Wall Street veteran Dan Dreyfus: Copper is AI’s next bottleneck, with data centers driving an additional 750,000 tons of annual demand—copper prices could easily double.

Over the past two decades, the world has grown accustomed to the 'asset-light' economic miracle epitomized by companies such as Google, Meta, and SaaS firms. However, with escalating geopolitical conflicts, supply chain reconfiguration, and the explosion of the AI computing revolution, the world is now facing an unprecedented surge in demand for capital-intensive assets and commodities.

Dan Dreyfus, a veteran Wall Street commodities investor and partner at Fortnite Capital, clearly stated: The next critical bottleneck for AI lies not solely in HBM memory, but in the most fundamental commodity—the 'king of metals': copper. Humanity’s demand for copper over the next 18 years will equal the total consumption of the past 10,000 years, while current power grids and critical mineral supplies are perched on the edge of extreme fragility.

I. The Era of 'Asset-Light' Miracles Is Over—The Age of Reckoning for Capital-Intensive Infrastructure Has Arrived

Dreyfus noted that from the early 2000s until just a few years ago, the United States and the global economy experienced an 'asset-light' economic miracle. Giants like Google, Meta, and Apple generated trillions of dollars in market value with minimal capital investment. Yet, while doubling down on this asset-light mindset, Western nations were simultaneously dismantling critical infrastructure and offshoring it overseas.

With successive shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, tariffs, and Middle East tensions, this fragile and unresilient supply chain has begun to unravel, triggering persistently high inflation.

The world now stands at a pivotal inflection point: manufacturing reshoring, reindustrialization, and an 'AI-driven technological revolution'—which demands far greater infrastructure intensity than previous generations of computing—are all unfolding simultaneously. This convergence is generating an extraordinary surge in demand for critical minerals and commodities.

Currently, multiple massive capital cycles are running in parallel:

Aerospace and the space economy: Boeing and Airbus face a $1 trillion backlog in orders over the next decade, compounded by competition for raw materials from the emerging space economy.

Grid modernization: Power grids in Europe and North America are widely aging (with some transmission lines exceeding 106 years in age). Even before accounting for the impending AI-driven electricity demand surge, existing upgrades—such as electric vehicles and electrification of heating systems (e.g., replacing gas boilers with heat pumps)—are already straining grid capacity.

Power generation and data centers: The power generation sector will require $1 trillion in investment every decade over the next 30 years; meanwhile, data centers are already spending $1 trillion annually on infrastructure and commodities.

II. The 'King of Metals' Faces a Super Tsunami: AI Data Centers to Consume 750,000 Tonnes of Copper Annually

In this infrastructure renaissance, copper—the 'king of metals'—is experiencing an unprecedented supply-demand mismatch.

1. The Copper-Intensive Scale of Green Energy and AI

Both clean energy and artificial intelligence are driving exponential growth in copper consumption:

Solar power: Requires five times more copper per megawatt of generation capacity than conventional gas turbines.

Wind power: Requires seven times more copper than traditional energy sources.

AI data centers: A 1-gigawatt (GW) AI facility requires 50,000 tonnes of copper. At the current industry projection of building 15 GW of such facilities annually, data centers alone will add 750,000 tonnes to annual copper demand.

Electric vehicles & military applications: An electric vehicle consumes five to six times more copper than a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle; meanwhile, modern military conflicts—such as the Russia-Ukraine war—have consumed vast quantities of non-recyclable copper through munitions like 'copperhead' shells.

2. 18 Years = 10,000 Years

Looking back across human history, humanity extracted a total of 700 million tonnes of copper over the past 10,000 years. Today, global annual copper demand stands at 30 million tonnes (comprising 26 million tonnes from mining and 4 million tonnes from recycled sources).

Dreyfus emphasized that even without accounting for the additional demand from data centers and green energy, and assuming only conventional GDP-aligned growth:

the world would still require 700 million tons of copper over the next 18 years. This means we would need to mine as much copper in the next 18 years as was mined in the entire previous 10,000 years combined.

3. Supply Constraints Are Too Distant to Alleviate Near-Term Shortages

Meeting this demand would require five world-class, Tier-1 mines to come online globally every year. However, due to declining ore grades at aging mines (such as century-old operations in Chile) and the typical 7- to 12-year lead time required to develop a new copper mine, only a handful of Tier-1 mines are expected to actually enter production before 2030.

