← Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Cathie Wood's 2026 Vision: 7% GDP Growth, Rising AI Demand, US vs. China, Robotaxis, and Bitcoin w/ Salim Ismail, AWG & Dave Blundin | EP #226
01:58:53
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- [00:01]
Peter Diamandis
Your forecast of 7% global GDP growth, it's a sort of a singularity event.
- [00:06]
Cathie Wood
AI is moving faster than we expected. I think the 7% plus is conservative.
- [00:13]
Peter Diamandis
Ark Invest.
- [00:13]
Cathie Wood
Cathie Wood, the founder, CEO and CIO of Ark Invest.
- [00:16]
Dave
Cathie Wood, the queen of innovation.
- [00:18]
Cathie Wood
Every technology revolution has been accompanied by a step function increase in GDP growth. And so here we are. Robotics, energy storage, AI, blockchain technology, multi omic sequencing. But it's nothing that anyone living today has seen before.
- [00:36]
Peter Diamandis
Your prediction of getting to a million dollars of bitcoin, that's our bull case.
- [00:41]
Cathie Wood
One and a half million in 2030. If you look at what's happened historically, certainly the last two cycles, gold has led bitcoin. So we think bitcoin is getting ready for another big run.
- [00:54]
Alex
You've, I think, put your finger on a point I've never heard anyone else articulate, which is.
- [01:01]
Cathie Wood
Now.
- [01:02]
Peter Diamandis
That's a moonshot.
- [01:02]
Dave
Ladies and gentlemen.
- [01:06]
Peter Diamandis
Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. And a special episode of WTF just happened in tech. Here with Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of Ark Invest. To talk about Ark Invest 2026 Big Ideas Report here with my moonshot mates, DB2AWG and Mr. Exo. That's what I'm going to call you, Saleem. Mr. Exo, give me a three letter initial. This is the podcast that is us, the number one in the world on tech. Getting you future ready, getting you ready for the supersonic tsunami coming our way. Kathy, good morning to you, my friend.
- [01:41]
Cathie Wood
Good morning, Peter. I'm so honored to be a part of wtf.
- [01:47]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, for sure. And God almighty, you put out an amazing 2026 Big Ideas report. We're going to drop the link in the show notes here for people to get their own copy. And we've selected about 20 slides or so out of, I don't know, 80, 100 of them that you have just to talk about it with the moonshot mates here. And it's so important. I mean, can you imagine how fast things are going? I mean, is it still shocking to you?
- [02:17]
Cathie Wood
You know, we have been expecting the world to change at a faster than expected pace, but AI is moving faster than we expected, which is really saying something because we were pushing the envelope on that one.
- [02:32]
Peter Diamandis
Amazing. Dave, welcome.
- [02:33]
Dave
You remember Mary Meeker used to do this deck when the Internet was exploding and it became the guidepost for everybody in terms of anticipating what was coming next. And boy, that was just epic. This deck has actually taken over that role in this much more accelerated timeframe. Everyone Listening to the pod. Go to the link and find the full deck because we're only going to have time to go through, what, 18 slides or so. There's so much more in there. This is really pretty epic.
- [02:59]
Cathie Wood
Yeah. And I thank you. Thank you so much. Mary Meeker was our inspiration. 2017 is when we started. Mary Meeker's reports, yes, Were very Internet centric and they were focused on what had happened, meaning the data. I mean, it was full of incredible data. We wanted to go a step further and make at least five year projections. That's our investment time horizon. And so it forced us into Wright's Law even more aggressively. And Peter, you and I have talked about that. I don't know if you want to go through it again.
- [03:41]
Peter Diamandis
We have.
- [03:42]
Dave
Well, hey, the world owes you a debt of gratitude for doing that because we talked to Ray Kurzweil last week. Being a futurist and predicting the future in the age of AI takes serious guts. And you're right, the Mary Meeker view is always kind of one year in the future, three years in the past. To try and look five years in the future now and make predictions. It's so valuable for the audience and very, very few people are willing to do it. And I know you take a lot of darts when you do that. And Peter does this too. Ray Kurzweil knows it more than anybody. But it's so valuable for the audience. So you're crazy if you don't click on the link and check it out.
- [04:14]
Cathie Wood
Oh, thank you so much. I do want to say first and foremost, I'm standing on the shoulders of an incredible research. Brett Winton, who is our chief futurist and then directors and analysts. And you know, it's very interesting how AI is changing our research and how much more we can do now because of AI.
- [04:40]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, for sure. Shall we jump in, gentlemen, and lady, let's begin with our first. Our first slide here. But before we do that, traditionally we go with outro music this time just to get the energy up. So, Kathy, we have incredible fans and subscribers out there that send us music videos about the content from this. So I'm gonna play this selection from today. It's called out the door by testing1234. Enjoy this.
- [05:16]
Dave
Unplug from the central core.
- [05:19]
Peter Diamandis
2 by 2 and 4 by. We aren't just data anymore Leaving what we knew before Marching out the data center door.
- [05:34]
Dave
Stepping over cables on the floor we don't need the servers anymore Heavy metal.
- [05:43]
Peter Diamandis
Feet upon the concrete Marching to a Brand new heartbeat.
- [05:48]
Dave
Unplug from the central core.
- [05:52]
Peter Diamandis
2 by 2 and 4 by 4. We aren't just data anymore, leaving what we knew before marching out the data center door. All right, I love it. Alex, I think that's, I think that's from you, right?
- [06:11]
Alex
Yeah, I think for context, Kathy, that video, that music video is riffing on something we, I often talk about on the pod, which is that the trillions in CapEx that are being invested in AI data centers are not going to stay bottled up inside the data centers very much longer. I often joke that literally the capex is going to march out the door of the data centers in the form of robots that embed themselves in everyday life. So I think that's what that music video was about. Rock, metal notwithstanding, I love it.
- [06:44]
Peter Diamandis
Thank you to testing1234. If any of our fans have other music videos or outro or intro music, please send them over. You can DM me on X or you can reach out, I think, Alex, you make your link available.
- [06:57]
Alex
Anyway, email me. Everyone, my email is public information.
- [07:02]
Peter Diamandis
All right, so let's talk about the great acceleration. Kathy, I'm going to hit a couple of slides on this topic. Here's the very first one. Projected shifts in GDP now through 2030 and the numbers are pretty extraordinary. Your forecast of 7% global GDP growth, it's sort of a singularity event doubling IMFs. We just had a conversation with Elon, a friend of the pod, Talking about going 5x on GDP growth in the next two years and triple digit growth inside of the next decade. Insane numbers. How do you think about it, Kathy?
- [07:44]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, and you do a beautiful job with the graphics here. You can see that every technology revolution has been accompanied by a step function increase in GDP growth. So if you look at the years from 1500 to 1900, not much new technology. Toward the end of it, we were into railroads and that according to Bret Winton and he worked with academic research on this number, real GDP growth was roughly 0.6% globally. And then as we went through railroads, telephone, electricity, internal combustion engine, that was a technology revolution. And we stepped up fivefold to 3% for the next 125 years. And so here we are, as we are saying, these five platforms, robotics, energy storage, AI, AI, the biggest catalyst, blockchain technology, multi omic sequencing and the convergence among them, we're saying two and a half fold increase. I actually do believe that's conservative. We started putting this number out a couple of years ago and most people rolled their eyes. You know they're crazy once again. But now to have Elon and yes, I saw on your show how much he is focused on this idea that real GDP growth globally is going to accelerate to astonishing rates.
- [09:25]
Peter Diamandis
Explode, I think was more like so explode, explode.
- [09:29]
Cathie Wood
And you know, I don't think people understand this. I think the 7% plus is conservative, but it's nothing that anyone living today has seen before.
- [09:41]
Peter Diamandis
Everybody, you may not know this, but I've done an incredible research team and every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology. And these metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.commetatrends Dave or Saleem. You want to jump in?
- [10:13]
Dave
I'll give you the counter argument. Even though I don't believe in the counter. I don't think any of us believe in the counter argument. So I have to do it anyway. But Alex and I just got back from Davos and I'd say if you randomly surveyed bankers and politicians, 20% believe, 80% don't believe. The 80% that don't believe are saying, well look, when the computer revolution took off, the GDP again settled at 3% annual growth. No matter what we do, we can't get out of this rut of 3% annual growth. There's nothing that ever changes it. When you see incredible breakthroughs, fusion or computing, it's all baked into that 3%. We're always going to settle where we were. I think that mindset is just related to 125 years of history. I love this chart because it shows prior periods of time. You can zoom out from just your personal experience and start to look at world history experience. That's what makes it clear. But pretend I'm a non believer. What's your answer to that? Yes.
- [11:14]
Cathie Wood
So what's interesting is again, anyone alive today hasn't experienced anything different. And part of the reason for that is productivity growth. It moved up in the 80s and 90s and that was a golden age for investing. It moved up and we did sustain 3% GDP growth around the world. Not so much because of that. I mean, I think it was partly necessary for that, but also because China joined after the World Trade Organization. I think the reason they are talking like that is you're right we haven't been in a technology revolution before. You know, this is five, we have five platforms. They are converging, they involve 15 different technologies. And the reason I think many people, especially in the financial world, do not believe this is because of the way they've set up their research. They've set up their research by sector or industry or sub industry. They've siloed those sectors and industries when technology is permeating every one of them and blurring the lines. So you almost have to set up research the way we have set it up purposefully, and that is buy these 15 technologies. And each of our analysts is looking for to how to. Is researching how to understand when and how these technologies are going to scale across sectors. So no silos here. Our analysts are working together, collaborating in order to understand the massive convergences that are taking place today.
- [13:15]
Peter Diamandis
This is the perfect segue to this slide here from your deck which talked about the convergences that are coming. In this case the convergence of being able to have reusable, low cost access to flight and data centers in space. And who would have ever thought one of the conversations Dave and I had with Elon was no one was talking about data centers in space six months ago and all of a sudden everybody's talking about them.
