Pod Insights Moonshots with Peter Diamandis What’s Coming in 2025? Bitcoin, Robots, Space Exploration & the AI Revolution w/ Salim Ismail | EP #137 About this episode 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
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Peter Diamandis? It's becoming exceptionally difficult to predict what's happening next. I mean, the speed of change has been off the charts.
0:09 Speaker 01 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.
0:20 Peter Diamandis? Claude III hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT-01 hit an IQ of 120. I think we're going to see Grok III when it finishes its training and goes live, maybe hitting an IQ of 140.
0:34 Speaker 01 I think we're just going to keep hitting, moving the goalposts. We'll hit AGI and I'll go, okay, we hit AGI and nobody will even notice.
0:40 Peter Diamandis? We're living during a period of hyper exponential growth, and it's only accelerating, and it's going to become incredible.
0:51 Peter Diamandis? 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 is 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.
1:35 Peter Diamandis? 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 in Tech this week, a special episode of Moonshots with my dear friend Saleem 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.
2:04 Speaker 01 Ah, totally. I can't wait for the end of year to get here. This is a Norwegian ski sweater in the Leelahammer design. So it's some people that know the
2:14 Peter Diamandis? Was it made by humans or machines?
2:16 Speaker 01 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 the with dad having a picnic basket on his arm. It's kind of incredible to watch. It's a cultural phenomenon.
2:35 Peter Diamandis? You know, this, this red cord here is my Christmas celebration. So it's about as far as I'm, as I'm going. Uh, listen, this is a, 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.
3:14 Peter Diamandis? We broke, we broke through 100K. Uh, you know, I hope your wife is happy with you when you mortgage your home and bought Bitcoin. Uh, cause it turned out to be a good deal.
3:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, not enough of the mortgage went into Bitcoin, but, but, you know, it's, 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 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 uh, the other week was, was the most thing. As time goes by, Bitcoin just expands my overall investment portfolio naturally. And it's great.
4:00 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, I had dinner with Mike in Miami, um, in his beautiful yacht, which he's parked in front of his beautiful, you know, 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, 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 Microstrategies. And you said, mortgage your home, sell all your non-productive assets, put it into Bitcoin. I mean, he is the Bitcoin maximalist.
4:43 Peter Diamandis? 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. Yeah, so how high will Bitcoin go in 2025? What are your predictions?
5:00 Speaker 01 Um, my guess is 300K by the end of the year.
5:05 Peter Diamandis? So, you know, I can't think of much that's going to perform at, you know, 300% growth. But what's interesting, if you look at Microstrategies as a stock, it's outperforming Bitcoin itself by a significant amount.
5:19 Speaker 01 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. Um, he's got this, Michael has this incredible analogy of the voltage patterns. And it's really amazing though here, because if you have a highly volatile electrical current, you need a modifier and then you need to kind of downsize it and downamp it and downregulate it. And basically that's what he does for the bond market.
5:48 Peter Diamandis? 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, you know, 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?
6:22 Speaker 01 I'm trying to, it's getting more expensive as time goes by, but yes, as much as I can grab.
6:30 Peter Diamandis? Yeah. Any other thoughts on Bitcoin before we turn the subject?
6:34 Speaker 01 You know, I think the real measure, two points. One is it's really a measure against the the deflation of the dollar. Right? The dollar is deflating about fourteen percent a year. So your normal portfolio has to increase by fourteen percent 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'll still be kind of quite a bit of nervousness around it in different ways. And there's still a couple of time bounds 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.
7:18 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
7:18 Speaker 01 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 those shocks.
7:24 Peter Diamandis? It's a global twenty four seven energy creation
7:30 Peter Diamandis? 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, you know, all real estate ownership, all of that could be easily manipulated and changed. And even before that, you know, the US nuclear codes. So you're concerned about Bitcoin, last thing on my list if we get,
8:14 Peter Diamandis? if we get quantum decryption going.
8:17 Speaker 01 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 that 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
8:57 Speaker 01 is now forced to consider Bitcoin as a treasury component because of what's going on. And if 1% of the Fortune 1000 puts their, put some of their treasury in Bitcoin, that will send it to a million dollars of Bitcoin.
9:10 Peter Diamandis? You heard it here first, folks. A million dollars a coin.
9:14 Speaker 01 Minimum.
9:14 Peter Diamandis? A minimum.
9:15 Speaker 01 Over time.
9:16 Peter Diamandis? 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 Saylor's videos, plug yourself into, you know, Gemini 2.0 or, or.
