The Coming Bitcoin Surge w/ Cathie Wood | EP #88

In this episode, Peter and Cathie dive into investing in exponential companies, Bitcoin's role as a new asset class within a global monetary system, the potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and the convergence of technologies like AI, robotics, and biotechnology. 20:13 | The Trillion-Dollar Transformation of Travel 40:30 | The AI Revolution: Is Capital Overwhelming? 58:20 | Bitcoin: The New Financial Frontier Cathie Wood is the founder of the $60 billion Investment Management firm, ARK Invest, a key figure in the investment landscape for disruptive innovations such as self-driving cars and genomics. Learn more about ARK Invest: https://ark-invest.com/ Cathie’s podcasts: https://ark-invest.com/podcasts/ Investing with $500 : https://ark-ventures.com/videos/an-introduction-to-the-titan-app/ Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  There are 19.6 million Bitcoin out there right now. And the highest it will ever go is 21 million. Is this a bubble? And the way we are answering it is

• 1:15Speaker 03

  we think in the next five to 10 years, you will not recognize the world as we know it today.

• 1:24Peter Diamandis?

  In the next decade, we're going to see as much progress as we've seen in the last century.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  What we think is going to happen is not exponential growth, but super exponential growth as we get the convergence between among technologies out there. This is not just a technology. It's a new asset class. And beyond that, a global monetary system.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  It's a big idea.

• 1:56Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, welcome to Moon Shots. Peter here, about to have a conversation with Kathy Wood, the head of ARK Investments, one of the most extraordinary moonshot investors on the planet. Both she and I recently had a conversation with Elon on our channels. Today, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence, the coming wave of artificial general intelligence, robotaxis, flying cars, Bitcoin, humanoid robots, US-Chinese relations and AI, all the things that are going to make literally an explosion of exponential wealth and potential over not decades, over the next few years between now and 2030. All right, let's jump in. Everyone, it's Peter. In a few weeks, I'm gathering an incredible

• 2:41Peter Diamandis?

  group of AI leaders, including Ray Kurzweil, Eric Schmidt, Mustafa Suleyman, Ahmad Mustak, Michael Saylor and others, at my Private Abundance Summit to discuss the impact of AI on our lives, our businesses and the world. The Abundance Summit is a private community open to extraordinary moonshot entrepreneurs. It's Singularity University's highest level program, and it's not for everyone. If you're at the top of your game and you want to learn more about this program, click on the link below to be considered. Okay, let's go back to the episode. Enjoy. All right, well Kathy, you know, one thing I love is that you and I have the same sort

• 3:20Peter Diamandis?

  of massive transformative purpose and and moonshots, you know, seeing disruptive technologies as the mechanism that uplift humanity and create the most progress. And I'm kind of shocked that more people are not on this thesis, that more people are not seeing it and not moving towards it. Because I'm convinced, you know, I'm 100% convinced of what you have been saying. I've been saying the same thing, but you've made the financial vehicles to enable people. Why do you think people aren't actually seeing it in such a clear fashion?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  I think in in the traditional financial world, which is where there are the trillions and trillions of dollars, the reason is because of the move to passive investing. Now,

• 4:16Speaker 03

  This used not to be a thing. When I started in the business in the late 70s, early 80s, asset managers were all active, meant, which simply means they were trying to figure out how the future was going to work. And they would do so using macro analysis, so economics and so forth, as well as micro analysis, company by company. And then in 2000, with the tech and telecom bust, we had this shift towards benchmark

• 4:57Speaker 03

  style investing, accelerated shift, benchmarks being S and P 500, NASDAQ, MSCI World. And then even more so after 08, 09, the financial meltdown, we had an accelerated move towards passive investing. And why was this? It was a self fulfilling prophecy. As more and more active managers became benchmark sensitive, they were bidding up those stocks in the benchmarks, of course. Now, the other thing that happened to active managers, which was really terrible, is while they were doing that, they were charging fees. They were charging fees,

• 5:41Speaker 03

  and yet they were starting to look like these benchmarks that don't charge fees. And so they were already behind the benchmarks at the start of every year, just because of their fees. And so you had the self fulfilling prophecy. And now what we have is, I think it's almost 75%, definitely north of 50% of all assets under management are in, in the passive style, which means they simply mimic a benchmark. I believe this is the most massive misallocation of capital in history.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Because there is no, I can't tell you how many conferences I've gone to in the ETF world, which is mostly passive, where it's starting to turn active. But how many ETF conferences I'll go and I'll see there are no Bloomberg machines, no broadcasts, CNBC or Bloomberg or Fox Business News, nothing. Guess what? They don't care what's in the index. All they care about is how closely the index tracks the S and P or the NASDAQ. So there's a loss of brain power in the industry. And I think there is, there's a,

• 7:02Speaker 03

  you know, one of the things, honestly, one of the things that I say is here you have the best and the brightest coming out of the elite schools into our business. And I think I'm going to, I'm sure I'm going to be criticized for saying this, but I think we lose their brains to this quant way of looking at the world, which slices and dices indexes. Indices are at the heart of all the quant analysis. And so

• 7:31Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I agree with you. And it's, it's such a large institutional force that bucking the system is very, very difficult and risky. You've done it. And thank you for that. And I think, again, like I said in the beginning, I think your thesis is going to prove out, not by a little bit, but by orders of magnitude at the end of the day.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  And can I say, Peter, just sorry to interrupt you, but what happened to, I think there were a lot of people in 17, 18, 19, 20, who were looking at what we're doing, and they were starting to copy us. And I was thrilled with that. And then we hit 21 and 22, which was a bloody disaster. Interest rates

• 8:26Peter Diamandis?

  Fear causes retrenchment to the norm.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Well, and you know, a 24-fold increase in interest rates never happened in history, crucified all long-duration assets, even bonds, long-term bonds, which were where safety was supposed to be. They had their worst year in 250 years since the 1700s. So, you know, we couldn't win. Now I think we're on the other side of that. Now people are trying to figure out, why aren't long-term interest rates continuing to go up if the Fed says inflation is still an issue? And they're not going up because the real issue is deflation.

• 9:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and technology is a deflationary force in a very good way. It's an efficiency, an efficiency magnifying force.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Productivity boom.

• 9:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, agreed. The other thing that's going on, Kathy, that I keep on seeing, and I had this conversation with Ray Kurzweil, who's a dear friend, he's my co-founder of Singularity, he's sort of the high priest of exponential thinking, if you would, right? And Ray and I were talking about this, he'll be with me at the Abundance Summit in a couple of weeks, and we're talking about how absolutely challenging it is for people to think in exponential fashion, that despite all of the evidence they keep seeing over and over and over again, they still extrapolate in a linear fashion.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  They do.

• 9:58Peter Diamandis?

  And it's, it's, it's crazy. I mean, anyway, I want to get into this conversation here.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Before, before we go further there, it's such an important point. In the financial world, exponential, that concept, the last time investors heard it.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Was during the tech and telecom bubble. And for them, that ended badly. Now they just don't believe it. They don't believe it's possible to sustain growth rates at fifteen, twenty, twenty-five percent plus per year. But what we think is going to happen is not exponential growth, but super exponential growth as we get the convergence between among technologies out there.

• 10:48Peter Diamandis?

