Cathie Wood on the Bitcoin Halving, Apple/Open AI & NVDIAs Dominance w/ Cathie Wood | EP #108

Kathy, welcome. It's great to see you.

Thank you, Peter.

Let's talk about Bitcoin. We just had the halving and the question is where is bitcoin going? How are you feeling about things?

We are, we believe, halfway through this bull market. And I think what's going to happen.

Is I think about this partnership between OpenAI and Apple as the direct challenge to Google. I'm curious if that was what really underlined and drove that.

Already we're seeing Bing, believe it or not, see starting to gain share. We've been thinking, oh my gosh, Google is in harm's way here.

Nvidia, you know, it's jockeying to be the most valuable company on the planet. What's your take on Nvidia?

Our thought here is okay, $3 trillion company gross margins in the high 70s. Now, will the competitive environment allow that?

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. My guest today is none other than the incredible Cathie Wood. Tech investor, visionary, the head of the Ark Invest 60 billion dollar platform. Our conversations are going to go over AI, all things AI, humanoid robots, the bitcoin having Tesla's robo taxis, humanoid robots and biotech like Alphafold. This is one of my favorite conversations about what's happening in the next 12 months, in the next five years. If you enjoy conversations like this, please subscribe. Gives me a chance to bring incredible people like Kathy to you. Thanks. Let's jump in. Kathy, welcome. It's great to see you. First off, let me just wish you a happy 10th year anniversary.

Oh, thank you. Yes, yes. Big Milestone this year, 10 years old. Thank you.

Yeah. 2014 to 2024 and it's been an incredible decade right between AI and robotics and bitcoin and Tesla and rockets and everything. I was just on the phone with Ray Kurzweil who's my partner in singularity and abundance 360 and a few other companies. And we were talking about his new book, the Singularity is Nearer just came out, which I have to talk to him about naming his books, but that's a different subject. I think the next book is going to be called the Singularity Just Passed, but we'll see. And we're saying that the next 10 years, the way to think about it is the next 10 years we're going to see as much progress as we've seen in the past century, which is an extraordinary way to think about this on your 10 year anniversary. Thinking about the next 10 years, it's going to be insane.

It is. We talk about this a lot on Our brainstorming sessions and the equity markets mosey along like nothing much is going to change. It's same old, same old. And we're trying to figure out, oh my gosh, these technologies are falling so dramatically in costs, whether industrial robots, energy storage, AI blockchain technology, multi omic sequencing. The costs of all of them are hitting such low levels that they're going to scale, I think, much more dramatically than most people think. And I think it's going to be very exciting if you're on the right side of change. It's going to be very disturbing if you're not on the right side of change. And I don't think, and this is where I think you've got it right, Peter. I don't think people understand how quickly this is going to happen.

Yeah, the government's not ready. I think the public's not ready. Our educational system isn't ready. But they're going to have to get to. And it's going to be, I think, more, I don't want to use the word disruptive in a negative connotation. It's going to be more reinventive of society than we saw during COVID Right. Covid was the last time we had a step function change that the world stopped and people got sort of disoriented and then re established a new norm. But I think we're going to see that. I just read through your Big Ideas Ark Invest research paper. It's magnificent. So congratulations on that.

Our team, all our research team, just amazing. Yeah.

If you haven't seen this report, go, it's downloadable for free. It's the Big Ideas Ark Invest report and it's pretty incredible.

Can I just say, what it showcases is. Yes, the speed at which we expect these technologies, technologies to evolve because costs have come down to such a low level. And it also highlights how we've set up our organization. Our analyst responsibilities are broken out not by sector, not by industry, not by sub industry because technology is blurring the lines between and among industries and these technologies are converging. So it's going to seem to the traditional analysts, it's going to seem like a chaotic world. And we did have, and I know we talk about Tesla a lot, but it is the poster child. And you get a sense of what's going to happen here. It's a robot company, it's an energy storage company, it's an AI company.

It's an AI company.

It is. And yet auto analysts.

It's ridiculous the way Tesla is being valued. But let's get to that. First of all, you mentioned convergence. It's going to be the theme of abundance. 3602025 and excited to have you on stage with me to help interpret all of this and where it's going. There are three subjects I want to talk about today with you. The first is AI. I mean a lot between OpenAI and Apple, between Nvidia, between Xai, which I think we're both investors in. Next one hit bitcoin. A lot happening there and you have been a staunch advocate for bitcoin and making some, I think, bold predictions, which I'm counting on because it's my biggest asset class personally. And then the third is I'm talking about disruptive tech. Everything from the genomics revolution AlphaFold3 to robots. A lot in robots. I'm just a big robot fan right now and see where this is going. Is that good for a roadmap for us? All right, let's jump into AI, Apple OS and OpenAI. I found that fascinating. I'm curious. I expected for the longest time that we would get a update to Siri and that it would be a large language model that Apple had been defining because Siri socks right still spells my name wrong and it's pretty simple. It should not be spelling it P I E T E R. And they didn't. They ended up partnering with OpenAI. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that.

Yeah, we've been watching Apple for a long time from, from a particular AI angle. We, we believe that autonomous vehicles are the ultimate mobile devices and so rightly, China app gone for it. And yet we saw one management turnover after another after another and now they're pretty much abandoning it. And so that was our first clue that AI was a tough nut for Apple to crack. It was very interesting to hear various responses and a big debate around what this means for Apple. It's not bad, of course, but we within our own organization have two points of view. One of them is this is great for Apple. They're going to be able to layer in all of these features functionality. They already know so much about their users. And one of my friends said I almost felt relieved when I heard the features they were going to roll out. I felt safe. They were going to keep me safe in this world which so I found that very interesting. And so of course Nick Grus, our Apple analyst, was very excited. He thinks this is going to be fantastic. One thing it will do is the refresh cycle. This next one will probably be a good one because there's something new. New. Okay, so that's that on the other.

