Bitcoin vs. Stocks: What’s the Smarter Investment? (AMA) w/ Salim Ismail | EP #139

In this episode, Peter and Salim answer questions from X about investing strategies, traveling to Mars, the AGI takeover, and more. Recorded on Dec 16th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice 04:45 | The Future of Space Exploration 09:55 | Brain-Computer Interfaces and Human Enhancement 35:17 | The Impact of AI on Warfare 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/bookyt ____________ 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  The numbers are insane Bitcoin compared to everything else over the last, you know, number of years. Outperformance is off the charts.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I think that's probably going to be the safest bet going forward and I would much rather put my money into Bitcoin than an aggregate fund today.

• 0:17Peter Diamandis?

  Is it still safe to own the broad stock market through an index fund over the next 20 years, considering all the disruption that's going to occur? The biotech industry was decimated over the last four years. I think a lot of that's going to come back. So index funds around small biotechs think will do well.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Make your organization as adaptable as possible and that will give you future proofing and staying power. That was what is going to drive the future in a huge way.

• 0:45Peter Diamandis?

  How high will Bitcoin go in 2025? What are your predictions?

• 0:49Speaker 01

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

• 0:55Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, welcome to Moon Shots, our special end of year episode in which I'm going to be answering your questions. We're doing an AMA myself and Saleem Ismail in this special WTF just happened in tech. This segment is sponsored by three companies I use daily Fountain, Viome and OneSkin. Fountain is my company that helps me avoid disease and helps me understand what's happening to me. I go for an annual upload every year to answer two questions. Anything going on inside my body I need to know about and what's happening to me in the future that I can optimize myself. Viome is built custom supplementations for a surprisingly affordable price. They measure

• 1:35Peter Diamandis?

  my gut microbiome and deliver supplements that are custom made for my body, my gut, my oral microbiome. And OneSkin is how I keep my skin looking young. I get a lot of compliments on my skin, which constantly surprise me. And I tell people it's from my OneSkin product, incredible technology for finding senile cells on my skin, zapping them and keep me, you know, looking good, at least to myself in the mirror. Everything is linked below. Enjoy this episode. Your questions answered by Salim and myself. All right, Salim, we have a lot of really incredible questions. And some of these are made me think and I'm excited about your thoughts. The first one is from Zovarians.

• 2:17Peter Diamandis?

  It says, if BMIs grant us unprecedented access to the human mind, how will this redefine our concept of privacy, agency, even what it means to be human? And when he says BMIs, he doesn't mean, you know, body mass index. It's a brain-computer interface or brain-machine interface. So what happens there? What do you think?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  You know, it's like I said in the last episode, right? I think we're going to take increasingly more functions of the brain that we have dedicated neurons towards. Like our memory neurons are now outsourced to the smartphone. It's just going to free us up a lot more for the creative aspects of being more human. For the last couple of hundred years in work, you got measured by how robotic you were, how many widgets a thing you could do. And now the most valuable employees and colleagues you have are the ones that can are the most human. And they can learn the fastest.

• 3:08Peter Diamandis?

  I think we're going to, this is going to, if you allow it, if you turn on intimacy mode where someone else can know your, all of your thoughts. There's a level of intimacy that occurs that is very rare today. I think you're going to give AI access to everything because it'll make your life automagical. All right, so at Beaz asks, thoughts on Sailor and MicroStrategy's Bitcoin playbook? So at Beaz, as I mentioned in a previous podcast, I just had dinner with Michael and his playbook is amazing. We're going to do a podcast actually on how to implement his playbook, how to turn other companies on the Bitcoin standard.

• 3:53Peter Diamandis?

  The performance of MicroStrategy is off the charts. And, and Michael is one of the most brilliant people that I know. And he has gone, he's divin, he's dove in deep.

• 4:06Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let me ask this one of you, my friend. Are you concerned that quantum computers breaking encryption and hacking crypto wallets? What do you think about that?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I'm not because as we get to quantum encryption break or quantum breaking encryption, we also have quantum encryption standards that are emerging. And we'll just move to the standard, it's an arms race. What is under threat is all the decades of past stuff that's encrypted, that will be at more risk, but the time value of that is much lower.