Current market attention is focused on memory, HBM, and NAND, but if one takes a long-term, forward-looking view, the next critical bottleneck will undoubtedly be copper. Dan Dreyfus stated plainly: “I think it’s easy for copper prices to double from current levels.”

III. The Harsh Reality of the Energy Pool: Solar and Nuclear Power Cannot Be Deployed Overnight

Amid a massive power supply gap, markets place high hopes on solar and nuclear energy, yet significant raw material and physical bottlenecks stand in the way.

The 'Land Bottleneck' of Solar Power:

Solar power has a capacity factor of only around 20%. To fully power a 1-gigawatt data center solely with solar energy, one would need to install 5 gigawatts of solar capacity. Since each gigawatt of solar capacity requires approximately 7,000 acres of land, 5 gigawatts would require 35,000 acres—larger than the entire city of San Francisco.

Silver Crisis:

Manufacturing solar panels requires substantial amounts of silver. Currently, global annual silver consumption stands at 1.2 billion ounces, while supply is only 1 billion ounces, resulting in an annual shortfall of 200 million ounces. With only 600 million ounces of above-ground inventory remaining, the solar supply chain faces a potential stockout crisis within three years if the silver bottleneck is not resolved.

Nuclear Energy’s Manufacturing Dilemma:

Although natural gas and uranium reserves are abundant, the United States currently cannot even manufacture critical heavy-industrial components required for nuclear power plants—such as containment pressure vessels—domestically, leaving its supply chain heavily reliant on overseas sources.

IV. Macroeconomic Context: Dollar Depreciation and 'Hard Assets' as the Only Safe Haven

Beyond intrinsic supply-demand shocks, macroeconomic monetary policy is further fueling the surge in commodity prices.

Dreyfus stated that since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the value of fiat currencies has been significantly diluted. U.S. government debt has now reached $40 trillion and is growing at a rate of $2.5 trillion per year. Additionally, the present discounted value of future social liabilities—including healthcare and social security—amounts to $100 trillion and is also expanding at $2.5 trillion annually.

By comparison, the U.S. government’s annual tax revenue is only $5.5 trillion. This implies that when the next economic recession hits—causing tax revenues to fall while expenditures are forced to rise—the Federal Reserve will have no choice but to print vast quantities of dollars (Print Giga Dollars).

In the highly analogous 1970s, the currency lost 70% of its purchasing power. In such an environment, commodities, hard assets, and critical infrastructure are the only viable means of preserving purchasing power.

V. Labor Returns to Prominence: Skilled Blue-Collar Workers Emerge as the Scarcest Resource

In this revival of heavy industry and infrastructure, skilled blue-collar workers (Craft Labor) have replaced white-collar professionals as the most significant bottleneck across the entire supply chain, both in the U.S. and globally.

Over the past decade or so, public discourse has steered young people overwhelmingly toward humanities or asset-light industries, leading to a severe generational gap among skilled technical workers at the grassroots level. Now, the situation has completely reversed:

The demand for skilled blue-collar workers in infrastructure development is currently virtually unlimited.

Top graduates from elite vocational colleges can command starting salaries of $150,000 right after high school.

The previously displaced middle-tier blue-collar workforce is now receiving exceptionally generous compensation, and their roles cannot be replaced by AI in the near term—on the contrary, it is early-stage, lower-level white-collar labor that faces the risk of being optimized out by AI.

Below is the full transcript of the speech, translated with AI assistance:

Moderator:

Today we are joined by Dan Dreyfus from Fortnite Capital. In the future, human progress will be measured by how much electricity humanity consumes. I view the semiconductor industry as an industrial or infrastructure company—in fact, it’s essentially just a factory.

Dan Dreyfus:

We try to understand where the world is heading and then figure out what we need to get there.

Dan Dreyfus:

In the next 10 minutes, I’ll do my best to help you understand critical minerals, commodities, and the extreme vulnerability of America’s infrastructure. Achieving our technological ambitions, reshoring and reindustrialization goals, and our national security and military objectives will require investments amounting to trillions—tens of trillions—of dollars. But before we get into that, let’s take a brief look at some history.

Dan Dreyfus:

Right now, we are at a critical inflection point regarding U.S. economic growth and its future trajectory.

In fact, from the early 2000s until just a few years ago, the United States experienced what I consider to have been an economic miracle. During this period, we generated enormous growth, massive market capitalization, and tremendous value—virtually without investing any capital at all. I mean, think about all those companies that were created with virtually no capital.