  So this is the other side. These are overlapping waves of exponentials that cause tsunamis. Right? And I like to say, you know, you need to surf on top of the tsunami instead of being crushed by it.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 11:02Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the analogy I use, which I welcome you. I love this analogy is the ten-kilometer asteroid that hit the planet sixty-five million years ago. Right? So this ten-kilometer asteroid hits the planet. It changes the environment so rapidly that the slow lumbering dinosaurs are unable to adapt. But it's the furry mammals that are agile, that are able to rapidly adapt to the environment and then become the dominant players. And the massive asteroid hitting planet Earth today, they are these converging exponential technologies. And they're going to change everything faster, faster than people could possibly imagine.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Yes, we think in the next five to ten years, you will not recognize the world as we know it today. And we just put on something called Big Ideas Summit here in St. Petersburg, Florida, to as the

• 12:00Peter Diamandis?

  That's right, you moved to St. Petersburg.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. And really innovative, optimistic spirit down here, I must say. And just trying to communicate to people, not just investors, but parents, grandparents.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  This is how you steer students into this way of thinking and have them catch these waves because they're going to be enormous and make sure they stay away from the disrupted or the disintermediated or the soon to be destroyed.

• 12:35Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I'm going to share this with you a little bit off the subject, but related. I just gave a talk to my kid's school, to all of the teachers there in sixth grade right now in middle school. And I asked two questions at the beginning. It was a talk on exponential technologies and where our world is going because I don't think our schools are preparing our kids anywhere close to for what's coming. And I asked the question, how many of you, and this is the teachers in the room, 150 of them, how many of you think that the world was better off 40 or 50 years ago? Two thirds of the room raised their hand.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 13:11Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. And then I asked a second question. How many of you think that the lives of our children will be better in the future? Two out of the 150 raised their hand. And I was like, uh oh, wrong school.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  What, what, let me ask you, what age group?

• 13:29Peter Diamandis?

  The, the, these were middle school and high school teachers.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Such an important time.

• 13:36Peter Diamandis?

  A hundred percent. And at the end of the day, we have to realize that those of you who are parents listening to this, think about who is preparing your kids for the future. Because honestly, the future, if they're in middle school or high school, their future is going to be not a little bit different. It's going to be dramatically different. What, you know, Ray and I talk about is in the next decade, we're going to see as much progress as we've seen the last century. So think of what it was like in 1924 to today, right? That's their future.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're, when we're trying to help people understand the same thing, again, not just investors, but anybody, we often say the last time we had multiple innovation platforms evolving at the same time was in the early 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s. And, and absolutely right. That's what, you know, got everyone off the farms and into the new world, right? This is the same, but it's on steroids compared to that.

• 14:37Peter Diamandis?

  I think it's a starship compared to a bottle rocket.

• 14:42Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, there's so much to talk about and so much extraordinary things. I mean, the grandfather of all of the, you know, well, first of all, the underlying, you know, bedrock of this is computation. It is the massive explosion of processing power, cloud, GPUs. But, you know, that layer on top of that is AI, which is what all I'm talking about right now and everything that you're principally talking about right now. My thesis for the Abundance Summit in a few weeks is the Great AI Debate. And we'll have Eric Schmidt and Mustafa Suleyman and Ray Kurzweil and Jeffrey Hindon and a whole bunch of amazing people there.

• 15:24Peter Diamandis?

  And it's going to be a conversation to help people flesh out the idea of, am I a boomer or a doomer? Is this the most important technology? Should we go as fast as we can, slow it down? And of course, it is the most important technology, and we don't fully understand it, and we can't slow it down, if we wanted to even.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. And the one thing I will say about that in terms of the doomers, I'm glad there are a lot of people worried about it, because half of the solution is understanding the problem and being very straightforward about it. And, you know, I was very happy to learn about hallucinations and confabulations and, you know, all of the, all of the things that could go wrong. And then also to even, you know, someone during one of our brainstorms raised the idea that, wait a minute, wait a minute, could these confabulations be the same as what human beings go through when they dream?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Could this actually, could this be channeled into something very interesting? Let's not denigrate it. Let's think about it. Let's maybe harness it, you know?

• 16:36Peter Diamandis?

  I love that. You know, one fun thing I've done, I've always wanted to do this, you know, the Abundance Summit is part of Singularity University, and Ray Kurzweil and I started that. God 14, 15 years ago and always dreamt about having AI faculty. And so for this, this year, for the first time, we've got a number of AI faculty and AI robot faculty. Amiga will be teaching a session on humanoid robotics with me. And then we have, we have, we have Raybot, Ray Kurzweil is be there physically, but also as a avatar. And it's going to truly reinvent the entire educational ecosystem in a massive fashion.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. Personalized tutors, absolutely. Can, while we're on education, and I wanted to say this earlier, but one of the reasons we moved to St. Petersburg is because of this innovative spirit. After what, after two years of being here, ARX Research, as you say, it's not being taught in the schools. ARX Research has been made age appropriate for sixth graders. So that ARX Research is the science curriculum for all of sixth grade throughout Pinellas County, and soon to be all of middle school.

• 17:57Peter Diamandis?

  That's awesome.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  It's awesome. It's awesome.

• 18:01Peter Diamandis?

  That is because at the end of the day, this is not only what our kids are going to inherit, but what they're going to have to lead.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. One foot in the new world, okay, excite them about it, you know? And, and especially in the lower socio-economic, you know, demographic. Tell them, this is the great leveler. This, this is the great leveler. Catch this wave and your life and your family's life will be delightful.

• 18:36Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I think that is such an important point. One of the things I talk about a lot is the, what I call the six Ds of exponential. That when you digitize something, you're dematerialized, demonetized and democratized. It's deceptive in the beginning and disruptive in the end. And Google, for example, isn't. A little bit better for Larry Page's kids compared to the poorest kids. It's identical. It is complete leveller. And AI is the same. And in fact, there was a study done, I think it was at a Microsoft, that looked at the impact it had on high-end workers and low-end workers. And it actually brought up the low end higher than it brought up the high end. So it is a leveling force.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  So that was a Bain consulting study. It was a study of Bain consultants. And we put this in our big ideas this year. The improvement of the high-performing consultants after, I think this was GPT-3, ChatGPT, was seventeen percent. The improvement of the lower-performing consultants was forty-three percent. Think about that. It's crazy.

• 19:48Peter Diamandis?

  I probably got it from one of your tweets. I love, I love the social media that you and your, you and your team put out. So let's, let's dive, I want to dive into AI. I want to dive into autonomous cars, robotaxis, flying cars. I want to talk a little bit about biotech and my, my personal favorite subject, which is longevity, which I think, you know, I think the two biggest financial markets on the planet are going to be AI and longevity. Because I still, when I'm in a crowd and I say, how many of you would, how much of your wealth would you pay for an extra twenty healthy years?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  It's a lot.

• 20:25Peter Diamandis?

  It's a lot. It's, it's most of a person's wealth at the end of the day, if they're being honest with themselves. So it's a massive market. We can talk about that. There should be some ETFs around longevity side, too. AI. So what are you most excited about in the AI world right now? There's so much to be excited about.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Well, I, again, it's AI and the convergence with everything.

