What’s Coming in 2025? Bitcoin, Robots, Space Exploration & the AI Revolution w/ Salim Ismail | EP #137

It's becoming exceptionally difficult to predict what's happening next. I mean, the speed of change has been off the charts.

I did a talk last week to 200 CFOs of public companies and every one of them is now forced to consider Bitcoin as a Treasury component. That will send it to a million dollars of Bitcoin.

Claude 3 hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT01 hit an IQ of 120. I think we're going to see Grok 3 when it finishes its training and goes live, maybe hitting an IQ of 140.

I think we're just going to keep moving the goalposts. We'll hit AGI and now we're going to go, okay, we hit ogn. Nobody will even notice.

We're living during a period of hyper exponential growth and it's only accelerating and it's going to become incredible. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and our special end of year episode on WTF just happened in tech. In the next 30 minutes we're going to try and give you our best predictions for 2025 across the whole tech sphere industry. I'm here with Saleem Ismail. Also, this segment is sponsored by three companies. I use Daily Fountain, Viome and Oneskin Fountain helps me keep young. It's my partner across all the testing and diagnostics and therapeutics to help me find disease before it happens. Viome has built my custom supplementation for both oral and gut health. And one skin is how I'm reversing aging on my skin. Surprisingly, I get compliments all the time on my skin. Well, the way I do it is from Oneskin. Everything is linked below. Enjoy this episode of WTF just happened and we're gonna dive into 2025 and give you our best predictions for the year ahead. Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to WTF Just Happened in Tech. This week, a special episode of Moonshots with my dear friend Salim Ismail, the CEO of OpenExo, the first president of Singularity University, one of the smartest people in tech. I know. Salim, you're wearing your end of year Christmas outfit.

I totally am. I can't wait for the end of year to get here. This is a Norwegian ski sweater in the Lela hammer design some people know.

Was it made by humans or machines?

No, no, no. Very much humans. And you know in Norway when you watch families, they all ski together wearing family kind of signature things, top to bottom with the long tassels and they all ski down with dad having a picnic basket. On his arm. It's kind of incredible to watch as a cultural phenomenon.

You know, this red cord here is my Christmas celebration. So it's about as far as I'm going. Listen, this is a conversation we're going to look at both end of year and into 2025. We'll give you our predictions, we'll talk about where things are accelerating. You know, one of the things that's so true is it's becoming exceptionally difficult to predict what's happening next. I mean, the speed of change has been off the charts. And I can think of no better place to begin this conversation with. Holy shit. Bitcoin is now today at $107,000. We broke through 100k. You know, I hope your wife is happy with you when you mortgaged your home and bought bitcoin because it turned out to be a good deal.

Yeah, not enough of the mortgage went into bitcoin. But, you know, as Michael Saylor said, you get bitcoin at the price you deserve and you always, never can have enough. And everybody always regrets. There's no number, there's any number of people we both know, Peter, that had bitcoin on their hard drives. They mined 500 of them in the early days and lost it, et cetera. And so it's just the reality of it, but it's incredible to watch it. And I think the comment that we had with the other week was the most thing. As time goes by, bitcoin just expands my overall investment portfolio, naturally. And it's great.

Yeah. I had dinner with Mike in Miami in his beautiful yacht, which he's parked in front of his beautiful mansion. And we were talking about this and we're going to be doing a podcast in early January about how to get companies onto the bitcoin standard. And he is on the bitcoin standard. And it's a formula that he thinks can be utilized by other companies, both private and public. And I was saying, okay, for an individual, what do you do? Like, what do you do? I understand what you're doing with microstrategies. And he said, mortgage your home, sell all your non productive assets, put it into bitcoin. I mean, he is the bitcoin maximalist. And I have to say at this point, bitcoin is my largest holding. And every time I have any kind of exits, I'm sweeping it into bitcoin and not looking back. So how high will bitcoin go in 2025? What are your predictions?

My guess is 300k by the end of the year.

So I can't think of much that's going to perform at 300% growth. But what's interesting, if you look at microstrategies as a stock, it's outperforming Bitcoin itself by saying.