Dan Dreyfus:

You had Google with its search engine; you had Meta with social media—they acquired WhatsApp for $30 billion with only 12 employees, you know, requiring virtually no capital. You also had streaming platforms, food delivery platforms. You had Apple, which operated with a light asset base yet created trillions in market capitalization. And then there was software-as-a-service (SaaS), generating all this value without needing any capital whatsoever.

Dan Dreyfus:

Meanwhile, as we were building these companies and doing all this, we were actually dismantling our critical infrastructure and offshoring it overseas. So at the time, we were really doubling down on that light-asset mindset.

Dan Dreyfus:

But then, this started to backfire on us, right? We went through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, tariffs, and now we’re facing tensions involving Iran.

Every time these geopolitical conflicts arise, inflation surges like a rocket—you’d need a telescope to see how high it climbs—and it never really comes back down. The reason is that we’ve made our supply chains far too fragile and weak, with absolutely no resilience.

Dan Dreyfus:

We are now at an inflection point: we want all our assets to reshore, and we want to achieve reindustrialization. We are experiencing a computational technology revolution whose infrastructure intensity far exceeds that of the previous generation of computing, creating an absolutely frenzied demand shock for critical minerals and commodities underpinning infrastructure. At the same time, there is also a supply shock, because we have underinvested in these resources for far too long.

Dan Dreyfus:

There are simply too many capital cycles happening simultaneously—I have never seen this many overlapping cycles in my entire career. We have the aerospace cycle: Boeing and Airbus together hold a trillion-dollar backlog of orders over the next decade. Now add the emerging space economy on top of that, which will compete directly with Boeing and Airbus for the exact same materials and supply chains needed to fulfill those backlogs.

Dan Dreyfus:

And then there’s the power grid, right? Every time it gets a bit colder in Texas—ERCOT, the Texas grid, which is not connected to the rest of the U.S. grid, not connected at all—every time the temperature dips slightly, the grid collapses, leaving people freezing in the dark. And you know that transmission line in Paradise, California—the one that caught fire and killed 300 people? Do you realize that line was already over 106 years old? Parts of this country’s grid infrastructure are more than 106 years old.

Dan Dreyfus:

In California, if even half the population buys electric vehicles or starts using autonomous robotaxis, and we all plug them in to charge while cranking up the air conditioning when we get home from work around 6 p.m., we will instantly overload the grid—boom—and destroy it completely, leaving all of us sitting in the dark. Right now, the grid is barely keeping up with current demand, and we haven’t even begun to address the tsunami of electricity demand that artificial intelligence (AI) is about to unleash.

Dan Dreyfus:

And then there’s power generation—a capital cycle exceeding one trillion dollars, likely requiring another trillion every decade over the next 30 years.

Regarding data centers, we’re now looking at $1 trillion annually—every single dollar is being poured into infrastructure, and it’s all commodities. Then there are semiconductor fabs (semifabs). CPUs are experiencing a massive resurgence, with CPU density skyrocketing like a rocket. I’d bet with you that this number is far too low—$750 billion—and I’d say it will soon be measured in trillions.

Dan Dreyfus:

And then there’s defense, right? Japan is increasing its defense budget, Europe is increasing its defense budget, and the U.S. is also increasing its defense budget. What all these end markets have in common is this: not one of them can function without critical minerals. Not a single one—none of this can happen without them.

Dan Dreyfus:

To be honest, I’ve been in commodities for 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. This truly is what I call a 'Vuja De' moment—that overwhelming feeling that none of this has ever happened before.

Dan Dreyfus:

Take copper, the 'king of metals.' It’s just one example—we need copper for everything we do. You know, if we want clean energy, solar power consumes five times as much copper per megawatt as a typical baseload CCGT (combined-cycle gas turbine) plant.

The same goes for wind—it requires seven times as much copper. When it comes to data centers, a 1-gigawatt (GW) AI facility now needs 50,000 metric tons of copper per gigawatt. And we’re about to start building 15 GW of these facilities every year. So, at 50,000 tons per GW, 15 GW translates to 750,000 metric tons of copper—just for these facilities alone.

Dan Dreyfus:

Do you know how much copper supply increased last year? Only 500,000 metric tons. And that’s just the demand from data centers. Then there are electric vehicles—if we’re going to have autonomous ride-hailing everywhere, an EV uses five to six times more copper than a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle.

