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

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

In this episode, Peter and Salim discuss their 2025 predictions for tech, AI, EVs, Humanoid Robots, and more. Recorded on Dec 16th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice 11:09 | Bitcoin's Future and Its Role in Investment 20:40 | Predictions for AI and AGI in 2025 35:17 | The Future of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail  Pre-Order my Longevity Guidebook here: https://qr.diamandis.com/book-audiopodcast ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at  https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

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. Flaud 3 hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPTO 1 hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT-01 hit an IQ of 120. I think we're going to see GROK3, 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 hate AGI, and we're going to go, oh, OK, we hit AGI, 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 your episode on WTF Just Happened in Tech. 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 OneSkin 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 going to dive into 2025 and give you our best predictions for the year ahead. Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to WTF Just Happened 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 Open EXO, 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 Lillehammer design. So some people know that. Was it made by humans or machines? No, no, no, very much humans. And it's, 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. It's 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. 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. I hope your wife is happy with you when you mortgage your home and bought Bitcoin, because it turned out to be a good deal. Yeah, not enough of the mortgage went into Bitcoin. But 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 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, etc. 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? You know, I understand what you're doing with with micro strategies and you said mortgage your home Sell all your non-productive assets put into Bitcoin I mean he is the Bitcoin maximalist and And I have to say, at this point, Bitcoin is my largest holding. And every time I have any kind of exit,

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 micro strategies as a stock, it's outperforming Bitcoin itself. Well, because he's got this brilliant mechanism of using bonds to then buy Bitcoin to then add to the 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 downregulate 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 that'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? increase. Are you buying more? I'm 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? I think the real measure, two points. One is it's really a measure against the deflation of the dollar. 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 let's keep in point that it's still a bit volatile. You have quantum computing algorithms that are coming along, and there's 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 shock wave in the system, Bitcoin drops a bit and then just keeps going. Yeah. 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 shops. And I think that's profound.

Global 24-7 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 you're 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 threat. And the time value, though, shrinks pretty rapidly as time goes by.

So I think I'm pretty confident, and 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 puts some of their treasury in Bitcoin, that will send it to a million dollars a 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 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 Saylor's videos, plug yourself into Gemini 2.0 or chat. 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 notebook. Notebook LM. Yeah. So put it into notebook LM, put the white paper into notebook LM 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. It's really easy to learn about it and create your own opinion about it. 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 amazing.

Bitcoin equals longevity. Bitcoin equals abundance. There is this, if we're going to be living for 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. 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 point out. 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, but we're the expert as we see in our book. He went to first principles and if he 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 has blown the minds of every AI researcher out there. Incredible. So this is like the third or fourth time he's done that, right? I remember in the early days of SpaceX when when he said he's gonna 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, right? With 90 plus percent going to 99%. And when Starship starts operating, it's game over. It's the 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 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. It's interesting. If you ask the question, what percentage of the rocket cost is hardware, labor, and fuel, the fuel for 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 hundred fold. And so when Starship becomes fully reusable, and guess what, they're not just building one or two or 10, 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

a 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 shut shuttle per year, it was $3 billion per launch. And if you launched four space shuttles per year, do the math, it's $750 million per launch. And that was it.

It 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 and Agni out of India that are doing it first. they're going to be able to do it for about $6 million. And this goes to your whole 60s demonetization aspect, right? A 100x drop in the cost of launching a rocket over say a 20, 25 year period, that blows

your mind because, you know, rockets aren't some Silicon Valley gaming, social media, digital play. This is physical reality dealing with the gravity well of the earth. And even there we're seeing 100x drops. So what's possible in other domains? I just reflect on that. It was 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 optimist robot that goes to the Martian surface. Yeah.

They don't need to breathe as much. Way easier. Yeah. And they don't catch viruses. They don't need to breathe as much. Not as much. Way easier. They don't catch viruses. They don't take coffee breaks. They don't eat. 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 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. 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. So going back to predictions on AI and AGI. So I think we're going to see Grok 3. So interesting on intelligence, what are we going to see? So we saw the average IQ a year ago, Grok, I'm sorry, Anthropix, Claude 3 hit an IQ of 101. Yeah. We just saw GPT-01 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 in though. Yeah, I've heard 130 is the current level. So 140 is totally doable. Yeah. So intelligence, we're going to see, you know, do we see GPT-5 in 2025? What do you think?

I believe so. Defined. The rate of, so two things, the rate of output from opening 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 moving the goalposts. We'll hate AGI. Now we're going to go, OK, we hate AGI. Nobody will even notice. Yeah. I agree with you. We passed the Turing test, and people ignored it, yawned, or just said, oh, interesting.

