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

0:00It's becoming exceptionally difficult to predict what's happening next. I mean the speed of change has been off the charts. I could either 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 a bit. On the 3rd floor, we saw GPT -01 hit an IQ of 120. I think we're gonna see GROC 3 when it finishes its training and goes live. Maybe hitting an IQ of 140. I think we're just gonna keep hitting, moving the goalples. We'll hate AGI now where to go. Okay, we have AGI, nobody will even notice.

0:40We're living during a period of hyper -exponential growth and it's only accelerating and it's gonna become incredible.

0:51Everybody, welcome to Moon Shots and our special end of your episode on WTF just happened in tech. 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 sleep Ismail. Also, this segment is sponsored by three companies I use daily, fountain, vionm, and one skin. Found helps me keep young. It's my partner across all the testing and diagnostics and therapeutics. tell me fine disease before it happens. Vyom is built my custom supplementation for both oral and gut health. And one skin is how I'm reversing aging on my skin.

1:31Surprisingly, I get compliments all the time on my skin. Well, the way I do it is from one skin. Everything is linked below. Enjoy this episode of WTF just happened. And we're gonna dive into 2025 and give you our best predictions for the year ahead. Everybody, Peter D. Amanda's here. Welcome to WTF just happened in tech this week a special episode of moonshots with my dear friend Selim Ismail the CEO of open EXO the first president of singular university one of the smartest people in tech I know Selim you're wearing your end of your Christmas outfit Totally, I can't wait for the end of your to get here.

2:07This is a Norwegian ski sweater in the Lila hammer design So it's some beautiful. I know they know was 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, topped a bottom with the long castles and they all ski down the, with dad having a picnic basket on his arm. It's kind of incredible to watch as a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, this, 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.

2:46We'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. 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 what? Bitcoin, because it turned out to be a good deal. Yeah, not enough of the mortgage run into Bitcoin, but as Michael Seller said, you'd get Bitcoin at the price you'd deserve and you always never can have enough.

3:34and everybody always regrets. There's no number, there's any number of people we both know Peter the had, Bitcoin on their hard drives, they mined 500 of them in the early days, unlost it, et cetera. And so it's just the reality of it, but it's incredible to watch it. And I think the comment that we had with the other week was the most thing. As time goes by, Bitcoin just expands my overall investment portfolio naturally, and it's great. Yeah, I had dinner with Mike in Miami in his beautiful yacht, which he's parked in front of his beautiful mansion. And we were talking about this, and we're going to be doing a podcast in early January about how to get companies onto the Bitcoin standard.

4:20And 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 it into Bitcoin. I mean, he is the Bitcoin maximalist. And I have to say at this point, Bitcoin is my largest holding. And every time I have any kind of exit, so I'm sweeping it into Bitcoin. And not looking back. So how high will Bitcoin go in 2025?

4:59What 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 by Bitcoin to then add to the the chord 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 high uvalutile electrical current, you need a modifier and then you to kind of downsize it and down amp it and down regulate it.

5:46And basically that's what he does for the bond market. So I think one of the things when you think about what's accelerate, 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. situations 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?

6:23Trying to, it's getting more expensive as time goes by, but yes, as much as I can grab. Yeah. Any other thoughts on Bitcoin before we turn the subject? You know, I think the real measure, two points. One is it's really a measure against the deflation of the dollar, right? The dollar is deflating about 14 % a year. So your normal portfolio has to increase by 14 % just to keep pace. So that's a huge kind of mental framing to put in mind. The second is let's keep in point that it's still a bit volatile. You have quantum computing algorithms that are coming along. And there will be kind of quite a bit of nervousness around it in different ways.

7:05And 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 bin and then just keeps going. Yeah, it doesn't matter whether China bands it or India bands it or Russia bands it or whatever that happens It just keeps recovering from the It's a great little global 24 seven 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.

7:44And 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 that could be easily manipulated and changed. And even before that, the US nuclear codes. So, you know, 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.

8:26And therefore, going forward, you'll be fine. What's under I think the most threat is communications and stuff that's under lock -in key from the past. Old communications, old emails, those are the ones under the most strap. And the time value, though, shrinks pretty rapidly as time goes by. So that I think I'm pretty confident. I agree with you, 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.