Side, it's not just a better camera.

Right. On the other side of the debate is, and I lean a little bit here is our chief futurist, whom you know, Brett Winton, is saying, well, wait a minute, Apple's. Apple is known for privacy and security. And sure it's going to roll out these features, which sounded kind of meh during the launch. Sure, they're going to roll them out and it's going to make these Apple phones somewhat more interesting. But there is so much happening when it comes to AI and there are going to be companies who are not constricted by this. You can say constricted or confined or whatever by this privacy, security kind of priority, who will come up with some crazy new ideas that are going to become very attractive to people, but Apple will not be able to adopt them in the same way. So this has set up for us, this is part of the Mag 7 or Mag 6 versus rest of disruptive innovation. You know, is it those companies, is it theirs to lose here? And you know the history of disruptive innovation is yes, it is theirs to lose. We just don't know who's going to come up with what provocative product to dislodge them.

Well, you know, it's never been the dominant player that made the transition. The icebox manufacturer didn't design the refrigerator. Right. It's always been someone from the outside. It's always been the young innovator who doesn't know what they can't do that comes in and disrupts the world. You know, it's interesting, I think about this partnership between OpenAI and Apple as the direct challenge to Google and I'm curious if that was what really underlying drove that, because I had to imagine that Apple and I didn't make that connection that you just made about them not going after an electric car, which was always part of the equation, but they didn't have that. Yeah, autonomous electric cars. Yeah. Real quick. I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Xai, I'm an investor. I think you are an investor in xai. Did you take a good position there?

Yeah, I mean, we have a small venture fund, it's scaling, it's almost 65 million now. Took a nice little slug for the size of that fund. And we're very, very happy to be on the cap table. So, yes, you know, when we first, as we've been studying foundation models, we've been thinking, oh my gosh, Google is in harm's way here, you know, because who wants to link to anything anymore when we can just go directly to whatever we're looking for? So, and that was kind of a risk for Apple as well. You know, the apps, you know, maybe we don't have to use these apps, maybe the developers won't have to pay that tax. You know, as, as with ChatGPT and, and others, we can just go where we want, ask, you know, and get exactly what we want. Now that's an oversimplification and I think it has been confirmed that Google paid Apple $20 billion to be the default search, if I'm not mistaken. And so, yes, the whole world is being, I think the traditional world is going to be shaken up in a way that I think people don't quite understand yet.

I agree. If I have right now, the entire search engine industry and I love Google, I've had a 20 year love affair with the teams there. I know them well, they've been partners, they've been xprize sponsors. Eric Schmidt and Larry and Sergey were huge underwriters of XPrize in the beginning. And Larry's on our board. They've had this cash machine that has allowed them to go and build Waymo and purchase incredible companies. But that is going to be fundamentally threatened if I say to my AI, listen, go buy me all my stuff. My AI is not looking at ads. It doesn't care what someone's smiling at them for. Toothpaste, it just knows my genetics. It knows which toothpaste is going to work best for my teeth and not for others. The hegemony of the ad industry is going to be up for grabs with AI in the mix.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, even already we're seeing Bing, believe it or not, starting to gain share. That's very interesting because of the open AI and now you have Apple and you know, so again, a rearranging of the guards. But, you know, are they the real winners anyway? I think the world we're imagining is going to be so different from the world we're in right now. And yet you wouldn't know that from the way the equity markets are behaving.

There's a paper that just came out that talks about the projected speed of AGI and digital superintelligence and the paper's predicting two orders of magnitude increase by 2027, 100 fold increase in capabilities and heading towards massive GPU TPU clusters coming up as an arms race really, if we really do have AIs that are 100 fold beyond GPT4. GPT4 is described as an intelligent high school student, College student, where two orders of magnitude further is the world's top double PhD, expert in whatever accessible in your hand at a moment's notice. The world is very different all of a sudden.

Yes, it is. No, I have not read the paper, but this aligns with some of our own research into maybe that's a little bit faster, but the cost declines associated with AI. So training costs dropping 75% per year, inference costs dropp 85% plus per year. As you mentioned in Big Ideas. Yes, we're seeing even and I'm not sure if we talked about this on our last podcast together, but we're seeing pre ChatGPT AGI was predicted by futurists out maybe 80 years and then post ChatGPT. So just a year and a half ago, eight years and now maybe even sooner than that. Yes, we try and imagine, okay, what is the world going to be like? Well, one of the things, and this is in Big Ideas as well is again, those who actually harness these tools, if they are under performers today and they become very serious about, about harnessing tools, the performance increase for a low performer and I think it was BCG or Bain.

Yes, I saw that report on its own consultants.

Right. The, the high performers improved after ChatGPT by 17%, the low performers by 43%. And, and we've begun to think, okay, so that's at the individual level. What about at the company level? Companies that are scrapping and scraping around and you know, they've found it difficult to compete against some behemoths who have well oiled machines. Well, if they harness tools and if the world is changing as rapidly as we think it is, maybe they're developing a competitive advantage relative to the big guys.

It's flattening the playing field in a fascinating way. Right. It's no longer your level of dominance that will save you, it's really how you can integrate technology rapidly. I want to go back to Xai, because I'm super curious, right, You've got the leading players right now with Gemini and Google and OpenAI and Microsoft and you've got Anthropic and then here comes this startup, Xai. Now I've learned over the years I will never bet against Elon and I've had the most extraordinary returns betting on him from a financial standpoint. And so your position in Tesla for me is 100% warranted and it's a good reason to really look at your innovation fund. He never plays for second place and so the question is, can he catch up and Excel and really leapfrog the current players? What are your thoughts on that?

