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Cathie Wood's 2026 Vision- 7% GDP Growth, Rising AI Demand, US vs. China, Robotaxis, and Bitcoin W/ Salim Ismail, AWG & Dave Blundin | EP

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

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  • Convergence Will Boost Global GDP
    • AI plus four other platforms are converging to create an unprecedented productivity wave across the global economy.
    • Cathie Wood expects 7%+ real GDP growth and calls that conservative given the scale and convergence of robotics, energy storage, blockchain, and multi-omics. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Projected shifts in GDP now through 2030. And the numbers are pretty extraordinary. Your forecast of 7% global GDP growth, it’s sort of a singularity event, doubling IMFs. We just had a conversation with Elon, a friend of the pod, talking about going 5x on GDP growth in the next two years and triple digit growth inside of the next decade. I mean, insane numbers. How do you think about it, Kathy? Cathie Wood Yeah, so, and you do a beautiful job with the graphics here. You can see that every technology revolution has been accompanied by a step function increase in GDP growth. So if you look at the years from 1500 to 1900, not much new technology. Toward the end of it, we were into railroads. And that, according to Brett Winton, and he worked with academic research on this number, real GDP growth was roughly 0.6% globally. And then, as we went through railroads, telephone, electricity, internal combustion engine, that was a technology revolution. And we stepped up fivefold to 3% for the next 125 years. And so here we are, as we are saying, these five platforms, robotics, energy storage, AI, AI, the biggest catalyst, blockchain technology, multi-omic sequencing, and the convergence Among them. We’re saying two and a half fold increase. I actually do believe that’s conservative. We started putting this number out a couple of years ago, and most people rolled their eyes. You know, they’re crazy once again. But now to have Elon, and yes, I saw on your show how much he is focused on this idea that real GDP growth globally is going to accelerate to astonishing rates. Explode, I think was more like accelerating. Explode, explode. And, you know, I don’t think people understand this. I think the 7% plus is conservative. (Time 0:07:10)
  • Research By Platform, Not By Sector
    • Research across technology platforms, not industry silos, to spot convergent disruptions early.
    • Build cross‑disciplinary analyst teams so innovations that blur sector lines are visible ahead of mainstream investors. Transcript: Cathie Wood They’ve siloed those sectors and industries when technology is permeating every one of them and blurring the lines. So you almost have to set up research the way we have set it up and on purposefully, and that is by these 15 technologies. And each of our analysts is researching how to understand when and how these technologies are going to scale across sectors. (Time 0:12:28)
  • Deflation From Tech Can Be Growthary
    • Falling unit costs cause massive demand expansion that can drive net GDP higher despite deflationary price effects.
    • Cathie says productivity-driven deflation is good and can lower measured inflation while increasing real output and incomes. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Inference cost is collapsing at an extraordinary rate. And the implications of this are massive. And I don’t think people realize it. Salim, do you want to jump in on this one or do you want to let Dave come in? Salim Ismail I have a question that goes back, connects this and the rockets and the GDP question. And the question is the following. When you have technology being as deflationary as we see, and we can see it in this graph very clearly, that token costs are collapsing. The cost of rocket launches, it was $600 million for a NASA space shuttle launch, $60 million for a SpaceX launch, and they’ll get it down to another 10x. That’s a drop in GDP. So how do we project such a huge increase in GDP when technology is dropping the cost of everything so radically? Peter H. Diamandis That’s my big concern in terms of how we get to those numbers. Kevin’s paradox playing in here. Cathie Wood Yeah, so the other side of costs coming down is, of course, explosive unit growth. So that 7% plus GDP number is a real number. Salim Ismail So Javon to the rescue, basically. Cathie Wood Exactly. And, you know, many people, especially in our industry, just laugh at me, us, when we say we think prices are going to start falling. This is another one of those, well, it’s been stuck in the 2% to 3% range. We’re not getting out of there. If you look at truflation, which is, it measures 10,000 items in real time, inflation is already down to 1.2%. And yet the Fed is fighting this notion that we’re up in the 2.5% to 3% range, and they’re going to get it down to 2% by golly. And, you know, that’s how they potentially could overdo it. But I think I think that within the next year, we’ll see inflation below 2 percent and heading negative. (Time 0:19:17)
  • Cheap Inference Won’t Kill AI Economics
    • Inference costs are collapsing but demand for intelligence is effectively unlimited, keeping infrastructure economics viable.