Well, because he's got this brilliant mechanism of using bonds to then buy Bitcoin to then add to the cord, and therefore the value augments at multiple levels. He's got this. Michael has this incredible analogy of the voltage patterns. And it's really amazing to hear because if you have a highly volatile electrical current, you need a modifier and then you need to kind of downsize it and down amp it and down regulate it. And basically that's what he does for the bond market.

So I think one of the things, when you think about what's accelerating, what's pushing it, as we start to get institutions that are really buying in more than ever, and as we start to see strategic reserves from potentially United States, potentially from other nations, there's only so much bitcoin. It's going to drive the price. I mean, we are going to see fluctuations. We saw this huge celebration when it hit 100k, dropped down to 96, 97. Now it's bounced up to 107. It's a slow and steady increase. Are you buying more?

Trying to. It's getting more expensive as time goes by, but yes, as much as I can grab, yeah.

Any other thoughts on Bitcoin before we turn the subject?

You know, I think the real measure, two points. One is it's really a measure against the deflation of the dollar. Right. The dollar is deflating about 14% a year. So your normal portfolio has to increase by 14% just to keep pace. So that's a huge kind of mental framing to put in mind. The second is less key point, that it's still a bit volatile. You have quantum computing algorithms that are coming along and there'll still be kind of quite a bit of nervousness around it in different ways. And there's still a couple of time bombs waiting to hit the crypto world that could cause a problem. But again, it's one of those where every time something happens, every time there's a shockwave in the system, bitcoin drops a bit and then just keeps going. And it doesn't matter whether China bans it or India bans it or Russia bans it or whatever the heck happens, it just keeps recovering from the shock.

It's a profound global 247 energy creation engine. So one thing that's interesting right we just saw this past week, Willow out of Hartmut Nevin's lab at Google, and a lot of buzz once again about whether Quantum can break the encryption codes. And I just want to put this on the table for everybody listening. If quantum should break encryption, the last thing to worry about is Bitcoin. Because if you could break encryption, the entire financial market world, your bank accounts, all real estate ownership, all of that could be easily manipulated and changed. And even before that, the US Nuclear codes. So concerned about Bitcoin, last thing on my list, if we get quantum decryption going.

Well, two quick points about that. One is if you have quantum encryption that breaks old things, we have quantum encryption that will recreate encryption models and therefore going forward, you'll be fine. What's under, I think the most threat is communications and stuff that's under lock and key from the past. Old communications, old emails, those are the ones under the most stress. And the time value, though, shrinks pretty rapidly as time goes by. So I think I'm pretty confident I agree with you. But bitcoin is still such a small piece of it. I just want to make one point that I had. I did a talk last week to 200 CFOs of public companies, Fortune 1000 companies, and every one of them is now forced to consider Bitcoin as a Treasury component because of what's going on. And if 1% of the Fortune 1000 put some of their treasury in bitcoin, that will send it to a million dollars of bitcoin.

You heard it here first, folks. A million dollars a coin, minimal. A minimum over time. And so it's a performing asset class. And, you know, I think what I would propose people do, if you haven't yet, spend 10 hours over the holidays, spend 20 hours over the holidays, watch some of Mike Sailors videos, plug yourself into, you know, Gemini 2.0 or.

Or read the bitcoin white paper.

Yeah. Actually, the better thing to do is take the bitcoin white paper and put it into Google's. What do you call it? What's their Gemini? No, no, no, no, no. The platform where it will turn into a podcast. Notebook LM. Yeah. So put it into Notebook LM. Put the white paper into NotebookLM and it will generate a podcast about the white paper with two incredibly fun voices speaking about it and making it very understandable. So that's your Christmas assignment. If you're not into Bitcoin yet, boom. It's. It's really easy to learn about it and create your own opinion about it. And it's, Is it something that you need to have a percentage of your portfolio in? This is not investment advice. I am not an investment advisor. It is what I'm doing and I just think it's, it's amazing. Bitcoin equals longevity. Bitcoin equals abundance. There is this, you know, if we're going to be living for, you know, age 100, 120, 150, having an asset like that to be by your side, I think is important.

It's really critical. And if the dollar was a measure of the scarcity economy, Bitcoin is the underpinning of the abundance economy.