Like you, I would not bet against him. And you know what's interesting also is this is the physical world and the digital world coming together. He's a maestro at that. You know, a lot of the Silicon Valley born and bred innovators, they have gotten used to the digital world and viral apps and very high returns on investment with very low fixed costs. Elon is the inventor of our age who is, I'll say a maestro at the convergences between and among technologies. Tesla's one example. And yeah, so I, I think he has big ideas and I think he's motivated by what has happened at OpenAI and probably wants to, probably is betting on something pointing away from OpenAI in terms of, okay, where, where, where should I place my bets and towards what he is doing from, from a trust point of view, which, you know, OpenAI has just been through a transition with, you know, a lot of the so called safety advocates leaving. So you know, there's certainly a compare and contrast evolving there. It'll be very interesting to see, to see what he.

Kathy, when I think about what's required to Excel and win the AI wars and let's call them that because they are. It's GPU concentration, it's talent and it's data. And what I think is interesting about Xai is that Elon, I don't hear people talking about this. He's got access to extraordinary data through Tesla, right? Tesla is a imagery gathering machine, millions of them on the roads, interacting with people and things. And also the X platform is a massive data asset for him.

We just had a brainstorm around this and yes, we think proprietary data at the end of the day is going to be one of the biggest competitive advantages. And yes, think of all of his companies and all of the different kinds of data, even Neuralink there's AI around that as well and bringing in the Human brain, neural network. So I mean, he's covered. When I think about our five platforms, he's touching all of them and they're all converging and they're all spewing out data that only convergence, baby. It's crazy. Preview for your conference next year.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm giddy as a geek about the potential of how much things are going to accelerate and change and worried for those people who unfortunately the majority of humanity likes to go to sleep and wake up and hope that the morning is just like the night before. People don't like change, but we're about to see a lot of change.

They don't like change. And I do think that it's important to get these ideas into schools as early as possible. I think I've mentioned to you before the AHRQ education initiative. We are going to be the science curriculum throughout Pinellas county within the next for the middle school system. So sixth, seventh and eighth grade, which.

I just changed my kids middle school because it was devoid of a vision of the future and technology. Oh my God. It's preparing them for 40 years ago, not for the next 10 years.

And it's so important to inspire them at that moment. They face a lot of forks in the road around middle school. Right. And, and so to actually inspire them and you know, and let them know, look, if you study this, it is so new. You are on the same playing field. You'll know more about whether it's drones or robots than 98% of the people in the world if you study this now and then go for it. There's so many ways. With our own AI tutors, we can deepen our knowledge of any given area and deepen our understanding of the convergences that are evolving and how we might capitalize on them.

One last question on the AI front here, Nvidia, what's your theme on this? I mean, honestly, I missed Nvidia. I knew it was going to come as, as powerful, but I didn't. I took my chips off the table way too early. You know, it's jockeying to be the most valuable company on the planet, which is extraordinary. And they still have a lot of. They can create their own platform plays instead of just selling chips. Right. There's a lot of opportunity for them. Do you think it's at the peak? Do you think it's going to continue growing? Can it be disrupted? I happen to know one of my investments, Liquid AI, is, is working closely with intel on a new type of chip that could be Orders of magnitude faster. What's your take on Nvidia?

So like you, well we, we did enjoy a hundred, nearly 100 fold increase in Nvidia be from on this stock, the split stock from around $0.40 to $40 and the stock's at 120 and we still own it in our more specialized portfolios, one being more AI focused. But our thought here is okay, $3 trillion company gross margins in the high 70s. Its major customers, the cloud customers, their gross margins are lower than that. That's a very concentrated customer base. And the history of the hyperscalers is when they see the economics going to their suppliers, they decide, you know, we're going to do that, you know, we should do that, we can do that. You know, they're very cash rich. So you know it. Nvidia is an incredible story. All praise to Jensen Huang and his team. And they're trying to evolve from a strictly hardw company to more of a software company, a platform company. Now will the competitive environment allow that? As I mentioned, the hyperscalers, they're all designing their own chips, right? Some of the more general purpose, some, some like Tesla, I put that in a hyperscaler, designing its own chip. It already pulled one Nvidia chip out of its cars. And, and with Dojo, ultimately I think that it will verticalize completely. So, you know, and by the way.

That'S Elon's play continuously, right? He always verticalizes. I mean that's what he did. He did that in SpaceX. I remember having a conversation with him in the early days during Falcon 1 and he's like, he's pissed at the supplier and it's like a ridiculous pricing and his immediate reaction is figure out how to build it ourselves as soon as somebody's margins are too big.

Well, right, and what happened a couple of quarters ago during an earnings call, Elon said, and we know he was trying to get more Nvidia GPUs. So a couple of quarters ago he said, you know, building a chip is really hard, really hard. Now we might be successful, but it's really hard and the odds are low. And then lo and behold, a couple of quarters later, later, not only does he have all the chips he needs, but he donates. I don't know how it worked. I'm sure it was legal. Some from Tesla to X. Now this brings up supply versus demand. I think what's happening in AI and I'd love to get your thoughts, Peter. What we're seeing, and we hear about this from Palantir we're Lear from Palantir. How much it is going to take, how much time and preparation it's going to take to move into the AI age for these large enterprises. And all of these companies are catering to the large enterprises. What do they have to do? The way they need to set up is, first of all, they have to aggregate their data, far flung data. They don't even know where a lot of their data resides. Aggregate it, clean it up, integrate it, map out workflows in excruciating detail. And what we're seeing now is, you know, the cycle is a little uncertain. The cycle, meaning the economic cycle. We're seeing the consumer is showing signs of significant weakness in some, some categories. And so companies are saying, okay, this is a strategic decision we have to make and we're going to put a lot of resources it, but let's make sure we prepare appropriately.