    • Multiple monetization paths (ads, commerce, robots) are emerging to capture value as usage scales. Transcript: Cathie Wood Well, it’s been very interesting to watch OpenAI recently. And it is now starting to monetize. It’s planning for advertising, for commerce, for robots. But in terms of the monetization, and we just learned they’re going to start charging $60 per thousand. Alex Wissner-Gross Per thousand views, I think, or engagements. Yeah, something like that. Cathie Wood The equivalent at Facebook right now is $20. This is Super Bowl kinds of pricing. And they’ll probably get away with it in the beginning because they’ll control the supply. But our analysts on the consumer side are saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. Gemini is not going to do this. They’re not going to do this. They’re going to hang out and take share from OpenAI. They don’t have to. They have Google to support and Google’s massive cash flows to support their spending. So that is something that’s evolving here. And I think our consumer analysts are saying, huh, that’s not good news for open AI. Now, it is true they have 900 million users. They have a huge head start in that way. But the fact that our consumer-oriented analysts, the Internet analysts, are saying that is interesting. So I think they know they have to start driving revenue much faster in order to scale the infrastructure the way they must. (Time 0:27:08)
  • Think Five Years Out For Alpha
    • Use forward-looking five‑year research lenses to find disruptive innovation outperformers.
    • ARK targets long-term compounding and expects disruptive innovation to drive ~35% annualized returns over five years. Transcript: Cathie Wood First of all, in terms of indexation, that is a live wire for me because that is what has happened to the financial markets. Unfortunately, they have, and Elon Musk feels very strongly about this. We had an X-Spaces session with him and spent more time than I ever dreamed we would on this topic. But the S&P, the NASDAQ, the companies at the top of those lists are there because of past success. If we are right and we’re moving into the most disruptive time from an innovation point of view in history, then the traditional world order is going to be disturbed. Now, the S&P 500, if you look at the Ibbotson-Sinkfield studies, the S&P 500 has returned, nominal returns have been in the high single digit range over time. We think that that’s going to change, but it’ll take a while for the S&P to catch up because they need to see the revenue growth. They need to see profitability. And so they are lagged in terms of getting these new stocks in there. If you look at our big ideas, we go into a section where we say disruptive innovation, we believe, is going to compound in terms of returns in the market at a 35% annualized rate for the Next five years. (Time 0:39:17)
  • Monitor Open‑Source Projects Aggressively
    • Track open-source projects and community forks closely as they can produce rapid, decentralized innovation.
    • Treat open-source AI releases as strategic inputs rather than threats, since they diffuse improvements globally. Transcript: Cathie Wood And in the early 60s, I think they did in the 50s, in the early 60s, there it was in his paintings. And, you know, so I find this fascinating, you know, I find this fascinating, the lobster element of it. Alex Wissner-Gross Anyway, so- Embodying economic growth. Cathie Wood Yeah. Peter H. Diamandis All right. I’ve just texted you that, Kathy. So enjoy the book. Thank you. Cathie Wood So the Claudebot or Maltbot is open source. And I think that started in the U.S., so maybe that’s where this is going. And I was just on a call, it’s called the Bitcoin brainstorm with Alex Gladstein, who who’s now become infatuated with AI as well as Bitcoin and how they can work together. But he was all over CloudBot. And it’s just, I mean, it’s just taking the world by fire. And so this is the individual agency at work here, not the big companies at work. So it’s going to be fascinating to see where this goes. Anyway, so I’m glad we’re hopping back into the open source movement. (Time 0:48:39)
  • Open Source Shifted The AI Race
    • Open-source AI in China accelerated development after Western firms withdrew software, making China a major contributor to open research.
    • Cathie sees open source competition as healthy and warns it has shifted some leadership dynamics in AI. Transcript: Cathie Wood Anyway, so I’m glad we’re hopping back into the open source movement. If you look at, and we have this in Big Ideas as well, if you look at investment as a share of GDP, and now this includes property, and it’s both in China and the U.S. In the U.S., our share of GDP is a little north of 20%. In China, it’s 40%, and it’s been there since they moved into the World Trade Organization. So their quote-unquote investment,, it includes property. But we know that property is deflating big time there. So their investment is staying up at that 40 percent range because Xi Jinping has moved away from solely common prosperity, as the slogan, towards new productive forces. That’s all about technology. So they are pouring money, pouring money into this. And we should be on guard. And I think it’s great that we know about their open source movement, because there’s nothing like competition to get the U.S. Going. So I actually think the competition is very good. (Time 0:49:50)
  • Oct 10 Flash Crash Cleared Leverage
    • Cathie recounts the Oct 10 flash crash at Binance that liquidated $28 billion of leveraged positions.