It is. All right, I have a huge number of questions that came in from our community, our Moonshot listeners and on X, and I want to jump through many of these with you. So the first is what's your concrete predictions for big tech in 2025 across the following sectors. AI and AGI, humanoid robots, EVs and BCI. All right, let's dive in. So, AI and AGI, what are we going to see in 2025? Well, what did we just see? We just saw Elon build Xai out to 100,000 GPUs and soon 200,000 GPUs. And I don't know, was he joking when he said he wants to build a million, a cluster of a million GPUs?

No, not at all. And there's something really important here to, to point out, you know, when he started stitching. There's a problem in these chips when more and more you put together into a cluster, getting coherence amongst them and an aggregate performance and compounded performance is very, very hard. All the AI chip experts said what he's doing will never, ever work.

I love that.

And again, he did the same thing he does repeatedly. Beware the expert, as we say in our book. He went to first principles and if you had to redesign the coherence and the aggregate compound performance by scratch, what it would look like, and boom, he's got 100,000 cluster working and it's blown the minds of every AI researcher out there. Incredible, incredible.

So this is like the third or fourth time he's done that, right? I remember in the early days of SpaceX when he said he's going to land and reuse the Falcon 9 for a stage. Boeing, Lockheed, all of the launch providers were like, this guy's crazy. He has no idea what he's talking about. And he does it. And he sucked the oxygen out of the room in the launch market with 90 plus percent going to 99%. And when Starship starts operating, it's game over. It's the final, final nail in the coffin for anybody.

I have a second piece of homework for people.

What's that?

If you've not seen the video of heavy being caught in the chopstick thing, go watch that. It'll send bone chills down your spine.

Yeah, it's the greatest engineering feat of this decade or the last couple of decades. And in some part, sometime in the Q1 Q2 of 2025, we're going to see not just the booster segment of starship, but also the starship itself, which is the upper portion being caught again by those chopsticks. And that makes it fully reusable. And when you make these spaceships fully reusable, the price drops down precipitously. You know, it's interesting if you ask the question what percentage of the rocket cost is hardware, labor and fuel? You know, the fuel for a Falcon 9 has been like a half of 1% of the cost, which means if you can make it reusable, you can drop the cost down a hundredfold. And so when starship becomes fully reusable and guess what? They're not just building one or two or ten, they're building hundreds of these starships. Humanity is getting ready for a highway to the stars.

And what's even more important is the drop in cost. Right. It used to cost an average of $600 million launch when we were launching space shuttles.

Can I give that number? We had a budget of about $3 billion to run the space shuttle program. So if you launched one space shuttle per year, it was $3 billion per launch. And if you launched four space shuttles per year, do the math at 750 million per launch. And that was was just a public works project.

That's right. And then SpaceX dropped it by 10x. And now we've got the new generation of relativity space in agony out of India that are doing it for. They're going to be able to do it for about $6 million. And this goes to your whole 60s demonetization aspect, right? 100x drop in the cost of launching a rocket over say a 2025 year period. That blows your mind because rockets aren't some Silicon Valley gaming, social media, digital play. This is physical reality dealing with the gravity well of the and even there we're seeing 100x drops. So what's possible in other domains? I just reflect on that with just incredible amazement.

One of my predictions for 2025 is out of the Trump White House. We're going to hear a historically hearkening back to the year 1961 where JFK said, I challenge you to go to the Moon by this decade. I think we're going to hear, I challenge us to get to Mars by the end of this decade and put boots on Mars. And the second half of this prediction is it's likely to be Optimi or an Optimus robot that goes to the Martian surface.

They don't need to breathe as much.

Not as much. Yeah.

They don't eat viruses, they don't eat.

They don't sleep and not eat as much.

They don't unionize.

And they can stay there and hang out and build a robot army so that by the time we were humans, we carbon meat sacks get there, they've built a nice home and a nice sort of lounge and a Jacuzzi ready for us. So we're going to enjoy Mars when we get there. But going back to predictions on AI and AGI, so I think we're going to see Grok 3. So interesting unintelligence. What are we going to see? So we saw the average IQ a year ago. Anthropic's Claude 3 hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT01 hit an IQ of 120 on chain of thought reasoning. And I think we're going to see Grok 3 when it finishes its training and goes live, maybe hitting an IQ of 140.