They're screwed. They're screwed. Well, I think, I think, I think this is Macy's, JCPenney, Toys R Us all over again. I think that they're going to have the small players who are digital, first AI, first born, who are going to eat their lunch in the final result.

I think there will be a lot of that. That's our bet. We're all about truly disruptive innovation. That's not how the market's bet right now. And you know, the market's betting.

The market's betting, I think from, from a safety, what they know, not willing to make the leap. Yes, they're, it's just, it's, it's momentum of their previous mindset. They haven't seen the disruption yet. They haven't seen it. Yeah.

And if there is any disturbance, let's just say we have this, you know, strategic reset, you know, pause. Then what we have is probably too much supply out there relative to current demand. And I am talking about GPUs and, you know, use of that. But that will be a moment in time because this is so big and we're seeing in the private markets a lot of companies being funded who are going to come up with, you know, something new, interesting, different, provocative, controversial, you know, and probably the way the world's going to work.

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 when 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, 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, 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. You might as well find out when you can take action. Found Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. 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 LifeForce, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will 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 onto 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 on our next conversation because we don't have time for it today. I do want to talk about the fact that in one more iterative cycle, one more order of magnitude, we're going to have the best AI programmers as AIs and the acceleration that occurs at that moment is blinding. And where we're going to have drop in employees, drop in programmers, drop in physicians, drop in lawyers. And it's just this is what's going to Enable a startup to come from nowhere and become the single person billion dollar company and disrupt the large players who didn't see it coming.

Right. Just to take that, you know, when the cloud happened, the barriers to innovation came down and even more so now that we can all become natural language programmers or prompt engineers or. I think the barrier to entry is coming down and the costs of all of this innovation are coming down. Not so much the large language models, but the cost of most innovation is coming down dramatically.

Let's go to our topic number two, a subject that your audience, my audience loves. Let's talk about bitcoin. We just had the halving. It happened with little fanfare, little change. And the question is, where is bitcoin going? You know, it was 70,000 or thereabouts. You know, a month or so ago it dropped down to below 60. I bought more bitcoin. How are you feeling about things? What's, what are you seeing as the future here?

Yeah, I think so. We have four people at ARK who are working on crypto, generally one dedicated to bitcoin on chain analytics. And judging by those, we are, we believe, halfway through this bull market. And halfway doesn't mean we're halfway through the price increase because at the end of a bull market prices tend to go parabolic. So we have no idea where that. But we feel very strongly just based on, on chain analytics, looking at them versus the short ten year history. Ten, a little bit more than that history that we're halfway through the bull market. What's very interesting, since the ETFs were launched in January, many people think, oh, all right, the, the boom. And you know, we, we had, we've had a very nice showing. David versus Goliath. We're, we're, we're in, we're in the fight. And very congratulations. Where we are. Yeah, but not one major. We call them wirehouses like Morgan Stanley, ubs, Wells Fargo, bank of America, Merrill Lynch. Not one has put bitcoin on its platform yet. A bitcoin etf. They're all doing their due diligence. And I think what's going to happen is within the next few months, one will, and it may be not the big ones, it may be an independent RIA like lpl. They tend to move a little more quickly. Once you get one with a spot bitcoin ETF on its platform, the others will fall in line pretty quickly.

It was so funny. My, my mom was like, where do I put my retirement money? I said, put it in a bitcoin etf. And I said, you know, who manages for you? She says, merrill Lynch. Let me talk to your Merrill lynch person. We're not allowed to do that. And I'm like, mom, change who manages your money, please.

You know, well, she. Any, any of the big ones, she's not going to have any, any better luck. So. But, but you can go to an online, online broker, Robinhood and others, and they tend to be a little bit more adventurous.

Kathy, when you were on stage with me at abundance360 last, you were saying you saw a million dollar per coin price. Are you still there?

Yes.

By 2030.

Yes, 2030. So our bull case. Bull is over 1.5 million. Our base is in the $650,000 range. So about tenfold from here by 2030. And there are three big building blocks. Institutional is one. And I would put the. It sounds like retail distribution, but these are institutional decision makers at B of A, Merrill lynch and so forth. So that's one. The second is this is a replacement for gold. So we assume that it's going to subsume 50% of what would be the gold market, especially as younger people are looking to diversify. And then it is an insurance policy in emerging markets. I just visited El Salvador and had the pleasure of meeting the top officials there. And. And they are blazing a trail, making it legal tender and, you know, giving their populations or showing the way for other countries to give their.

What a brilliant move.

Yes, it is a brilliant. There are two people President Bukele is going after two big ideas and we're talking about them AI and Bitcoin. And my mentor and friend Art Laffer, who joined me on this trip, I think is going to be working with that government. It's only a $30 billion economy. Can you believe that?

Wow.

And here we're talking and they're going after. They're being very progressive. They're putting in tax policies that are going to encourage innovation. So I think that's a very big idea. Think about that. El Salvador, the entire country. 30 billion.

Time to buy some real estate in El Salvador. Wow. Honestly. And I wish other nation states would take. Would. Would follow suit here. What an incredible gift to your populace to actually provide them future.

Argentina is moving in this direction. We've talked to the economics ministers there. They're not ready to go the bitcoin route in the way that President Bukele is, but they're moving in that direction. They're thinking. They're thinking about it. And then the other insurance policy is for anyone but. And high net worth individuals, but anyone as you know, a protection against confiscation of wealth, whether that's inflation or outright confiscation because of corruption.