    • She notes that event cleared out excess leverage and that Bitcoin could be poised for another big run, supported by gold’s recent strength. Transcript: Cathie Wood What has happened in the last few months is 10.10. So October 10th was the flash crash caused by a software glitch at Binance. And it got a lot of highly leveraged, either speculators or investors, way offsides. There was an automatic deleveraging that took place. $28 billion worth of being offsides. And we’re hearing that that has pretty much cleared out. So we have very high hopes for Bitcoin. And talking to the team, we had a number of people on the Bitcoin brainstorm yesterday. You know, our thinking is, okay, stable coins are, they’re serving a humanitarian purpose, this insurance policy, back by the dollar. But, and consider this is the Bitcoin crowd. They believe, and I do too, that Bitcoin, that its cause is freedom, financial freedom from all government oversight and so forth. And from censorship and seizure and all sorts of things. As emerging markets, wealth grows. And we think this is a global phenomenon with all these technologies. They will move towards, from a savings point of view, right now they’re hand to mouth for the most part. (Time 1:00:22)
  • Bitcoin Use In Iran’s Bazaars
    • Dave recounts that many marketplace transactions in Iran already use Bitcoin as everyday payment at bazaars.
    • He suggests Iran and similar cases act as bellwethers for crypto adoption in unstable economies. Transcript: Dave Blundin The country is teetering on the brink. And I noticed in the blockchain ledger reports, you know, this was a couple of years ago, a hugely disproportionate fraction of transactions come from Iran. So this would be a good bellwether because, you know, that kind of disruption, you know, Venezuela and all around the world, you look at just massive fraction of the population of the World lives in unstable places. (Time 1:05:22)
  • Proprietary Data Enables Platform Convergence
    • Convergence of proprietary data across Elon Musk’s companies could yield a uniquely dominant AI platform.
    • Cathie suggests Tesla (plus other Musk assets) is the likeliest candidate to scale into a massive converged company. Transcript: Cathie Wood Yeah, it’s interesting. And I’m not sure if he said it on your podcast. I’m not quite sure where I heard this. But he talked about, he said, you know, I can see convergences among my companies that I didn’t expect. And we’ve been saying that for some time because, you know, in the world of AI, what do you have to have to win? You have to have proprietary data. And think about all the proprietary data he has, different kinds of proprietary data. Tesla, the language of the roads. Neuralink, he’s got multi-omics data now to source. Space, nobody else has that data. X, nobody else has that data either. So, and boring, no one has that data. So I could see, yes, $100 trillion. I think it’s going to happen because of convergence. Peter H. Diamandis So you could see $100 trillion company come online by 2030? Cathie Wood I think there could be. (Time 1:12:19)
  • AI Will Reward Original Active Research
    • Markets are unusually inefficient now; AI and prediction markets can revive genuinely active, forward‑looking investing.