• 4:35Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've heard people say we've got about three years to start getting, switching over, maybe, you know, and five years we need to be there. But just to remind folks, I'm not concerned about it breaking encryption on my Bitcoin wallets. I'm concerned about breaking encryption on nuclear codes or on the entire banking industry. Much bigger concern, you know, your Bitcoin wallets, may they grow exponentially.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  And peacefully.

• 5:03Peter Diamandis?

  And peacefully, not the major problem. All right. At Mouse Boy Science says, will you in any way contribute to the Mars colonial missions, starting in six years? What would you, would you go yourself or provide resources for those who go on your behalf? When will we see humans on Mars? So, great question. When I was interviewing Elon last in October, I asked him, I said, Elon, when is Starship going to Mars? And his answer was aggressively, the next couple of years. So I think we're going to see, as soon as Starship is operating, it's going to be going to orbit around the Earth. We'll see it landing on the moon with its landing legs, and then we'll see it going to Mars. I mentioned in a previous episode

• 5:47Peter Diamandis?

  in my predictions for 2025, that I think we're going to get a clarion call from the Trump White House saying, boots on Mars by 2030, reminiscent of JFK, but those boots are going to be an optimist robot. When would I go? I'd like to go to the moon, actually. That's my, my first priority. Mars, sure. After, there's a nice chalet and jacuzzi waiting for me there. I don't want to rough it. I'll rough it on the moon because it's close by. But on Mars, if I'm going to go for two or three years, I want to be able to enjoy myself. So, some robots digging Martian soil and building first. How about you? Do you want to go to Mars?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Um, I, I really don't. It doesn't look so great over there. I totally agree with you on the moon. I would go there in a second. I think Mars is for the next hundred years or so, definitely a one-way ticket.

• 6:36Peter Diamandis?

  Really? No, I don't agree with that. I think it's a round trip.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  One-way ticket, meaning you can get there. It's going to be very hard to get back.

• 6:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, the whole idea of Starship is that it's being fueled with methane.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Not from a physics perspective. It's the human, it's the time lag, it's the, it's all of the, the human aspects of all of that. I think we'll send humanoid robots for a while and that'll be great. I think it'll be a while before we send the first human beings. And then it'll even longer before they come back.

• 7:07Peter Diamandis?

  You know, what's interesting is Bezos and I, I've known Jeff since college. When I saw him back after Amazon was start, I said, Jeff, what are you doing with this Amazon thing? I thought you wanted to go to space. He goes, I make my money in Amazon and I'll spend it in space. And he's doing that now. Uh, we're going to see, uh, New Glenn, uh, their first orbital mission effort very shortly. Good luck, Jeff. Uh, but his vision is rather than going to Mars, let's build O'Neill colonies, large colonies that hold a million people built out of asteroidal materials that are rotating to give you one G and are in orbit around the sun, maybe co-orbiting with the earth.

• 7:48Peter Diamandis?

  And I would love to go and pioneer one of those, bring all my friends along and, uh, and build one. All right. Next question is at Felsso. How long until we can experience something like Oasis, Ready Player One? I imagine AI has to come first for something like that to be possible. What do you think?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I think we're almost there now. I mean, you take some of the virtual reality and augmented reality apps. It's kind of incredible. If you, if you look at their latest Grand Theft Auto, it's almost indistinguishable from real life. And there's this point in time where, um, resolution on a screen exceeds that of the human eye and we're just about there now. And that changes the game completely. Um, what's interesting about all of this is that virtual reality is much more disruptive than real reality. Right? And therefore you'll see some really fascinating things happen. So gamifying it and going to Ready Player One scenario, I completely see that happening in the, in the near, short to medium term future.

• 8:46Peter Diamandis?