• 20:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Right? And so, in fact, our chief futurist Brett Wenton wrote the, the convergence part of our big ideas. And you can talk about excitement from a number of angles. So in terms of how our lives are going to change, I think the biggest, from a revenue impact for, you know, investors to think about.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Is autonomous mobility and and what it's going to do to transportation? It's interesting, we just had a a presentation, they're going to redo St. Petersburg around the new, the new Tampa Bay Rays baseball team and it's just going to transform it. And when I mentioned to that organization that, do you know, because they were focused a lot, a lot on parking, I said, did you know that for every car on the road in the United States today, there are five parking spaces, but the world's going to change.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  And we will only need one of those parking spots per car. So, you know, 20% of the parking spaces is all we'll need. That should, so we think that autonomous taxi platforms are an eight to 10 trillion dollar revenue opportunity by 2030. Now, a lot of people dismiss us out of hand now because Elon has been predicting this for the, as, as this year, for the last four or five years. And now that in this last quarterly report, he said, I, I know that I've been doing this and I know I've been wrong, so I'm not going to give you a time. That probably means we're really close now. You know what I mean? It's just how human psychology is.

• 22:51Peter Diamandis?

  I do, you and I both did a Twitter Spaces with Elon in the last few months. And he's, you know, he's been a friend for 24 years. He, I would never bet against him, and not even, I, I remember, you know, in the reusability space, I was, you know, I met him before he started SpaceX, because we were both were space cadets. And we were having dinner and he was sketching out for me when the Falcon 9 was first launching, how he wanted to make the Falcon 9 first stage reusable and resell it for the same price or maybe higher because it was a proven first stage. And I was like, that's incredibly brilliant. And of course, that's happened in spades.

• 23:35Peter Diamandis?

  And now Starship is about to occur. And of course, you know, Our cars are idle, what, 95%, 97% of the time?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 23:46Peter Diamandis?

  I want to push that big button on my, I have a Model X and a Model S and go out, make me money, right?

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, I really think it, we really think it's going to happen. And that it's an enormous opportunity. It will, it will lower the cost of transportation dramatically. And so therefore we will get more of it. So, you know, I know that Mary Barra at GM says zero congestion. That's just not true. We will get more congestion. It's just, we will then take to the skies. And, and that's what started our air taxi work. So, mobility for all kinds of things, delivery of food, you know, people and so forth, moving to the skies.

• 24:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, my, the example I give is, I want you to imagine, I mean, we will get rid of our cars. Or if you're a two or three family car, family, you know, in two or three cars in your family, you'll get, you know, rid of a couple and leave one. I imagine you're at breakfast, you're, you're getting up from breakfast with your kids, you're walking towards the front door. Your AI knows your calendar, knows your schedule, is watching you walk towards the front door. It's, it knows that you didn't sleep much the night before and it has, it has, it pulls up in front of your house is an autonomous Tesla or Uber, or whatever it may be with a lie down bed in the back, right? Taking you where you need to go. You never, it will be seamless and you'll never have to ask.

• 25:16Peter Diamandis?

  It'll be, the term I use is automagical, right?

• 25:20Speaker 03

  And there will be lots of different form factors, as you say, some for sleeping, some for entertainment, some for office, study, work, you know?

• 25:31Peter Diamandis?

  And my, my, my numbers are that an electric autonomous car will be four times cheaper than car ownership. I'm not sure if you go further than that.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have it really being a third of a person, including everything. And you'll see that in our big ideas and in our study as well. Because insurance, depreciation, maintenance, all of that. So we've got it at roughly a third, yes.

• 26:03Peter Diamandis?

  But it's probably 4X if you include productivity time.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  That's a good point. That's a good point. I was going to say something else, just lost it, but yeah.

• 26:13Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'll say the thing that's interesting is that the poorest people on the planet will be chauffeured around most efficiently, right?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Isn't that wonderful?

• 26:23Peter Diamandis?

  It's a leveling of the playing field.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  It is. It is. Yeah, so when people talk, denigrate technology as creating the great divide. I just ask them, you know, okay, do you think the cellphone bringing the world together hurt? Hurt people at the lower? No, it helped them, helped them enormously. You know, I remember when I lived in Ireland, which I did as a child. I remember how important us, you know, learning about the rest of the world was. There weren't any TVs in the households when I lived there. That was a long time ago. And it was a very rural part of Ireland.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  And so when one person got a TV and got to see how the rest of the world lived, transformed their lives. And the same thing happened with cellphones and smartphones, right?

• 27:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and now the fact that you can make a video call effectively for free if you're on Wi-Fi just continues to blow my mind.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  I know.

• 27:26Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I love, earlier this year, and we could talk about Tesla versus GM or other or Waymo. You know, earlier this year, when Tesla replaced 300,000 lines of C++ code with 3,000 lines of basically a large language model.

• 27:49Peter Diamandis?

  That was amazing. And, you know, and the, I love using self-driving on my Tesla. It, you know, it scares me on occasion, but it works really well 98% of the time.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've done some great statistics around this, you know. I'm shocked. I'm shocked when I go to conferences now. And if they're, if they're On the conservative side of things, I'm seeing this anti-EV vehicle, but you present, you present anyone with these facts and you understand why this is going to take off. So this is a measure of safety.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  How many miles between accidents for the average car on the road?

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  Don't know.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Now, this is on surface street driving, not highway. Okay, so surface street, the hardest, 190,000 miles on average.

• 28:48Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, that's pretty good.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Yep, in a Tesla without FSD, that number is roughly 600,000 miles. In a Tesla with FSD,

• 29:04Speaker 03

  it is 3.2 million miles.

• 29:07Peter Diamandis?

  Wow, wow.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Wow, wow. So yeah, again, any, you know, this is a Volvo made its brand and its name was safety.

• 29:16Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  So, yeah.

• 29:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, no, I'm, I'm thrilled by it. And then, as you said, in addition to our, our electric autonomous cars, the other thing that convergence is enabling, of course, but you know, in autonomous Volvo, autonomous Tesla is a convergence play. You know, I, I think about the convergence play on EV tolls, which I hate that term, electric vertical takeoff or letting, I'm going to call them flying cars.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Yes, air taxis, air taxis.

• 29:49Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, that's extraordinary and coming soon. And the price point, you know, I was speaking to the CEO of Archer and their goal is the price point for a pilot and four paying passengers is the same as taking a, you know, an Uber drive.

• 30:09Peter Diamandis?

  That will be amazing.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  And it's going to be here sooner than I think people imagine. Of course, we have to get the regulators in gear here. That's the, that's going to be the gating factor because I think we're almost there, Peter, in terms of, I mean, we did this study on getting from Manhattan to JFK for roughly the same, yeah, for roughly the same cost as a taxi. I think we're almost there now. I mean, technically, we're almost there now. Of course, it has to scale to, to, to make sense. You won't, you won't go straight down to the taxi rate right away because of the massive amount of convenience.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  And, and you know, these companies do have to earn a rate of return for all of the investment that they've put in. But I think we're there now. They're just, that we just need to scale it.

• 31:03Peter Diamandis?

