Bent** (0:32)
Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm true.
I don't know the rest of the words to talk about. But no, we kid here. I will say, I'm just opening up, maybe not singing, but I sent out a tweet on the 4th of July acknowledging like, hey, it's undeniable we're the best nation on the planet. I think what really makes us the best nation is ingrained culture of high agency, risk tolerance, and industrious innovation. Innovative industriousness is what I said, that is inherent in our culture. As long as we have that alive and well, which I think mistakenly it is today. There is no doubting that those cultural values are still alive and well, and exist very strongly today.
As long as those things persist, I think we will always have the ability to right the ship. We may have some qualms about tax policy and the overstepping of boundaries at the federal level. But I think those are details that can be flushed out in the long run. Really, what it comes down to is the people doing things and getting out there, and making sure that in the free market side of things, we're innovating and pushing the world forward, which I think any objective observer would have to admit the US leads the way in those regards.

**John Arnold** (1:58)
High agency culture is underrated, for sure.

**Marty Bent** (2:00)
It really is. You know, all of this is underrated, and was for a while, but many people are beginning to realize probably shouldn't have slept on this, is grid stability, generation capacity, and a focus on an abundant energy future. I think it's come back into focus. We probably went two decades here in the United States or the West broadly without really focusing on this. But now with the AI boom, this is an AI show now, the energy grids are coming into focus. I think more people are beginning to recognize that we need more cheap, abundant energy and we want to start off the show today with FERC, ordering grid operators to properly revise or justify interconnection rules for data centers and large loads.

**John Arnold** (2:44)
Yeah. This is, we kid, this is not an AI show, this is a Bitcoin show. I'll prepare everyone that we've got a lot of AI headlines this week to talk through. But I think, as I said in the newsletter this week, it all really is connected. I think if you hold Bitcoin, if you care about Bitcoin, you're going to want to pay attention to things like this. What's going on in the AI complex broadly, both in terms of what companies are doing and also what the US is doing, what the government is doing. I think this is a really good example of that. Marty, you're right that it's basically us, the US here, marking to market a 50-year shortfall in energy stability, grid capacity, our power production capacity, our ability to deploy that. We've all seen the various charts highlighting how that's flatlined on different metrics over the last basically 50 years, relative to would-be rivals like China. Important theme that you've been calling out for a very long time, and it's now being addressed very clearly by the federal government. I think most notably, there's that piece of it, but there's also very clearly a desire to push very aggressively, to accelerate some of these deployments. From the top down, make sure that whether you like data centers or not, I think there are many arguments you could maybe make about living next to one. But regardless, there is a clear and explicit goal from the top down to push them forward, accelerate their development.
We'll see if you can pull this up. I meant to open the deck with the lead image from the newsletter this week, but I think a picture is worth a thousand words as it relates to this FERC order and what we're going to do. We're going to talk about the rest of the show. But basically, I think the key theme for this week is like if it wasn't obvious to you before, for the last year, for however long we've been doing the show, we are definitively moving in the direction of AI being a key strategic priority for the country, rightly or wrongly, that's how it's being viewed by the administration.