  I just finished some time with Alvin Graylin, who is one of the real visionaries. He wrote a book called Our New Reality. And talking about this, and it's really AI, like the question said, is fundamental to have this happen. And we're seeing, you know, Sora and new stability AI and a number of these being able to generate in real time scenes to create whatever, whatever you want. And so I think, I think we're there within two years that the hardware on your head has to catch up. Do you own a, a Vision Pro?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I don't. I've tried it, but I don't own one yet. I think for a while it's going to be used in very specific, specific applications like surgery, surgery and fixing sensitive aircraft parts and things like that. I think we're a ways away from the, from the profile of that. The meta glasses are really an amazing leap forward at a couple of levels. And I think that's where we'll see things happen first. But I think we're a year or two away from the hardware being anywhere near workable to the way we want it to.

• 9:54Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. You know, it's interesting because I own a Vision Pro and it's been sitting under my desk. I've used it twice, which tells you something, right? The software isn't there yet and the hardware is difficult to get on and off. It should be something you put on and it's instantly you're there.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And you don't notice it.

• 10:14Peter Diamandis?

  It needs to weigh, it needs to weigh under 50 grams, which, you know, a pair of glasses. Next question, who else besides Elon is working on brain computer interface? And do you think anyone is going to enable Rick Hirschwell's predictions to come true? So Ray's predictions, 2033, mid 2030s, high bandwidth BCI. So you're able to basically communicate directly with the brain, think in Google, you know, bypass the peripheral nervous system.

• 10:46Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've got one answer to that. I mean, there are a number of incredible BCI companies. One of them in particular is going to be on stage at the Abundance Summit this year. It's Science. Max Hodak, I mentioned him in our last podcast, is the CEO of that, and they have a brand-new technology that, rather than like a thousand little microfibers, which Neuralink puts into the neocortex of the brain, we're talking about tens of millions, the way they do it. I'm not going to disclose how it, you'll learn about it. It blew my mind when I saw this. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of companies coming into the BCI space. So here's the question, would you get one?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%. Yeah, I think, you know, I think the whole brain modeling thing is incredibly hard to do, but interfacing with the brain is a much easier thing to do. And it's important to note that we've got a long spectrum of interfacing with the brain: yoga, martial arts, prayer, meditation, then neurolinguistic capabilities, and neurolinguistic programming, et cetera, et cetera, all the way to psychedelics. But once you have technological interfaces, those accelerate Moore's Law. And now we can, it's like the comment about sleep, we still have no idea why we sleep, but the more we can help it, the longer it's better. And therefore, we have lots of technologies that can help it. We don't need to know exactly how it works.

• 12:12Peter Diamandis?

  We sleep.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  The brain, the brain will operate in the same way. I think we'll interface with it in really powerful ways.

• 12:18Peter Diamandis?

  We sleep, perchance to dream. All right, at Imagine Action 38 says, is it still safe to own the broad stock market through an index fund over the next 20 years, considering all the disruption that's going to occur? Great question. How do you think about it?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I think it's very simple to what's going to happen, and this is a plug for EXO, where we've done an analysis that showed that the more flexible and adaptable an organization is. This is a study we did on the Fortune 100. Delivery is 40 times the shareholder returns over a seven-year period than those that were least flexible, least agile. So therefore, the name of the game in a volatile future is make your organization as adaptable as possible, and that will give you future-proofing and staying power. That was what is going to drive the future in a huge way.

• 13:10Peter Diamandis?

  I'll give two data points of a friend of mine who is a billionaire in Silicon Valley. And he, when Trump took the White House, he basically took a bunch of money and dropped it into index funds. And basically said, we're going to have a roaring twenties and I'm getting invested in QQQ and a few others. I mean, the biotech industry was decimated over the last four years. And I think, I think a lot of that's going to come back. So index funds around small biotechs, I think will do well. But one of the questions is, do you put it all into Bitcoin? I mean, if you look, I mean, the numbers are insane. If you look at, if you, if you compare Bitcoin compared to everything else over the last,

• 13:55Peter Diamandis?

  you know, number of years, outperformance is off the charts.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  I think that's probably going to be the safest bet going forward. And I would much rather put my money into Bitcoin than an aggregate fund today.

• 14:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I don't know where, let's see where Bitcoin is at this very moment.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  107.