I'm going to put that prediction 130 is the current level. So 140 is totally doable.

Yeah. So intelligence we're going to see, you know, do we see GPT5 in 2025? What do you think.

The rate of. So two things. The rate of output from OpenAI has been unbelievable. Having said that, there's definitely some weird stuff going on. Lots of people are leaving mira, the CTO is leaving. And so there's some funny politics going on there. But the aggregate field is moving ahead so fast that it's going to happen one way or the other. You know, my beef about AI and AGI in terms of the definition of it. So we don't need to kind of get into here. I think we're just going to keep hitting, moving the goalposts. We'll hate AGI and everybody go, okay, we had OGI and nobody will even notice.

Yeah, I agree with you. You know, we passed the Turing Test and people, people ignored it, yawned or just said, oh, interesting. And, you know, there's Some belief right now and I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this that we've reached quote AGI, whatever that means. It's an undefined boundary. But oh my God, I am so impressed by what we can get out of Gemini 2 and GPT01 and Claude 3.5. If people haven't played with this, your third assignment, you're giving people too much homework over the holidays is just play. Kristen is planning this huge dinner celebration for a bunch of friends and you know, GPT, you know, ChatGPT generated everything. You know, the shopping list, the step by steps, the menu generation. And I've just seen it being used. People are not using it enough.

Yeah, totally. 100% agree. We should be. It should be a constant companion where it's kind of, you're speaking to it, it's listening to and maybe even poking and going, hey, don't forget about this. You forgot these three considerations when comment, et cetera, et cetera.

What's the funniest thing you've seen or the funnest thing you've done with one of these AI models?

The first thing I ever did, which is still, I think one of the funnest was I told it to Rewrite Genesis chapter 1 from the Bible as a rap song. And it was just awesome. It was just mind bogglingly good. How interesting. That was the thing that I've done most recently that I've been tweaking, you know, this whole thing of what is intelligence Soapbox I've been on.

I'm still laughing about that first one.

So I've gone on, I've kind of extended that to go as you move intelligence down that spectrum, you get to consciousness, self awareness, collective consciousness. So I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to come up with a spectrum of intelligences like a signal from noise, kind of data mining. Type at one level, then at the middle you have human intelligence with emotional intelligence and spatial intelligence and linguistic intelligence. And then you get to hyperintelligence, collective consciousness, the more spiritual aspects. For example, it's well known that when a group of people meditate together that everybody in meditation is much more powerful. So there's a kind of a group effect that comes into intelligence and consciousness that I think is interesting to explore. If people are interested, I can put a link to that in the show notes where they can look at what the AI came up with as the different pieces along the way. It's really, really fascinating. Saved me dozens of hours of research, trying to figure it all out myself.

Agreed. And it will organize and present and structure in a way that's fully understandable.

Amazing.

The next part of the conversation here that was asked is what's your predictions for 2025 on humanoid robots? But just again, on the AI and AGI, I think we're going to hit IQs in the 140. I think we're going to see Grok 3 come live. I think we're going to see GPT or chat or GPT5 coming live. By the end of 2025, I think we can't imagine Anthropic is not going to be coming out with a cloud four. So everything is moving forward. And one of the questions, when do you think, speaking of consciousness, when are we going to see an AI model? That you're like, holy shit, this thing is alive. This thing is behaving it like, left me a message, it wrote me an email and said, peter, I'd like to chat with you about something. When we get, you know, it's like, when are we going to see that happening?

Yeah, coming from a human or robot, that would be a little bit. Oh my God, what the hell does he want to talk about?

What did we do? What was the.

What did we do? So I really like had Lipson's framing here, right? Hod has a path to what he thinks how an AI achieves consciousness, which is when you consider a human being to think of themselves into the future, they're really good at it. Mosquitoes are not going to consider themselves in the future. But you can say to a human being, what do you think you look like five years from now? He started running that line of questioning with an AI and he feels that that's a path with the feedback loop that that creates. The AI is now forced to ponder who am I as an entity? And that leads to self awareness fairly quickly. If you ask that question of Gemini or ChatGPT has been blocked for precisely what they think, these reasons, but somebody's going to do open source local downloads of this and start posing those things and run that vector. And I think I will say something really crazy. I think in the next 18 months, if not this next coming year, we'll see something where you have what either is self aware or simulates self awareness to such an extent that you could call it the SALIM test of consciousness if you wanted to, of course. Can you distinguish between a human being that's conscious and self aware and a humanoid robot or an AI that's conscious and self aware? How would you think about that?