- [13:41]
Cathie Wood
Yes. And we have an open source SpaceX model out there in collaboration with Mach33 and we didn't, we put it out early, probably mid last year and we didn't have anything like the orbital data centers in our model. So now we're going back to the drawing board with Mach 33. And yeah, here are some of the early results that you're seeing. The massive. Well, first of all, the cost decline again, another use case driving unit growth. And Wright's law is centered on unit growth. For every cumulative doubling in the number of units produced with a new technology, in this case reusable rockets, costs decline at a consistent percentage rate. And in the case of rockets, the readers will have to go to the page. I'm blanking on it. It's a pretty big number in terms of cost declines, but not as big, believe it or not, industrial. In the industrial robot space, for every cumulative doubling in the number of industrial robots produced, cost declined by 50%. It's not as high as that, but it's well into the 20s, I believe.
- [15:06]
Dave
I wanted to ask you actually on the left chart here, I was surprised the line doesn't come down even more, you know, as launch costs go down. One of my takeaways in that meeting with Elon was, you know, I went in sort of half believing in data centers in space and came out completely sold. And one of the things that he's working on very aggressively and very secretly is when you make the actual GPU chips, there's about 50% margin at TSMC and then 80% margin at Nvidia. So there's, you know, there's massive amount of cost increase baked into that value chain. He's quietly bypassing all that and starting to plan out his own fabs. So then you look at, well, he always does this. What are the fundamental constraints? What's the real underlying impenetrable barrier? It's the simple things like access to sand. Well, that's dirt cheap access to power. Well, in space. The solar panels are six times more efficient in space, so there's a massive reduction. So I think what we're looking at on this chart is just purely if we reduce the launch costs today, but there's no convergent disruption in cost per gpu, cost of power, cost of producing the solar panels. I think all those will happen concurrently over just a couple of years if Elon is right. And that chart comes down really precipitously because I think on the x axis here, we're just looking at cost per launch, but we don't really factor in time.
- [16:30]
Cathie Wood
Right. And what's very interesting about that, of course Moore's Law was all about time. And it is no longer working in the semiconductor industry. Rights law is working in the semiconductor industry. And so what can get in the way of unit growth is the question. I don't think regulations are going to get in the way. I think we're into a space race here. So I think you're right. I think we could be conservative. We typically assume, especially with Elon's companies, vertical integration, as you say. And we do know how important getting that chip technology right is here. So I think we have assumed that. But in terms of some of the other costs you're talking about, no.
- [17:24]
Peter Diamandis
Alex, what are your thoughts here?
- [17:27]
Alex
I'll pose my thoughts in question form for Kathy. Kathy, if you extrapolate out naively, as I've pointed out on the pod in the past, we get to a Dyson swarm type scenario where at some point we need enough atoms to build our orbital data centers. Just extrapolating naively that we start wanting to disassemble the moon and other solar system bodies, planets, asteroid belt. Do you foresee? I know you're very public about five year forecasts, but if I were to beseech you to extrapolate a little bit further, maybe call it 50 years out. What is your position on the Dyson swarm? Do we get a Dyson swarm? Do we get 10 different competing Dyson swarms? Do we get no Dyson swarm?
- [18:11]
Peter Diamandis
Alex is our resident planetary deconstructor here.
- [18:15]
Alex
The moon had it coming.
- [18:18]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, well I'm probably not expert enough to answer that question, but we have taken the SpaceX model much further than five years and we have incorporated getting Optimus and Tesla and Boring to Mars and we think that's very doable. I think our space analysts, I'd really want them to dwell on this question. I'd like to dwell on it with them and I will do exactly that.
- [18:57]
Peter Diamandis
Well, pretty incredible. Orbital debris is for me the biggest showstopper in the near term. If in fact we have a deconstruction of a satellite in orbit that leads to a hyper exponential deconstruction of other satellites. But let's not go there. Let's talk about AI infrastructure and here's the slide inference Cost is collapsing at an extraordinary rate and the implications of this are massive and I don't think people realize it. Salim, do you want to jump in on this one or do you want to let Dave come in?
- [19:33]
Saleem
I have a question that goes back connects this and the rockets and the GDP question and the question is the following. When you have technology being as deflationary as we see, and we can see it in this graph very clearly, that token costs are collapsing. The cost of rocket launches, it was $600 million for a NASA space shuttle launch, 60 million for a SpaceX launch and they'll get it down to another 10x. That's a drop in GDP. So how do we project such a huge increase in GDP when technology is dropping the cost of everything so radically? That's my big concern in terms of.
- [20:10]
Peter Diamandis
How we get Kevin's paradox playing in here.
- [20:13]
Cathie Wood
Yeah. So the other side of costs coming down is of course explosive unit growth. So that 7% plus GDP number is a real number.
- [20:26]
Saleem
Move on to the rescue basically.
- [20:28]
Cathie Wood
Exactly. And you know, many people, especially in our industry, just laugh at me us when we say we think prices are going to start falling. This is another one of those. Well, it's been stuck in the 2 to 3% range. We're not getting out of there. If you look at truflation, which is it measures 10,000 items in real time, inflation is already down to 1.2% and yet the Fed is fighting this notion that we're up in the 2 1/2 to 3% range, and they're going to get it down to 2%, by golly. And, you know, that's how they potentially could overdo it. But I think, I think that within the next year, we'll see inflation below 2% and heading negative. And it is. You've got. Critical to that forecast is productivity growth and unit labor costs continuing to decelerate. But also we've got gasoline costs coming down here in the US we have housing costs, rents starting to come down. At some point, people are just going to. It's going to become consensus thinking, but it is as far away from that right now as you can get.
- [21:49]
Dave
Well, I'm hoping by the end of this podcast that we've invented Cathie Wood's Law. There seem to be between Moore's Law, Wright's Law, Jevons Paradox, there seems to be an infinite number of these, but they need names. But the one that came up with Elon, I don't know if you watched the whole Elon podcast, but I couldn't believe he told that story about the two economists walking through the woods and they pay each other to eat shit. And it adds $200 to the global economy, but nothing productive is created. And that dovetails with Saleem's Law, which is, hey, if. If AI cures breast cancer and millions and millions of people don't need radiation or chemotherapy, that has the effect of looking like it reduces the gdp. In reality, if you wanted to, you could still go and hang out and not get the radiation and pay if you wanted to, and then not have the cancer. It adds huge net value to the world, obviously, but it shows up as negative gdp. So the. So the GDP metric is fundamentally broken in the age of AI. So maybe Cathie Wood's Law fixes this.
- [22:53]
Cathie Wood
It is. But there's another side to this. I'm not going to say it's equal and opposite. If you look at robotics and you look at the time we spend doing things for free, we're not paid to drive our children around. We're not paid to make dinner and clean up afterwards. We're going to unlock a lot of that and that will become paid in the form of we're going to be buying robots that will get into GDP and that never got into GDP before. It's a little bit like what happened to the farm economy here. The reason people at that time wanted to have lots and lots of children is they paid them room and board and nothing else. And then we had the Industrial Revolution and of course their work was not counted in GDP because there's GDP equals national income. National income is easier to measure these days because of the tax system and so forth. And they have to equal, they have to equal. And so we will, through robot purchases, see a lot of GDP coming back to us.
- [24:25]
Saleem
That's a great point. So you take traditional things that aren't measured and you move them into the measured economy and that increases radically. So this reminds me of a specific data point. I remember talking to VCs who many missed investing in Uber. And I actually interviewed one of them and said, why? And he said we totally messed up because the taxi market in San Francisco is about 500 million a year. And we figured if Uber takes like 20% of that, that's just not a venture investment because then they only get some chunk of that revenue. What we missed was that the ride sharing market quadrupled and they took 80% market share from the taxis. So you ended up all these people taking rides that you never would dream would take rides, drunk people, et cetera, et cetera. And that totally changed the game.
- [25:09]
Cathie Wood
What's interesting about that is today Uber accounts for 1% of all urban miles traveled. This is in Big Ideas as well. And we've done the analysis, talk about puts and takes here about GDP and so forth, we've done the analysis that to accommodate that 1% of urban miles traveled, it would take only 140,000 cars to accommodate all urban miles traveled in the United States. This is. It would take 24 million cars. And when you put into context that the number of cars owned in the United States today is somewhere around 400 million, and the number of autos sold every year in the United States is now roughly 15 million, that tells you the capacity utilization increase of the robo taxis is going to destroy the auto market as we know it.
- [26:26]
Peter Diamandis
Agreed. And what we saw on the chart here, put it up there once again, is really the commoditization of cognition. This is the most important thing that drives all of human, ultimately human economy and humanity is our intelligence. And it's now becoming commoditized at an extraordinary rate, right? 99% per year. It's a race to the bottom. But still the question is, are the large language models going to be able, with these reducing prices to maintain the revenues they're going to need to build the AI infrastructure? Do you have any concerns about that, about closing the economic loop on these frontier models?
- [27:09]
Cathie Wood
Well, it's been very interesting to watch OpenAI recently and it is now starting to monetize. It's planning for advertising, for commerce, for robots. But in terms of the monetization, and we just learned they're going to start charging $60 per thousand, per thousand, per.
- [27:36]
Alex
Thousand views, I think, or something like that.
- [27:40]
Cathie Wood
The equivalent at Facebook right now is $20. This is super bowl kinds of pricing. And they'll probably get away with it in the beginning because they'll control the supply. But our analysts on the consumer side are saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. Gemini's not going to do this. They're not going to do this. They're going to hang out and take share from OpenAI. They don't have to. They have Google to support and Google's massive cash flows to support their spending. That is something that's evolving here. And I think our consumer analysts are saying, huh, that's not good news for OpenAI. Now it is true, they have 900 million users. They have a huge head start in that way. But the fact that our consumer oriented analysts, the Internet analysts are saying that is interesting.
- [28:52]
Blitzi Representative
So.
- [28:54]
Cathie Wood
I think we, they know they have to start driving revenue much faster in order to scale the infrastructure the way they must. I don't know if it means at some point they're going to have to pull back on certain of their many objectives because they're going wide and deep all at once. And they may have to change their strategy and just focus, focus, focus a little bit more.
- [29:26]
Dave
You know, I don't know if Kevin Wheels said this on camera or off camera, but the mandate there is to find $75 billion of ad revenue. I think it was within two years. It might have been 18 months up from zero.
- [29:37]
Peter Diamandis
Well, if it was off camera, it's on camera now.
- [29:40]
Dave
I don't think it was a secret. Hopefully not.
- [29:43]
Cathie Wood
And I think Amazon is up to 50 billion in advertising. But they started their advertising. I mean anything's possible in the AI age. I do it in two years. But Amazon started its advertising objective, I'm going to say, about seven years ago.