9:03And 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. You heard it here first folks, a million dollars coin. Minimal. A minimum. Over time. And so it's a performing asset class. And, you know, I think what I would propose people do if you haven't yet spend 10 hours over the holidays, spend 20 hours over the holidays, watch some of Mike Sayler's videos, plug yourself into, you know, Gemini2 .0 or... Re -read the Bitcoin white paper. Yeah. Well, actually, the better thing to do is take the Bitcoin white paper and put it into Google's what do you call it?

9:47What's their... Gemini. No, no, no, no. The platform where it will turn into a... Oh, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. put the white paper to 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 and 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.

10:28Bitcoin equals longevity, Bitcoin equals abundance. There is this, if we're gonna be living for age 120, 150, having an asset like that to be by your side, I think it's important. Hmm, 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.

11:13All right. Let's dive in. And so AI and AI, 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 cluster of a million GPUs? No, not at all. And there's something really important here 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 aggregate performance and compounded performance is very, very hard. All the AI chip experts said what he's doing will never, ever work.

11:56I love that. And again, he did the same thing he does repeatedly be worthy expert as we say in our book. He went to first principles and if you had to redesign the coherence and the aggregate compound performance by scratch, what it would look like? And boom, he's got 100 ,000 cluster working and it's blown the minds of every AI researcher out there incredible So this is like the third or fourth time he's done that right. I remember in the early days of SpaceX uh, when he said he's gonna read you know Land and reuse the Falcon 9 for a stage Boeing Lockheed all of the launch providers will like this guy's crazy is no idea what he's talking about and yeah 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.

12:43It's the final, final nail in the coffin for anybody. I have a second piece of homework for people. What's that? If you've not seen the video of heavy being caught in the chopstick thing, go watch that. It'll send bone chills down your spine. Yeah, it's the greatest engineering feat of this decade or the last couple of decades. And in some part, sometime in the Q1, Q2 of 2025, we're going to see not just the booster segment of Starship, but also the Starship itself, which is the upper portion being caught again by those chopsticks. And that makes it fully reusable. When you make these spaceships fully reusable, the price drops down precipitously.

13:25You know, 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 100 fold. So when Starship becomes fully reusable, and guess what? They're not just building one or two or ten. They're building hundreds of these Starships. humanities 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 to launch when we were launching space shuttles.

14:08Okay, and 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 -shadows 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? 100x drop in the cost of launching a rocket over say a 2025 year period.

14:56That 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 still reflect on that. We're just incredible amazement. One of my predictions for 2025 is out of the Trump White House we're going to hear a historically harkening back to the year 1961 where JFK said, I challenge you to go to the moon by in 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 optimist, or an optimist robot that goes to the Martian surface.

15:41Yeah, they don't need to breathe as much. Not as much. Way too much. Yeah. And not eat as much. And they can stay there and hang out and like build a robot army so that when they time the humans we carbon meat sacks get there they 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 going back to predictions on AI and AGI. So I think we're going to see GROC3. So interesting, unintelligence, what are we going to see? So we saw the average IQ a year ago, GROC, I'm sorry, and Thropix, Claude 3, hit an IQ of 101. We just saw GPT01 hit an IQ of 120 on chain of thought reasoning.

16:36and I think we're gonna see GROC -3 when it finishes its training and goes live, maybe hitting an IQ of 140. I'm gonna put that prediction. Yeah, actually, one 30 is the current level. So 140 is totally doable. So intelligence, we're gonna see, do we see GPT -5 in 2025? What do you think? I believe so. The rate of, so two things. The rate of output from opening up has been unbelievable. Having said that, there's definitely some weird stuff going on. Lots of people are leaving. Mirror of 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.

17:21You 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 gopals. We'll hate AGI. I would go, okay, we had a jam, nobody will even notice. Yeah, I agree with you. You know, we passed the touring test and people ignored it, yond, or just said, oh, interesting. And, you know, there's some belief right now, and I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this, that we've reached quote, AGI, whatever that means. It's an undefined boundary, but oh my God, I am so impressed by what we can get out of Gemini 2 and GPT01 and Clawed 3 .5.