• 14:13Peter Diamandis?

  As we're speaking here, Bitcoin is at 106,250. Yeah, so, I mean, listen, it's going to be up and down, up and down, but your prediction for 2025 was Bitcoin at 300. I think that is very possible. And it's due to a lot of factors, including everybody beginning to start to think about, do we replicate what Michael's done, Michael Saylor? And I think a lot of people are going to follow his, his lead.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  By far, you'll get multiple entries in that, therefore that it'll just expand the scope of that whole domain of using the bond market to augment, et cetera. So I think there's a huge future in this.

• 14:52Peter Diamandis?

  Here is a, a great question from Nithi Ashree G., who says, imagine that you're 23 right now. Actually, I think I'm 23 right now. Actually, in my mind, I'm 28 right now. What would you do? Would you build planetary resources? Would you, you know, what would you read and learn? Where would you put your time and money? Where would you travel? What tech will you absolutely master? What will you, you know, what will you question about? So a lot of great questions. You could take an entire episode and discuss just that. But you're 23 right now, Salim. What would you be doing?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  If I was myself telling my 23 year old and me what to do, pun intended, I would say go study philosophy a lot more and go learn the liberal arts a lot more because it gives you different frames for thinking about the world, which I think are very powerful. A little secret about Silicon Valley is more than half the CEOs are liberal arts background, which is kind of an amazing thing to comment on.

• 15:53Peter Diamandis?

  Huh. So if I were 23 right now, I would be diving deep into AI or biotech. I think these are the two industries that are defining the next decade. There are both massive trillion dollar opportunities. So I would get absolutely clear about my purpose in life, my, my purpose and passion.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  MTP.

• 16:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And by the way, if you don't know what your massive transformative purpose is, I've, uh, my team and I have built a, uh, a platform called mypurposefinder.ai. It's free and it will walk you through a process. It's really, really easy and walk you through the process of defining your massive transformative purpose. So, uh, find out your MTP. And if it's related to AI or health and longevity, those are two incredible exponential growth curves ahead of us. Would I go and do planetary resources again? Yeah, I still want to go do it. I still want to, but I need to go and do it when I've got a few hundred million dollars of

• 17:00Peter Diamandis?

  cash in my pocket. So I'm not going to raise the money from anybody else because it's just, it's just too painful to build these companies that are, they're so cash dependent. Okay. Next question comes from, uh, at Alex, uh, Lubarsky. If you could design a system of healthcare in the U.S. focused on youthful longevity, what would be the most important aspect? Alexi.

• 17:27Peter Diamandis?

  I think the most important aspect right now is reinventing the food system. I think, you know, I'm all a thousand percent on board with RFK's Make America Healthy Again. It's we're killing ourselves by virtue of the stuff we're ingesting. So, you know, first, do no harm. So it's let's get our health system in order. The second thing I would be doing is actually creating a set of sensors and AI models that are monitoring us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, right? So I've got my on my arm, I've got my continuous glucose monitor, got my Oura ring, my Apple Watch, just the beginning.

• 18:08Peter Diamandis?

  There will be a suite of sensors that you wear on your body, in your body, in your car, in your bed, that's dribbling data to your AI and able to find and accurately predict what's going to happen to you. And just doing that. And then it's about getting people to realize the power they have on sleep and exercise and mindset. Do you want anything to that, Salim?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think two things. One is there's a massive amount of regulatory capture in the healthcare industry. And you want to break through that. And I think that's the most promising aspect of the incoming administration is the opportunity and frankly, the obligation to do that because that's holding back the health of Americans in a huge way. I think that's one. And the second thing is a faster path to market for breakthrough in new therapies and diagnostics.

• 19:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Because right now, it takes seven years to get through the FDA and by the time your drug is approved, it's out of date. And so there's so much more. And by the way, just to plug here, Peter, for those who have not watched your interview with Jack Hittary, absolutely drop everything and go watch that interview that Peter did with Jack a couple of weeks ago. It's unbelievable to see what's happening and what's possible now with quantum sensors and quantum computing coming online. The opportunity for transforming healthcare is absolutely there and we need to take full advantage of it.