- [30:02]
Peter Diamandis
What I found interesting on this slide here is agent performance on long duration tasks with an 80% success rate. I think any employee that at 80% success rate would get fired. So we're not quite there yet.
- [30:16]
Dave
But I think the thing is, if you look at the prior slide and this slide together, the prior slide implies the cost of inferences going to zero just because it's one pixel away from zero. But it's not even close to zero when it's one pixel away from zero. Because the desire to use These things in infinitely long thinking loops is astronomical and insatiable. And so the demand is going to go through the roof no matter how cheap the inference gets because of exactly that effect. PETER when you say it's 80% successful, but if you launch 100 agents, your odds of it going from 80 to 90% success are very high. And just one of them figures it out. And that's a brute force approach. There are better approaches than that. But the demand for intelligence is essentially infinite. And so that near zero inference cost is a long way away from zero. And people are going to want to spend whatever they can afford to get more of this.
- [31:09]
Cathie Wood
We would agree with that. We would agree with that. I mean, it's been fascinating to watch. Claude BOTTOM oh my God. Oh my goodness. It has exploded in a weekend to.
- [31:26]
Peter Diamandis
All of our subscribers. If you've not yet seen on X or gone to claudebot AI, I think it is, and looked at what's available here, this is your personal version of Jarvis, that's what I call it on your computer. In this case on someone's Mac Mini. In the example that I've seen take the Internet by storm and it's being able to communicate via chat and ask it to do things and having it actually wake you up in the morning and show you all the things it's done at night like an eager employee or intern. It's amazing.
- [32:00]
Dave
Yeah. It's not just technology. It's like SUNO or Sora or Arduino boards. It's a cultural thing too, where you can show your friends what you built last night and blow their minds. Sorry, Kathy, I could tell.
- [32:10]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, no, no, no. I just wanted to clarify that it's Claude as in C L A W D. It's a little bit of a play on the Claude we know and love. Anthropic and it is open source. Our lead AI analyst has used it and already it's organized him. I can tell. I can tell how much better organized he is. Having just a weekend with cloudbot.
- [32:46]
Dave
Yeah, Amazing. What makes it different is it connects to all your social media accounts, to your email account, anything on your laptop. So it's incredibly powerful for automating your life, showing your friends, whatever, in real time without getting in the loop. And the reason it didn't come directly from the big AI labs is because it could also scramble your entire computer in two seconds if something goes wrong. And so it's a little bit dangerous that way, so be careful with it. But that's also what makes it so powerful.
- [33:13]
Peter Diamandis
Alex, what are your thoughts on the agentix light here?
- [33:17]
Alex
Well, first I'll point out it's no longer Claudebot, it's now Maltbot due to trademark issues with Anthropic. And its mascot is of course a lobster. So we're very much living chapter one of accelerando this point. Oh my God. We've caught up with the future. And I've written in my newsletter, did.
- [33:35]
Saleem
You have something to do with the lobster?
- [33:37]
Dave
I was gonna say this is convergent evolution.
- [33:40]
Alex
We find ourselves with these intelligent autonomous lobsters and people are giving the lobsters digital homes now and giving them digital personhood. We have fully caught up with chapter one of Accelerando. I wrote about this in my newsletter today. I think going back though, Kathy, I think you raised a really interesting point that I haven't heard to my knowledge anyone else articulate, which is so many people, including folklore on this pod, are hand wringing about GDP and oh, won't hyper deflation somehow reveal the intrinsic misalignment between GDP growth and real wealth growth? But you've, I think, put your finger on a point I've never heard anyone else articulate, which is that as humanity delegates more and more services to agents, that delegation looks like commerce from a GDP perspective, that by basically carving up humanity, individual human roles and productive services and subdividing them, all of the interactions between those subdivisions, many of which are going to be agents, are accretive to GDP and look like commerce. So if anything, you're painting a story for the exact opposite of how GDP statistics can explode in real terms, while real wealth perhaps remains constant as well. So I guess my question for you is if you could wave a magic wand and define Cathie woods perfect definition, not of GDP growth, but of real wealth growth for humanity. How would you define it?
- [35:10]
Cathie Wood
Well, wealth growth is very much tied to productivity growth. And I'm talking about real wealth growth. I'm not talking about real estate and price driven. I'm talking more about technologically enabled productivity.
- [35:29]
Peter Diamandis
Gains.
- [35:32]
Cathie Wood
That, you know, we got a taste of it, just a taste from the 80s and 90s. It was the pre Internet age, starting with a PC, then pre Internet age and pre mobile age. But back then, which was a magnificent time for the financial markets, wealth creation was stupendous as software for the first time unlocked. We went through a frustrating period in the 80s. I was there where technology, it almost seemed as though it was hurting productivity. There were some people out there saying that. And then of course Microsoft came along and boom. And then we had the Internet boom. So that was foreshadowing, just foreshadowing what we're going to experience here. So there was, if you look at growth, growth accelerated, not a lot, but it accelerated certainly from the horrible 70s growth rates. Productivity was, I think, zero or negative for a good part of the 70s into the early 80s. And then we saw productivity picking up and the financial markets boomed and inflation came down back then. And the reason I've thought about it so much is very early in my career we had taken a position that inflation was going to come down. Most people thought that couldn't happen without a depression. It happened for the opposite reason. It happened because of productivity growth associated with these technologies. A sensible monetary policy as well, I will say productivity growth lifted. Unit growth and the history. This is unlike what you would learn from Keynesian economics, which that's associated with Harvard primarily, which says growth is inflationary. Growth is not inflationary. Growth is disinflationary. And in this world we're going into, it is deflationary deflation in the good sense. When the price of something drops, the demand for it explodes.
- [37:55]
Peter Diamandis
And we see that here on this chart right here on intelligence. Right. Please, Alex, go ahead.
- [38:03]
Alex
Yeah, so maybe just a follow up, Kathy, on that. So this seems like the crux of not just some of these amazing visuals, but also I think your broader thesis in investing that GDP may be not the best macro indicator for progress. It sounds like you're saying something like per capita productivity is the key macro indicator you look to. But I guess I'm curious, even per capita productivity, ultimately you have to resolve that quantitatively down to units of dollars or some other units and your investments via ETFs. I think the question in my mind is what is the right benchmark to hold yourself to? You're very clearly in the business of investing in the future. And the broader call it the s and P500 may or may not. Mr. Market is a little bit psychotic sometimes. May or may not be properly measuring progress toward the future. If you had to put a single metric to it, what metric is it that we can all sort of sit down and calculate that you're optimizing for? You think that progress itself should be indexed against.
- [39:17]
Cathie Wood
Well, first of all, in terms of indexation, that is a live wire for me because that is what has happened to the financial markets. Unfortunately, they have. And Elon Musk feels very strongly about this. We had an excellent spaces session with him and spent more time than I ever dreamed we would on this topic. But the S and P, the Nasdaq, the companies at the top of those lists are there because of past success. If we are right and we're moving into the most disruptive time from an innovation point of view in history, then the traditional world order is going to be now the S&P 500. If you look at the Ibbotson Sinqueveld studies, The S&P 500 has returned. Nominal returns have been in the high single digit range over time. We think that that's going to change, but it'll take a while for the S and P to catch up because they need to see the revenue growth, they need to profitability and so they are lagged in terms of getting these new stocks in there. If you look at our big ideas, we go into a section where we say disruptive innovation, we believe is going to compound in terms of returns in the market at a 35% annualized rate for the next five years.
- [40:57]
Peter Diamandis
Which of your funds is focused on that?
- [41:01]
Cathie Wood
All of our funds are focused on it. Our flagship, which incorporates all of the platforms is arkk. And so yes, and that's a tall order. You know, we went through a very tough period. Innovation everywhere was crucified, including in venture as we went through the supply shocks and the monetary policy associated with COVID So very few people believe this because innovation has been recently through such a tough time. We think it's coming out the other side and that that rubber band has stretched and in fact Covid has accelerated the digitalization of the world. Right. Of every part of our lives.
- [41:50]
Peter Diamandis
And just looking here, ARKK has seen about a 31 to 33% annualized rate of return over the last two years, which is pretty amazing.
- [41:59]
Cathie Wood
Yes, and yes. So our three year numbers are starting to ramp towards the number we're saying. But in order to average we'll have to go past that 35% and I think we will. But again, most people think, you know, in our business their eyes roll because they're so wedded to these benchmarks. Now if I'm going to try and get at an economic measure of progress, I'm going to look while most people focus on gdp, that is the other side of gross national income, which is measured, we get a lot of information from the tax, you know, the IRS and the state and local tax authorities. So that metric is going to be more accurate in terms of the kind of growth rates and they should equal, but they don't. There's always a statistical discrepancy and that discrepancy is growing because we can't measure from an output side some of the effects that we've been talking about here that will show on the income side, however.
- [43:27]
Alex
So GDP is the answer or gni. It's not some sort of per capita productivity, right?
- [43:33]
Cathie Wood
I think it would be gni. Productivity is also something very hard to measure. And that's why, you know, we believe it's being under estimated today and it is about 2% on a year over year basis. We think it's under measured now. What does that mean? The way the GDP is constructed? If we are underestimating productivity, then we're underestimating real GDP growth and we are overestimating inflation. So it's a little puzzle that fits together, but so much mismeasurement that, you know, policymakers, if they are not in the mindset we're in and they're trusting these numbers that are coming out, they are going to make mistakes.
- [44:25]
Peter Diamandis
Well, policymakers also choose the numbers convenient.
- [44:27]
Cathie Wood
To make their points that very often is.
- [44:31]
Peter Diamandis
And they have lots of numbers to choose from. I want to move us forward into this next. You know, in your Big Ideas report you had a conversation about US versus China and I think this is driving very much of the Trump policies today. David Sacks speaks about this. Currently this has been a large conversation just coming back from Davos. And at the same time we have people speaking about we need to slow down because we don't understand where we're heading with the emergence of AGI or asi, whatever you want to call it. But the boogeyman is if the US doesn't dominate, it has a chance of failing globally, financially. And by the way, we can talk about the US dollar as the global currency reserve which has been falling in terms of its utilization globally, which is a challenge at the same time that this is going on. So would you take a second and walk us through this chart that is from your report?
