Cathie Wood x Peter Diamandis: AI and Bitcoin Are Moving Faster Than We Expected
Guest: Cathie Wood, Founder & CEO of ARK Invest Host: Peter Diamandis Co-hosts: Dave (Link Ventures), Alex / Salim Ismail Show: Moonshots / WTF Just Happened in Tech EP #226 Duration: 01:57:54 Source: YouTube Analysis: Deep Analysis & Editorial Commentary
Table of Contents
- Opening & 2026 Big Ideas Report Introduction
- The Great GDP Acceleration: 7% Growth Forecast
- Space Data Centers & Technological Convergence
- AI Infrastructure, Deflation & the Agent Era
- GDP Is Broken: Measuring Real Wealth Growth
- US vs China & Open Source AI
- Bitcoin & the Future of Digital Assets
- Trillion-Dollar Companies & the Future of Active Investing
- The Energy Revolution & Nuclear Renaissance
- Autonomous Vehicles: Tesla vs Waymo
- Europe’s Dilemma & Opportunity
- Can Automation Substitute for Capital?
1. Opening & 2026 Big Ideas Report Introduction
Peter: Welcome to Moonshots. A special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech here with Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARK Invest. To talk about the ARK Invest 2026 Big Ideas Report here with my moonshot mates, DB2AWG and Mr. Exo. That’s what I’m going to call you, Salim. Cathie, good morning to you, my friend.
Cathie: Good morning, Peter. I’m so honored to be a part of WTF.
Peter: God almighty, you put out an amazing 2026 Big Ideas report. We’re going to drop the link in the show notes here for people to get their own copy. We’ve selected about 20 slides or so out of, I don’t know, 80, 100 of them that you have. Can you imagine how fast things are going? Is it still shocking to you?
Cathie: We have been expecting the world to change at a faster than expected pace, but AI is moving faster than we expected, which is really saying something because we were pushing the envelope on that one.
Dave: Everyone, you may remember Mary Meeker used to do this deck when the Internet was exploding and it became the guidepost for everybody in terms of anticipating what was coming next. And boy, that was just epic. This deck has actually taken over that role in this much more accelerated timeframe. Everyone listening to the pod — go to the link and find the full deck because we’re only going to have time to go through about 18 slides. There’s so much more in there.
Cathie: Thank you so much. Mary Meeker was our inspiration. Her reports were very Internet-centric and focused on what had happened — the data. We wanted to go a step further and make at least five-year projections. That’s our investment time horizon. It forced us into Wright’s Law even more aggressively.
Dave: To try and look five years in the future now and make predictions — it’s so valuable for the audience and very, very few people are willing to do it. You take a lot of darts when you do that, and Peter knows this too. Ray Kurzweil knows it more than anybody. But it’s so valuable.
Cathie: First and foremost, I’m standing on the shoulders of an incredible research team. Brett Winton, who is our chief futurist, then directors and analysts. It’s very interesting how AI is changing our research and how much more we can do now because of AI.
2. The Great GDP Acceleration: 7% Growth Forecast
Peter: Let’s talk about the great acceleration. Projected shifts in GDP now through 2030 — the numbers are pretty extraordinary. Your forecast of 7% global GDP growth, it’s sort of a singularity event, doubling the IMF’s forecast. We just had a conversation with Elon, talking about going 5x on GDP growth in the next two years and triple-digit growth inside of the next decade. Insane numbers. How do you think about it, Cathie?
Cathie: You can see that every technology revolution has been accompanied by a step function increase in GDP growth. From 1500 to 1900, not much new technology — real GDP growth was roughly 0.6% globally. 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 — these five platforms: robotics, energy storage, AI, 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. But now to have Elon focused on this idea that real GDP growth globally is going to accelerate to astonishing rates…
Peter: I think the 7% plus is conservative, but it’s nothing that anyone living today has seen before.