  And, and of course, what's happening is we're seeing a regulatory arbitrage where companies are going to Saudi or Dubai or China or India because the regulators are more supportive, which is fine. But, you know, the old adage for the FAA is we're not happy until you're not happy.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. We saw, and when we first started studying drones in 2014, when, when I founded ARC, I think Amazon was on its ninth generation drone. And at that time, this is 2014, the, the FAA would not let Amazon fly its drones outside on its own property. It had to be inside. And so they went to Hong Kong, India, as you say, UK, I think they went, and Australia. I mean, it's a, and of course, the same thing has happened with crypto, you know, broadly.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of talent has left this country and, and a lot of the asset managers in Europe don't even want American customers because of our regulators.

• 32:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I see, I see that. And when I'm, when I'm coaching entrepreneurs, you know, I'm like, please take your vision beyond the US borderline. You know, it's interesting, I was a Kaifu Lee, I'm sure you know Kaifu out of Sinevations in China, and I used to take a group of American investors there to Shenzhen and Shanghai and Beijing to go meet the Chinese companies and entrepreneurs. And I remember two distinct things. Number one was the work-life balance was their motto was nine nine six, which I'm sure you heard right, nine AM to nine PM, six days a week. The second thing was a Chinese entrepreneur looks at the one

• 33:01Peter Diamandis?

  point something billion Chinese market and the 300 million US market, while the US entrepreneurs are basically just looking at the US market. And it's a big world out there with porous borders. And sometimes regulations allow you to start faster elsewhere. And then, you know, in the biotech world in particular, because we humans are all the same globally.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I'd love to get your thoughts, Peter, on China, China and GPUs. Do you think that the sanctions that the US has placed on China will embolden them to to become much more creative and focused on getting their own GPUs, much like in the 80s, when we banned cars, Japanese cars from the US, or certain kinds of cars, or put enormous tariffs on it, it encouraged Japan to become the highest quality, because

• 34:07Speaker 03

  at the time, they were junk, the highest quality, most innovative auto companies in the world.

• 34:18Peter Diamandis?

  I have no question at all, for a multitude of reasons, the Chinese will invest. And, and, you know, I was talking to some of my friends who run large language model. Fun, you know, focused AI companies today. And their belief is that China's LLMs are at or above the GPT four level already and will be. And, you know, one of the things that the Chinese companies have as advantages are a government that puts their finger on the scale.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 34:50Peter Diamandis?

  And creates regulatory reforms to support them and causes, you know, capital to flow in. So there are very few restrictions. And despite that, America does incredibly well. But that is a, we, China is, is, is going to play big in this, in the chip world and in the AI world, for sure.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  I think, I think their property issues and just the massive over leveraging that took place over the 20 years after they entered the WTO, just buy the dip, buy the dip, leverage up, leverage up, has come back to haunt them and that they need to change the subject. So what I'm hoping is that it's not Taiwan, but that it is actually their own prowess in AI.

• 35:44Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look.

• 36:25Peter Diamandis?

  We don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning, when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 37:10Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life, and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades

• 37:53Peter Diamandis?

  on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Speaking of AI, let's go to the conversation around AGI and digital superintelligence. The first thing I'll say is, we passed the Turing test without anyone noticing, a long time ago, right? So like, hey, everybody, did you notice we passed the Turing test 1,000 times over in the last couple of years, or the last year at least? AGI, you put out a beautiful curve that looks at people's predictions of when we're going to have human

• 38:37Peter Diamandis?

  level intelligence, right? In 1999, Ray Kurzweil famously predicted 2029, pretty ballsy, 30 years out.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 38:46Peter Diamandis?

  To predict a single year and not

• 38:48Speaker 03

  And they thought he was crazy.

• 38:49Peter Diamandis?

  Prediction. Thought he was crazy, impossible. It's 100 years out, it's 50 years out. And so what did that curve you put out say?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  So it said, um, as recently as 2019, so that's 30 years after, was it, he, he put it out in 99, did you say it was?

• 39:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, 1999, yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, okay, 20 years later, uh, in 2019, futurists, these aren't just normal, you know, forecasters of technology, but actual futurists, it's a, a survey, Brett Wynton, our chief futurist.

• 39:25Peter Diamandis?

  And AI, and AI focused futurists as well.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So 2019, uh, those futurists said, uh, AGI was 80 years away. Today, today, eight years away. So Ray, and if they continue to make the same forecasting error, it could be three to four years away. And there you go. I mean, Ray may have hit it on the mark.

• 39:58Peter Diamandis?

  Nailed it. Yeah, nailed it. Uh, and I'll, I'll, uh, we'll celebrate him in, in 2029. You know, Elon's predictions have been between 2025 and 2028. And he said, basically, listen, Ray got it right. And of course, the question becomes, all right, and so what? Uh, we have human level AI, because I still think of much of the AI systems that I'm using right now, in their focused area, are much better than humans. It's just, we don't have a generalized, uh, AI. But what happens next, of course, is where we have a singularity. You know, we talk about, a singularity is a, is a horizon beyond which you can't predict what's going to happen next.

• 40:42Peter Diamandis?

  And there's going to be an AI singularity when AIs are self-programming themselves.

• 40:49Peter Diamandis?

  And when we get to digital superintelligence, you know, because, fine, if we have human level AI in 2029, by 2030, you know, it's 2X, 4X, 10X, because the doubling time in the AI world in terms of algorithms, capital, compute, has been less than Moore's law. It's been faster than Moore's law.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yes, every, yeah, every three to four months. Forget about two, 18 months to two years. It's, uh, it's unbelievable because AI training costs.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Are dropping seventy five percent per year AI inference costs. According to our estimates and research are dropping eighty five, ninety percent per year.

• 41:30Peter Diamandis?

  And the amount of capital going in, amount of capital going in now, what do you predict that at?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Number, you mean the amount of capital.

• 41:40Peter Diamandis?

  Being invested into, into AI related compute companies and so forth. I mean, last year, the prediction I think was like about a hundred and fifty to a hundred and eighty billion went in. And I just see this as a, as a, everybody's pouring capital in.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Yes, and so here is the question there that we're getting all the time. Is this, is this a bubble? And the way we are answering it is no, this is not a bubble. This is, there's something profound going on.

• 42:14Peter Diamandis?

  Electricity a bubble?

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Now, is there too much capital chasing, you know, chasing the same thing? That could be, I can tell you, you know, we've had in, in, and you know, the headlines. I'm not saying anything that you don't know, but we have been pulling away from Nvidia. Mostly because we see how well understood that story is, and it is. And, and all praise to Jensen Huang and his incredible team.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  You know, they have done so much of the heavy lifting up, you know, as we've evolved to this level. Now, however, it is, we're, the companies in our portfolio that are hugely undervalued and not recognized for what AI is going to enable are those with deep domain expertise. And especially in one of your favorite areas, Peter, the multi-omic space. So deep domain expertise, AI expertise, take this seriously. This is going to determine winners and losers. Good distribution, whether alone or with partners.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  And then finally, most important, harnessing that proprietary data, data that.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  A company has that nobody else has. So that's where we're spending a lot of our time.

• 43:48Peter Diamandis?