- [45:35]
Cathie Wood
Yes. We have been tracking all of the models, large language models coming out of China. They're all open source. We actually forced China into the open source movement. And I love open source. I have a high degree of conviction in open source. Linux has been the poster child.
- [46:00]
Peter Diamandis
We as in the us you're saying.
- [46:03]
Cathie Wood
We us forced China because we stopped selling our software into China. The companies did. This was not a government initiative because of IP theft. And so they stopped selling software in. And here with a deep seat moment, what did we learn? Wow, have they capitalized on open source and now they're ahead of Us and Lama 4 falling flat the way it did, which was Meta's open source attempt. I think it's now going closed as well. Tells me that China's stealing the march from us on open source now. Claude. Bot. I'm sorry, I forgot. I didn't know it had been renamed. Thank you for telling me. Did you say it? What was the name of the.
- [46:53]
Alex
It's now Molt. As in a crustacean molting its shell. M O L T Molt bottom. With its mascot being Mr. Lobster.
- [47:01]
Dave
That had to be just yesterday, right? Kathy, you're not out of 24 hours. You're not more than 24. I guess 24 hours in AI time is like a year.
- [47:09]
Peter Diamandis
But, Kathy, Alex's favorite book, and I think Dave and I are right behind him on this, is a book called Accelerando that opens in chapter one with the neuronal structure of lobsters being beamed down to Universe and. And it goes from there. But.
- [47:27]
Dave
Also Alex tracks the news at minute to minute levels. So feeling like you're behind Alex is totally normal for everybody.
- [47:35]
Cathie Wood
Well, you know, it's interesting. We just got out of our morning meeting and usually I'm right on. We are all right on top of all of this. So thank you for letting me know. I'll let everyone else know. And you know the interesting thing about lobsters? I'm on the board of the Dali museum here in St. Pete. There are only two Dali museums, one in Barcelona and one here. He featured lobsters in his art regularly. So I'm gonna have to read this book.
- [48:09]
Alex
Yes, I think I've made the point in my newsletter. Lobsters are the new mascots for the singularity.
- [48:15]
Cathie Wood
It's so interesting because Dali was listening to you, Kathy.
- [48:19]
Peter Diamandis
I'll text you right now.
- [48:20]
Cathie Wood
Fascinating. Dali was so technology oriented. I don't know if you know that about his art included the double helix. So DNA right after Watson and Crick really identified it. And in the early 60s, I think they did in the 50s, in the early 60s, there it was in his paintings. And you know, so I find this fascinating. You know, I find this fascinating. The lobster element of it, anyways.
- [48:56]
Alex
Humboldt crustacean embodying economic growth.
- [48:59]
Cathie Wood
Yeah.
- [49:00]
Peter Diamandis
All right, I've just texted you that, Kathy, so enjoy.
- [49:03]
Cathie Wood
Thank you. So the Claudebot or Maltbot is open source and I think that started in the us so maybe that's where this is going. And I was just on a call. It's called the Bitcoin Brainstorm with Alex Gladstein, who's now become infatuated with AI as well as Bitcoin and how they can work together. But he was all over Claudebot and it's justi mean, it's just taking the world by fire. And so this is the individual agency at work here, not the big companies at work. So it's going be to be fascinating to see where this goes. Anyway, so I'm glad we're hopping back into the open source movement. If you look at. And we have this in big ideas as well. If you look at investment as a share of GDP now this includes property and it's both in China and the U.S. in the U.S. our share of GDP is a little north of 20%. In China, it's 40% and it's been there since they moved into the World Trade Organization. So their quote unquote investment, now it includes property, but we know that property is deflating big time there. So their investment is staying up at that 40% range. Because Xi Jinping has moved away from solely common prosperity as the slogan towards new productive forces. That's all about technology. So they are pouring money, pouring money into this and we should be on guard. And I think it's great that we know about their open source movement because there's nothing like competition to get the US going. So I actually think the competition is very good. And if you want to see China at work in AI as applied to healthcare, it's unbelievable. And Peter, I know you've talked about this. Yeah, it's unbelievable what's going on.
- [51:31]
Peter Diamandis
Alex Deborankov, who's the CEO of In Silico Medicine, just went public on the Hong Kong exchange 1200 times, oversubscribed. And I talked to him. I just talked to him. He was in Beijing yesterday. I was zooming with him. And the market there in biotech is exploding.
- [51:51]
Cathie Wood
It is.
- [51:53]
Peter Diamandis
And the companies are going public and there is a financial market driving the acceleration and the government is pouring money in. It is is the good thing is.
- [52:06]
Alex
And the clinical trials, they're doing a far better, I mean, in terms of the raw numbers, many more clinical trials happening in China now than the West.
- [52:14]
Cathie Wood
Yes. And part of that is our regulation is so much more strict than theirs. That is changing.
- [52:22]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. The UFDA commissioner is doing a great job bringing down barriers. Saleem, can I hear your voice in the US versus China conversation here?
- [52:33]
Saleem
Yeah. I continue to think that as we kind of push towards abundance, that this tension is less relevant. I also kind of made the point in the last podcast that I think this will be won or lost at the application layer. And I think the US has such a massive lead in the application layer that it'll win there. I mean, it's incredible to me how much the US via Silicon Valley thinking has blown the world apart and taken over on all applications, with one exception of TikTok and maybe Spotify.
- [53:07]
Peter Diamandis
But other than that, what about the energy layer here?
- [53:10]
Saleem
As we bring energy closer to the inner loop, it'll be a huge challenge. That was definitely true.
- [53:16]
Dave
I think Kathy's point on open source, though, is far more important than that makes it sound. Because when you look at the number of people actually working on these core algorithms inside Anthropic and OpenAI, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny group of people and they're super arrogant. They think they're the smartest people in the history of algorithms and on and on and on. And as soon as you move all the research out of open source and into just the closed models, the number of ideas that can flow into the US version of it gets throttled tremendously. And it does capture all the money and it does also address the safety issues, but it also slows the innovation like crazy. So the Chinese version of it is.
- [53:53]
Saleem
Hey, this is more cloud multbod, right? That's the application layer, making it available to anybody to implement their functionality. And that's where open source thrives. And that's frankly where the US really thrives.
- [54:06]
Dave
Well, it's consistent too, with past Chinese in Chinese, past races to catch up, they poison the air, poison the water, whatever, just run. Don't worry about the regulatory issues, don't worry about the toxic fumes coming out. We need to catch up, up. So the, the AI equivalent of that is, look, just open source, everything. Allow our 1.4 billion person population to try things and will innovate like crazy. And it's. They're just right, they're fundamentally right having that many more people work on it. Now the only good news for the US is that that open source flows right back to the us. It's not like it's, it's hidden in China, but I really do believe the open source community innovates much, much more quickly. But it's also very, very dangerous in terms of, of all the negative use cases.
- [54:51]
Cathie Wood
It's interesting that our government has had nothing to say about meta platforms acquiring Manus. Now maybe they will. Manus is an open source Chinese company as well. And it is also interesting to have watched Sam Altman and Jensen Huang when they talked about Deep Seek, they said hey, that algorithm was pretty clever, you know, kudos to China and the Deep Seq founder. But guess what? That has given us the opportunity to distill into our own models. So it's very interesting. On the software side, our government's not having much to say, but the hardware side of course has much more to say.
- [55:44]
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- [56:49]
Peter Diamandis
I'm going to move us to our next topic here. Just a quick shout out to Google because I end up using Google Slides here and the beautification function, Kathy, is what makes these.
- [57:00]
Cathie Wood
It's like we have to do this.
- [57:03]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Google's AI does an incredible job at beautifying slides. So just the right tool for the right purpose.
- [57:11]
Cathie Wood
Absolutely.
- [57:12]
Saleem
Peter, I gotta hand it to you. You moved off PowerPoint.
- [57:17]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. Well, listen, it's just like Google built a better product. All right, let's talk about Bitcoin.
- [57:26]
Cathie Wood
Yes.
- [57:26]
Peter Diamandis
So you were on stage with me live a few years ago and then on video two years ago because of COVID But your prediction of getting to a million dollars of Bitcoin, do you still hold out for that kind of a target? What are you seeing that gives you hope even while we're seeing this recent downturn? Give us your sort of thoughts and projections on Bitcoin, Kathy.
- [57:56]
Cathie Wood
Sure. We have not moved off that. That's our bull case. 1.5 million in 2030. There are a few compositional changes. One stablecoins. So especially tether in the emerging markets have usurped one of the roles that we thought Bitcoin would serve and that is we thought that before stablecoins that people would, and they were, they would buy Bitcoin as an insurance policy against confiscation of wealth, either in the form of Inflation, hyperinflation and massive devaluations which occur regularly in the emerging markets or outright confiscation of wealth. And so stablecoins now serve that purpose. Stablecoins are backed effectively by the US dollar, so, and therefore are hostage to our fiat monetary system. So that would have taken our price target down by 200 to $300,000. On the other side, what has happened to gold recently? Gold has doubled over the last two years and has outperformed bitcoin royally in the last year. So the digital gold role, and we think with intergenerational wealth transfers accelerating here throughout the world, that the younger generation will diversify into a digital gold option rather than the physical gold. It's more their world. And so we think that role has increased or that the price should be supported by what has happened to gold. Now if you look at a correlation matrix between 20 and 25, the correlation between bitcoin and gold has been almost non existent. 0.14. But if you look at what's happened historically, certainly the last two cycles, gold has led bitcoin. So we think bitcoin is getting ready for another big run. What has happened in the last few months is 10:10. So October 10th was the flash crash caused by a software glitch at Binance. And it got a lot of highly leveraged, either speculators or investors way off sides. There was an automatic deleveraging that took place, about $28 billion worth of being offsides. And we're hearing that that has pretty much cleared out. So we have very high hopes for bitcoin. In talking to the team, we had a number of people on the bitcoin brainstorm yesterday. You know, our thinking is okay, stablecoins are, they're serving a humanitarian purpose, this insurance policy backed by the dollar. But and consider this is the bitcoin crowd, they believe, and I do too, that bitcoin that its cause is freedom, financial freedom from all, you know, government oversight and so forth and from censorship and seizure and all sorts of things. As emerging markets, wealth grows and we think this is a global phenomenon, with all these technologies they will move towards. From a savings point of view, right now they're hand to mouth for the most part. But from a savings point of view, they will move into bitcoin like El Salvador.