Dave: I’ll give you the counter argument, even though I don’t believe in it. Alex and I just got back from Davos and I’d say if you randomly surveyed bankers and politicians, 20% believe, 80% don’t believe. The 80% say, look, when the computer revolution took off, GDP settled at 3% annual growth. No matter what we do, we can’t get out of this rut. There’s nothing that ever changes it.
Cathie: What’s interesting is, anyone alive today hasn’t experienced anything different. They’ve set up their research by sector or industry or sub-industry. They’ve siloed those sectors when technology is permeating every one of them and blurring the lines. You almost have to set up research the way we have — by these 15 technologies. Our analysts are working together, collaborating to understand the massive convergences that are taking place today.
3. Space Data Centers & Technological Convergence
Peter: This slide talks about the convergences coming — reusable rockets and data centers in space. Dave and I had a conversation with Elon — no one was talking about data centers in space six months ago and suddenly everybody’s talking about them.
Cathie: We have an open-source SpaceX model out there in collaboration with Mach 33. We didn’t have anything like orbital data centers in our model when we put it out mid last year. Now we’re going back to the drawing board. Wright’s Law is centered on unit growth — for every cumulative doubling in the number of units produced with a new technology, costs decline at a consistent percentage rate.
Dave: When you make the actual GPU chips, there’s about 50% margin at TSMC and then 80% margin at Nvidia. There’s a massive amount of cost increase baked into that value chain. He’s quietly bypassing all that and starting to plan out his own fabs. In space, the solar panels are six times more efficient. I think all those cost reductions will happen concurrently over just a couple of years if Elon is right.
Cathie: What’s very interesting is that Moore’s Law is no longer working in the semiconductor industry. Wright’s Law is working. What can get in the way of unit growth is the question. I don’t think regulations are going to get in the way. I think we’re into a space race here.
Alex: Cathie, if you extrapolate out naively, we get to a Dyson swarm type scenario. At some point we need enough atoms to build our orbital data centers. What is your position on the Dyson swarm — do we get one?
Cathie: I’m probably not expert enough to answer that question, but we have taken the SpaceX model much further than five years and have incorporated getting Optimus and Tesla and Boring to Mars. We think that’s very doable.
Peter: Orbital debris is for me the biggest showstopper in the near term — if a satellite deconstructs in orbit leading to a hyper-exponential chain reaction. But let’s not go there.
4. AI Infrastructure, Deflation & the Agent Era
Salim: When technology is being as deflationary as we see — token costs collapsing, rocket launches from $600 million to $60 million with another 10x to go — 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?
Cathie: The other side of costs coming down is explosive unit growth. That 7%+ GDP number is a real number. Many people laugh at us when we say prices are going to start falling. If you look at Truflation, which 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. I think within the next year we’ll see inflation below 2% and heading negative.
Peter: Elon told the story about two economists walking through the woods who pay each other to eat shit. It adds $200 to the global economy but nothing productive is created. That dovetails with Salim’s Law — if AI cures breast cancer and millions of people don’t need radiation or chemotherapy, that looks like it reduces GDP. In reality, it adds huge net value to the world but shows up as negative GDP. The GDP metric is fundamentally broken in the age of AI.
Cathie: But there’s another side to this. If you look at robotics — we’re not paid to drive our children around, not paid to make dinner and clean up afterwards. We’re going to unlock a lot of that through robot purchases that will get into GDP — that never got into GDP before. It’s like what happened to the farm economy.
Peter: So you take traditional things that aren’t measured and move them into the measured economy, and that increases radically.
Cathie: We’ve done the analysis — to accommodate the 1% of urban miles traveled that Uber accounts for today, it would take only 140,000 cars. But the number of cars owned in the United States today is around 400 million. That tells you the capacity utilization increase of robo-taxis is going to destroy the auto market as we know it.
On AI monetization and agents:
Peter: What we saw on the chart is the commoditization of cognition. It’s the most important thing that drives human economy — our intelligence. And it’s now becoming commoditized at an extraordinary rate — 99% per year. Are the large language models going to be able to maintain the revenues they need to build AI infrastructure?