Then there’s also the military aspect. In the Ukraine-Russia conflict, did you know that we’ve used more explosives than were used throughout the entire Second World War? Did you know that? And those explosive shells—guess what they’re made of? One type is called the 'Copperhead'—very cleverly named after a venomous snake—and they’re all made of copper. Do you think we’re going to go out onto the battlefield and recover that copper? No, that copper is gone. So everything we do requires this metal.

Dan Dreyfus:

Now, where are we going to get it from? Looking back through human history, all the way to the time of Mohenjo-daro, over the past 10,000 years, we have mined a total of 700 million tons of copper. Seven hundred million tons of copper.

Now, in theory, we might be able to recover as much as 80% of that copper—but what we’d have to do is tear down this building, dismantle the entire power grid, demolish buildings across Europe and Japan. Yes, we could technically reclaim all that copper. Of course, by then, we’d be holding this meeting in tents. So how are we actually going to get it?

Dan Dreyfus:

Right now, annual copper demand stands at 30 million tons. Roughly 4 million tons of that supply comes from recycled copper. The remaining 26 million tons is newly mined. If we simply grow in line with GDP—forgetting about the upside demand from data centers, forgetting about the upside demand from green energy and solar power, and just growing as we have historically with GDP—listen carefully: this means that over the next 18 years, we will need 700 million tons of copper. In the next 18 years alone, we will require as much copper as was mined over the entire past 10,000 years.

Dan Dreyfus:

That means we need to bring five world-class, Tier 1 mines into production every single year. Go ahead—look it up on Google or ask ChatGPT. You can count on one hand, and still have fingers left over, the number of Tier 1 mines scheduled to come online between now and the end of this decade (2030).

Dan Dreyfus:

So I don’t know what they plan to do, because it takes 7 to 12 years to build a copper mine. Existing mines are depleting—you know, Chile’s giant mines are over a century old, and their ore grades are declining.

Moreover, this will be a very, very significant challenge and an imminent bottleneck. Right now, all the attention is on memory and HBM, and NAND prices are skyrocketing vertically because that is the current bottleneck. If you want to look ahead and identify the next looming bottleneck, I strongly suggest you take a close look at copper.

Dan Dreyfus:

So, we are now at a moment where a supply shock meets a demand shock. Commodity cycles typically last 15 years and offer room for price increases of several hundred percent. We are only a few years into this cycle—this is just the beginning.

Dan Dreyfus:

There’s one more thing I’d like to add, alright? We’ve talked about demand—we’re experiencing this demand shock—and we’ve discussed supply, but what we haven’t addressed yet is how we’re destroying the value of the U.S. dollar.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have completely eroded the value of our fiat currency. Today, we have $40 trillion in government debt, growing by $2.5 trillion annually. More importantly, the present discounted value of our future social liabilities—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and pensions—amounts to $100 trillion, and this figure is also increasing by $2.5 trillion each year.

Dan Dreyfus:

So, your federal debt increases by $2.5 trillion, and your social liabilities increase by another $2.5 trillion, while the U.S. government’s annual tax revenue is only $5.5 trillion.

So, what happens the next time we face an economic recession—when tax revenues fall and expenditures must rise? We will print giga-dollars.

In the 1970s, we encountered a similar problem, and our solution then was to devalue the currency through a combination of inflation and growth—the dollar lost 70% of its purchasing power. In such an environment, commodities, hard assets, and infrastructure will preserve your purchasing power. Go research the 1970s: what was the single best-performing asset class by a wide margin? That’s your homework. Alright, that’s all for now—thank you, and I look forward to engaging with you.

Moderator:

Chamath, I think on the forecasting show, you... that was your prediction—I forget the exact category—but you definitely said you believed copper would be the best-performing asset.

Chamath:

Yes, yes, very accurate. And that was before I spoke with Dan—it really was—and that’s quite telling.

Dan Dreyfus:

Well, you know, I think it would be easy for copper prices to double from current levels. I mean, I’ve seen molybdenum go from $1 per pound to $33 per pound, so doubling isn’t a big deal at all.

Moderator:

Let’s take a step back. You mentioned something very interesting backstage—namely, that if you look at everything we’re currently doing, we’re barely keeping up with humanity’s inherent energy demand, right? Explain that argument using the phrasing you used backstage.