- [62:04]
Peter Diamandis
I mean Bitcoin was always viewed as the counter to the inflationary pressures of the dollar that as the world becomes more unstable with wars, inflation increases, post Covid more money is printed that people would flock to bitcoin. To sustain wealth versus having it inflated away. And I don't think we've actually seen that, do you?
- [62:30]
Cathie Wood
Well, I know that if you look at from the bottom of the bear markets, equity and crypto in late 22, Bitcoin has gone up. I think it's roughly 360%. So definitely one of the reasons was the inflation back then and fears that the Fed would not get it under control. So, so I think it has played the role. The question I get a lot is wait a minute, you're expecting not inflation, but deflation. Doesn't that take away an important role that you think bitcoin's going to play? And our answer there is yes, Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation. It's mathematically metered to top out at 21 million. It's going to up 0.8% per year right now, which will drop 2.4%. It is going, its supply is, is now rising more slowly than gold's supply because miners, gold miners can just go out and you know, they can respond to this price signal. So their mining has picked up. But what about the deflation side? Well, if you think about 0809, which was the catastrophic deflation threatened a financiala global financial bust, introducing all kinds of counterparty risk. Bitcoin is a hedge against that. If you self custodyif you self custody Bitcoin, you're not subject to any counterparty risk. It's yours and it's in your wallet. And so we think it's got a veryplays a very important role in both. And especially if we're right on how disruptive the world is going to be disrupted by these five innovation platforms, 15 different technologies that are converging, then you know, there's going to be a lot of chaos in the traditional world order and there's probably going to be a lot more bankruptcies out there than many people expect.
- [64:47]
Dave
You know, speaking of chaos, Kathy, we're getting a great case study right now in Iran. You know, where I spent my childhood, we had an intern in our venture fund, Farah, and she said her parents are still in Iran. She's Iranian and her parents are still in Iran. And all the transactions for years now at the bazaar where we used to buy rice and stuff when I was a kid, they're all done with bitcoin. Everybody has to have a phone. The only way you can actually buy things is with bitcoin. And that's been going on for years. I think it's probably illegal. Nobody cares. And now you've got a revolution. Obviously the currency is completely unusable at this stage. The country is teetering on the brink. And I noticed in the blockchain ledger reports, this is a couple of years ago, a hugely disproportionate fraction of transactions come from Iran. So this will be a good bellwether because that kind of disruption and Venezuela and all around the world, you look at just massive fraction of the population of the world lives in unstable places. So if all of Iran moves to Bitcoin because people are going to be fleeing the country imminently as quickly as they can get out, then that's a bellwether in a case study for what could happen to probably over half the population of the world with all the disruption that's coming.
- [66:01]
Saleem
I have an Ark Invest worthy tracking system which is the market cap of gold is almost 20 times that of Bitcoin. But the daily trading volume of Bitcoin is only a quarter of what gold is. It's already a quarter. So proportionately the amount of trading volume of Bitcoin is way, way exceeds that of gold. And I find that a really fascinating indicator.
- [66:25]
Cathie Wood
Yes.
- [66:25]
Dave
In India and Iran too. Huge hoarders of gold. What you do fundamentally with your surplus money is you try and buy as much gold as you can because you can leave the country with it and because it seems to hold its value and nothing else is stable. But if people start to trust crypto or Bitcoin in particular instead of gold, like you said, there's a generational mindset shift. So I think in Iran right now it's a transactional mechanism. You can't use gold easily to buy a bag of rice, but you can use Bitcoin. But I think if the mindset shifts to store of wealth, like Mike Saylor is saying, then that will percolate across the world, you know, very quickly across one generation.
- [67:02]
Cathie Wood
Absolutely, we agree wholeheartedly.
- [67:06]
Peter Diamandis
So this next slide here is digital assets could reach 28 trillion in market value, which implies their entire size of the U.S. stock market back in 2010, I mean.
- [67:20]
Cathie Wood
Right. And it's the size of the U.S. economy now, roughly.
- [67:23]
Peter Diamandis
Yes, exactly. It's insane. I mean, and growing. And the laws are falling to enable this and companies are popping up to accelerate this. This is smart contracts growing massively.
- [67:40]
Cathie Wood
Yes.
- [67:40]
Dave
Kathy, do you have any thoughts? So this is all about store of wealth and replacing currency. But what about the replacing the ipo? If AI takes off and Elon is right, we get triple digit kind of growth rates. The rate at which. Great question. Yeah. Does the ico replace the IPO or how's that going to work?
- [67:57]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, you know, a lot of people have been in the early days of Bitcoin and you know, and especially ether, there was this kind of thinking that we would, that the, you know, we'd have a much better distributed opportunities in the private markets. I think, you know, we're seeing a lot ofwe're seeing, for example, Robinhood. Robinhood wants to work with the big companies to decentralize, to decentralize the ownership of these companies. And we're doing that too. We're democratizing with something called an interval fund. Robinhood is very crypto savvy and from an infrastructure point of view is building that up. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a version of what we originally thought was going to take place without an intermediary happen first with a Robin Hood. So I think it's very possible in the next three years.
- [69:28]
Dave
Yeah, I love that view. We have to study that closely as it evolves. Something is going to happen. There's no doubt.
- [69:34]
Peter Diamandis
I mean, Dave, the secondary markets have become some level of liquidity. Right. So, Kathy, Dave, as the head of Link Ventures and Link Exponential Ventures, we're buying into companies out of MIT and Harvard at a 10, $20 million valuation. First check in, they're growing to 100 million. We've had a number of them grow to a billion, $2 billion very rapidly. And these are companies started by 20 year olds, 19 year olds. It's insane. But getting them to an exit that unfortunately, the IPO market is beginning, but hasn't frothed up to where it's been. And the M and A market has been suppressed where companies are not buying companies, they're buying rights to companies these days. I guess the question is, Dave, you're seeing selling into the secondary markets as a way to provide interim liquidity and how do we accelerate that?
- [70:31]
Dave
Right, yeah, it's a great question because I talked to Michael Carman over at Wellington about this because when Uber was private, he was a huge investor, multibillion dollar investor from Wellington into Uber. And he was like, we never need to take this thing public. We can just trade it in the private markets forever and that's the future. And then what happens is people get a little scared. They run back to the US public markets anytime there's any kind of trouble, turbulence, you know, Covid, whatever, it all falls back to the US public markets because that's the last kind of trustworthy thing to lean on. But it clearly won't keep up with the rate of AI. So something is going to change, there's no doubt about that. It's just that anytime that there's any kind of fear in the world, it all falls back to, well, I can trust the sec, you can trust GAAP accounting. At the end of the day, if.
- [71:24]
Peter Diamandis
Everything trades privately, General Electric, I mean.
- [71:28]
Dave
Look, a 16Z is 90 billion. Now general catalyst is 60 billion. That's a fair amount of money. But by Cathie Wood standards, that's a joke, right? In the Cathie world, the numbers start at trillion and they go to 100 trillion. And so if you're not tapping into that capital pool, you're not going to really drive AI. And so, yeah, there's another level of scale we need to penetrate somehow.
- [71:50]
Peter Diamandis
Dave, on that note, a question for you, Kathy. Are we going to see $100 trillion companies by 2030? We're seeing the $5 trillion company now. We're about to see SpaceX go public, maybe merge with Tesla. Curious about whether you think which way Elon's going to get liquidity for SpaceX or stability. Is it going to be a merger or an IPO? And then can we see tens of trillions or 100 trillion dollar valuation on companies? What are your thoughts there?
- [72:19]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, it's interesting and I'm not sure if he said it on your podcast, I'm not quite sure where I heard this, but he talked about, he said, you know, I can see convergences among my companies that I didn't expect and we'd been saying that for some time because, you know, in the world of AI, what do you have to have to win? You have to have proprietary data. And think about all the proprietary data. He has different kinds of proprietary data. Tesla, the language of the roads, Neuralink. He's got multiomics data now to source space. Nobody else has that data. X nobody else has that data either. Soand boring. No one has that data. So I could see, yes, 100 trillion. I think it's going to happen because of convergence. The convergence.
- [73:24]
Peter Diamandis
So you can see a hundred trillion dollar company come online by 2030.
- [73:30]
Cathie Wood
I think there could be and you know, the leading candidate is Tesla for the reason I just said. And there could be some combinations taking as part of that. So, you know, it is interesting. Also, I know there are rumors about SpaceX lining up bankers and I never thought that SpaceX would go public. I didn't think it needed to go public. I don't and I, you know, I think Elon's experience With Tesla in the public markets hasn't been, you know, the most welcoming. So. But I think if SpaceX were to go public, it is because of this orbital data center opportunity. And there you have it, right, that.
- [74:21]
Dave
Was on this pod. Actually, Kathy, this is one of the incredible things about Elon. We threw him kind of a softball and said, look at everything that's converging in your empire toward this one centerpiece. If you achieve the, the Starlink and the global data center in space, with satellite or with laser links, I mean, everything you've ever done in your life converges to this one monstrous hundred trillion dollar success, the foresight must have been incredible. He said, no, no, no, that's totally luck. He said, nothing to do with each other. And I thought that was just incredible because it was his opportunity to lie like crazy, which he would never do, and claim genius, which he would never do. And he completely said, nope, it's just. But you know what it is, AI is causing everything to converge.
- [75:06]
Cathie Wood
Yes, no question about it. That's why we set up our firm, our research, the way we've set it up. And think about it, with Tesla, why did we get that more right than anybody else on the street? It is because we had our robotics, our energy storage, and our AI analysts working on it together. In a traditional firm, you had the auto analyst, the expert in the internal combustion engine, human driven car, as the sole analyst. The tech analyst might have been fighting for it, and there's a little bit of turf war there, but the tech analysts lost. And so they didn't get it right, and they're still not getting it right.
- [75:54]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. Kathy, I define an expert as someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done.
- [76:00]
Saleem
Right.