• 19:32Peter Diamandis?

  Well, it's what you teach inside of Open EXO. I mean, there's so much disruption that is there, especially in a highly regulated. And I think, I think you nailed the head, nailed the whatever.

• 19:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, something like that. On the regulatory reform that's required. It's just, and people are, you know, the wealthiest people I know are leaving the country to get advanced healthcare elsewhere.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Makes no sense.

• 19:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, crazy. All right. Next question. Did you see the recent study done on the ability of AI to diagnose better than humans or better than humans plus AI? What are your thoughts? Did you see that one?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Well, this has been in different domains, has been around for a while now, right?

• 20:16Peter Diamandis?

  But let me, let me give you the numbers. So a, a, it's approximate numbers, but like a physician by themselves with a set of data can diagnose at like 70% accuracy.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:28Peter Diamandis?

  A physician with a chatbot by their side can get it up to 75%, but an AI on its own is like at 90%. And like, why? Well, you know, the physician is biased. You're injecting all the wrong information. And it's like insane, you know, how, anyway, I'm gonna stop my rant there.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So just like human beings should not be driving cars because we're terrible control systems for two ton cars going high speed. Doctors, human beings should not be doctors. The legacy seven years.

• 21:01Peter Diamandis?

  Don't tell my, don't tell my nieces that.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I know, but look, you, you spend seven years earlier in your career becoming a doctor and then you never refresh. Right? And that's just absurd, given the amount of pace of change.

• 21:13Peter Diamandis?

  Continuing medical education, CME credits and so forth, but it, the field, so today, today's a special day. My sister Marcel just, just passed her functional medicine exam. And so functional medicine is a, a branch of, of medicine, which is root cause, looking at on a cellular level, what's going on. And it's so much more advanced than what you're learning in medical school. So she went back and spent a year basically retraining in this. But even then, you're right, in, in AI and functional medicine is going to just be that much better.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  I remember Daniel Kraft making this comment that until very recently, in seven years of medical training, you only got one hour of genomics. That's just ridiculous. And why? Because you can't update the education system, right? In an easy way. You talk about immune systems, education, healthcare, the worst there are out there.

• 22:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's insane. All right. At mathgov says, how do we overcome exponential tech being used to wage future wars? Interesting. You first, buddy.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Well, the good news is this is an arms race that we've seen before, where bad people will use AI unfiltered, unrestricted with regulatory ethical concerns. It makes it actually easier to spot, and then you can police the big ones. Quick anecdote here. Mark Goodman, who wrote Future Crimes, 2015 Amazon Business Book of the Year, tells this great story. There was a bank robbery in like somewhere in the Midwest. And the bank manager calls the police and says they were all dressed as construction workers and they robbed the bank. So police are like, oh, this should be pretty easy to spot. Except what the bank robbers had done and had put an ad on Craigslist saying anybody who wants a high paying construction job, show up with all your gear at nine o'clock at this location. And so there were eight

• 23:04Speaker 01

  hundred construction workers in this square. And so they essentially crowdsourced their escape and melted into the crowd. And I just, the creativity that comes from that element is so amazing that you don't want to lose that. Can you guide it in more constructive ways? So I think what happens is as we figure out the techniques used by the bad guys, we fix it. Years ago, we were totally thought that spam would take out all email or that the phishing would make the internet ungovernable. And we've managed to solve those pretty quickly. So I think the same thing will happen as we have bad actors and the latest technologies.

• 23:38Peter Diamandis?

  So, so the question really is exponential tech like drones and humanoid robots and humanoid robots with guns or AI powered tanks waging future wars, you know?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  My bigger concern would be biotech, because somebody will design a virus that could, and they consider that virus, go find all middle aged brown guys with a Norwegian sweater and attack. And that would be a bad outcome. Right? And so how do you deal with that is not a non trivial thing.

• 24:10Peter Diamandis?

  Well, you've got your attack dog in the background there.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  I do the dog was trying to protect me from the back. Yeah, not that that dog could do anything to protect anyone, but still.