  You've got to wrap your arms around your data. What data do you want to collect? What data do you have? What data are you going to gather for sure? So when I'm looking at ARC for investments in AI, is it the Innovation Fund? Is it the Autonomous Tech Fund and Robotics Fund? Which ETF do you have most of your AI assets in?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Well, when we think AI, ARK W is probably the most focused, but AI, as I mentioned before, is going to permeate every sector, every industry and should impact every company. And so our flagship strategy has the multi-omics in it as well. And we think that there will be some of the most profound applications of AI in the in the multi-omic space, which is incredibly out of favor. I know, you know, when when when

• 44:44Peter Diamandis?

  It's been a bloodbath. It's been a bloodbath in biotech stocks. Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And when the critics, shall I say, see a sale of a sale of Nvidia and the purchase of recursion, which, by the way, Nvidia's venture firm owns, and is very picky about what it owns too, especially in the life sciences space. They go crazy. They don't understand. They don't understand that recursion is, from a drug discovery point of view, getting superior results because of AI and because of Nvidia.

• 45:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you know, you know, my friend who runs in Silicon Medicine, which is another AI-driven drug discovery company. He was creating generative pre-trained transformers or molecule designs before it was a term. And it's amazing because all of a sudden drug discovery costs are collapsing. And what people don't realize is AI is the first act. Quantum is coming next. And it's going to, you know, the people, I don't, I don't know how people are going to deal with the disruption, the speed of disruption.

• 46:09Peter Diamandis?

  We're, we're, we're about to announce an X Prize with Google in the quantum space, by the way. So stay tuned for that. And I have Hartmut Nevin, who is the head of Google's Quantum onstage with me this month. And he was telling me that they're about to make some huge announcement in the quantum space as it relates to classical computing. And so I'm super excited. When quantum starts to become part of the infrastructure of our day to day lives and we don't realize it, but things are just instant and magical. It's coming and I think it's not, you know, it's, it's in the near term.

• 46:51Peter Diamandis?

  It's within everybody's investment horizon and job horizon and leadership horizon, education horizon, and no one is getting us ready for it.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, just to jump back to the last point, because I think something, you know, as we say, new discoveries and just kind of unlocking the, the code to life, death and, death and disease, that, that is what's going on now and this, this convergence between multi-omic sequencing and artificial intelligence. But one of the more practical things that I, I think astonish people who are in, in the research business, shall I say, is that the number, if we're right, the, the, the

• 47:37Speaker 03

  number of trial failures, and you know, 90% plus of trials fade, 95% of trials, they fail, that's going to drop by, we think, 75%. And that's going to be a huge unlock of resources, very practical, huge unlock of resources.

• 47:57Peter Diamandis?

  And one of the reasons is you're going to select who's in your trial more accurately.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 48:04Peter Diamandis?

  One of the things people don't realize, when you're taking a drug that's been approved for a disease by the FDA, the percentage of people who have that disease for which the drug actually works is like under 20%.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 48:21Peter Diamandis?

  It's crazy.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  What's very interesting, again, this is in big ideas, is if you look at the drugs that the FDA has approved for the proteome now, today, it is only, they target only 4% of the proteome. We think with, yeah, targeted protein degradators and degraders and multiomic sequencing, that is going to shoot up over the years. This is a slow moving because of regulatory, but to 56, 58%.

• 49:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, one of the things, I want to get to my, my favorite pet subject on human health span and longevity. We just launched the largest X Prize ever, $111 million of capital for the team that could reverse loss of function in muscle, immune and cognition by 20 years or more. All right. So we have 300 teams, hopefully get to 1,000 teams competing for this X Prize. It's funded out of Saudi and out of the US.

• 49:36Peter Diamandis?

  But what folks don't realize is, you know, we've all accepted death at like 80, 90 years old. It's like just the way it is. And, you know, there are species on this planet, bowhead whale that lived to 200 years and Greenland sharks that lived to 500 years have, have pups at 200 years. And the question is, why can they and why can't we? And when I was in medical school years ago, for me, the realization was it's either a hardware problem or a software problem. And we're going to be able to eventually solve that. I think this is the decade that we have the tools to understand why we age, how to slow it, how to stop it, how to reverse it. And you want to talk about impact on society?

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 50:21Peter Diamandis?

  Imagine if at 70, 80, 90, you had the energy when you had a 30 or 40, right? There was a study at a Harvard, David Sinclair did that said, adding just one year of health. To the US population is worth $38 trillion. I have to track those numbers down. I mean, if you Google it, that's insane.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting that you say that. I had, when you were mentioning the whales, I was thinking, okay, cold baths, that's definitely one of the reasons, right?

• 50:51Peter Diamandis?

  I think it has to do with their particular genes that allow them to detect and slay cancers. But we now got the tools to go and reprogram ourselves, right? The tools around CRISPR and around gene editing.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. And what's so interesting in the traditional financial world, we own all of the CRISPR, pretty much all of the major CRISPR stocks. And yet, you know, and we get questions like, why do you own those? There's no EBITDA there because this is so new, just approved by the FDA for beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease. That's CRISPR therapeutics and Vertex. This is what I'm talking about. We talked about it at the beginning of this spaces and podcast.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  It is investors in the traditional financial world not willing to invest in the future. Isn't that something? What is investing? In fact, when I started ARC and I was trying to explain to someone not in the financial business, why I needed to start ARC.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  He ended up replaying it back to me and he said, oh, you mean the future of investing is investing in the future? And I said, yes, bingo, because these benchmarks are all about the past, right?

• 52:27Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, I think the old economic systems and theories and practices have all broken. I think they've all, if I had more time, I'd write an economics book because the old economics don't bear witness to what's going on today.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Well, I think that there are many economic theories. I think the right one is the Austrian School and you know that people who who who understand the world from that angle are making sense of all of this, but I agree that and I also agree that regulation and government policy is typically in the way typically in the way.

• 53:06Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the the theme I love is the best way to predict the future is create yourself. And one of the things that you're doing through your investing, I'm doing through my investing or the companies I'm starting is let's make this happen. Let's not moan about it. Let's not worry about it. Let's actually go and solve. The the truth will win out and you know, I believe there is no problem we cannot solve. And the best way to become a billionaire is help a billion people and those convergent, you know, principles uplift humanity in a beautiful way.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  And I think as as you say, as as far as human longevity, just use first principles thinking, just because something has been done one way for 100 years, think automobile production, doesn't mean that's the way it should be in the future. That's what Elon has done and has, you know, helped helped many people understand, wait a minute, can I think about this in a different way? And and that's good. Just challenging conventional wisdom. Again, the more that happens, the more what you are saying is is going to prove to be correct. Truth will win out.

• 54:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I mean, there's so many subjects to go on. How do you? How do you make short term trades on these on these waves of exponentials? What's your thesis there?

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, we get all kinds of questions on this, as you might imagine, especially anytime we sell Tesla or Nvidia. So

• 54:50Speaker 03

  We in in high conviction names that are still, we believe, going to deliver us our minimum hurdle rate of return, which is 15% at a compound annual rate over five years. So on average per year, 15% like a Tesla in spades. I mean, so much more than that if we're right, but we will, we will, when it, when it goes through a massive move to the upside. Last year, at one point, it was up 150%. And we started taking profits because guess what? Some of these multi-olics names were getting crushed. And we needed, you

• 55:32Speaker 03

  know, when you have only 100% to work with, you need to trade around ideas. So take some of those profits from something that's up 150% and buy something that is down 15% in the same year, you know, sell high, buy low, kind of a very basic investment tenet. Now, does that mean Tesla leaves our top five? No. In fact, it's still number two. Coinbase in our flagship fund is number one because of the massive move that it has had, and you'll see us taking profits there as well.