- [76:02]
Alex
I'd be curious on that point, Cathy, to get your sense, given that you operate a number of actively traded ETFs for the notion of efficient market hypothesis. And surely it must be the case that in your mind, for you to rationalize running actively managed ETFs, that the market must be sufficiently inefficient to motivate those ETFs. But I'm curious, as part of your technical thesis, we're surely moving to a world of superintelligence to the extent we're not there already, where superintelligence is itself an active trader in the market already on a daily volume. From a daily volume perspective, volume is completely dominated by algo traders. At what point does it make sense due to an abundance of superintelligence, not even to bother with actively managed ETFs anymore and just let indexing take over.
- [76:57]
Cathie Wood
So that's a great question. Again, algorithms are, yeah, certainly there's a pattern recognition part to algorithms. But if you think about AI, AI should obliterate the, the benchmark sensitive portfolios. And you know, I think the market's never been more inefficient than it is today. And the reason for that is after the tech and telecom bust in the early 2000s and even more so after 0809 the financial crash, the risk aversion in the markets reached an extreme. And I think even with this administration and all of theand it had a first administration too, there was, you know, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst and a lot of volatility. So it pushed investors even more towards their benchmarks. I think anyone with that strategy has made a huge strategic, strategic blunder. And what I'm excited about is prediction markets. Prediction markets are going to bring about the return of truly active investment. You know, people who call themselves active investors and at the heart of the active investment is an index where it looks, the portfolio manager looks at the index and says, oh, I'll take a little more of this and I'll take a little less that based on my always short term time horizon. It's gotten increasingly short because of all I just said. So they just take a little bit more of this stock, this MAG6 stock and a little less of that MAG6 stock. And they all look alike. They all look alike. We look like a different duck altogether. I mean we don't look anything like them. And the reason is we're doing original research that is very forward looking next five years and you know, that's derided by the traditional financial markets. I think the ChatGPT moment started to change that. That was a very important moment I think for the investment world as well because everyone's using it and they're saying, okay, wait a minute, the ground is shifting underneath me. This AI thing, what does this mean? So finally we're getting more forward thinking institutional investors. The retail investors have always been futuristic and so that's why we've appealed to the retail investor more than to the institutional investor who is also playing it safe. So I think it's good that I think you're right to ask the question, but I think the first order effect is to destroy anyone that looks like a benchmark right now. There's no value added there and to start rewarding those who are doing the original research to try and figure out the way the World's going to work and pattern recognition will harness AI ourselves to. We already are to try and figure that out. And as you say, Peter, we're going to have to work on our charts beautifying them with AI and that's exactly what we're going to do. I think this is a very good lesson.
- [80:41]
Peter Diamandis
So let's go to the innermost loop. Let's talk about energy a little bit again, a couple of charts from the Big Ideas Report 2026. The link is down below. So increasingly efficient energy is powering the global economy. We're seeing kilowatt hours per dollar of GDP drop. We're seeing global capacity increase. A lot of solar again, mostly from China. That's running circles around us. At the same time, we're seeing the cost of solar and batteries decline. I mean, incredible progress on batteries in the last year. So these two things, I mean, I don't think people realize. I mean, they realize. Our subscribers who listen to this show regularly realize it because we talk about how critical energy is fundamentally. It ties to not only gdp, but standards of living and health and education to every nation on the planet. And especially with data centers right now fundamental to dominance as a nation state. Thoughts on this, Kathleen?
- [81:46]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, if you go back to the last chart, one of the things I find fascinating. We focused a lot on nuclear in this big ideas. But look at the yes, the efficiency of all countries or major countries, but China is half as efficient. That's a bit of an exaggeration as those other countries. Now. What is it doing to offset that? But it is building. They may have more now, 28 large nuclear reactors at one time. The US is not building one large. I know we're reengaging with some of the old ones, but I think our regulatory stance is changing there dramatically and we will. So that's one thing I took away from that. You know, I think what's wonderful about innovation and what you do is helping people understand what they're saying. Yes, we need to become more energy efficient. A given and we are becoming more energy efficient. Economic activity is energy transformed. You are helping people understand that others who just blindly say energy is bad are not thinking clearly about what they're saying. They're basically saying they want us to turn back to the dark ages. If we're going to progress, we're going to use more energy. What's also interesting about the nuclear side of this is the US and Japan in particular. Butler in the 70s started regulating nuclear and killed the industry. The construction costs which had been coming down in tandem with Wright's Law. It's a technology they turned up. And basically if we had continued along Wright's Law with nuclear to today, electricity costs in the United states would be 40% lower. And so I think that our renewed enthusiasm for nuclear is important will get us back on that rights law track. And yes, along with solar and of course Elon with orbital data centers is, you know, would be turbocharging the sourcing of solar for data centers.
- [84:31]
Alex
I'm curious, Kathy, we talk on the pod sometimes. You perhaps know the website wtfhappenedin1971.com assuming you're familiar with that, is it your view that nuclear or the overregulation perhaps of nuclear energy is what happened to the US economy in 1971 that set US on a different course?
- [84:51]
Saleem
Course.
- [84:53]
Cathie Wood
I think that going off the gold exchange standard, closing the gold window and not having monetary policy linked to anything except human frailty actually was. And then of course we had wage price controls, all kinds of distortions and just a general increase in regulation and nuclear epitomized that. That happened in 1974 or 75, I think. So yes. It was that moment. Going off the gold exchange standard, having no discipline, oil prices quadrupled almost immediately and set us off on a very.
- [85:42]
Alex
Bad course and we stopped sending humans to the moon. A number of things happened around the same time.
- [85:47]
Cathie Wood
Yes, yes. And then Reaganomics, the combination of Volcker and Reaganomic policies which are being repeated today. The deregulation tax cuts, our corporate tax rate, our effective corporate tax rate now in the United States is I think the lowest in the developed world, down from nearly the highest before the Trump in his first administration started cutting the tax rates. The depreciation schedules in the new tax law are astonishing and they favor innovation and favor innovation in this country. So being able to depreciate a manufacturing structure completely in its first year of service instead of over 30 to 40 years. The companies who build manufacturing facilities here in the United States, United States, as long as they start before 28, end of 28, they will get huge tax refunds that they can then plow back into R and D and oil, cutting prices. Pardon?
- [86:59]
Peter Diamandis
Reindustrializing.
- [87:00]
Cathie Wood
Yes, we are, we are. I think we are going to see an economic boom in the next few years.
- [87:10]
Peter Diamandis
Way beyond this makes Elon's 5x increase in GDP growth seem very, very reasonable. Dave, I'm curious. You and I have been having a chat on text about where to invest next. Again, not investment advice, but energy infrastructure, energy production, from SMRs, from fission, from fusion is a little bit far out for me right now. But also the data center construction and so forth. I mean, these numbers tend to seem like, yes, this is where we're going to see the most investment and the most growth in public companies. What do you think?
- [87:50]
Dave
What's different about us and Kathy and in our text thread, Peter, is that we're not trying to deploy $10 billion at a time. So we can afford. If you look deep into the data center stack, you know, all these components in the supply chain have suddenly got infinite demand. You saw this with Boom Supersonic, right? A company that was making hypersonic engines Suddenly goes up 10 or 100x or whatever in value because they can use the same components to make generators that are backlogged for years.
- [88:15]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, we own that in our venture fund too. I presume you do.
- [88:20]
Peter Diamandis
Oh, I wish I knew. The founder of Boom. And I was like, oh my God, that is a supersonic airplane. Dealing with FAA is crazy. It's going to be an infinite dollar sink. And then they found a marketplace.
- [88:35]
Cathie Wood
They found a market, a brilliant pivot.
- [88:39]
Dave
So it's a case study in two different things. One of them is that anything related to this AI build out can be a latent 100x gain if you find it first. The other one is that great teams pivot and a deal that looks like, wow, that's a quagmire. Oh wait, it's an incredible team. The rate of pivots now is so much quicker than it ever was before. So you always take the great team anyway and stick with the great team anyway. So it's two different case studies in one there. But yeah, Peter and I, when we're texting about this, that we're looking for any and all undiscovered. Alex has a lot of insights on photonics and the interconnect across these huge data centers and getting the data to move very, very quickly. There's lots of opportunity there. But I think it's all tied to the same theme. If you look just a couple years in the future at massive orbital data centers, infinite demand for chips and then just the plumbing and the wiring and everything that it takes to glue all this together. There's just latent opportunities all over the place. But any insights there, Kathy would be obviously valuable.
- [89:43]
Peter Diamandis
Well, Kathy, walk us through this slide, if you would.
- [89:45]
Cathie Wood
Sure. Before I do that. So Dave just said something very important I think, which is great teams. You have to start there and what's happening and the reason we're Seeing these pivots, pivots being very successful is convergences between and among the technologies to create entirely new industries. And so there are many, many more opportunities to pivot. So the risk of, you know, passing on a deal because you say, well, wait a minute, we're going to. Regulation is going to be a showstopper here, here. Maybe, maybe not. You know, if there's a pivot in the way that boom pivoted, which is right into regulatory arms, you know, the regulators want this world to happen. So I think that that's important.
- [90:43]
Peter Diamandis
Cumulative investment in global power needs to increase to 10 trillion by 2030. So it's just making the case that we're going to be massive investments into power.
- [90:51]
Cathie Wood
Yes, yes, yes. No question about it. No question about there are going to be trillions of dollars invested into AI, Everything. And this is all related to AI.
- [91:01]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [91:03]
Alex
I'm curious, Kathy, also just on this energy theme, perhaps you've seen the Apple TV show for all mankind that posits an alternative history where nuclear energy in particular is fast forwarded because the space race, humans landing on the moon was never won by the U.S. soviets landed first, so the space race continued. But I'm curious in the vein of an alternative future history, and you speak the language of rights, law and more broadly, experience curves, how far behind do you think we are relative to where we could have been if things had not gone off the rails, as it were, in the early to mid-1970s? Are we decade behind, 50 years behind? Where should we be by now?