And that's the story of south and Central America, unfortunately. And it's an important one. Are you tracking anything that would disrupt bitcoin? Are you concerned at all? I mean, US politics are interesting. We just saw a rather shaky presidential debate. We'll see what goes there. I don't want to talk about it, but it's interesting. I was meeting with a minister out of Saudi Arabia and who was telling me in, I don't say in confidence, but he was saying that his understanding was the US really wanted to block the continued growth and proliferation of bitcoin. And I can't imagine that that's possible anymore. Do you?

Yeah, we don't think it's possible. And it's so interesting how surreptitiously bitcoin really got into the hands of 50 to 60 million Americans and has become an election year issue. In fact, for many voters it is the election issue. And that is why for the Financial Innovation Technology act of the 21st century, so fit 21 was able to attract 76 Democrats. I think when, when the Republicans basically turned this into an election year issue, whether accepting campaign donations in crypto or saying that they would protect the right for self custody, that's a big one. That's a very big one for bitcoin and we're very much aligned even though we have an ETF and that could be a centralization vector. We think both, both are true self custody for, you know, the early adopters and those who learn more about the ecosystem. But then just getting people into understanding what this is, how powerful this movement is, that is the role of a spot bitcoin etf. Because once you own a spot bitcoin etf, if you want to learn even more about it, you'll want to understand the risk profile of return profile.

It's the easy button. For those of you who want to get into, into bitcoin, your predictions or your Team's predictions for 2025, where do you see bitcoin going?

Yeah, we tend not to do one year, but if we're in the middle of the bull market, I think the next spur is going to be the, the, the platforms putting the spot bitcoin ETF on it. So, and I do think that will happen this year. We were told by some of our, our prospective clients, the platforms themselves, that they would need six to nine months to evaluate it. So Here we are entering the six month. So I would expect in the fall one or more will put its put the A spot Bitcoin, ETF or many of them on, on their platforms and I think that will be the next wish then. You know it's interesting. I remember in the last, I think it was the last having many people, you know, we went through the having and everybody waited for a pop and it didn't happen. Well, first of all it didn't happen because there's a lot of anticipatory buying into it. But I've watched it kind of, you know, gestate, shall we say. And then all of a sudden. So those two could coincide in the fourth quarter of this year. It could be pretty exciting.

All those, all those platforms need to do is spend an hour with Mike Saylor and I'm sure they'll accelerate their.

Well, maybe not. Okay. They're risk averse. So they don't, they want, they don't. And Mike is an incredible evangelist for the space. But that doesn't feel safe. Evangelism. It has to. You know, I'd like to think that our research and we've done a number of white papers, our first one starting in 20, 2015. I'd like to think that that kind of methodical approach and studying of the subject and someone like Art Laffer who he couldn't be more excited about Bitcoin because for him he really believes that, you know, the Fed, many people feel that they have managed monetary policy over the years. So, so we've prevented terrible things from happening. If you look what happened before the Fed came about in 2000, I mean in 1913, what happened then is prices were stable, we're on the gold standard and the economy was very volatile and you ran into booms and busts, but they were very quick. They were over in weeks. We lead up for years to a crash in 0809. Poster child for that. And here we are again. We had zero interest rates and you know, I wonder what the fallout from private equity, private credit, you know, putting enormous sums into real estate and then leveraging it up. We're starting to see the fallout whether.

It'S offices and the post Covid right.

With the office, family, multifamily now even in the areas where there's been large in migration. So the sun belt, we're beginning to see multifamily in excess. So we're going to, we'll continue to see crises. I think hopefully nothing like 08 09. I don't think so. But, but still, zero percent for a very long period of time leads to reaching for yield, which leads to bad behavior.

Yeah, gluttony, I think is the term that I would put towards that. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their rna? Well, a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance like, like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle medicine. After just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following. A 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, VIOME is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com Peter I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it@viome.com Peter let's go to our third subject, my favorite, and it's the disruptive tech conversation. And you and I share that DNA and that fascination and that focus I put into that category. For our conversation today, humanoid robots. I want to talk about Tesla's autonomous Robotaxi, which is a huge, huge deal. I don't think people realize how big they are. Opportunity is there and you have obviously with the work that you've done and then biotech with Alphafold. And I want to get your thoughts on the sort of the biotech winter and if that's over. So let's begin with humanoid robots, shall we? So we've got Tesla Bot, also known as Optimus. We've got figure and figure two, we've got out of, of China, we've got unitree. And by my count there's like 30 other humanoid robots that are reasonably well capitalized. We've got Vinod Khosilov saying we'll have a billion by 2040. Elon Brett Adcock is saying maybe closer to 10 billion by 2040. I asked a friend of mine, I said, what's it going to be like when you've got a humanoid rover walking down the street? And he says normal.

Well, you know, it's so interesting that he, he says that because we walk down the street with our AirPods on and we're all talking. I remember when cell phones first came out, I wouldn't, I was an early adopter because they were so useful, so important, but I would not talk on the street because people would think I was crazy, you know, So I agree.

People talking to themselves.

Yeah, I do agree with that. We think it's a 25 trillion dollar market broken down half between manufacturing and half non manufacturing. Sam Coris has done a lot of work on it. Yes. Brett Adcock, we went. Charlie, Charlie Roberts, our chief investment strategist.

And I love Charlie's amazing.

Yeah, yeah. And we went. And his specialty of course is multi ometech. Yeah, absolutely. But we went to, to see figure AI and it is amazing. And I think that, I think rumors this week are they, they have been courting two very large companies, testing with them and, and they may have sealed a deal. Not sure about that. That's rumor mill stuff. But it's starting to move very quickly. No doubt about it.