Cathie: It’s been interesting to watch OpenAI recently. It’s planning for advertising, for commerce, for robots. They’re going to start charging $60 per thousand — Super Bowl kinds of pricing. But Gemini is not going to do this. They don’t have to — they have Google’s massive cash flows. Our consumer analysts are saying that’s not good news for OpenAI.
Dave: AI agent performance on long-duration tasks with an 80% success rate — any employee with an 80% success rate would get fired. But if you launch 100 agents, your odds of going from 80% to 90% success are very high. The demand for intelligence is essentially infinite. Near-zero inference cost is a long way from zero, and people are going to want to spend whatever they can afford to get more of this.
Peter: Clawdbot AI — Maltbot now — has exploded in a weekend. This is your personal version of Jarvis. It connects to all your social media accounts, your email, anything on your laptop. Incredibly powerful for automating your life.
Alex: It’s no longer Claudebot — it’s now Maltbot due to trademark issues with Anthropic, and its mascot is of course a lobster. We have fully caught up with chapter one of Accelerando.
5. GDP Is Broken: Measuring Real Wealth Growth
Alex: Cathie, you raised a really interesting point that I’ve never heard anyone else articulate — that as humanity delegates more and more services to agents, that delegation looks like commerce from a GDP perspective. All the interactions between those subdivisions, many of which are going to be agents, are accretive to GDP. So you’re painting a story for the exact opposite — GDP statistics can explode in real terms.
If you could wave a magic wand and define your perfect definition of real wealth growth for humanity, how would you define it?
Cathie: Wealth growth is very much tied to productivity growth — technologically enabled productivity gains. We got just a taste from the ’80s and ’90s. There was a frustrating period in the ’80s where technology almost seemed to be hurting productivity. Then Microsoft came along — boom. Then the Internet boom. That was just foreshadowing what we’re going to experience here.
This is unlike what you would learn from Keynesian economics, which says growth is inflationary. Growth is not inflationary. Growth is disinflationary. And in this world we’re going into, it is deflationary — deflation in the good sense. When the price of something drops, the demand for it explodes.
Alex: GDP may not be the best macro indicator for progress. It sounds like you’re saying per capita productivity is the key indicator. But what is the right benchmark to hold yourself to?
Cathie: In terms of indexation — that is a live wire for me. The S&P, the Nasdaq — the companies at the top are there because of past success. If we’re right that we’re moving into the most disruptive time in history, the traditional world order is going to change. We think disruptive innovation is going to compound at a 35% annualized rate for the next five years. ARKK has seen about a 31 to 33% annualized return over the last two years.
For an economic measure of progress, I’d look at GNI — gross national income. The statistical discrepancy between GDP and GNI is growing because we can’t measure from the output side some of the effects that will show on the income side. If we are underestimating productivity, then we’re underestimating real GDP growth and overestimating inflation.
6. US vs China & Open Source AI
Salim: In your Big Ideas report you had a conversation about US versus China. This is driving very much of the Trump policies today. Could you walk us through this chart?
Cathie: We have been tracking all of the large language models coming out of China. They’re all open source. We actually forced China into the open source movement — because US companies stopped selling software into China due to IP theft. And here with the DeepSeek moment — wow, have they capitalized on open source? And now they’re ahead of us. LLaMA 4 falling flat — I think Meta is now going closed as well. China’s stealing the march from us on open source now.
Cathie: I’m glad we’re hopping back into the open source movement. If you look at investment as a share of GDP — in the US it’s a little north of 20%, in China it’s 40%. Xi Jinping has moved from solely “common prosperity” to “new productive forces” — that’s all about technology. They are pouring money into this and we should be on guard. The competition is actually very good. And if you want to see China at work in AI as applied to healthcare, it’s unbelievable.
Peter: Alex Dobrenkov, CEO of InSilico Medicine, just went public on the Hong Kong exchange — 1,200 times oversubscribed. The biotech market there is exploding.