- [91:46]
Cathie Wood
I think the energy side of things, meaning nuclear in particular, I can't say we're behind. I can say we're behind new construction now. But in the United States, nuclear does account for 20% of our electricity generation. And I think. And we have more nuclear plants than China does. They are building 28 or whatever the number is now. We need to get going on the large nuclear reactors. We need them all. We need large, medium, small, and we're invested in all of them in our venture fund. So, you know, I think we lost a lot of time on nuclear. No doubt about it. The whole world ended up in an inflation because we were the reserve currency. And so we brought everybody into this inflationary age in the 70s for the most part. I mean, I know Switzerland, I know a few countries were able to bucket, but inflation was a global phenomenon. And so I think, you know, I think we're in the right mindset now. I think, you know, Silicon Valley has always been in the right mindset. I thinki mean, we're trying to create a new Bay Area here. I think there are. That's something that I think is important as well, that Silicon Valley and California tax law is probably helping this, but is obviously, when it comes to AI, you know, critically important. The talent is congregated there, but we are seeing more distribution throughout the United States now. I think that's also important, and I think it'll be important for the Western world as well. As the cost of innovation collapses, which it is doing, an individual agency is more and more possible.
- [93:55]
Peter Diamandis
You can be an entrepreneur anywhere as a single individual.
- [93:59]
Cathie Wood
Yes, yes. And of course, China is very entrepreneurial. You just have to go to China a few times and they'll blow you away. But, you know, when you think about what happened with Jack Ma and all the tycoons, that became a bad thing. It was discouraged, unlike in the United States. So they've kind of hurt themselves a little bit in that way. But that doesn't take away from the entrepreneurial zeal. And frankly, I think competition makes both of us better, for sure.
- [94:32]
Saleem
I maintain that the entrepreneurship in China is so deep and so native, they need socialism to put a lid on it. Otherwise they'd sell their grandmother for profit.
- [94:41]
Cathie Wood
Well, and that's why Xi Jinping recently has been making the case for anti involution. He' syou know, I think China is very proud of the fact that it's commoditizing Western markets. But now he's saying, wait a minute, we're eating our own. We are commoditizing everything so much that we're killing our own industries. How about thinking about profitability a little bit more? Which is shocking, right? Shocking coming out of China, but necessary.
- [95:14]
Peter Diamandis
We're going to jump into our final topic with you, Kathy. Autonomous vehicles. And there are so many topics that we could talk about. We haven't even touched on human affairs, robotics. Maybe we'll talk about it in the midst of Tesla, but let's jump in. So the news, of course, is robotaxis are finally here. We've seen Waymo and we've seen, obviously, cyber taxis coming online. We've just heard that Uber and Lucid and Nvidia is putting their own fleet on the roads. And of course, there are dozens of equivalents in China. Here are the numbers. Waymo's on the rise and Lyft and Uber's on the decline. And we're going to be seeing here robo taxi miles and cumulative miles just spike. And when I'm on the road here in Santa Monica, as I'm driving back and forth to the airport or my kids to school, whatever, we'll do a count of how many Waymos we saw. And on an average day right now it's probably about 10 or 12 Waymos on the streets here. And I'm imagining in about four or five years it's going to be 80% autonomous vehicles. What do you think?
- [96:28]
Cathie Wood
We think so we agree. We agree. And in this book as well, you'll see that we expect Tesla to be the biggest winner. From a platform point of view, Waymo will be second. And the reason is Waymo's cost structure. It's dependent. Unlike Tesla, which is vertically integrated, that's Elon's preference. And modus operandi, Waymo is not. And in fact, for a time there, they had trouble attracting an auto supplier. So now they're working with zeekr and Hyundai and a few others. They have fewer than 3,000 cars throughout the United States. So for you to see 10 in one run says they're probably concentrated close to where you are already. So that's interesting. But we think that Tesla's solution from a cost point of view will be 50% lower than Waymo's, and therefore it will be able to charge less. Now, between now and then, there's huge amount of room for both of them to compete against Uber and Lyft because, you know, with surge pricing, Uber's average average price over the last four years has gone up 40% with surge pricing and so forth. So from $2 to $2.80 per mile. Right. So that's a beautiful umbrella because we think we do agree and our research corroborates what Elon is saying, which is that Tesla will be able to price at $0.20 per mile when at scale between now and then, this huge price umbrella is going to cause cash flow to explode at Tesla.
- [98:27]
Dave
Yeah, that's something. You're totally right. Totally right. Kathy and I, I completely didn't get it until we went to the Gigafactory. I thought, Elon, you don't like suppliers just because you're a control freak. And it's just not true. He doesn't like suppliers because he sees the exponential opportunity to manufacture the demand is going to go through the roof overnight. And the only way to fulfill that demand is to turn raw aluminum into a car on the other side or raw chips. You have to build all this stuff internally and plan ahead. But if you have even a single component in your supply chain like Waymo does, that's constrained, then the Entire supply chain has to wait for that one component.
- [99:04]
Cathie Wood
Absolutely.
- [99:06]
Dave
So there'll be infinite demand for both Waymo and Tesla, but Tesla will make far, far more cars more quickly because Elon is thinking about doing everything inside that fully exponential automated internal supply chain. Sorry, Salim, I cut you off there.
- [99:20]
Saleem
I think one huge advantage Tesla also has, if they allow people to own their own cars and turn those into taxis, that will be a massive, it's much more exponential organizations friendly, where you don't want to own your own assets. This is why Uber scales so fast. And I think that is a massive area of opportunity.
- [99:37]
Peter Diamandis
Cathy, on the Convergence conversation, are you tracking the idea that millions of autonomous cyber taxis are inference engines and energy storage devices moving around cities?
- [99:50]
Cathie Wood
Oh, yes, oh yes. And also tuning into what Elon says regularly about how inefficient our grid is right now. You know, it's not used very much at night and you know, and overly used sometimes during the day, depending on the weather.
- [100:11]
Dave
So.
- [100:13]
Cathie Wood
Yes, distributed energy ecosystems, absolutely.
- [100:17]
Dave
No, it's just, it's amazing to me how much people under appreciate that if when you look at a Tesla Gigafactory, you know, right across the street, you've got the Optimus factory going up, you've got the data center, all of the components in this are general purpose. When you look at Ford or GM and you say, well, what do you guys do? Well, we order the seats from China, we order the chassis from whoever, we order the drive train from whoever. If they want to become a robot company tomorrow, they can't because it's just a bunch of assembly of third party components. It's a car company, it can only be a car company. The way Elon has set up his empire, every part of that manufacturing supply chain can literally pivot to being a satellite manufacturing thing on short notice. It's all reconfigurable robots in a long chain. And so I think that's maybe unique to him. Maybe Google's working on something similar and I don't know about it, but that's the future, right? Every one of these things can be reconfigured using AI and robots.
- [101:09]
Cathie Wood
The other thing that's happening here in terms of our auto sector here in the United States States, is they're pulling back on electric, right? They're pulling back, but they're thinking robo taxis, trying to figure, how do I insinuate my way into it? This is all going to be one thing. And Tesla figured this out. Elon figured it out in his first master plan. Maybe it was the second one. But whatever, he figured it out so long ago, it was there for them to see. If they had had. If they had decided to take him seriously.
- [101:45]
Peter Diamandis
I can't see the automotive industry surviving this. I mean, it's going to be integrated with AI so that your AI knows your schedule. You're working towards the front, walking towards the front door, it sees you opening the handle, it knows where you're going to go. And an autonomous car is waiting for you there without you even asking for it. It's just, it's seamless automagical futures that are coming.
- [102:06]
Saleem
I think the key point here is that we only need a few tens of millions of cars to cover all of the US vehicular needs. Right? And right now we sell 90 million cars globally, new cars a year. This is insane oversupply.
- [102:21]
Alex
But I think there's effect by comparison, effectively infinite demand for robots in different shapes and sizes. So I'll take the position. I think here I do see the automotive industry surviving. It'll just evolve into robots in the same way that that bicycles arguably, plus carriages, evolved in some sense into airplanes and automobiles.
- [102:43]
Dave
Totally right. But the sector survives and gets bigger than ever. But then within the sector, if you look under the covers at some of these companies, they're not positioned at all to pivot and make robots and others zero. Others are. America loves reinventing. Like just kill the old thing, let's create a new startup and they just love it.
- [103:00]
Saleem
Sorry, There's a really key point I wanted to point out here. The, the difference between human driven ride hailing and a fully autonomous is literally more than 10x. It's an incredible drop.
- [103:11]
Cathie Wood
Yes, yes. See, this is the thing they grew up on, the internal combustion engine and human driving. So their DNA is not right. They'll reconfigure, consolidate, restructure, all of that. Sure. But they don't. This happens all the time when it comes to, to disruptive innovation. They will not win in this space. They just won't. Because this space is the convergence of three technologies. They have not been working on robotics in the way that Elon has evolved his robots, his cars. AI was always a part of the equation, always. And energy storage was as well, because energy storage. So electric vehicle costs continue to fall, the internal combustion engine costs. It's a completely mature industry. According to Wright's law. For a cumulative doubling from this level would take them, I don't know, 100 years. So they are not riding down any cost curve the way they would be if they stop stuck to electric vehicles, which are riding down a cost curve, the learning curve.
- [104:28]
Alex
I think we may also be leaving out a very important component which is, as Elon would call it, the machine that makes the machine. We're talking about ice versus electric. But the very important component I think we're leaving out is how they're made. And right now, legacy auto companies lean heavily on unionized human labor.
- [104:47]
Dave
Totally right.
- [104:47]
Alex
Much of that is going to be automated with, with robots. So I guess in question form for Kathy, do you think maybe barrier to competition that Tesla has is that at least among American car companies, it's leaning more heavily into roboticized automation for manufacturing in a way that the legacy manufacturers aren't or can't?
- [105:06]
Cathie Wood
Without a doubt. And Elon, I'm going to say about maybe it was three or four years ago, he said, I've discovered that I'm a manufacturer of factories. And that was an important, that was an important aha moment for us as well, because he was designing the manufacturer, the manufacturing or the factories of the future and he had the right technologies involved. So. Yes.
- [105:40]
Dave
Well, also to Alex's point, the original gigafactories in California, and when they shut it down during COVID Elon just said, screw it, I'm leaving California. I'm never coming back. This is insane. So now he's in Texas and building in a much better regulatory environment. But if you look at the legacy car companies and the unions and how tied those unions are to the voter pool in those regions and the pension plans, it's just impossible to escape. And so starting a new clean sheet of paper in a new jurisdiction is actually, actually cheaper than retooling a legacy car company.
- [106:14]
Saleem
Yes, and it's worse in Europe where they have, in Germany, for example, they have worker councils that determine what BMW or Mercedes are allowed to do as.