• 56:12Peter Diamandis?

  I want to move to Bitcoin in a second, but I want to ask you another question. So I mean, I just have to imagine that Elon will become the first trillionaire. I have no way of of not imagining that.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  I, I think he will. And we have to get the court system out of determining CEO pay shareholders. We were, we were, we were among the 73% of shareholders who voted for that pay package, just delighted with it, saying, wow, if he really will not take a salary, will not take a bonus until he, you know, double, at least double, minimum doubles the share price, and then takes the, the stock up and revenue up and EBITDA up by as much as these 12 tranches of, if he does that, the stock is going to go crazy.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  And it did. It went up 13 fold and the, and they're using some.

• 57:13Peter Diamandis?

  If only he has performed over the last decade or so.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. You know, think about that. That is, they were using some very, you know, esoteric legal fairness clause. And it was like, are you kidding me? That was so fair to shareholders, taking no pay, everything in options, all on the come, all on performance. You know, if more CEOs were like that, we'd have a much stronger economy, much better performing companies.

• 57:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, without question. Hey, everyone. I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day. In fact, I use it twice a day. It's Seed DS01 Daily Synbiotic. Hopefully by now you understand that your microbiome and your gut health are one of the most important modifiable parts of your health. You know, your gut microbiome is connected to everything, your brain health, your cardiac health, your metabolic health. So the question is, what are you doing to optimize your gut? Let me take a moment to tell you about what I'm doing. Every day, I take two capsules of Seed DS01 Daily Synbiotic. It's a two-in-one probiotic and prebiotic formulation that

• 58:32Peter Diamandis?

  supports digestive health, gut health, skin health, heart health, and more. It contains 24 clinically and scientifically proven probiotic strains that are delivered in a patented capsule that actually protects the contents from your stomach acid and ensures that 100% of it is survivable, reaching your colon. Now, if you want to try Seed DS01 Daily Synbiotic for yourself, you can get 25% off your first month's supply by using the code PETER25 at checkout. Just go to seed.com/moonshots and enter the code PETER25 at checkout. That's seed.com/moonshots and use the code PETER25 to get your 25% off

• 59:15Peter Diamandis?

  the first month of Seed's Daily Synbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's go back to the episode. Bitcoin. Congrats on your ETF. It's done very well. You're number three now?

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Number three. You know, this was David against Goliath and, you know, so this is a very nice win for us. Now, we're not finished. And in fact, in our business, what's interesting is the wirehouses which dominate our customers. So Morgan Stanley, all the advisors at these wirehouses, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merrill Lynch, B of A, Wells Fargo, not one of them has approved Bitcoin on its platform. That hasn't even happened yet. And those are our primary clients. When that happens, wait until you see.

• 1:00:06Peter Diamandis?

  Explosion. Yeah, I used to, years and years ago, I went on CNBC saying, I sold all my gold and I bought Bitcoin. And I said, it's, you know, it follows the six D's roadmap. It's digitized, dematerialized, demonetized, and democratized. And in all of these things, you have slow deceptive growth, and then it becomes disruptive. And we're just at, I mean, it's been a slow disruption, but institutional, the institutions coming on, and then governments following. I mean, the ship has sailed.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  Yes, it has. And this, this is not just a technology. It's a new asset class, right? And beyond that, it's a global monetary system. You know, it is the first global,

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  private, meaning no government oversight, digital and decentralized, rules-based. That's the most important word here. Rules-based monetary system in history. It's a big idea.

• 1:01:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it is. I'm going to have Mike Saylor on my, on my stage, the same place that you spoke last time. And we're going to spend a couple of hours talking about this, but not just Bitcoin as a store of value, but Bitcoin-related applications, right? Where's Lightning Network going? This is, you know, Bitcoin is, and I've heard you say this, the, the financial side of the internet that did not exist in the 90s. And it's also the mechanism that AI is going to be using to, to implement its, its will, or your will through it on the world.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Yes, what's, we, we did something called Bitcoin Brainstorm. We do a Bitcoin brainstorm monthly, and one of them was the convergence between Bitcoin and AI. And we had, you'll probably know of his, his developer name, Roast Beef, from the Lightning, from the Lightning Network on. And he was talking about how in Africa, already this convergence is redefining division of labor. I mean, the gig economy, we understand here in the United States, put that on steroids

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  in terms of micro, micro gig economy in the emerging markets, and you have a, a whole, a whole new kind of economy. So, yes, very exciting.

• 1:02:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we can see the, the hash rate exploding onto the scene, having, coming. And, you know, I, I hate to ask predictions again, but I think, I remember your sort of bear case, meeting case, and best case. Give us some of those numbers as you see them.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Yes, well, we have all kinds of metrics, but when I was at Abundance, the, the forecast was, our bull case was $1.5 million in five years. So that would have been 2027. We still have time. And we still think that's going to be right. If you just look at the institutional push into Bitcoin, this new asset class, they have to consider it as fiduciaries. When you use that, those code words, new asset class, what it means, the correlation of these returns are very low compared to those of other assets.

• 1:03:57Peter Diamandis?

  Especially as bonds and stocks are becoming more correlated, you need something uncorrelated.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And so they have to consider it. Now, what are we saying? There are 19.6 million Bitcoin out there right now, and the highest it will ever go is 21 million. Well, okay, there's real scarcity value. And what is going to happen? The price increase for every institutional dollar pushing in now is going to be much higher than it was last year, two years ago. It's, you know, we're going to get into, if these institutions really want to own it, what I found fascinating recently, just learned it this morning, is

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  typically when you go through a price move, a Bitcoin price move to the upside, you usually see long-term holders, which is a metric we monitor. It's an on-chain analytics metric. And it means people who have not moved, or wallets that have not moved their Bitcoin in 155 days or more. Yes. Well, normally, when you go through a price move to the upside, a very nice one like we've seen in the last year, that tends to start moving down. And it did that, true to form, but it has reversed in recent days

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  because what we learned is GBTC sold some of its Bitcoin. So that was, those wallets hadn't been changed in a long time, right? Now that is done, at least for the time being, now that is done. And it's going back up again as the price goes up. That's highly unusual. And I think it is because the long-term holders saying, why would I sell now when I know all these institutions, which own nothing, own nothing in this realm, in this new asset class? They have to consider it because it is a new asset class.

• 1:06:08Peter Diamandis?

  I have friends of mine who are just setting up their, there are Bitcoins they can borrow against it. No one wants to sell. Everyone is convinced it's an uptick. And so I want to hear you a couple of questions here. A friend of mine who you know, Bill Barheit, who's the CEO of Abra, right? Is when the last man, last man standing, he's done an amazing, amazing job. What's your, what do you think of as the, the future of DeFi and the future of banking with regard to this?