• 24:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's a yapper. So it was, you know, Star Trek was such an incredible TV show that explored so much. And one of the things that, you know, has the potential for exponential tech is to take humans out of the loop. So it's like robots fighting robots or drones fighting drones. And there was an episode of Star Trek, I don't know if you remember it, it was like, it was called like the forever war or something like that, where Kirk and Spock beam into the planet and they find a society there where there are two societies that have been basically at war for like thousands of years, because they did it in an AI simulation where they

• 25:02Peter Diamandis?

  were like, like in the simulation and they, they would say, okay, in the city precinct, a hundred people died here. So go in, you hundred people have to go into this booth where you'll get vaporized. And so they had a war going on that didn't destroy the environment, didn't destroy buildings and it just very neatly executed people. And then Kirk gets there and goes, listen, if your war isn't bloody, you're never going to end it. Right? So, so then he, he destroys that system and says, if you want to have a war, like have a real war, I love Star Trek for having explored all these areas. So that's a question.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Shout out to the underlying framing of Star Trek, which was IDIC, infinite diversity and infinite creativity. Right? I think that, you know, we are seeing that already. Let's note that the Russia, Ukraine conflict is being prosecuted by something like half a million drones, more than people. And the number of people killed by war is at its an all time high, an all time low in human history. Right? So that's already happening and trending. We don't notice it because we only see the current wars and the current We see it amplified in the news, but things are getting much better on that front and should get much better exponentially as we take out the need for war. My favorite example to give

• 26:26Speaker 01

  people a counterpoint is once you have abundant energy, which is coming shortly, then what are you fighting over? Because the oil was the thing we've been fighting over for the last hundred years. And so there's all of that to think about as we change the underlying dynamics that will have some impact on conflicts.

• 26:41Peter Diamandis?

  Well, let's go, let's go there on energy because I think it's very important. We didn't talk about predictions for energy for 2025 in our last episode, but I do think we're going to start to see a real refocusing on resources and energy, in particular, the United States. And I think we're going to start to see a fourth generation nuclear power plants becoming the thing that's going to power our hyperscalers.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and small nuclear and fourth generation are going to change the game. And if we don't do it, that everybody else will. And so it becomes incumbent that it has to be done. It'll get done everywhere. It's just the time lag until those things come online that we have to worry about. And hopefully, we can get through that without too much difficulty.

• 27:23Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think, when do you predict fusion is going to come on? I'm hearing a lot of conversation on Helion being actually delivering commercial grade by before 29?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think solar and storage trump fusion. Because if you have solar at very, very low cost and storage at near low, at almost zero cost, and it's very, it becomes very distributed and decentralized, that trumps fusion.

• 27:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And so I think that'll take place before the need for fusion, but fusion is definitely coming in. As we've been saying since the 60s, it's five years away.

• 28:02Peter Diamandis?

  One of my favorite companies I advise is a company called Paranova, and it's a perovskite company. Right? So folks, folks need to realize, you know, not all solar is made the same. There's solar thermal where when I'm flying from here to Las Vegas and I fly in my plane over these solar thermal, they all these, you're. Tens of thousands of mirrors all pointing the sun at the top of this tower where there's a molten salt and it's driving a generator. That's great. And then there's photovoltaic, which are silicon, and those are typically converting at like 20% efficiency. But then there's this material called perovskite, and you and I were on stage talking about this years ago.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we saw this, I think in 2013 or 2014.

• 28:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  It was in the labs for a few years. Now it's gotten to commercial scale. The only issue now is maintenance and how long will they last before they need, but they're very inexpensive and therefore that gives us huge opportunity.

• 28:58Peter Diamandis?

  Here's the numbers. Conversion rate, rather than like photovoltaic at 20%, these are at 30% higher conversion rate and it has the potential theoretically to get up to the mid 40s. And it's like 40% cheaper than silicon.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and doesn't use rare earths because it's a widely available substance.

• 29:18Peter Diamandis?