Dan Dreyfus:

Here’s the problem: since the end of World War II, we haven’t invested in upgrading, modernizing, and strengthening the power grid.

We’ve let it deteriorate. You know, the last two, three, or four consecutive administrations have been sleepwalking, taking no action to reinforce this infrastructure. Now, even if we merely aim to achieve our stated goals—reindustrialization, reshoring of manufacturing, and electrification—just that alone will strain capacity. By electrification, I simply mean replacing old gas boilers in buildings with heat pumps (which every commercial building is now doing), increasing adoption of electric vehicles, and greater use of electronic devices. This doesn’t even account for artificial intelligence—AI hasn’t even entered the picture yet. Just by living our normal lives, just by going about daily routines, we’re already heading toward shortages.

Moderator:

So what happens next? Blackouts and brownouts?

Dan Dreyfus:

Widespread blackouts, rolling power outages, and we’re facing ever-rising electricity prices—rising electricity prices.

Host: But you know, you made a really compelling point in one of your earlier shows about how utilities deliberately inflate the costs of all their operations so they can report higher figures to regulators and earn a return on equity (ROE) based on a larger rate base.

I think what’s truly fascinating—and significantly underestimated—is that this is precisely where all inflation originates: from utility transmission and distribution. Because over the past 20 years, even after the recent increases we’ve just experienced, electricity prices have actually declined in real terms—they’ve absolutely fallen when adjusted for inflation. In nominal terms, they haven’t risen much at all. So when you talk about price increases, power generation itself remains cheap; it’s delivering that power to consumers that’s becoming expensive, due to—you know—labor…

Dan Dreyfus:

Labor has been, by far, the biggest bottleneck—skilled blue-collar workers, right? Over the past 10 to 15 years, what have we all been telling our kids to do? You know, go study liberal arts in the Northeast—yes, that was a huge mistake.

Moderator:

So I’d like to ask the audience here: How many of you have installed solar panels and/or a Tesla Powerwall at your homes? How many of you have actually done this? (Audience raises hands) About half of you.

Second question: How many of you plan to do this within the next year or two? Okay, that’s another 20%.

So clearly, this is an affluent group that’s bypassing the grid altogether. The solution lies in enabling households and businesses to achieve energy independence. Businesses won’t wait for the government, you know. So perhaps the future grid will become this quirky, outdated piece of legacy infrastructure, replaced instead by bottom-up solutions.

Dan Dreyfus:

In any case, industrial applications still require the power grid—I mean, that’s the foundation of industrial operations. I’m saying that the scale we must achieve just for industrial use is enormous.

Here’s a good statistic: if a 1-gigawatt (GW) AI facility wanted to be powered entirely by solar energy—right? (I myself am a strong advocate for solar, okay)—if you want to rely solely on solar, given that solar has a capacity factor of 20% because the sun doesn’t shine all the time, then a 1-GW data center would require 5 GW of solar capacity.

Each gigawatt of solar requires 7,000 acres of land, so 5 GW amounts to 35,000 acres—larger than the entire city of San Francisco. So where do you plan to find the people? You know, where do you even go to find… By the way, our biggest bottleneck right now is skilled technical labor, yes.

Moderator:

So overall, what about the idea that 'scarcity drives innovation'? There’s discussion—or at least I’ve seen some startups talking about new technologies in mining to extract… I think traditionally the focus has been on rare earth elements, but the core argument is that everything we need already exists beneath our feet; we’re just currently mining only near-surface deposits.

Do you believe a wave of innovations is about to hit the market that will ultimately unlock far more productivity than we currently see? Because the technology we still use today to extract these materials from the ground is essentially the same as it was 100 years ago.

Dan Dreyfus:

Dan Dreyfus: For certain commodities, yes. You mentioned rare earths. Starting in the 14th century, there was a group of people called 'alchemists,' remember? They claimed they could turn lead into gold. Back then, the periodic table consisted of only four elements: water, fire, air, and earth. They understood the nature of fire, air was pure, water was pure—but whenever they encountered something unfamiliar in the earth, they called it 'rare earth.'

Dan Dreyfus:

Thus, rare earth elements are actually ubiquitous, and the technology to extract them will give us access to extremely abundant reserves. But the real challenge lies in processing—that’s the difficult part. As for something like copper, the market is so massive that it’s hard to imagine any single technology solving the supply-demand imbalance overnight.