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Yes, and first let me tell you a little story about Bill. In 2017, when Bitcoin was below a thousand dollars and there was a war going on between the Bitcoin maximalists and, you know, those focused on the Ethereum network. Chris Bernisky, you may know him. He was our first crypto analyst and went off to start Placeholder. He decided, you know what? We should have a meetup at our office between the Bitcoin and Ethereum supporters. And we'll, we'll provide rules of the, yeah,

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  we'll provide rules of the road. And Bill was the grown up in the room, set the tone from, you know, the Ethereum side. And we had a talk, such a productive talk that I went out and bought Ether right away. We own, you know, I already owned a lot of Bitcoin because it was so convincing that there is a place for both.

• 1:07:48Peter Diamandis?

  Bill is a brilliant adult in this space. Yes, for sure.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. And so, so, uh, yes, we're, um, very excited about the Ethereum network and Solana. And so they all play different roles. And what I love is there's kind of a little competition. Uh, I think competition is always good, uh, to keep the other networks honest. And, uh, so yes, we think that, um, decentralized finance, and we do call it now the internet financial system, which is really a Chris Bremis point that, yes.

• 1:08:22Peter Diamandis?

  I, I, I like that because it's, it really, uh, it really talks about the functionality more than this, this ethereal idea. It's, it, it is the financial backbone and it's the, it's really the dematerialized and democratized access to taking action in the world.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And taking the middlemen out of

• 1:08:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Everything, you know, when

• 1:08:49Peter Diamandis?

  Get the sand out of the gears.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, when we did our digital wallet work, um, you know, we're, we're saying, okay, let's try to figure out how much, how many steps it takes for a merchant or for a consumer to pay a merchant. And that was nine steps, including the two of them. Uh, and that's, and, and, you know, there are many other middlemen, but these were the most direct steps. And that is a one, well, a two to 4% tax on every purchase in the world. If you're using, uh, intermediaries, credit cards and so forth. So, uh, just think about that. Cutting, you know, that tax rate dramatically is, is going to increase access dramatically.

• 1:09:36Peter Diamandis?

  I want to hit on, uh, another fun subject. The, uh, the nine-year-old inside of me is like, the robots are coming, the robots are coming. You know, uh,

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Yes, they are.

• 1:09:48Peter Diamandis?

  Humanoid robots. Tesla Bot, a friend of mine is one of the, uh, senior, uh, leaders at Tesla and just showing me what's going on there is amazing, right? Tesla Bot 2, um, uh, Optimus, uh, second generation. And then we've got, uh, we've got Amiga, we've got Figure and my count 30 other humanoid robots under development.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Yes. And we, we think this, uh, first of all, If you look at the rights law and apply it to industrial robots,

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  what we see is based on the 50% cost decline for every cumulative doubling in the number of robots out there, we believe that during the next six to seven years, that space is going to grow the fastest, even faster than AI. Now, this is from a market valuation point of view. I'm talking about how it's valued in the marketplace. We think by more than 80% per year at a compound annual rate, whereas we think all of disruptive innovation will be growing 40% from roughly $20 trillion now in the public

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  and private market. And Figure AI, we have taken a position in our venture fund there. So from 20 trillion to 220 trillion by the year 2030. So that's a 40% compound annual rate of growth. But generalized, generalizable robotics is going to grow the fastest, we believe.

• 1:11:25Peter Diamandis?

  Incredible. And I, you know, my venture fund, Bold Capital, we took a position in Figure as well. And of course, I'm a huge Tesla fan.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, of course we are too.

• 1:11:38Peter Diamandis?

  And, you know, it's interesting, if you look at the, you know, Elon's prediction on optimists at 20,000, let's say he's going to be optimistic as he normally is. And that's good. Optimism helps you. You know, if innovators weren't optimistic, they would never start any of the ventures because you've got to be optimistic. But let's say that it's not 20,000 for an optimist, let's say, or Figure, let's say it's 50,000. You know, if you're leasing it like you lease a car, you know, 500 bucks a month, you've got labor 24/7 sitting in your closet downstairs, working for you.

• 1:12:15Peter Diamandis?

  It's extraordinary.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  It is, it is. We're pretty excited. And the way we value this, this particular space is, it's roughly 50/50, home and out of home, about $12 trillion each. So yes, very exciting.

• 1:12:33Peter Diamandis?

  It's a lot. Now, the numbers are interesting. For those who haven't sort of seen the conversation.

• 1:12:40Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've seen Vinod Khosla, who's a friend, you know, talk about, you know, as well as the team at Figure, that we'll hit, you know, billions, perhaps 10 billion by 2040. These are humanoid robots walking amongst us and millions by 2030. What do you think? What have you? What's your projections?

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  We think they are right and that we are hitting the tipping point now. And, you know, Elon does not do anything unless he...

• 1:13:15Peter Diamandis?

  Small.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Well, nothing small, we for sure, for sure. But unless, again, on a first principles basis, he can justify it. And so the fact that he's, you know, throwing this weight behind it. And I hope he does get his 25% voting control at Tesla because, you know,

• 1:13:34Peter Diamandis?

  I hope he does too.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  As a Tesla shareholder, yeah. I want him to see this through.

• 1:13:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, it's interesting. What I love is not only convergence in technologies, but convergence within Elon's companies. So we've got, we've got, you know, Tesla and SpaceX working together. And the other thing, and I'm spending some good time at the Abundance Summit on brain-computer interface, an area that we haven't spoken about much. But, you know, the ability to connect your neocortex to the cloud and be able to think and Google or take action, increasing intelligence, right? The number one greatest asset a company or nation has is the intelligence of its employees or its citizens. If you can up that to some degree, that would be extraordinary. So imagine Neuralink and Optimus together, right?

• 1:14:23Peter Diamandis?

  So I'm able to occupy an Optimus robot someplace and drive it around. We've seen movies about this and it's not that far away.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  We agree. We agree, especially, yeah, as we're combining what you just said with AGI, that how wrong, how wrong the market has been and how close to reality it might be.

• 1:14:49Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it, the point you just made, how wrong the market has been.

• 1:14:56Peter Diamandis?

  I am, I'm flabbergasted. I don't know, I don't know what the right term is, how...

• 1:15:04Peter Diamandis?

  How confused I am about the the public and the markets not recognizing how impactful these exponential technology-driven companies are? And how, like you said earlier, right? Superexponentials are coming as these tsunami-sized convergences are about to transform every aspect of our lives, every company. Nation-states are going to be transformed.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Exactly. Accelerate the exponential growth rates. So I can tell you why. And I mentioned it briefly, but in the reasons, but in a word, people are scared. And they are hugging benchmarks because they don't want to go through another tech and telecom bust. They don't want to go through another financial meltdown. People are talking about, you know, another technology hype cycle here. So these are trigger words for them right now. So here's the irony. Here's the irony. In the late 90s, I was there.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  In the late 90s, this idea of the internet captured the investors' imagination and they started valuing companies on number of eyeballs potentially in 10 to 20 years.

• 1:16:26Peter Diamandis?

  I'll never forget when one travel company was worth more than all the airlines put together.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  There you go. So too much capital chased too few opportunities too soon, and it ended badly. The technologies weren't ready and they were too expensive. So, but what people do not understand is the seeds for everything happening now were sown during the 20 years that ended in the tech and telecom bubble. They've been germinating for 25, 30 years. We are ready for prime time. And unlike the late 90s, they're running away. They're running for the hills. What are the hills? Their benchmarks. It's ridiculous.