And 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 GPT-01 and Claude 3.5. I mean, if people haven't played with this, you know, your third assignment, you're giving people too much

homework over the holidays is just play. Like Kristen is planning this huge dinner celebration for a bunch of friends and you know, GPT, you know, chat GPT 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 speed, you're speaking to it, it's listening to you and maybe even poking and going, hey, don't forget about this. You forgot these three considerations when making that 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 one from the Bible as a rap song. 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 pre-king, you know this whole thing of what is intelligence? The soapbox I've been on? I'm still laughing about that first one.

So I've extended that to go, as you move intelligence down that spectrum, you get to consciousness, self-awareness, collective consciousness. So I asked Chachi P.T. 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 like 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. Save me dozens of hours of research trying to figure it all out myself. Yeah, agreed. And it will organize and present and structure in a way that's fully understandable. Amazing.

Yeah. All right, so 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 hit IQs in the 140. I think we're going to see Grok 3 come live. I think we're going to see GPT 5 coming live by the end of 2025.

I think we can't imagine anthropics not going to be coming out with a Claude 4. So everything is moving forward. And one of the questions, when do you think, speaking of consciousness, when are we gonna 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 are we gonna see that happening? Yeah, coming from a human or a robot, that would be a little bit, oh my God, what the hell does he want to talk about? What did we do?

What did we do? What did we do? Um, uh, so I really like Hod 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 in 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? And he started running that line of questioning with an AI and he feels that that's a path with

the feedback 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 ChapTPT, it's 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 can you distinguish between a human being that's conscious of self-aware and a human-ordered robot or an AI that's conscious of self-aware? How would you think about that? I just spoke yesterday to Joshua, the CEO of HeyGen,

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 a point. You know, if you get to a great point, sorry, I'll 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, arguing.

I was jealous. I was actually very jealous. And it's getting better from there. We need a big red button on some of these things to preserve our egos. But I think there's gonna 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. 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 a third 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. Yeah. And so it's a hard topic to talk 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 at metatrendreport.com.

I looked at the top 16 robot companies, and it's a detailed dive into that reports free and there's now probably a Good solid hundred well-funded humanoid robot companies and We're getting critical mass to an amazing level. I did the calculation So both Brett adcock 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 $20,000 to $30,000 price for the robot. Let's call it $30,000. If you lease a $30,000 car, your monthly lease payments are about $300, which is $10 a day. So imagine a robot, a fully functional Grok 3 GPT-5 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. Okay, but that's 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

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? You walk into the room and the robots hold the baby up by one leg. I mean, the humor that's going to come from this is going to be ridiculous. I think that may be the funnest part of all of this as to what the inadvertent consequences of that. So, you know, when you talk to, we talked about AIs, 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 gonna create a massive new area of interfacing with an autonomous humanoid robot is gonna be a massive area of study over the next 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 FII8 summit and I asked him outright how many

humanoid robots by 2040, gave the same answer that Brett Atcock 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 Cologne? I did not see that. So it is a robot that uses hydraulic pressure and it is, looks like Westworld, right?

Oh yes. Yeah, so it basically, it has in your hand, you know, 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 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 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 four billion years of revolution creating this idiotic looking thing that's bald. And so I think there's so much more you could do with it by having five arms and 16 fingers each, et cetera, et cetera. This is the part I don't understand. Because for example, let's say I have my favorite example of how a human ordered robot might work 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 work 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 into the bed to find a sock, can

do everything that we can. 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 pull a few of them together. I mean, we're gonna see, there's a Darwinian evolution occurring right now and someone's gonna win the race. It's okay.

So two comments. One, I think it's fantastic. There's a hundred 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 know, I have to think about that. And we can't even have 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. You know, 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 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 CyberCab 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 principal 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, etc. But when you operate outside 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 I think we're going to get rights law and demobilization effects kicking in where the cost of driving should be dropping.

We're like a stone is right now about a dollar a mile. If you add up the cost of the car or whatever, whatever, and all the leasing costs, fuel maintenance, et cetera, 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 an electric Porsche Macan next to my 2017 Model S. And it's incredible to me that the car industry is a brilliant car.

It's just fantastic. And I'm a bit of a driving enthusiast. So it's really a 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. 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 Model S.

But it doesn't have autopilot. It's like, I don't care how fast or. It does, but it doesn't have F, full self driving. Full self driving. Yeah. And weirdly, I still prefer my Tesla. 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. Yeah, again, stupid regulatory. Yeah, well, and we'll see that soon. You and I have been on stages together around the world for God knows a better part of... 15 years now. Yeah, 15 years now.

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 a sanity check on this. Look, in a Tesla with FSD, you feel it. In a Waymo that's driving 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 soft 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. Yeah. 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 into on silico so that you could say, OK, 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 we're going to 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 types of 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 and 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 hard 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. You know, 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 gonna become incredible. What's your Christmas gift list, wish list? What do you want? In the tech world. You want AGI, you want a BCI? Do you want world peace? How about that? 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 of 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, Salim. Salim Ismail Great to be here.