Salim: I continue to think that as we push towards abundance, this tension is less relevant. I think this will be won or lost at the application layer, and the US has such a massive lead there. But Cathie’s point on open source is far more important than it sounds. The number of people actually working on core algorithms inside Anthropic and OpenAI is a tiny, tiny group. As soon as you move all the research into closed models, the number of ideas flowing into the US version gets throttled tremendously.
Cathie: The Chinese approach is: open source everything, allow our 1.4 billion person population to try things, and we’ll innovate like crazy. They’re fundamentally right — having that many more people work on it. The good news for the US is that open source flows right back to the US — it’s not hidden in China. But the open source community innovates much more quickly — and it’s also very dangerous in terms of negative use cases.
It’s interesting that our government has had nothing to say about Meta acquiring Manus, an open-source Chinese company. And Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, when they talked about DeepSeek, said: that algorithm was pretty clever, kudos to China — but that has given us the opportunity to distill into our own models.
7. Bitcoin & the Future of Digital Assets
Peter: Your prediction of getting to a million dollars of Bitcoin — do you still hold out for that? What’s giving you hope even during this recent downturn?
Cathie: We have not moved off that. That’s our bull case — $1.5 million in 2030. There are a few compositional changes. One — stablecoins, especially Tether in the emerging markets, have usurped one of the roles we thought Bitcoin would serve. That would have taken our price target down by $200,000 to $300,000.
On the other side, gold has doubled over the last two years and outperformed Bitcoin royally in the last year. We think with intergenerational wealth transfers accelerating, the younger generation will diversify into a digital gold option. If you look at what’s happened historically, the last two cycles, gold has led Bitcoin. So we think Bitcoin is getting ready for another big run.
Bitcoin’s supply is now rising more slowly than gold’s — 0.8% per year. Gold miners can respond to price signals and increase output. But on the deflation side — if you think about 2008-09, which was catastrophic deflation threatening a global financial bust — if you self-custody Bitcoin, you’re not subject to any counterparty risk. It’s yours. We think it plays a very important role in both inflation and deflation scenarios.
Salim: I grew up in Iran. All the transactions at the bazaar for years now are done with Bitcoin. Everyone has to have a phone. If all of Iran moves to Bitcoin because people are going to be fleeing the country imminently — that’s a case study for what could happen to over half the world’s population.
Dave: The market cap of gold is almost 20 times that of Bitcoin. But the daily trading volume of Bitcoin is already a quarter of gold’s. Proportionately, Bitcoin’s trading volume far exceeds that of gold. If the mindset shifts from transactional mechanism to store of wealth — like Mike Saylor is saying — that will percolate across the world very quickly.
Peter: Digital assets could reach $28 trillion in market value — the entire size of the US stock market back in 2010. Does the ICO replace the IPO?
Cathie: We’re seeing Robinhood wanting to work with big companies to decentralize ownership. We’re doing that too with something called an interval fund. Robinhood is very crypto-savvy and building up the infrastructure. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a version of what we originally envisioned — without an intermediary — happen first with Robinhood.
Dave: Anytime there’s fear in the world, it all falls back to US public markets. But a16z is $90 billion now, General Catalyst is $60 billion — by Cathie Wood standards, that’s a joke. In the Cathie world, the numbers start at trillion and go to $100 trillion. If you’re not tapping into that capital pool, you’re not going to really drive AI.
8. Trillion-Dollar Companies & the Future of Active Investing
Dave: Cathie, are we going to see $100 trillion companies by 2030? We’re seeing the $5 trillion company now. We’re about to see SpaceX go public, maybe merge with Tesla. What are your thoughts?
Cathie: Elon said he can see convergences among his companies that he didn’t expect. In the world of AI, you have to have proprietary data to win. Think about all the proprietary data he has — Tesla has the language of the roads, Neuralink has multi-omics data, SpaceX has space data, X has social data. I could see $100 trillion — the leading candidate is Tesla because of convergence. There could be some combinations as part of that.