9:37 Speaker 01 Read, read the Bitcoin white paper.
9:40 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, what you 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?
9:49 Speaker 01 Gemini.
9:49 Peter Diamandis? No, no, no, no, no. The, the platform where it'll turn into a podcast. 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.
10:10 Speaker 01 Boom.
10:11 Peter Diamandis? 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's 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.
10:43 Speaker 01 It's really critical and you know if you if the dollar was a measure of the scarcity economy Bitcoin is the underpinning of the abundance economy.
10:50 Peter Diamandis? It is. All right. I have a huge number of questions that came in from our community, our 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?
11:34 Speaker 01 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 and aggregate performance and compounded performance is very, very hard. All the AI chip experts said what he's doing will never, ever work.
11:56 Peter Diamandis? I love that.
11:57 Speaker 01 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 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.
12:17 Peter Diamandis? Yeah. 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 re, you know, 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
12:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:33 Peter Diamandis? And he does it. And he sucked the oxygen out of the room of the launch market, right? With 90 plus percent going to 99%. And when Starship starts operating, it's game over.
12:43 Speaker 01 It's incredible.
12:44 Peter Diamandis? It's the final, final nail in the coffin for anybody.
12:47 Speaker 01 I have a second piece of homework for people.
12:49 Peter Diamandis? What's that?
12:50 Speaker 01 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.
12:58 Peter Diamandis? 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 Falcon 9 has been like a half of 1% of the cost.
13:42 Peter Diamandis? Which means if you can make it reusable, you can drop the cost down, you know, a hundredfold. 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's getting ready for a highway to the stars.
13:59 Speaker 01 And what's even more important is the drop in cost, right? It used to cost an average of $600 million to launch when we were launching space shuttles.
14:08 Peter Diamandis? Can I give that number? It was, 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, you know, do the, do the math, it's 750 million per launch. And that was it. It was, it was just a public works project.
14:34 Speaker 01 That's right. And, and then SpaceX dropped it by 10x. And now we've got the new generation of, of relativity space and Agony 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 hundred x 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 drop. So what's possible in other domains? Yeah, I just reflect on that. It was just incredible amazement.
15:13 Peter Diamandis? 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 the end of 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 Optima or an optimist robot that goes to the Martian surface.
15:41 Speaker 01 They don't need to breathe as much.
15:44 Peter Diamandis? Not as much, yeah.
15:45 Speaker 01 They don't catch viruses. They don't take coffee breaks. They don't sleep.
15:49 Peter Diamandis? And not eat as much.
15:51 Speaker 01 They don't unionize.
15:53 Peter Diamandis? And they can stay there and hang out and like build a robot army so that when play time we're humans, we carbon, you know, meat sacks get there, they've built a nice home and a nice, you know, sort of lounge and jacuzzi ready for us. So we're going to enjoy Mars when we get there. So 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, Grok, I'm sorry, Anthropic's Claude 3 hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT-01 hit an IQ of 120 on chain of thought reasoning.
16:36 Peter Diamandis? 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.
16:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've heard 130 is the current level. So 140 is totally doable.
16:50 Peter Diamandis? Yeah. So intelligence, we're going to see, you know, do we see GPT-5 in 2025? What do you think?
16:57 Speaker 01 I believe so. 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 hit AGI now where to go, okay, we had AI, nobody will even notice.
17:34 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, I agree with you. You know, we passed the Turing test and 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 two and and GPT O one and Claude three point five. I mean, if 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.
18:18 Peter Diamandis? And, you know, GPT, you know, chat GPT generated everything, you know, the shopping list, the step by steps, the menu generation. And I I've just seen it being used. People are not using it enough.
18:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally. Hundred percent agree. We should be, it should be a constant companion where it's kind of you're speaking to it, it's listening to you and maybe even poking you going, hey, don't forget about this. You forgot these three considerations when making that comment, etc., etc.
18:52 Peter Diamandis? What's the funniest thing you've seen or the funnest thing you've done with with one of these AI models?
18:57 Speaker 01 The first thing I ever did, which is still, I think, one of the funnest was I 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 how interesting that was. The thing that I've done most recently that I've that I've been tweaking, you know, my this whole thing of what is intelligence soapbox I've been on?
19:18 Peter Diamandis? I'm still laughing about that first one.
19:20 Speaker 01 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 chat GPT 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 the more spur. Virtual aspects. For example, it's well known that when a group of people meditate together, that everybody meditation is much more powerful.
