Issue #43, Volume #1
Understanding The Next Epoch And Functional Immortality
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Three Things You Need To Know Now:
1. The Fed cuts again. As expected, this afternoon the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by another 25 basis points – its third cut this year – to 4.25%-4.50%. However, in his post-meeting press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell pushed back on the likelihood of further cuts for the first time. He noted that with today’s cut, he views the Fed’s policy as “significantly less restrictive,” and said the central bank would be “more cautious” when considering further cuts next year. In short, with inflation remaining “sticky,” we may have just seen the last rate cut of this cycle.
2. Honda and Nissan feel the squeeze. As we wrote on Monday, China is eating the world’s auto market. Within the past four years, China has gone from an afterthought to being the biggest auto exporter… and meanwhile, three in five auto buyers in China are choosing a domestic brand – more than at any point since China became the global economy’s biggest auto market. And so it’s no surprise that Honda (HMC) – one of the world’s top 5 automakers – and fellow Japanese car company Nissan (NSANY), which has been struggling for years, are in merger talks. Among the losers if the two combine? Struggling American automakers, who have for decades failed to make cars people want at prices they can afford.
3. Big tech dominates the S&P 500. The Magnificent 7 – Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Tesla – are up on average 70% year to date and now make up a record 34% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization. The other 493 stocks in the S&P 500 Index are only up 15% year-to-date. The high-flying Magnificent 7 are up 291% since the beginning of 2023, led by Nvidia’s historic 811% rise, but when the AI boom ends, big tech is going to get hit and so will the S&P:
And one more thing…
The S&P 500 Index is within 1% of its all-time highs, while less than 40% of the stocks in the index are trading above their 50-day moving average: That’s today’s lopsided, top-heavy market. The last time it happened? In early August 1972. (Other similarities – massive deficit spending, a ballooning federal debt, and rising inflation.)
What happened next back then? The market fell by nearly 50% over the next year. Don’t say we didn’t warn you… (hat tip: Jason Goepfert)
The Spice Must Flow
Understanding The Next Epoch And Functional Immortality
There’s a crucial relationship between electricity, intelligence, and wealth.
For investors who understand these links – and the unique economics of power and intelligence – the next decade will produce an unprecedented amount of wealth.
So much wealth, that like House Harkonnen in the movie Dune, these investors will have lives the rest of humanity simply doesn’t recognize.
They will have the spice.
And the spice must flow.
Today, we stand at the gateway to immortality.
Soon (within two decades) we will have entered an entirely new epoch: the rise of the machine. This is a fundamental event horizon. What it means to be “alive” will come to have an entirely new meaning. Men and machine will merge.
Today history is split between before Christ and after Christ. Christ brought a new idea to humanity, that there was more to be gained – eternal life – by loving your brother, rather than simply enslaving him. This led, slowly, to what we call “the West,” the leading culture of human development. But all of that is about to change. There will be a new epoch for mankind as truly functional immortality emerges and we begin to explore space.
And all of this will depend, utterly, on one thing.
The spice must flow.
To understand how any of this is possible, you need to understand the long arc of human technological development. It has always been driven by two things: energy and intelligence.
Man’s discovery of fire and written language was the first epoch. That technology led to the emergence of civilization, innovation in tools and weapons, the development of religion, and to the establishment, like at Alexandria, of centers of learning and memory.
But by the 1600s the English were running out of trees. And that meant they were running out of power. This shortage of power put their civilization at risk: the English navy needed lots of giant trees to make their warships, to defend their small island country. More directly, the scarcity of energy threatened human lives as the population grew and there wasn’t enough energy to cook food and heat homes. In 1665, the Great Plague struck London. It was the worst outbreak of the bubonic plague since the Black Death in 1348. More than 100,000 people died. The plague left London at, more or less, the same population as in 1300.
The British developed coal mining. Beginning in 1600, shipments of coal into London grew exponentially from only 35,000 tons (when it was used by royalty to heat castles) to 467,000 tons in 1700 (+1,234%) as it became the dominant fuel source in the city.
The dramatic increase in coal production and usage in the 1600s was truly remarkable, considering all of the labor involved in mining and transporting it. However, there was a good economic reason: coal contains twice as much energy per pound as wood.
The spice must flow.
By 1800, following the introduction of the Newcomen steam engine in 1712 (to pump water out of coal mines), the United Kingdom was producing an astonishing 10 million tons of coal (+2,041% in 100 years). And then came the railroads, which were first developed to move coal out of the mines and then, later, into the cities. Coal production would peak around 1900 at almost 300 million tons per year (+3,000% in 100 years).
And with this energy, humanity flourished.
For almost a thousand years (between 100 AD and 1000 AD), London’s population remained around 50,000. It took another 500 years to double from there, to 100,000 by 1500. It then doubled again, to 200,000 by 1600. But then, because of a lack of energy, the population collapsed.
Then came coal. And London’s population grew to 1 million by 1800, roughly four times more people than the city had previously been able to support at any point earlier. Historically, the largest cities had always been in China, where urban populations topped out at about 1 million. But, by 1900, 6.5 million people lived in London, making it the largest city in the world – the largest city in the history of humanity.
Even now, 500 years later, coal is still the dominant source of energy in the world and thus the foundation of human life.
Over the last 22 years, more than 1.4 thousand gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity has come online, almost all of it in India or China. To put that in perspective, that’s more new coal-fired power in the last 20 years than America’s total installed base of all forms of power generation (1.2 gigawatts).