Yeah. I was over with Brett. My venture fund is an investor in figure and I had a chance to. We've all seen figure one and I had a chance to see figure two and plans for figure three and the speed of innovation there is amazing. I mean I said to him, I haven't seen anything with this level of energy and iterative innovation since, since I was at SpaceX on the Falcon 1 days and they were literally iterating as rapidly as they possibly could. Yes, it's amazing.

And Optimus, I think this came out this week or else it's another one of those rumors. But now Optimus is starting to work in Tesla's factories. So I think they have.

And with a $10,000 price tag, I mean that's the question. I love Elon's optimism. We both have an abundance mindset, an optimistic mindset for sure. I think maybe his timeframes are becoming a little more realistic. But $10,000. Now, I have to imagine if you price a optimus robot by weight and complexity compared to a car. Yeah, $10,000. If a Model Y is running at 30 or 40K, that's probably appropriate. If it's $10,000 and you can finance it like you do a car, that means you've got a 247 humanoid robot in your house or apartment for 100 bucks a month. That's insane.

Right? So our work, and as you know, we use rights law and what we have have found that is that in the industry.

Define rights law for folks.

Oh, okay, sure. Well, it's a relative of Moore's Law. Moore's Law is a function of time and it worked very well in the semiconductor industry for years. Now that semiconductors have hit up against the laws of physics, it's not working so well. What is working well is Wright's Law. Even in the semiconductor industry, Wright's Law is not a function of time, it's a function of units. And it says for every cumulative doubling in the number of units produced in this new technology, costs decline by a consistent percentage rate. And what we're finding is that in the industrial robot space, that is the steepest cost decline. It's 50% for every cumulative doubling. Now, what's fascinating about industrial robots, again, you'll see this in Big Ideas, is that I think in all of the world today, there are only 700 or 800,000 industrial robots. So we're at a very low base from which we're starting this cumulative doubling. So 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8 and so forth. Very low base. And the reason there are only 700 or 800,000 is they're locked up in cages because they're so dangerous. Now, of course, with sensor technology, that is changing. That's a huge gating factor here. And that's why we do expect to see billions over time. So based on our industrial robot cost decline work, I think Elon is close to the mark.

Yeah. And I think again, the implications of this, where everybody, this is your homemaker in one sense, your cook, your elderly care, your baby care. I mean, I don't think we will see that. But if you've got AGI, and of course the robot revolution is riding on top of the wave of, of AI, 100%, and then you've got incredible capability coming. And the question becomes, you're either going to see this as a dystopian future or you're going to see it as a utopian opportunity. I don't Know if you know the gentleman Sadhguru who is a. I don't know him personally. So Sadhguru, I was on stage with him and he said something and he said, listen, exponential technology is the means by which humanity takes a vacation from survival. And that just really struck me. It was a beautiful, beautiful statement. Right. So we spend all of our time struggling and surviving and technology is the means by which we can relax. Now the question is, what do we do with our time? You know, can we find newer, higher purposes? Can we up level humanity in a way that we use those robots and that intellectual capacity to do even more extraordinary things?

Yeah, I think people were asking the same thing in the early 1900s. Right. Late 1800s, early 1900s, around farming and the reason for being and couldn't imagine how their lives were, were going to change. And that was the last time we've seen multiple innovation platforms evolve at the same time. Telephone, electricity, internal combustion engine, completely. And you know, many people thought jobs were going to disappear. Tractors. Right. They were just. There weren't going to be any jobs. Well, they forgot about human ingenuity and how creative we are and how resourceful we are. And I think, think we have no idea the kinds of jobs that are going to be created in the next 10 years. We have, we have no idea. In the early 1990s with the early days of the Internet, we couldn't even imagine Uber or Airbnb. We just couldn't imagine it. It was impossible. Right, So I agree with you.

Let's go to a subject that, that you've been speaking passionately about and I fully endorse your passion and love the research which is on Tesla's Robo taxis. We have an announcement coming up shortly, but a lot of news there. Talk to us about what's coming, what the implications are, because it's huge.

It is huge. And there are so many doubters. I think the most important, one of the most important pieces of work, not sure if I shared it with you, although it is in Big Ideas is the safety work.

I saw the graphs in Big Ideas. And again, by the way, where do people go to download the Big Ideas document?

It's ark-invest.com and in there you will see a chart showing the the safety of a cruise automation car, a Waymo car, the average car in the us A Tesla car before FSD and a Tesla car after fsd. I'll just give two of those. The average car on the road in the US has an accident every 200,000 miles. The average car with old FSD think six months ago has an accident every 3.2 million miles, 200 to 3. You know, Volvo built its brand safety. I think, I think Tesla, I think we're trying to tell this story a bit that Tesla should be using this. So we believe that with unboxed manufacturing, with this August 8th announcement, Elon has been sending messages to his employee base, his supplier base, to the extent he has not verticalized and to ultimate consumers that we're getting very close to the days of a robo tax driving us from point A to point B safely, quickly and cheaply, inexpensively. So as you know, we've put out our model and last year we assumed that our price target, that two thirds of it would be due to Robotaxis. Our confidence that Robotaxi is going to launch within the next 18 months, maybe two years is very high. So much so that you'll also see in the Tesla report that we put out that you can find at the same site that we would be shocked if it isn't within two years. There's, you know, the probability of later we think has diminished significantly given the breakthroughs in AI, how quickly Tesla is harnessing them, how much data it is continuing to collect. And you know, Tesla said, or Elon said in his shareholder during the shareholders meeting recently that the disengagements are happening so rarely now with, with full self driving that he's worried about boredom. You know of the humans who are overseeing this, they're not finding disengagement so they are getting very close. Unbox manufacturing means they will be manufacturing both human driven cars and robo taxis in the same facility. No more assembly line completely, you know, new first principles, thinking and they'll toggle between them based on demand. So we are getting close and we also think we'll learn more about Master Plan 4 on October 8th. Might be wrong on that but you know, because he didn't put out Master Plan 3 more than maybe a year or a year and a half ago. So. But that's how quickly the world changes, I think.