20:00 Speaker 01 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 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.
20:20 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, I agree, and it will organize and present and structure in a way that's fully understandable.
20:28 Speaker 01 Amazing.
20:29 Peter Diamandis? Yeah. All right, so the next part of the conversation here that was asked is what's your predictions for 2025 on on humanoid robots? But just again, on the AI and AGI, I think you were going to hit IQs in the 140. I think we're going to see Grok three come live. I think we're going to see GPT or chat or GPT five coming live by the end of 2025. I think we can't imagine anthropics not going to be coming out with a clot four, so everything is moving forward.
21:00 Peter Diamandis? 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, this thing is behaving. It like, 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, you know, it's like, when are we going to see that happening?
21:24 Speaker 01 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?
21:28 Peter Diamandis? What did we do?
21:30 Speaker 01 What did we do? 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 to think of themselves in the future. They're really good at it. Mosquitoes are not good at consider themselves in the future, but you can say to your 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 ChatGPT, it's been blocked. For precisely, would they think these reasons?
22:13 Speaker 01 But somebody's going to do open source down, local downloads of this and start posing those things and run that vector. And I think I will, I will create, I will say something really crazy. I think in the next eighteen 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, the Salim test of consciousness, if you wanted to, of can you distinguish between a human being that's conscious and self-aware and a human or a robot or an AI that's conscious and self-aware? How would you think about that?
22:48 Peter Diamandis? 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, they're building a next generation avatar of me. Actually, I may be the avatar, I don't know, but, um, but there will be.
23:06 Speaker 01 You know, to 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.
23:18 Peter Diamandis? Oh my God, on a past month, 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.
23:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, we need, we need a big red button on some of these things to preserve our egos.
23:36 Peter Diamandis? But I think there's going to be a point also in 2025 where we will all, twenty-five or twenty-six, 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 HeyGen creating avatars and going to a Zoom meeting.
24:02 Speaker 01 I think that will happen next year, for sure. It doesn't have to be so long. 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.
24:19 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
24:20 Speaker 01 And so it's a hard topic to talk about.
24:22 Peter Diamandis? 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 meta trend report. Folks can get it for free at meta trend report.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
24:56 Speaker 01 It's hitting critical mass to an amazing level.
24:59 Peter Diamandis? 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.
25:12 Peter Diamandis? 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 three, GPT five robot multimodal, it understands what it's seeing, you can speak to it. And it's 40 cents an hour to operate.
25:46 Peter Diamandis? I mean, things, things become fascinating. How many of those would you own? How many would you want?
25:52 Speaker 01 Um, 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 autonomous cars get slowed down by the human element of drivers not being able to deal with, 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.
26:35 Speaker 01 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.
26:45 Peter Diamandis? Like putting the baby to sleep.
26:47 Speaker 01 Like changing the baby's diapers, right?
26:50 Peter Diamandis? You walk into the room and the robots hold the baby up by one leg.
26:57 Speaker 01 I mean, the humor that's going to come from this, right, is going to be ridiculous. I think that may be the funnest part of all of this as to what inadvertent consequences of that. So, you know, when you talk to, we talk 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 going to create a massive new area of interfacing with the, an autonomous
27:39 Speaker 01 human or robot is going to be a massive area of study over the next 20, 30 years and ongoing.
27:45 Peter Diamandis? 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 eight summit. And I asked him outright, how many humanoid robots by 2040? Gave the same answer that Brett Adcock said, 10 billion humanoid robots, you know, 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, you know, buzzing around on X called Cologne?
28:19 Speaker 01 I did not see that.
28:20 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, so it is a robot that uses hydraulic pressure and it is, looks like Westworld, right?
28:28 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
28:30 Peter Diamandis? 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.
28:48 Speaker 01 See, this gets me really annoyed.
28:50 Peter Diamandis? Why?
28:51 Speaker 01 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 five? Um, why not have four 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 strip, step past the limitations.
29:30 Speaker 01 Or four 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. Uh, this is the part I don't understand. Because for example, let's say I, 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? Where I can have six and it'll whip it all together right in front of me in three seconds.
30:05 Peter Diamandis? Well, you could just add, you could add 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 gonna see, there's a Darwinian evolution occurring right now and someone's gonna win the race.
30:36 Speaker 01 So, okay, so, so two comments. Yeah. One, I think it's fantastic. There's 100 companies funded for this. This is, this really gives it credibility and weight. And you'll see the evolution of that, 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 don't have to think about that.
30:56 Peter Diamandis? All right, well, let's jump.