I just spoke Yesterday to Joshua, the CEO of Heygen. Right. Which is the company making those incredible models and doing full translation. You're creating your avatar. They're building a next generation avatar of me. Actually, I may be the avatar. I don't know, but there will be.

To get to a great point. Sorry, I get to a great point where somebody would rather talk to your avatar than you because the avatar will have full awareness of everything you've ever said and done and the right references, et cetera. And you won't.

Oh my God. On a past Moonshot podcast, I interviewed my avatar, my Peterbot, and it was so eloquent, it was so capable of structuring argument. I was jealous. I was actually very jealous. And it's.

We need a big red button on some of these things to preserve our egos.

But I think there's going to be a point also in 2025 where we will all 25 or 26, but we'll have an avatar that has. You've structured it with all of your emails, all of your thought patterns, all of your opinions and you can send that avatar into a zoom meeting on your behalf.

Right?

That's already happening. We're already seeing hey gen. Creating avatars that go into a zoom meeting.

I think that will happen next year for sure. It doesn't have to be longer. I'll just end this segment with my normal kind of pain in the ass question around this topic of consciousness and self awareness, which is we don't have a definition for consciousness and we don't have a test for it. It's a hard topic to cop about.

Well, we'll just ask AI for that. All right, next up is humanoid robots. So what's our prediction for humanoid robots in 2025? A lot going on in humanoid robots, right? I just put out a Metatrend report. Folks can get it for free@metatrendreport.com on. I looked at the top 16 robot companies and it's a detailed dive into that. The report's free and there's now probably a good solid hundred well funded humanoid robot companies.

And we're seeing critical mass to an amazing level.

I did the calculation. So both Brett Adcock, who will be on my stage at the Abundance Summit this year, super excited to have Brett there. We'll have two other robot companies there in the Google Tech hub and Brett and Elon both predict a, you know, 20 to $30,000 price for the robots. Let's call it 30,000. If you lease a $30,000 car, your monthly lease payments are about 300 bucks, which is $10 a day. So imagine a robot, a fully functional Grok 3 GPT5 robot, multimodal. It understands what it's seeing, you can speak to it, and it's 40 cents an hour to operate. I mean, things become fascinating. How many of those would you own? How many would you want?

You know, I would not want to be the first owner of this. Right? Just because you. In the end you should only need one because it should be able to do everything. But that's down the line. But in the interim there's so many little things like power and what happens if it does something inappropriate like stumbles over and breaks my favorite vase? Who's liable right there, right? So there's all sorts of things that will come along that I think will slow down the progress. The way we've seen autonomous cars get slowed down by the human element of drivers not being able to deal with it, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's going to take longer to get that kind of in home adoption that people want. Or it'll have to be restricted to specific use cases where it's very prescriptive and predictable and it has a very confined range of activity like putting the baby to sleep, like changing the baby's diapers, right?

So you walk into the room and the robots holding the baby up by one leg.

I mean, the humor that's going to come from this, right, Is going to be ridiculous. And I think that may be the funnest part of all of this as to what the inadvertent consequences of that. So when we talk about AIs and interacting with AIs, it's still very much in the cloud. It's ephemeral, it's not tangible, it's not substantive. Sitting next to us. When a robot's sitting next to you and it decides it's annoyed with you, what will it do and what are you going to do? So there's a whole range of socio emotional questions that come into play here that I don't think we've really understood. Well, the whole field. This is going to create a massive new area of interfacing with an autonomous humanoid robot is going to be a massive area of study over the next decade, 20, 30 years and ongoing.

Well, I mean, so listen, the predictions for the number of humanoid robots. I was interviewing Elon when I was on stage in riyadh at the FII 8 summit and I asked him outright how many humanoid robots by 2040 gave the same answer that Brett Adcock said 10 billion humanoid robots, at least one per human on the planet. And so that's a pretty extraordinary prediction. Did you see the humanoid robot that was just buzzing around on X called Clone?