That is about to change.As the world’s “spice,” coal enabled the industrial revolution and is the underpinning of the modern world.
But uranium is a thousand-times more energy dense than coal. A single pellet of uranium can produce as much energy as an entire ton of coal.
The spice must flow.
And the demand for “spice” is endless.
Most people do not understand that the demand curve for energy and for intelligence do not follow classical economic models. There is never enough supply of either to satisfy demand.
All other commodities are disciplined by marginal utility. This is the idea that while one car, for example, can greatly increase your personal productivity and is therefore certainly worth a lot of money to you, another car will not yield much, if any, increase to productivity and, therefore, isn’t worth as much to you.
But that simply isn’t true when it comes to energy or intelligence. Computer programmers, for example, discovered that no matter how much memory could be built onto a chip, software designers would always use all of it – and want more. Likewise, demand for electricity is simply endless. No matter how much electricity is produced, under peak demand, all of it will be used unless pricing restricts demand.
Societies that provision energy efficiently, grow wealthy. Look at per-capita electricity production and you’ll find it is perfectly correlated to wealth (per-capita GDP). Interestingly, in the U.S., we’re using 8% less electricity per person today than we did in 2007. Likewise, although I can’t find such statistics, there is a very close relationship between electrical demand and computing per capita too.
And that relationship between electricity, computing power, and wealth is about to explode.
Look at Nvidia’s latest breakthrough: the world simulator chip. This isn’t just another processor. This is a complete paradigm shift in intelligence. This is a new way of thinking. A better way of thinking. A way of thinking that is inherently superior to human reasoning.
Nvidia’s world simulator doesn’t think like we do. It doesn’t make judgements based on a very narrow perception perspective and a small number of experiences. It creates physically accurate simulations of the real world and then runs millions of simulations, enabling it to learn how reality works, with statistical accuracy.
Machines have been learning in carefully controlled domains for decades. IBM’s Deep Blue beat the best human chess player for the first time in 1996. Today, even free online chess software can beat every human player, every time.
Nvidia’s parallel processors and lots of robotics innovations will create machines that can perform perfectly at every physical task. Every bounce, every shadow, every interaction between objects is calculated with precise physical accuracy.
Think about a robot that can never lose a squash match. Or a car that never wrecks. Or planes that never crash.
It will not be very long before civilizations that have access to this technology and have machine learning integrated into every possible system are simply nothing like the rest of the world. Like the difference today between Manhattan and Manaus. And it won’t be much longer before things like Elon Musk’s Neuralink merge the incredible power of this kind of unlimited intelligence with human minds.
Today, many people already function as cyborgs. Think about how useless you are right now without your cell phone. Men and machine will merge, biologically. And the entire idea of immortality will simply cease to have the same kind of meaning. For you to survive will have nothing to do with tissue or genetics or disease. All you will require is spice.
The spice must flow.
For Nvidia’s chips to simulate just 10 seconds of possible physical interactions requires more computing power than was used to land on the moon.
The chip doesn’t think like us: it is running a miniature universe in its head, complete with gravity, friction, and material properties. It’s running a “first principles” simulation, all the time, in real time. To scale this up to a city full of robots and cyborgs, each running these physics simulations in real-time, each needing to understand and predict the physical world around them with perfect accuracy… will require a level of power production (and reliability) that has never been conceived of before.
It’s not 1,000 times more power than we have now. It is millions of times more power than we have now. And the only way we can possibly provision this much power is by the development of widely distributed nuclear reactors.
Remember, the move from trees to coal (a 100% improvement in thermal efficiency) led to the industrial revolution and the modern world. A shift from coal (as the dominant energy source) to nuclear will be a 1,000-fold increase in thermal efficiency. Producing nuclear energy in a widely distributed way (not across huge power grids) will similarly constitute orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency and reliability.
And, until then, to power this revolution, we will need to ramp production and distribution of natural gas and coal massively.
The spice must flow.
Contrast this reality with this lunacy, from today’s Wall Street Journal:
British power producer Drax (DRXGF, $8.21) is scouting locations in the American pine belt to build electricity generators fueled by burning wood chips. The plan calls for constructing wood-fired power plants in parts of the U.S. South where pulp and paper mills have closed and left timber growers without buyers for those trees unfit for making lumber or poles. The plants’ exhaust will be piped underground instead of out of smokestacks, which generates lucrative carbon credits for which Drax is already lining up buyers.
Drax already burns pellets of compressed sawdust in a converted coal-fueled power plant in its home country. Its towering facility in the English countryside produces about 5% of the UK’s electricity. Drax has built pellet mills across the southeastern U.S. and in western Canada to feed that plant as well as other wood-burning plants around the world.
“The whole idea is that 24/7 renewable power is going to become increasingly in demand as data centers grow, as AI grows,” Drax Chief Executive Will Gardiner said. “There’s a huge need for that commodity.”
I know few things for certain. But one of them is that wood chips will not power the coming epoch of human development.
To learn more about how Nvidia and a small number of other companies are pioneering the parallel-processing revolution… please watch a video I put together, here. Even if you don’t buy anything, this alone will help you understand the real scope of the changes that will affect every corner of our society.
Good investing,
Porter Stansberry
Stevenson, MD
P.S. If you look up U.S. patent #11389978 you’ll find my name, Porter Stansberry, listed as the inventor.
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