I never thought SpaceX would go public. But if it does, it’s because of the orbital data center opportunity.
Peter: We threw Elon a softball — look at everything converging in your empire toward this one centerpiece. He said, “No, that’s totally luck. They had nothing to do with each other.” Incredible — the opportunity to claim genius and he completely said nope.
Alex: You operate actively managed ETFs. Given the move toward superintelligence — volume is already completely dominated by algo traders — at what point does it make sense to just let indexing take over?
Cathie: The market’s never been more inefficient than it is today. After the tech bust in 2000 and especially after 2008-09, risk aversion reached an extreme. It pushed investors toward their benchmarks. I think anyone with that strategy has made a huge strategic blunder.
What I’m excited about is prediction markets. Prediction markets are going to bring about the return of truly active investment. People call themselves active investors but at the heart is an index — they just take a little more of this MAG6 stock and a little less of that. They all look alike. We look like a different duck altogether because we’re doing original research that is very forward-looking — next five years.
The ChatGPT moment started to change that. Everyone’s using it and saying, “Wait, the ground is shifting underneath me. This AI thing — what does this mean?” Finally we’re getting more forward-thinking institutional investors.
9. The Energy Revolution & Nuclear Renaissance
Peter: Increasingly efficient energy is powering the global economy. Kilowatt-hours per dollar of GDP dropping. The cost of solar and batteries declining. Incredible progress on batteries in the last year.
Cathie: One of the things I find fascinating — China is half as efficient as other major countries. But they may have 28 large nuclear reactors being built at one time. The US is not building one large reactor. Our regulatory stance is changing there dramatically.
In the ’70s, the US and Japan started regulating nuclear and killed the industry. Construction costs that had been coming down in tandem with Wright’s Law turned up. If we had continued along Wright’s Law with nuclear to today, electricity costs in the US would be 40% lower. Our renewed enthusiasm for nuclear is important — it will get us back on that Wright’s Law track.
Alex: You know wtfhappenedin1971.com. Is it your view that overregulation of nuclear energy is what set the US economy off course?
Cathie: I think going off the gold exchange standard — closing the gold window, having no discipline — oil prices quadrupled almost immediately and set us off on a very bad course. And we stopped sending humans to the moon. A number of things happened around the same time.
Then Reaganomics — the combination of Volcker and Reaganomics policies that are being repeated today. The deregulation, tax cuts. Our effective corporate tax rate now in the US is the lowest in the developed world. The depreciation schedules in the new tax law are astonishing — they favor innovation. Companies building manufacturing facilities here, if they start before end of 2028, can completely depreciate a manufacturing structure in its first year. I think we are going to see an economic boom in the next few years.
10. Autonomous Vehicles: Tesla vs Waymo
Peter: Robo-taxis are finally here. Waymo’s on the rise, Lyft and Uber’s on the decline. I see about 10 to 12 Waymos on an average day in Santa Monica. In four or five years I’m imagining 80% autonomous vehicles.
Cathie: We agree. We expect Tesla to be the biggest winner from a platform point of view. Waymo will be second. The reason is Waymo’s cost structure — unlike Tesla, which is vertically integrated, Waymo is not. They have fewer than 3,000 cars throughout the US. We think Tesla’s solution will be 50% lower in cost.
Uber’s average price over the last four years has gone up 40% — from $2 to $2.80 per mile. That’s a beautiful umbrella because we think Tesla will be able to price at $0.20 per mile when at scale. Between now and then, this huge price umbrella is going to cause cash flow to explode at Tesla.
Dave: Until we went to the Gigafactory, I thought Elon didn’t like suppliers just because he’s a control freak. It’s not true. He doesn’t like suppliers because he sees the exponential opportunity to manufacture. Demand is going to go through the roof overnight. If you have even a single constrained component in your supply chain — like Waymo does — the entire chain has to wait.
Salim: One huge advantage Tesla has — if they allow people to own their own cars and turn those into taxis, that will be massive. It’s much more exponential-organization friendly where you don’t own your own assets. This is why Uber scaled so fast.