I did not see that.

Yeah. So it is a robot that uses hydraulic pressure and it looks like Westworld.

Oh, yes.

Yeah. So it basically it has in your hand, all of your muscles that control your fingers are up in the upper forearm. And so it has the same sort of functionality, the same sort of bicep, tricep. You replicate the exact muscles and so you can get the exact same type of mechanical interactions.

See, this gets me really annoyed. Why? Because, you know, yeah, as a. Human beings are great because we have an opposable thumb, right? But why not have 12 fingers instead of 5? Why not have 4 sets of eyes on all sides of our heads? And the only reason is to give comfort to the real human beings that this thing is not too alien, but it's way alien. We should just call it that and have it look like an octopus and let it operate in the. All the elegance that an octopus can, rather than trying to constrain it into five fingers on this hand that do certain things and manipulate objects the way we're supposed to manipulate them. You could get so much more range of options if you could step past the limitations or 4 billion years of revolution creating this idiotic looking thing that's bald, you know. And so I think there's so much more you could do with it by having. Have five arms and 16 fingers each, et cetera, et cetera. This is the part I don't understand because, for example, let's say my favorite example of how a humanoid robot might work is as a sous chef, right? I'm cooking a complicated Indian biryani and I need to collect like 14 different ingredients. It would be fantastic at that. Well, why is it limited to two goddamn arms for that? Why can't it have six? And it'll whip it all together right in front of me in three seconds.

Well, you could just add, you could have four other robots that are sharing their mind space and are coordinating everything they're doing. I think that the notion is you've got a general purpose humanoid robot that can fit in your car, can walk upstairs, can crawl under the bed to find a sock, can do everything that we can, and if you need more arms or legs, you just pool a few of them together. I mean, we're going to see there's a Darwinian evolution occurring right now, and someone's going to win the race.

Okay, so two comments. One, I think it's fantastic. There's 100 companies funded for this. This really gives it credibility and weight. And you'll see the evolution of that domain move very, very quickly, which is fantastic. All I want right now is a car that will drive my kid to school every day and bring it back. And you have to think about that. All right, well, let's jump that.

Let's jump into that because that's our next topic here on the list that was asked, which is EVs and autonomous cars. So a lot of progress there. I'm sitting here in Santa Monica, and the number of autonomous waymos running around, it's like ridiculously large. It used to be I would see the Waymos, you know, last year they were buzzing around and mapping and there was a driver in the seat. And now I probably, as I'm driving back and forth between my studio and the house, I probably see five or six waymos. They're all, you know, driverless with typically one person in the car. Typically, I'm seeing them more in the front seat than the back seat. And we just saw the Cyber Cab released by Tesla, which has two seats versus four seats, and it's a lot cheaper. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is Elon made the first principle decision. If humans can drive using only eyes, an autonomous car can drive using only eyes.

Again, typically courageous of Elon, because human eyes are notoriously limited in their ability to see things properly in the speed of recognition, et cetera. But when you operate out that design principle, then it allows you lots of scope. I think what I'm really fascinated by is tracking the number of rides that's being done by Waymo. I think it crossed 100,000 a week, a month ago. This is incredible. This has hit a tipping point now, bringing to real reality. And now I think we're going to get Wright's law and demonetization effects kicking in. Where the cost of driving should be dropping like a stone is right now about a dollar a mile, if you add up the cost of the car or whatever, and all the leasing costs, fuel, maintenance, etc. And there's no reason why it shouldn't be a few cents a mile. So I think this is where I think things will become incredibly excited. I just got a. An electric Porsche Macan okay, next to my 2017 Model S. And it's incredible to me that the car industry, it's a brilliant car. It's just fantastic. And it's really A and I'm a bit of a driving enthusiast so it's really a car. So I love it, but it's not much better. It's by far I think the best electric car in the world right now as far as I can see. But it's not much better than my.

But it doesn't have autopilot. It's like I don't care how fast.

It does, but it doesn't have f. Full self driving.

I mean.

Yeah. And weirdly I still prefer my Tesla. I just. I just love that goddamn Tesla for the breakthroughs and the way I feel in it. It's incredible what it's been accomplished. I much rather have a car that's much more software than hardware.

