I asked Cathie Wood the question no one else will

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
You manage more money than any other woman on earth.

**Cathie Wood** (0:03)
Across the company, we're closing in on 40 billion.

**Shaan Puri** (0:06)
She's called one of the most disruptive and innovative forces.

**Cathie Wood** (0:09)
Cathie Wood making some big headlines.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
The ARK Innovation ETF soared over the early pandemic. If I'm a believer in AI, what's the number one stock that I should own?

**Cathie Wood** (0:20)
I think everyone knows about NVIDIA. We always try and answer that question with stocks, people are not thinking about in the right way.

**Shaan Puri** (0:29)
So here's the tough question. If somebody else had your track record, would you invest in them?

**Cathie Wood** (0:35)
Well.

**Shaan Puri** (0:46)
Cathie Wood, you're here. I appreciate you doing this. You're a pretty remarkable person. I've been watching you for a long time and there's a good chance that you manage more money than any other woman on earth as an active fund manager. I don't know if that's exactly true, but you may be top five.

**Cathie Wood** (1:02)
Yeah, probably. I don't know. I don't know myself. I don't have those members. Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (1:07)
I'm curious, actually, what's the humble origins? What was Cathie Wood's first job?

**Cathie Wood** (1:12)
McDonald's.

**Shaan Puri** (1:15)
Cassie Ear, what were you doing? Fruitt & Burgers?

**Cathie Wood** (1:17)
No, I wasn't. I was at the register. I was 16 I also worked at a supermarket. First girl allowed to push in carts at Vaughn's Supermarket in Southern California.

**Shaan Puri** (1:29)
Do you remember roughly what you were making when you worked at McDonald's hourly?

**Cathie Wood** (1:33)
Gosh. Right before that, I was babysitting for a quarter an hour.

**Shaan Puri** (1:40)
So you went from maybe a quarter an hour to managing something like 20, $30 billion in fund. I think this is interesting. The reason I ask is because in the world of entrepreneurship, we always hear these hustle stories. I don't think you go from McDonald's to the top where you're at without hustle. So what's the hustle story you pride yourself on?

**Cathie Wood** (2:00)
Well, the first big break was getting into the business. Art Laffer, I'm not sure if you know Laffer, Laffer Curve, Supply Side Economics, Reaganomics. He was my professor at the University of Southern California.

**Shaan Puri** (2:14)
He was like an advisor to presidents, right?

**Cathie Wood** (2:16)
Oh, every president since Richard Nixon, except for Presidents Obama and Biden, and he was agnostic. If anyone, didn't matter what party wanted to hear what he had to say about taxes, deregulation, monetary policy, he wanted to give his point of view.
And we've come full circle, Art and I, because I and my team introduced Art in 2015 to Bitcoin. And when he read our paper, he said, this is what I've been waiting for since the US closed the gold window in 1971 A global rules-based monetary system. Wrong rule, quantity theory of money, you know, limited to 21 million units, but we'll get there. And of course, he was talking about stable coins. So now we have introduced him to stable coins, tether, circle, and so forth. And he said, the right rule.

**Shaan Puri** (3:27)
Have you seen this website, WTF happened in 1971? It's amazing. There's an entire website basically saying what the F happened in 1971? And it shows like a series of charts where something happened in 1971, and the world was really never the same. And it's just a very compelling case. It makes you want to go look at it. And obviously, I think that's the year that we went off the gold standard, right?

**Cathie Wood** (3:49)
That's the year we went off the gold standard, and all hell broke loose in monetary policy. We went into massive inflation. So anyway, it was in the late 70s that while I was in his class that Art introduced me to Capital Group, I walked in to Capital Group. I didn't even know what the investment business was. I had been a waitress. I was interested in economics, but I didn't know this business. And Capital was the premier firm in Southern California at the time.

**Shaan Puri** (4:22)
Sounds like that might be a tough job to get.

**Cathie Wood** (4:25)
Art recommended me highly to Don Conlon, who was the chief economist of Capital Group. And I walked in there, and Don was losing a person who was going on to Harvard Business School. So this woman, her name was Claudia Huntington. She was so good at what she did. He was looking for one and a half people to replace her. I was the half. But I didn't want to be the half. I wanted to be the one and a half.