30:57 Speaker 01 We can't even have that.
30:58 Peter Diamandis? Let's jump into that, cause 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, you know, driverless, with typically one person in the car. Typically, I'm seeing them more
31:38 Peter Diamandis? in the front seat than the backseat. 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 principle decision, if humans can drive using only eyes, an autonomous car can drive using only eyes.
32:02 Speaker 01 Again, typically courageous of Elon because human eyes are notoriously limited in their ability to see things properly and the speed of recognition, etc. 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, right? A month ago. This is incredible. This has hit a tipping point now of bringing to real reality. And I think we're going to get rights law and demodulization effects kicking in, where the cost of driving should be dropping like a stone. It's 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
32:47 Speaker 01 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 is, 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
33:16 Peter Diamandis? But it doesn't have autopilot. It's like, I don't care how fast.
33:20 Speaker 01 It does, but it doesn't have F um full self driving.
33:23 Peter Diamandis? Full self driving, I mean.
33:24 Speaker 01 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'd much rather have a car that's much more software than hardware.
33:37 Peter Diamandis? Yeah.
33:38 Speaker 01 And that's gives you huge power and scope and flexibility going forward.
33:42 Peter Diamandis? I, I, 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.
33:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, again, stupid regulatory.
33:52 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, well, uh, and we'll see that, we'll see that soon. You and I have been on stages together around the world for god knows, uh, you know, better part of
34:03 Speaker 01 Fifteen years now.
34:04 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, fifteen years. And I remember our conversations about uh self-driving cars for that fifteen years. And it was always around the corner. It was always coming next year. Where are we now?
34:17 Speaker 01 I think it's here. I think it's really here.
34:19 Peter Diamandis? Just do a sanity check on this.
34:21 Speaker 01 Look, in a, in a Tesla with FSD, you feel it. In a, in a Waymo that's driving around, you see it, you can't ignore it anymore. And it's one of these things that'll sneak up on people. Remember those curves where the, the early, we always over-optimize on the short term and we radically underestimate the long term. Um, 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.
34:48 Peter Diamandis? Salim, have you put your son in a Waymo yet? Cause you've wanted that.
34:52 Speaker 01 I, I've wanted that forever. I'm hoping to hell he never gets a driving lesson so he doesn't have to or don't have to worry about that. But I don't think it's gonna happen. Uh, just because we don't have Waymo here, I've not done it. Otherwise, I would have done it for sure.
35:03 Peter Diamandis? I should, I should do that with my kids here just to give them a fun, a fun experience.
35:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:07 Peter Diamandis? All right, let's go to one more sort of twenty twenty-five prediction, which is in the realm of BCI. Uh, so what's gonna 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 like say, okay, this is a silicon representation of a fruit fly, and if we give it some sugar water
35:52 Peter Diamandis? here or poke it there, what will it do? And you looked at that, and then when you actually gave the actual fly a fruit, you know, water or, you know, a poke, it did exactly what the computer model would predict. And I think we're gonna, that technology is gonna take us to being able to upload the brain of a mouse. And on stage this year at the Abundance Summit, you're gonna 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 on BCI?
36:27 Speaker 01 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 by that. The brain upload part, I do know they can now, even now, if you if you die suddenly,
37:09 Speaker 01 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 the connectome and modeling, the the the brain in that level, I think, is very exciting, but I think is still a little bit ways away.
37:27 Peter Diamandis? Yeah, and we'll see the announcement in 2025 of a few other BCI companies. One I'm excited about, again, will be on stage at the Abundance Summit, is science. This is Max Hodak, who is a co-founder of Neuralink in the past president with Elon and then went off to start science.
37:45 Speaker 01 I do want to make one point about all this, though.
37:47 Peter Diamandis? Please.
37:48 Speaker 01 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.
38:14 Peter Diamandis? 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, 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?
38:42 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
38:43 Peter Diamandis? In the tech world, you want AGI, you want a BCI?
38:45 Speaker 01 World peace?
38:46 Peter Diamandis? World peace. Okay, we can go there.
38:49 Speaker 01 And I really want to see the end of 2024. I think the whole planet needs to go and get really drunk.
38:54 Peter Diamandis? 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, Salim.
39:11 Speaker 01 Great to be here.
Previous Should AI Be Open-Sourced? The Debate That Will Shape Everything w/ Mark Surman | EP #136 Next Elon vs. OpenAI: The Battle Over For-Profit AI w/ Salim Ismail | EP #138 Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