Cathie: The traditional auto companies grew up on the internal combustion engine and human driving. Their DNA is not right. This space is the convergence of three technologies they have not been working on — robotics, AI, and energy storage. The ICE industry is a completely mature industry. According to Wright’s Law, a cumulative doubling from this level would take them 100 years. They are not riding down any cost curve.
Alex: There’s another important component — the machine that makes the machine. Legacy auto companies lean heavily on unionized human labor. Tesla is leaning more into roboticized automation for manufacturing.
Dave: When Elon left California during COVID — “I’m never coming back” — now he’s in Texas in a much better regulatory environment. The legacy car companies with their unions, voter pools, and pension plans — it’s impossible to escape. Starting a new clean sheet in a new jurisdiction is actually cheaper than retooling a legacy car company.
11. Europe’s Dilemma & Opportunity
Dave: The latent talent pool in Europe is like you would not believe. Historically, people from India flood the US, make money, then retire wherever they want. Europeans don’t do it because it’s so hard to leave Europe — it’s so wonderful. But I think the disparity is getting so wide that the entrepreneurial community will start flocking to the US.
Salim: I’ll give the counterpoint. For a European entrepreneur, coming to the US is not really an option right now. It’s going to force a change in the regulatory structure in Europe — via special economic zones or whatever. They will have to make a structural change very, very soon. We saw that at Davos this year — EU Inc, trying to unify incorporation rules across countries.
Cathie: The cost of innovation is collapsing. An individual can be an entrepreneur anywhere as a single person. China is also very entrepreneurial — but what happened with Jack Ma discouraged success. I think competition makes both sides better.
Salim: I maintain that the entrepreneurship in China is so deep and so native, they need socialism to put a lid on it. Otherwise they’d sell their grandmother for profit. That’s why Xi Jinping recently has been making the case for “anti-involution” — they’re commoditizing everything so much they’re killing their own industries.
12. Can Automation Substitute for Capital?
Peter: Fully autonomous delivery is here. Four million deliveries per year from Zipline. Keller Clifton started in Rwanda — cut the mortality rate of maternal bleed-outs from pregnancy by more than 50%. We’re seeing autonomous delivery in the air from Zipline and Wing, on the ground from Starship and Coco robots.
Dave: The airwaves are three-dimensional. They won’t get physically crowded. But the noise is going to be a major issue. If someone invents a silent drone, that’ll be a total game-changer.
Alex: A lot of this is premised on labor being substituted by automation. But do you think automation could also substitute for capital at some point? Could capital be replaced? Or is capital in some sense immortal?
Cathie: I think blockchain technology is going to transform everything in financial services — but that’s more infrastructure and efficiency. Is capital immortal? That’s very absolute.
Alex: Blockchain proof of work is fundamentally based on the difficulty of inverting a hash function — in some sense it’s an anti-technology bet. So even with blockchain, blockchain is just as immortal as the ability for AI to not solve math.
Salim: We’ve been using money as the main mode of discourse for several hundred years — capitalism, profits, business. I think we’re shifting from money to information, and then over time intelligence becomes the higher-order bit. We’re going from money to data to directed intelligence or purpose.
Dave: The vast majority of the world has latent talent that can’t participate in the world economy — corrupt environments, taxation, friction. But there hasn’t been an option before to trade in intelligence or trade in crypto. That dam is going to break very quickly in the age of AI — to unleash the talent in latent areas of the world.
Peter: I want to say thank you, this was a fantastic conversation. At least once a year we’d love to have you back to review your Big Ideas 2027 report.
Cathie: It would be an honor. I have to give all credit to my team — you have no idea how intense the research effort is here. Many people when they hear ARK, they think top-down stock picking. That’s not what’s going on. We’re probably the most intensely focused in traditional asset management on research and investing in disruptive innovation. This brain trust has been delightful.
Edited transcript from YouTube. Transcribed by AssemblyAI, edited by Claude Code.
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