  Flexible and can be used in space. So Para Nova is one that I'm tracking in that regard. I think energy, you know, if Trump is successful in his notion of we're going to become the most rapidly generating energy nation on the planet, that fuels massive tipping points across everything.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the only issue there is climate and environmental concerns and nuclear trumps both of those. So a nuclear kind of energy explosion, pun intended, in the US would be amazing from a generation perspective.

• 29:57Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I was in conversation with Eric Schmidt, again, in Riyadh, and we're talking about energy. And he was like, listen, we're going to solve the climate crisis by virtue of new breakthroughs in AI. And one of the things I'm seeing is countries are saying, listen, I know we made these commitments for, you know, reversing carbon emissions, but we can no longer abide by those because we need to produce more energy to win the AI race. And we can use AI to solve our climate crisis later.

• 30:32Peter Diamandis?

  Thoughts?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Well, two thoughts. One is, nation-states can't solve climate change. That's the wrong construct to do it, and therefore trying to do it at a country level through the UN and through COP doesn't work, and it will never work. And hasn't ever worked at all. That's number one. Number two, it's clearly in the technological solution, because even if we stop all fossil fuel emissions today, there's still too much carbon in the atmosphere. Hence, the carbon extraction X Prize, which is so important that X Prize is running.

• 31:02Peter Diamandis?

  So just by an aside, for folks who don't know, I was able to get Elon to put up $100 million for a, an X Prize to remove carbon out of the atmosphere of the oceans. We launched that about five years ago or so, and we are going to be basically awarding that in April of 2025, so stay tuned. It's coming up very quickly.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  That's an unbelievable, and what I remember hearing was there's massive numbers of teams that have applied, and equally in rock sequestration, water, and air. And that gives incredible optimism that we'll find a technological solution. I remember talking to Al Gore about this, and he said, "The best way to think about this is we have to run all of our mines and power plants backwards for 100 years. That's how much carbon we have to extract, and we have to figure that out. It doesn't matter what else we do, we have to solve that problem."

• 31:50Peter Diamandis?

  So @LeaderStocks is what jobs will be in demand in the future? Where should I focus my attention for myself and my kids? @LeaderStocks, I think, focus your attention and your kids on what you're passionate about. Become an expert in the problem space, and then every time new technology comes along, apply that to the problem space. What do you tell people about jobs, buddy?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Exactly the same thing, because the last few hundred years, we've been doing education and jobs on the supply side. You get to become an accountant or doctor or engineer, and you're trying to sell that into those skills in the job marketplace. Now we're shifting to the demand side, where we're saying, "What problem do you want to solve?" And then acquire the skills and technologies and capabilities to solve that problem. And that's much more fulfilling than trying to figure out how to become an accountant, and then spending your life trying to figure out how to sell those skills, which is a nightmare, which you never want to do because your parents wanted you to do it because they're Indian. And so now we can go to the demand side and solve all of that.

• 32:45Peter Diamandis?

  All right. One of our last questions in the community here is at GG Lab says, here's a philosophical question. What if sleep was embedded into every single organism so that the simulation can save energy? What's your take? I love that. I'm clear that we're living in a simulation. I don't know how you feel about it.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  No, no, we're on agreement on this. I think you had the best framing of it, that life is too goddamn interesting to be alive right now. It has to be a simulation.

• 33:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  I think of it the following way. When you look at all the research on sleep, the only viable means and necessary conditions, the only reason actually we can figure out that we actually have sleep is to do backend processing and filing of all the sensory things that happen to us during the day. And therefore, it's like, it's like literally a batch processing of your day's inputs, and which lends itself completely towards the fact that we must be living in a simulation because of the computational needs to sort out what happened and get ready for the next step.

• 33:42Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I'm going to hit three final questions here. So the first one, it's the end of 2024. What are you focused on right now? What are you focused on? I'll tell you what I am.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  I'm focused on what are the broad civilization institutional transformations that need to take place? And how do we get there? That's my big MTP anyway.

• 34:03Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. Okay.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  It's a niche project.

• 34:06Peter Diamandis?

  I'm focused on the release of my new book called Longevity Guidebook, How to Slow-Stop Reverse Aging and Not Die From Something Stupid. And that's coming out on January 3rd.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  That's a great title.