• 1:17:12Peter Diamandis?

  Old school safe havens for capital.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  And that will end badly, too. That will end badly.

• 1:17:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you know, when I'm looking to predict the future, one of the things I think about and look at is what I call user interface moments. These are moments where complex technology gets a simplified user interface on top of it that then makes the public, gives the public access. So when, when, when, when Mosaic came along, right, when Marc Andreessen created Mosaic, he put a user interface on top of ARPANET and all of a sudden it exploded, right? Steve Jobs does that with the phone, with iPhone and the App Store and so forth. ChatGPT created a user interface moment on top of large language models and all of a sudden, mass, right? So we're, we're going to be seeing these user interface moments coming on,

• 1:18:05Peter Diamandis?

  making all of this very rich, very powerful, complex technology accessible to everybody. And in one sense, AI is the ultimate user interface, right?

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:18:17Peter Diamandis?

  There will be a future, you know, I keep on in my, in my blogs and my books, I talk about Jarvis, because I just love Jarvis from Iron Man. And I, you know, and it's like, you know, it will be my interface where I don't know how to 3D print or write 3D printing code. And I haven't coded in a number of years, but I, I know what I want. And if I can explain to my user interface exactly what I want, it has all the APIs and everything needed to go and do anything I desire.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  And you know natural language?

• 1:18:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I do. I do.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:18:52Peter Diamandis?

  The challenge is going to be, of course, and we'll have to deal with this, is how do we overcome the, the ill actors, you know, the malevolent actors in society who will want to use this for, for harm. And therein lies, you know, the black hat, white hat, the use of AI to support humanity in, in doing good over evil.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, what I, you know, this brings up the open source versus closed, you know, just in, in the spaces with Elon, he was saying, Open AI, ha, you should call it closed AI, you know. But, you know, we have, and it's in the, again, the big ideas. We have a chart in there that shows the rate of performance improvement for closed source models and open source models. Now, if you look at the level, chat, I mean, GPT-4 is just out there. It's, you know, way above the rest.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  But if you look at the slope of the line of performance improvements for open source, it is steeper. It's improving faster. And I'm wondering, you know, I often say with the Bitcoin blockchain, I say, hey, this is a giant neighborhood watch. You've got a lot of people whose livelihoods and wealth are concentrated here, and they don't want anything to go wrong. I feel like that should be the case in open source, with open source AI as well. Now, Elon, in our spaces, said he thought closed would win.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  And I'm thinking, well, maybe, but, but could it be that, you know, we've seen Lama 2, and can't wait to see Lama 3, is good enough, good enough. And I've talked to many enterprises who say, we just need this to settle down because we have to quote unquote, hardwire this for compliance and security and all of that. So I just wonder, I just wonder.

• 1:21:03Peter Diamandis?

  I'm of the open source, you know, open will win. I really fundamentally believe that over and over again. You know, I'm going to have, you know, we have Hugging Face, we have, Ahmad Mustak's going to be with us from Stability. And, and I think one of the things that hasn't been calculated into this is we're going to see nation-state players partnering with open source players.

• 1:21:29Peter Diamandis?

  To digitize the data in their nations and create nation state language models that are respectful of their of their culture and of their, you know, their history. And so we're going to see, we'll see, you know, 100 plus major players out there. I don't think it's going to all be Microsoft or Google.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  I agree with you. I agree with you. I don't think people want it to be a Microsoft or Google.

• 1:21:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yep, though, you know, Google's, Google's been an open source player almost every place else.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  I know. That's what's so interesting, isn't it?

• 1:22:05Peter Diamandis?

  It is fascinating and I hope that they do take on the, the open source bandwagon. I will, I will not go into, into the conversation about Gemini right now because I don't want to get us into another half hour conversation. But listen, I want to, I want to close out. And you've been so generous with, with time. This has been a fun conversation, Kathy. I miss you.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  It's been great. Yeah, I miss you too.

• 1:22:31Peter Diamandis?

  You know, let's talk one second. You have gotten into the venture business since you were on my stage at Abundance 360. Talk one second about your, your venture fund moment and how people can find out more about that.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  So democratizing venture. It's an interval fund, which is, it's regulated just like an ETF or a mutual fund. And for $500, and we're available on both Titan, which is an Andreessen Horowitz funded app, and on SoFi now, just launched there. For $500, you can get access to SpaceX and Discord and Epic and Databricks, which bought Mosaic, which we own. So a free, free gnome in the, in the multi-homic space. So really transformational companies. We're excited about this effort and, and we're really grateful to the-

• 1:23:27Peter Diamandis?

  How big, how big is the, how big is your venture fund?

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  So it started about a year ago and it's grassroots, as I just described. It is approaching, I think it's just about 50 million now. And we know that the wirehouses will look forward to putting it on their platforms when it hits. crosses a threshold, say 70 to 100 million, depending on the warehouse. So we're excited about that.

• 1:23:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, because most people like, you know, for my venture funds, your minimum investment is a million, $2 million, you know.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Well. And so. Yeah, the other thing.

• 1:24:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  The other thing, Peter, is we're not charging a carry. We are charging a 2.75% fee, but no carry. And that is why we can offer it to retail. Go figure. This is an SEC rule. If you don't earn a million, if you don't, I don't know what the thresholds are, but a million dollars and some other dollar for for income, which most of our young, young investors don't, you can't have a shot at these moon shots.

• 1:24:32Peter Diamandis?

  This is critical for diversification to have some

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:35Peter Diamandis?

  segment of your assets in venture and you make it possible for them. And congratulations on that.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:24:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And where does one go to learn about the rest of the incredible ecosystem you've created?

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. So it's ark-invest.com. You can find big ideas 2024 on there. And then we also have all of our podcasts. We do In The Know, which is more economics and a little bit of innovation. That's every month. Bitcoin Brainstorm, Bitcoin Monthly. And we have something called, it's actually very interesting. It's called The Brainstorm. And it's Nick Ruse, who's an APM with me, and Sam Corus, who's a Director of Research, basically summarizing our brainstorm from the previous Friday. It comes out the following Tuesday. So definitely stay tuned for that.

• 1:25:31Peter Diamandis?

  Nice, nice. And I would love to have you back on my stage in next year's Abundance Summit, which is a common theme on convergence. And let's talk about sort of, you know, where things are going. Someone interested in seeing these tsunamis. Where do they invest? What's your thinking? Anyway, I'm excited for that. Thank you for your time.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  Likewise. Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you for your work. Yes, yes. We've got to, we got to bring, we got to reverse this massive misallocation of capital and redirect it, right?

• 1:26:04Peter Diamandis?

  And also, if I could, the negativism out there. We are living through the most extraordinary time ever, right? We are, this technology is uplifting humanity. It's creating increasing abundance. And these are good things.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  And it tends to, sorry, Peter, it tends to gain traction during tough times. So when people are negative and not optimistic is when surreptitiously, deceptively, as you say, these technologies start to take hold and then, please God, we're into the roaring twenties again.

• 1:26:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. Amazing. Amazing.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Peter Diamandis?

  Kathy, a pleasure. We're going to end our spaces here. If you'd stay with me on the video. Take care, everybody. Thank you for joining us and see you next time.

• 1:27:03Speaker 05

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