    • Cathie believes benchmark-driven passive strategies obscure true disruptive winners and original research will regain premium value. Transcript: Cathie Wood So that’s a great question. Part to algorithms. But if you think about AI, AI should obliterate the benchmark-sensitive portfolios. And I think the market’s never been more inefficient than it is today. And the reason for that is after the tech and telecom bust in the early 2000s, and even more so after 08-09, the financial crash, the risk aversion in the markets reached an extreme. Administration and all of the, and it had a first administration too. There was, you know, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst, and a lot of volatility. So it pushed investors even more towards their benchmarks. I think anyone with that strategy has made a huge strategic blunder. And what I’m excited about is prediction markets. Prediction markets are going to bring about the return of truly active investment. You know, people who call themselves active investors, and at the heart of the active investment is an index, where the portfolio manager looks at the index and says, oh, I’ll take a Little more of this and I’ll take a little less of that based on my always short-term time horizon. It’s gotten increasingly short because of all I just said. So they just take a little bit more of this stock, this mag six stock, and a little less of that mag six stock. And they all look alike. They all look alike. We look like a different duck altogether. I mean, we don’t look anything like them. And the reason is we’re doing original research is very forward-looking, next five years. And, you know, that’s derided by the traditional financial markets. I think the chat GPT moment started to change that. That was a very important moment, I think, for the investment world as well, because using it and they’re saying, OK, wait a minute, the ground is shifting underneath me, this AI thing, What does this mean? Investors have always been futuristic, you know, and so that’s why we’ve appealed to the retail investor more than to the institutional investor who is also playing it safe. So I think it’s good that I think you’re right to ask the question, but I think the first order effect is to destroy anyone that looks like a benchmark right now. There’s no value added there. And to start rewarding those who are doing the original research to try and figure out the way the world’s going to work. And pattern recognition will harness AI ourselves to, we already are, to try and figure that out. (Time 1:16:56)
  • Energy Infrastructure Underpins AI Growth
    • Nuclear, solar, and storage advances are critical to powering the AI-driven future and lowering energy costs.
    • Cathie argues renewed nuclear buildout could have large long-term effects on electricity costs via Wright’s Law. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Yeah. Cathie Wood If you go back to the last chart, one of the things I find fascinating, we focused a lot on nuclear in this big ideas. But look at the, yes, the efficiency of all major countries, but China is half as efficient, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, as those other countries. Now, what is it doing to offset that? It is building, they may have more now, 28 large nuclear reactors at one time. The U.S. Is not building one large. I know we’re re-engaging with some of the old ones. But I think our regulatory stance is changing there dramatically, and we will. So that’s one thing I took away from that. You know, I think what’s wonderful about innovation and what you do is helping people understand what they’re saying. Yes, we need to become more energy efficient, given, and we are becoming more energy efficient. Economic activity is energy transformed. You are helping people understand that. Others who just blindly say energy is bad are not thinking clearly about what they’re saying. They’re basically saying they want us to turn back to the dark ages. If we’re going to progress, we’re going to use more energy. Is the U.S. And Japan in particular in the 70s started regulating nuclear and killed the industry. The construction costs, which had been coming down in tandem with Wright’s Law, it’s a technology, they turned up. And basically, if we had continued along Wright’s Law with nuclear to today, electricity costs in the United States would be 40% lower. And so I think that our renewed enthusiasm for nuclear is important, will get us back on that rights law track. (Time 1:21:45)
  • Prioritize Teams That Can Pivot
    • Start with great teams and seek founders who can pivot across converging technologies.
    • Prefer companies that can reconfigure capabilities as industries converge, since pivots unlock exponential opportunities. Transcript: Cathie Wood Sure. Before I do that, so Dave just said something very important, I think, which is great teams. You have to start there. And what’s happening and the reason we’re seeing these pivots being very successful is convergences between and among the technologies to create entirely new industries. And so there are many, many more opportunities to pivot. So the risk of, you know, passing on a deal because you say, well, wait a minute, regulation is going to be a showstopper here. Maybe, maybe not, you know, if there’s a pivot in the way that boom pivoted, which is right into regulatory arms, you know, the regulators want this world to happen. So I think that that’s important. Peter H. Diamandis Cumulative investment in global power needs to increase to 10 trillion by 2030. So it’s just making the case that we’re going to be massive investments into power. Cathie Wood Yes, yes, yes. No question about it. No question about it. There are going to be trillions of dollars invested into AI everything, and this is all related to AI. (Time 1:29:45)
  • Robo‑Taxis Compress Vehicle Demand
    • Robo‑taxis will dramatically increase capacity utilization so far fewer vehicles can meet transport demand.