• 34:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And it's, it's, for me, it's one of the most important books. My goal is get it out into the world, providing it at cost to anybody. If you buy on Amazon, it's twice the price. But I donate those funds to the X Prize Foundation. If you go to longevityguidebook.com, you can get it with a bunch of other benefits at the cheapest possible price. All right. What are you not focused on? Salim, what are you not focused on end of the year?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I'm not focused on everything that happened during 2024. I want to put this year behind me as fast as possible. It's one of those things when you're an entrepreneur, you go through ups and downs, and this has been a tough year.

• 34:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and it's not about the politics of

• 34:58Speaker 01

  No, no, nothing to do with politics, just sheer startup chaos and madness.

• 35:01Peter Diamandis?

  You had, you had some madness that you're over now and you're dominating and you're winning and I'm excited for your brother. I am not focused on politics. I am, I don't focus on the past at all, really. So I'm like, you know, just forward vision. I'm trying to be more present over the holidays here. And the third question here is, do you take time off during this time of the year? If so, how do you spend your time? How about you, buddy?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I've got a stack of 45 books on my bedside table that I'm trying to read and about, and God knows how many podcast episodes I'm trying to get to. Also, every year, Lily and I do kind of an end of year completion to kind of really put the bow, a year in a bow and wrap it up and kind of go, okay, seal that away. And then also visioning for what do we want to see accomplished as a family, as careers, as, as help from a healthcare perspective for the year coming. So we'll, we'll work on that together.

• 35:54Peter Diamandis?

  That's beautiful. I love this time of year. It's me time. It's, it's a chance to actually do some deep thinking. I'm focused on trying to get clear about what is my stop doing list? What do I take off the table? What boards do I resign from? What things do I stop doing? How do I refocus?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I think, can I just comment on that? It's, you know, Steve Jobs used to say as a product, the hardest thing is to what features not to include. And I think the stop doing list is such a critical thing because we overload ourselves so much. I, I need to take that on. Writing this down right now. Stop doing more of those stuff.

• 36:38Peter Diamandis?

  As long as these podcasts with you and me are not on your stop doing list because I love them too much. The other thing is it's a time to write. So I love writing.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Hate writing.

• 36:49Peter Diamandis?

  You hate writing?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  I hate writing.

• 36:51Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, I love writing. That's fine. I'll do the writing for both of us. I've got my book, next book after longevity guide book is called mindset mastery. It's about 70, 80% done. And then Stephen Kotler and I just sold a book to Simon and Siskin called Age of Abundance, which will come out in 26. Yeah, and it's and Stephen's such a beautiful writer. I'm always learning from him.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  He's awesome. He's awesome. Can I tell a very quick anecdote?

• 37:16Peter Diamandis?

  Very quick.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  I remember when Steve Jobs died, I got a ping from Vogue asking, would you write a little summary article about what happened? Et cetera, et cetera. I was like, I can't. I'm in the world of running an executive program. I have no time. And Stephen Kotler pinged me and goes, are you crazy? Do you know how hard I work as a writer trying to get into? They're asking you and you're saying no. You know, I'll help you. And I wrote the article and he edited it and god damn the skill. He made two little tweaks that made the whole thing pop. And it was like, god damn the skill that people like that can bring to the table. I want to do a quick shout out to you, Peter. I think it's one of the things that's so amazing collaborating with you is people that can think at a very, very high level. And there's people that can execute like hell and get shit done.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And you have this unbelievable skill of being able to do both the top and the bottom and getting shit done. And I envy that so much about you.

• 38:08Peter Diamandis?

  I love you, brother. I'm so happy to be partnering with you in so many different ways. Good luck to the OpenEXO community. At Salimismal is your is your handle, isn't it?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  It is.

• 38:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah, whatever your celebrations end of the year. I hope you are filled with abundance. This is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. All right, let's take our moon shots for 2025 and I'll see you soon.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Please, everybody go get drunk.

• 38:36Peter Diamandis?

  Be well.