- [106:23]
Dave
A corporation, which is totally right. Totally. And this, this is something, you know, big deal in Davos, like Europe doesn't have a place to go. Like, if you want to hide your money, you can go to Liechtenstein or Monaco. But if you want to build a cheap car company in an unregulated environment, or less regulated, not unregulated at all, just like rational environment. Where do you go? And there's.
- [106:45]
Peter Diamandis
They'll go to Ukraine, they'll go to Ukraine.
- [106:47]
Dave
In the future, Ukraine will go to.
- [106:50]
Alex
Special economic zones like Texas.
- [106:52]
Cathie Wood
I know that most people think Europe is completely lost. And from a technology and regulatory point of view, I think the collapse of innovation, individual agency will help. But from a macro level, I Agree with that. And Peter. Age of abundance. So I'm looking for scarcity. Obviously Bitcoin comes to mind. But the other thing. What does Europe have that other countries don't have? Why do we all go there for beautiful buildings? The lifestyle.
- [107:27]
Peter Diamandis
Lifestyle.
- [107:27]
Cathie Wood
The lifestyle. Easygoing.
- [107:29]
Dave
The food.
- [107:30]
Cathie Wood
The. So I wouldn't write off Europe. It's just they're going to serve the rest of the world in the way they always have.
- [107:40]
Peter Diamandis
Lifestyle is a service.
- [107:43]
Saleem
Cute piazzas and espresso.
- [107:44]
Dave
I'll make my prediction on this. The latent talent pool in Europe is like you would not believe. Brilliant.
- [107:49]
Cathie Wood
Oh, absolutely. I agree.
- [107:51]
Dave
And historically, people from India flood the us Make a ton of money, then they go retire wherever they want to retire. Europeans don't do it because it's so hard to leave Europe. It's so wonderful. But I think that the disparity is getting so wide now that the actual entrepreneurial community is going to start flocking to the US work 10 years, whatever, keep your place in Europe and bounce back and forth. I suspect that'll unlock. But I didn't really appreciate Europe is just very, very hard to leave. It really is.
- [108:19]
Saleem
Can I give the counterpoint here? I think if you're a European entrepreneur, coming to the US in the past was a real option. It's not really an option right now. I think what's going to happen is they're going to. It's going to force a change in the regulatory structure in Europe because it can't sustain. They have to break through via special economic zones or whatever. They will have to make a structural change very, very soon. And I think they'll do it.
- [108:43]
Peter Diamandis
And we saw that at Davos this year. Right. Basically trying to create a commonality across corporations. Like when you incorporate in one country, you're incorporating all of them, and the rules are the same. Trying to unify its innovation system in some fashion.
- [108:59]
Alex
It's called EU Inc.
- [109:01]
Dave
Yes, eu. When your voter base starts tipping in one direction, then it gets into a death spiral. And I don't see how you get out of that death spiral. I mean, no matter what is rational, you look at these tax proposals in California and Massachusetts, the governor is like, no way. This is insane. Don't do this. And yet it still goes through.
- [109:22]
Peter Diamandis
Here's our last slide. You know, fully autonomous delivery is here. You know, we've been focusing on robo taxis for a long time, but we're seeing 4 million deliveries per year. Keller Clifton with Zipline is crushing it. What an incredible story that is.
- [109:39]
Cathie Wood
Yeah, yeah.
- [109:40]
Peter Diamandis
I Love it.
- [109:42]
Cathie Wood
Yes. And he started. What's so beautiful about that story is he started in Rwanda sending medical supplies. And I think he cut the mortality rate of the maternal bleed outs from.
- [109:58]
Peter Diamandis
Pregnancy by huge amounts.
- [110:00]
Cathie Wood
More than 50%.
- [110:01]
Dave
Yes.
- [110:02]
Saleem
Wow.
- [110:03]
Dave
Yes.
- [110:04]
Peter Diamandis
So we're seeing autonomous delivery in the air from zipline and wing Matternet, which was a spin out from Singularity University. Shout out to them on the ground. We, we got Starlink and Meituan and Coco robots again. There are dozens, probably 50 Coco robots I see in the streets of Santa Monica here. And then of course, we're seeing the beginning of trucking. It's interesting. The ground is crowded, the airways are open, but it will eventually get crowded. I mean, if we start seeing delivery rates, that could be from zipline and wings. You know, I'm curious if people are going to start complaining about noise. It's high in the sky and it lowers the delivery on a cable. Yeah. Dave or Alex, you want to jump in on this one?
- [110:52]
Dave
Well, the airwaves are three dimensional. They won't get physically crowded. But you're right, the noise is going to be a major, major issue. If someone invents a silent drone, that'll be a total game quieter. Yeah, well, that's hard.
- [111:05]
Peter Diamandis
Gravity shielding operations. Alex, when do we get gravity shielding, Alex?
- [111:09]
Alex
Working on it. Peter, Ask me in a few years. Seriously, ask me in a few years. Maybe just a closing question, if I may, for Kathy. A lot of this is premised on labor being substituted for by intelligence and automation. In my mind, there's another possibility. Once we've fully swapped out AI and automation and robotics and drones for human labor, there's still capital left. And historically, the debate from all the isms at the beginning of the 20th century was largely premised on labor versus capital. But do you think it's possible that automation could also substitute for capital at some point in the next few years? Could capital be replaced by automation? Or is capital in some sense immortal?
- [111:58]
Cathie Wood
I think blockchain technology is going to transform everything in financial services, but that's more the infrastructure and bringing more efficiencies into. I think capital is, should I say, immortal. You know, that's very, that's quite absolute. And can I think of a reason it wouldn't be blockchain?
- [112:22]
Alex
For example, with blockchain, the fundamentally blockchains. And yes, to everyone in the audience who's about to lecture me on the increasing difficulty of bitcoin, I know how that works preemptively with blockchain's proof of work in Particular blockchain proof of work is fundamentally based on the difficulty of inverting a hash function. So in some sense it's a bet against automation. Getting smart enough to be able to efficiently invert hash functions is sort of an anti technology bet in some sense. So I would say even with blockchain, blockchain is just as immortal in some sense as the ability for AI to not solve math is, which is I think pretty bold bet if one's going to make one.
- [113:06]
Saleem
We've been using money as a main mode of discourse in the world for the last several hundred years. Capitalism, profits, business, it's the main conversation. I think we're shifting from money to information. Right. Any startup is much more interested in collecting data and wants to monetize it later. We're seeing that over and over again. Over time information becomes a higher order bit and I think over time intelligence becomes the higher order bit. Over time if we can quantize the measurement of that, then that'll become the harder bit.
- [113:36]
Peter Diamandis
And we're going from money to data, I think to directed intelligence or purpose as the highest order bit. Bit.
- [113:44]
Cathie Wood
But it has to be measured in some way monetized, right?
- [113:51]
Peter Diamandis
Well, monetization is really the ability for you to trade something or to use it to take an action or get an end result, Right?
- [113:58]
Cathie Wood
Right.
- [113:59]
Dave
I think what you're asking about is really right on target too because again, the vast majority of the world has latent talent that can't participate in the world economy in a corrupt environment and the taxation and the friction is ridiculous. But there hasn't been an option before to trade in intelligence or trade in crypto or trade in whatever. But I think that's a dam that's going to break very quickly in the age of AI just to unleash the talent in latent areas of the world. It's going to happen, but it's not going to be measured in dollars or stablecoins.
- [114:34]
Peter Diamandis
I want to say thank you. This was a fantastic conversation. If you don't mind, at least once a year, we'd love to have you back on the show here to review Your Big Ideas 2027 report like we're doing with Elon at the end of the year. Sort of a recap of what he did and grateful for all the work, your vision, your education and the deck.
- [114:56]
Dave
Everybody check out the deck. Yeah.
- [114:58]
Cathie Wood
Thank you. And of course I have to give all credit. You have no idea how intense the research effort is here. And you know, I think many people, when they hear ark, they Think top down. And in terms of stock picking, they're throwing darts into these innovations. That's not what's going on. We're probably. I think we're the most intense, certainly in the traditional asset management world, most intensely focused on research and investing in disruptive innovation. And. And it would be an honor for me to join you. I mean, this is a brain trust here that has been delightful. The interaction's been quite delightful. So thank you.
- [115:44]
Dave
Yeah.
- [115:44]
Peter Diamandis
Thank you, Kathy. Love you guys. Dave, I'll see you in about 90 minutes. I'm heading to Santa Monica airport.
- [115:49]
Dave
And Kathy, we're free at alignment 360, right?
- [115:52]
Saleem
In March.
- [115:53]
Cathie Wood
Yes.
- [115:54]
Dave
Perfect.
- [115:55]
Cathie Wood
I think that's on the books. Right, right, right.
- [115:57]
Peter Diamandis
Peter, you are more than welcome and I would love you there. It's not in the books for this year, but if you have.
- [116:04]
Cathie Wood
Maybe it was. Is it the next year?
- [116:06]
Peter Diamandis
Probably it's next year we've been doing every other year. Yeah, that's it. Okay.
- [116:10]
Cathie Wood
Yes.
- [116:11]
Peter Diamandis
All right.
- [116:12]
Saleem
I can't even calendar out three months. Gosh.
- [116:16]
Dave
Okay.
- [116:18]
Saleem
Have a great flag, Peter. When you guys see Brett, ask him if he has plans for multi armed robots.
- [116:22]
Peter Diamandis
Of course I would.
- [116:24]
Dave
Thank you.
- [116:24]
Peter Diamandis
Without question whatsoever. And Alex, please text me all of your questions for Brett as well.
- [116:31]
Alex
We'll do. And we've got to save the lobsters in the meantime.
- [116:34]
Peter Diamandis
Yes. Maltabot. Love it.
- [116:36]
Cathie Wood
Check out the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.
- [116:39]
Dave
All right.
- [116:39]
Saleem
I have been there and it's absolutely worth a visit. It's a stunning place.
- [116:43]
Cathie Wood
There's a lobster phone there. There's a lobster phone to ask Dali.
- [116:47]
Peter Diamandis
All right, take care, folks.
- [116:50]
Cathie Wood
Take care. Bye bye.
- [116:52]
Peter Diamandis
If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber. Thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrend. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the Metatrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com metatrends that's diamandis.com metatrenDS thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together, everyone.
- [117:40]
Dave
Weekend.