    • ARK expects Tesla to lead on cost and scale, forecasting prices as low as $0.20 per mile at scale. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Waymo’s on the rise and Lyft and Uber’s on the decline. And we’re going to be seeing here, you know, robo-taxi miles and cumulative miles just spike. And, you know, when I’m on the road here in Santa Monica, as I’m driving back and forth to the airport or my kids, the school, whatever, we’ll do a count of how many Waymos we see. And on an average day right now, it’s probably about 10 or 12 Waymos on the streets here. And I’m imagining in about four or five years, it’s going to be 80% autonomous vehicles. Cathie Wood What do you think? We think so. We agree. We agree. And in this book as well, you’ll see that we expect Tesla to be the biggest winner from a platform point of view. Waymo will be second. And the reason is Waymo’s cost structure, it’s dependent, unlike Tesla, which is vertically integrated. That’s Elon’s preference and modus operandi. Waymo is not. And in fact, for a time there, they had trouble attracting an auto supplier. So now they’re with Zeker and Hyundai and a few others. They have fewer than 3,000 cars throughout the United States. So for you to see 10 in one run says they’re probably concentrated close to where you are already. So that’s interesting. But we think that Tesla’s solution from a cost point of view will be 50% lower than Waymo’s, and therefore it will be able to charge less. Now, between now and then, there’s huge amount of room for both of them to compete against Uber and Lyft because, you know, with surge pricing, Uber’s average price over the last four Years has gone up 40% with surge pricing and so forth. So from $2 to $2.80. Per mile. Right. So that’s a beautiful umbrella because we think we do agree and our research corroborates what is saying, which is that Tesla will be able to price at 20 cents per mile when at scale. (Time 1:35:51)
  • Autonomous Delivery Scales And Saves Lives
    • Autonomous delivery (air and ground) is already saving lives and scaling commercially in many countries.
    • Cathie highlights Zipline’s maternal health impact and growing urban delivery fleets as proof points. Transcript: Peter H. Diamandis Yeah. Yeah, I love it. Cathie Wood Story is he started in Rwanda sending medical supplies. And I think he cut the mortality rate of the maternal bleed outs from pregnancy by a huge amount. More than 50%. Yes. Peter H. Diamandis Wow. Yes. So we’re seeing autonomous delivery in the air from Zipline and Wing. Matternet, which was a spin out from Singularity University, shout out to them. On the ground, we got Starlink and Meituan and Cocoa Robots. Again, there are dozens, probably 50 Cocoa Robots I see in the streets of Santa Monica here. And then, of course, we’re seeing the beginning of trucking. It’s interesting, the ground is crowded, the airways are open, but it will eventually get crowded. I mean, if we start seeing delivery rates that could be from Zipline and Wing, you know, I’m curious if people are going to start complaining about noise. It’s high in the sky and it lowers the delivery on a cable. Yeah, Dave or Alex, you want to jump in on this one? Dave Blundin Well, the airways are three dimensional. They won’t get physically crowded, but you’re right. The noise is going to be a major, major issue. Alex Wissner-Gross If someone invents a silent drone, that’ll be a total game or at least quieter. (Time 1:49:39)
  • Delegation Turns Unpaid Work Into GDP
    • As humans delegate services to agents, many transactions become monetized and will show up as GDP even if previously unpaid labor declines.
    • Cathie argues robot purchases and agent commerce convert unpaid activities into measurable economic activity. Transcript: Cathie Wood Think blockchain technology is going to transform everything in financial services. But that’s more the infrastructure and bringing more efficiencies into. I think capital is, should I say, immortal? That’s quite absolute. And can I think of a reason it wouldn’t be? Alex Wissner-Gross Well, blockchain, for example, with blockchain, fundamentally blockchains, and yes, to everyone in the audience who’s about to lecture me on the increasing difficulty of Bitcoin, I know how that works preemptively. With blockchain’s proof of work, in particular, blockchain proof of work is fundamentally based on the difficulty of inverting a hash function. So in some sense, it’s a bet against automation getting smart enough to be able to efficiently invert hash functions. It’s sort of an anti-technology bet in some sense. So I would say, yeah, even with blockchain, blockchain is just as immortal in some sense as the ability for AI to not solve math is, which is, I think, a pretty bold bet if one’s going to Make one. Salim Ismail We’ve been using money as a main mode of discourse in the world for the last several hundred years, talking about capitalism, profits, business. It’s the main conversation. I think we’re shifting from money to information, right? Any startup is much more interested in collecting data and wants to monetize it later. We’re seeing that over and over again. Over time, information becomes the higher order bit. And I think over time, intelligence becomes the higher order bit. Over time, if we can quantize the measurement of that, then that’ll become the higher order bit. Peter H. Diamandis And we’re going from money to data, I think, to directed intelligence or purpose as the highest order bit. Cathie Wood But it has to be measured in some way and monetized, right? (Time 1:51:58)