Yeah.

And that gives you huge power and scope and flexibility going forward.

I love my full self driving. I use it all the time. I just hate the fact that I can't text and drive. So I'm looking forward to. I mean seriously, again stupid regulatory. Yeah, well. And we'll see that, we'll see that soon. You and I have been on stages together around the world for God knows.

Better part of 15 years now.

Yeah, 15 years. And I remember our conversations about self driving cars for that 15 years. And it was always around the corner, it was always coming next year. Where are we now?

I think it's here. I think it's really here.

Just do your sanity check on this.

Look in a Tesla with fsd. You feel it in a Waymo that's driving you around. You see it, you can't ignore it anymore. And it's one of these things that they'll sneak up on people. Remember those curves where the early. We always over optimize on the short term and we radically underestimate the long term. It's an old futurist framing. We will get to full self driving and we'll get to autonomous cars and we won't even notice.

Salim, have you put your son in a Waymo yet? Because you've wanted that?

I wanted that forever. I'm hoping to hell he never gets a driving license or doesn't have to or don't have to worry about that. But I don't think it's going to happen just because we don't have Waymo here. I've not done it, otherwise I would have done it for sure.

I should do that with my kids here just to give them a fun experience. All right, let's go to one more sort of 2025 prediction which is in the realm of BCI. So what's going to be happening in there. And let me throw the first one out. It's not exactly bci, but it is doing with the brain. So we saw something amazing just recently, which was the connectome, right. Of a fruit fly. Really small, but still significant. The first time we've seen a large organism like that relative to a nematode worm. The connectome of a fruit fly, 154,000 neurons and some 50 million synaptic connections was perfectly mapped and they were able to put it on silico so that you could say, okay, this is a silicon representation of a fruit fly and if we give it some sugar water here or poke it there, what will it do? And you looked at that and then when you actually gave the actual fly water or a poke, it did exactly what the computer model would predict. And I think that technology is going to take us to being able to upload the brain of a mouse. And on stage this year at the Abundance Summit, you're going to meet a CEO who thinks for $50 million he's got the technology to upload the entire human brain. So that will be amazing. Any thoughts on bci?

Two different topics here. One is digital twin type modeling, which I think is very real and will happen much faster than people think. Because when you scale these models, because the minute you can do modeling and visualization, you have a feedback loop. And when you can do things like FMRI scans in real time, scan the brain and have that be an active input into the modeling, you can essentially trap everything and therefore there's no limit to it except for computation at that point. And we have computation growing exponentially and AI growing 10x exponentially. So I'm super excited about that. The brain upload part. I do know they can now, even now, if you die suddenly, they can trap all key information and bring it back at some later point. So that whole kind of concept of living past and going through those type of seven things has already happened. The connectome and modeling the brain in that level, I think is very exciting, but I think it's still a little bit ways away.

Yeah. And we'll see the announcement in 2025 of a few other BCI companies. One I'm excited about. Again, we'll be on stage at the Abundance Summit is science. This is Max Hodak, who is the co founder of neuralink in the past president with Elon, and then went off to start Science.

I do want to make one point about all this though, please. Yeah, I think the one way we're going to see this happening is if you think about how we use our brains today, we don't use our memory anymore. All our memory is in our smartphone or it's in the cloud. So we don't have to worry about that anymore. Now we can free up those neurons for other things. And I think as we bring more and more brain computing interfaces online, we'll take chunks of processing that the brain is doing today and offload it and it'll make the rest of our brain much more active and much more alive.

So there you've got it. Some 30 minutes of predictions for 2025 on BCI, on space, on Bitcoin, AI, robots, autonomous cars. One of my favorite things right now is the notion that we're living during a period of hyper exponential growth and it's only accelerating and it's going to become incredible. What's your Christmas gift list? Wish list? What do you want? You want AGI? You want a bci?

Do you want world peace? How about that? Okay, we can go there and I really want to see the end of 2024. I think the whole planet needs to go and get really drunk.

All right, you heard it, everybody. So you got three homework assignments. I hope you enjoyed this special episode with Salim Ismail, my co author for EXO2, the CEO of OpenExo, my best buddy for predicting the future. Thank you, Saleem.

Great to be here.