I mean Tesla for me is the, is the unsung hero of the decade ahead. And so your position there is fully validated in my brain and it comes from the work they're doing obviously in their vehicles and their lower priced vehicles and really, I mean they're going to decimate internal combustion engine cars. It's just going to be cheaper, faster, better, higher performance vehicles, period.

And yeah, sorry, it's been again, I watched the traditional auto manufacturers, they've Rallied in here. Why? Because they're pulling back on electric, they're pulling back on autonomous and the, and they're raising dividends and increasing share repurchases. That's just more nails in the coffee.

They're manipulate, it's manipulation in the wrong direction. But that's coming on top of that, of course, is Tesla is an energy company. Tesla, Tesla is an AI company. Tesla is a humanoid robot company. Tesla is a replacement for Uber. And all of these things, any one of them can double, triple, get close to 10xing the valuation of the company. The question you have to ask yourself is, will Elon fall this time? Will he not be able to perform? And I think the recent pay package he received, or at least received validation of, is all the motivation he needed to push through. And he will be. We talked about this last time and it's now even more evident he will become the first trillionaire hands down, period. And I don't think that's very far away.

Yeah, we would not be surprised. Tesla alone and in our model, we don't include much for Optimus. We just assume that Optimus becomes, you know, a huge productivity booster within the Tesla organization. We're not assuming any outside sales at all. So, you know, that's a call option. Energy storage is, is much more of a call option for us. Elon thinks it can be as big or bigger than autonomous. We would find that hard to believe because we think the autonomous opportunity, 8 to 10 trillion dollars, this is for the entire ecosystem, not just Tesla in revenue generation. This is including China. And of course Tesla is now going to be participating in this space in China.

That was a coup.

Yeah, it is. Some people say, you know, we're debating this ourselves, you know, is, did China invite them in because China wants to reverse engineer what they're doing because Baidu and Apollo are not, are not up to snuff yet, or are they letting Tesla partner with Baidu for, you know, for mapping reasons? You know, there's, there's a big divide there. I tend to, I tend to think China wants to be first on robo taxis, meaning more ubiquitous robo taxis. And they want to learn more from Tesla just like they did.

You know, speaking of this, let's not forget China is developing their own humanoid robots as well. We've seen unitry there, which was announced at $16,000 price tag. The, the tariff doubled it to 32,000 and then Elon came out of 10,000. I found that within a month of it. A month of the announcements. Fascinating. But it's moving fast. And again, we have to realize all of this is riding on top of the AI wave. Right. Another field riding on top of AI is the whole biotech world that you and I love so much. How are you feeling about that?

Well, it's been crucified in the market. I, you know, this is a classic. Health care analysts don't like technology. It moves too quickly, you know, break things. You know, in a regulatory industry environment, you can get in trouble. And tech, tech analysts don't like health care because there's too much regulation, too many reimbursement obstacles. And so we have this. What is brewing in the multiomics field is probably more transformative than in any other field. Sure. Transportation, we just talked about it. That's pretty transformative. But, but we've kind of gotten the, we've kind of got the hang of what this is going to be because of Uber and Lyft longer run. We know we got that conception. But the idea of being able to diagnose cancer before stage one thanks to the convergence of sequencing technologies and artificial intelligence, and then we'll be able to cure disease because of CRISPR gene editing. I don't think the market believes it's biblical. It is. But what's so interesting to me about this is CRISPR Therapeutics has two of its therapies. One for beta thalassemia, one for sickle cell disease. They have been approved not only by the US but also by the UK and Europe. And back then, I'll never forget, I had the privilege of interviewing Jennifer Doudna before she won the Nobel prize for CRISPR Cas 9. And I remember back then she was saying, look, I don't want to talk about efficacy at all. All I care about is safety. That is the thing we have to prove here. So here we are, not even, well, maybe roughly four years later, not only have we proven it out on safety, but efficacy. Beta thalassemia cure.

Yes. Single injection.

Single one. One. And this man, the first trial participant now in the trial for almost four years, used to go to the hospital 17 times per year for, on an emergency basis for blood transfusions. Now here we are, it's been approved. It's a low single digit billion dollar company. This is a very big idea. And yet the market has no time. No time. And what they're looking at, it's so interesting because I think one of the Collison brothers just came out with a new gene editing technique on bacteria. And so this week that was the scare story. Well, that's going to take a decade. Meanwhile, we can cure one disease after another after another with existing technologies.

You know, the marketplace has done a. Well, it's interesting that the entire pharmaceutical biotech industry has gotten beat up because of not having revenues, even though the market potential is massive. I've seen this in my own companies and it's awful. It's better to be a private company than, and grow than being a public company because you're being beat up and trading below cash levels. It's crazy. But what I think the market hasn't realized and what I'm, you know, a lot of my work is right now, Kathy, is on longevity. It's the big, you know, there are two big markets on the planet, AI and longevity. You know, what would, what would someone pay to add 20 or 30 healthy years, real vital healthy years on the end of their life? I think it would be the majority of their net worth. I think that they would pay 80% of what they had in the bank account if they had really the ability to add decades of health on their life. If you think about it that way, it's a huge marketplace.

Not only that, there's going to be a massive shift in where investors allocate health care dollars. If we are curing disease right then, then we're done. You know, I mean that's an exaggeration. It's going to take years and years. But what are these big pharma companies? They're huge distribution, SGA engine sales, general and administrative. And the salesperson has to go in year after year to make sure that his or her company's drugs are, you know, top of mind. Well, guess what, you're not going to need them, right?