Moderator:

In the United States, people who want to work will have access to extremely high-paying jobs. We can start bringing semiconductor fabs here—and we’re already doing so—and we’ll bring them all to North America. And according to my friend Travis Adams, who works with automated mining systems, the same applies in South America. We’ll be able to create a large number of jobs here. So perhaps you could speak to its broader impact.

Dan Dreyfus:

What you just said is extremely important to this entire employment debate. The number of skilled tradespeople and technical blue-collar workers we need for the infrastructure we’re going to build is virtually unlimited—there’s really no way around it, right? You know, in many ways, look at what happened in the 2000s: who got decimated? It was those blue-collar skilled workers. That led to all sorts of unintended consequences: fentanyl abuse, widening inequality, the decline of Pennsylvania… The coastal regions captured all the wealth, while the salt of the earth—the honest, hardworking people in the heartland—were getting hammered.

Dan Dreyfus:

The irony today is that those very same people in the Midwest—the ones who were previously displaced—are now receiving extraordinarily high starting salaries.

You know, if you go to a vocational-technical college and graduate at the top of your class, you can walk out of high school with a starting salary of $150,000. And ironically, the work they’re doing now may very well be replacing—partially or entirely—the earlier, lower-tier white-collar workforce. So the situation has completely reversed itself. Look, this is an efficient market: jobs flow to where the money is, and right now, money is truly pouring into this sector.

Moderator:

Can we talk about a few other areas? What’s your view on other forms of energy—natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydrocarbons? I mean, the demand pool seems to suggest—if we base it solely on this—that perhaps the simplest conclusion is that we need ‘all of the above.’ But then, Dan, how do you differentiate? For example, why do you say you’re very bullish on solar? What’s your take on nuclear? How do you make trade-offs among all these different energy sources?

Dan Dreyfus:

The fact is, in this country, we’re swimming in natural gas—we have so much of it. We can build out solar; that’s not the bottleneck. As for nuclear, you know, we actually can’t really build it here—we can’t even manufacture containment vessels domestically. South Korea can, but we can’t produce them within the U.S. So there will always be significant bottlenecks in the system.

Dan Dreyfus:

Whether you’re talking about solar, natural gas, or uranium, we’ll always have the basic raw inputs—for example, natural gas we drill from underground. But what we’ll face shortages of are the critical minerals needed to build nuclear power plants. For instance, we’ll be short on silver—the very material required to manufacture solar panels—especially if we start deploying data centers in space, right? Those would consume staggering amounts of silver.

Dan Dreyfus:

But the current silver supply-demand dynamics are this: we consume 1.2 billion ounces annually, while annual supply stands at only 1 billion ounces. That leaves a shortfall of 200 million ounces per year, and we currently have only 600 million ounces of above-ground inventory remaining. So the clock is ticking, everyone—we’re down to roughly three years before we run completely dry. At that point, the solar story becomes: where do you get the silver needed for photovoltaic cells?

Moderator:

Therefore, as part of our asset allocation toolkit—for our children and for this generation across the nation—we should establish exposure to copper, silver, and minerals, along with a host of service providers operating around this sector, which we should research thoroughly over the coming year.

Dan Dreyfus:

Don’t forget about labor. Service providers—that’s a very large segment.

Moderator:

Alright, how do you allocate capital? You’re positioned right at the front end—owning mines and production—but there are also end-use applications. How do you decide where *not* to participate? Because many of these end markets appear incredibly compelling, yet you could still get crushed—if you’re in the wrong part of the market, you’ll face supply shocks and price dumping. It might seem obvious that you could make a fortune, but you could also suffer massive losses.

Dan Dreyfus:

Yes, look—you really must understand the supply chain deeply. I think for many people today, the supply chain remains a strange and mysterious concept. I still believe many Americans living in cities think ham sandwiches grow inside refrigerators—they never stop to consider that 30 million pigs are slaughtered each month just outside Chicago. Don’t get Friedberg started on this topic—but you absolutely need to identify bottlenecks and critical pinch points within the supply chain. That’s point number one.

Dan Dreyfus:

Second, I believe you must actively ensure you’re not vulnerable to technological disruption. In this space, you can find—this is what I think Friedberg was alluding to earlier—alternatives that alleviate the tightness and scarcity within the supply chain.

Moderator:

Let’s give a round of applause to Dan—excellent job! That was extremely, extremely insightful.

Dan Dreyfus:

Thanks, man.

Editor/Deng