No. There's a big disruption coming on the top of the food on the pharma industry. You know, I was having, I had dinner with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind. Right sir Demis, I should say. And we talked about AlphaFold 3. So AlphaFold 1, as you remember, was the AI Engine A able to predict the exact folding of a protein based on its amino acid sequence. A super competing problem for 50 years. AlphaFold3 gets released a few months ago and it can now predict the interaction of all molecules. Like here's a carbohydrate, a protein, whatever and sugar molecule and how they interact together. Where they're going next is amazing. They want to be able to create an AI model of, of an entire cell and then an AI model of a tissue and an organ and an AI model of you to Know that this drug works just perfectly for you. And the secret of why do some people make it to 120 and some people die at 70? It's not random chance. It's in the biology of the human. And we're able to understand that.

We have the information. And year by year, each of us will find more mutations. And the sooner we find them now that we can and we couldn't before, the sooner we'll be able to correct them, edit those programming errors out. So, yeah, it's going to transform healthcare. It's been fascinating to watch. I just told you what we think is going to happen to the large pharma complex. They have the cash. This market is treating companies with big cash.

And the GLP1, I mean, it's crazy what's happened with the GLP1 drugs making the most valuable companies in the planet.

Right. Well, and that was, you know, that was discovered brute force the old way. Right. And more power to them it is. But what if we cure diabetes? CRISPR Therapeutics has diabetes both type 1 and type 2 on its roadmap. And if Sam Kulkarni at CRISPR thinks that it's possible, I believe it. And, you know, these are the new platform companies, in a sense. You know, this reminds me of Genentech. I remember the wrestling around Genentech in the early days and Genentech launched the biotech age. The market's not even really looking at this. And it is astonishing. And I know one of the showstoppers right now is, oh my gosh, this cure one and done is $2 million. Well, you have to do the cost benefit analysis of not going to the emergency room 17 times per year on an emergency basis. And we do have to look at value based pricing. Okay, maybe it's 100,000 or whatever up front. And then for every year that this disease does not recur, the insurance companies should be willing to pay.

We need new business models. Absolutely, absolutely. But what you said is really important just now. These are cures versus versus amelioration of the, of the problem. Right. So the pharma. The pharma is industry has survived by not curing diseases, but by treating the symptoms of the disease. And so once you get the disease, like aids, for example, we're not curing AIDS right now. We do have the ability with CRISPR to cure someone who has an HIV infection. We can go in there and disrupt it and it's coming. But we're going to give you drugs for the rest of your life. And it's Your customer for the next 50 years. Congratulations and welcome aboard.

Yeah, well you know it's interesting in, in the hep C world this is where we got the sticker shock. First it was Gilead Solvaldi was the drug and everyone was up in arms, right? No, we're not paying that well. The system is now, it's one of the biggest drugs out there. The system is paying because it is saving so much, you know, in the long run. Yeah. So I think, I think that's, you know, as you say, many people do not. Most people don't like change. And especially in the healthcare space, investors, they just know phase one, phase two, phase three, that's what they know. Cures they don't know. It just doesn't register almost, you see.

Let me, let me make this, let me make this commercial for you rather than you doing it. This is where you differentiate from the majority of the investor thought leaders out there, Kathy, in a beautiful way. You're not going after the Mag six, right? You're going because they're the dominant players today. That's great. But there's 1,000 extraordinary young companies that are innovative, hungry and iterating at a much faster rate. And that's true both on the AI tech side as well as the biopharma side. And your ability through your research team to find those companies, identify them early because they are going to disrupt the, you know my analogy here is the dinosaurs of 65 million years ago, right? So these dinosaurs are fat and lumbering and moving along and this asteroid comes and strikes the earth and it changes the environment so rapidly that the dinosaurs are unable to adapt. And it's the furry mammals that are agile, they're able to adapt to this rapidly changing environment that are the ones that survive and thrive. And the asteroid striking the earth today is AI and these exponential technologies that are changing the game faster than you know, you can snap the head of a, of a CEO of a large old style company.

It's a great analogy. And so we do look at companies like Nvidia, we get information where are they choosing to invest themselves in their venture fund. And so Recursion Therapeutics, perfect example. But you know, and, and, and is enabling drug discovery, you know, at warped speed compared to other, compared to traditional methods. And again the, the involving AI variation importantly one thing I will say, and this I just found out this week, very hopeful that Roche, Roche, some people call it Genentech there is using it because we've been puzzled why aren't these companies racing after these new ways of doing things. It has to do with talent and the kind of talent they have. And their there will have to be a changing of the guard just like there was from pure chemistry to molecular biology. Right now you have to bring technology into it. And the way we started this was healthcare and technology. In the investment world, it seems as though the types of investors clash or the analysts clash. They operate at different cadences and they have different risk tolerances. And that's what I think we're dealing with your companies, with our companies. But truth will win out.

Yes. And exponential tech and innovation will disrupt it all. And it's not just to close us out here. It's not something if you're wherever you are in your life cycle as an entrepreneur, as a parent, this is not something that's 10 years out or 20 years out. It's the next two or three years. This is the most exciting time ever to be alive. Kathy, Congratulations on a 10 year run for Ark Invest. The next 10 years are going to be awesome.

They're going to be wild. Peter and thank you for all you do to enlighten people. It's so important. Get on the right side of change. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And I enjoy our friendship and looking forward to seeing you next March. But more so to see where you're making your bets. And tell us real quick, where do folks go to find out about some of your funds?

Yes. So the site I gave you before, arc-invest.com is our research site. Our fund site is ark-funds.com and that includes both our our ETFs and our venture fund.

Fantastic, Kathy, have a beautiful day.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.