18:03I mean, if people haven't played with this, you're 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 GPT, Chad GPT generated everything. thing, the shopping list, the step -by -step, the menu generation, and I've just seen it being used. People are not using it enough. Yeah, totally 100 % agree. We should be a constant companion where 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.

18:52What's the funniest thing you've seen or the funnest thing you've done with with one of these AM models? The first thing I've reviewed 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 ran most recently that I've that I've been preking you know my this whole thing of what is intelligence So box up and on. I'm still laughing about that for a while. 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.

19:29So 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 your 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 meditate, everybody meditation is much more powerful. So this is kind of a group effect that comes into intelligence and consciousness that I think is interesting to explore.

20:06If 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. There's a different piece along the way. It's really, really fascinating. Save me dozens of hours of research trying to figure it all out myself. Yeah, I agree. 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 you were going to hit IQs in the 140. I think we're gonna see GROC 3 come live.

20:45I think we're gonna see GPT or GPT 5 coming live by the end of 2025. I think we can't imagine ourthropics not gonna be coming out with a claw at four. 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, 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. What do we, yeah, it's like, what are we going to see that happening? Yeah, coming from your funeral robot, that would be a little bit, oh my god, what the hell is he on the top?

21:29What should we do? What should we do? What should we do? So, I really like, hot lipsons framing care, right? Hot has a path to what he thinks how an AI achieves consciousness, which is when you consider a human being to think of themselves into the future, they're really good at it. Mosquitoes are not good at considering 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 within 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.

22:07If you ask that question of Gemini or ChapTPT has been blocked for precisely what they think these reasons, but somebody is going to open source down 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 simulate 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 of software and a human or drill butter and AI this conscious and software how do you think about that?

22:48I just spoke yesterday to Joshua the CEO of Hagen right which is the company making those incredible models and doing full translation you're creating your avatar they're they're building an ex -generation avatar of me it actually I may be the avatar I don't know but But they will need 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 where 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 Peter bot, and it was so eloquent.

23:25It was so capable of structuring arguments. I was jealous. I was actually very jealous. And it's good. We need to get the red button on some of these things to preserve our egos. But I think there's going to be a point also in 2025 where we will all, 25 or 26, but we'll have an avatar that has, you've structured it with all of your emails, all of your thought patterns, all of your opinions. And you can send that avatar into a Zoom meeting on your behalf. Right? That's already happening. We're already seeing Hagen creating avatars that go into a Zoom meeting. I think that will happen next year, for sure.

24:06It doesn't have to be, it's no 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 meta trend report, folks can get it for free at metatrendreport .com on I looked at the top 16 robot companies and it's a detailed dive into that reports free.

24:47And there's now probably a good solid 100 well -funded humanoid robot companies. And we're seeing. It's getting critical mass to an amazing level. I did the calculation. So both Brett Atcock 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 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, which is $10 a day. So imagine a robot, a fully functional GROC3, GPT -5 robot, multi -modal, it understands what it's seeing, you can speak to it, and it's 40 cents an hour to operate.

25:45I 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 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? So there's all sorts of things that will come along that I think will slow down the progress the way we've seen Autonomous cars get slowed down by the human element of drivers not being able to deal with it etc etc I think it's gonna 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 and it has a very confined range of activity Like putting the name in sleep like changing the baby's diapers, right?

26:51So you walk into the room and the robot's holding the baby up by one leg. I mean, the humor that's going to come from this, right? It's going to be ridiculous. I think that maybe the fun is part of all this as to what an inverting consequence of that. So when you talk to, we talk about AI's and interact with AI's, it's still very much in the cloud. it's f or merrill is not tangible, it's not substantive setting next to us. When a robot sitting next to you and it decides it's annoyed with you, what will it do with that? So there's a whole range of socio -emotional questions that come into play here that I don't think we've really understood.

27:29Well, the whole field, this is going to create a massive new area of interfacing with an an autonomous humanoid robot is going to be a massive area of study over the next 20, 30 years, and ongoing. Well, I mean, so this and 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 out, right? How many humanoid robots by 2040 gave the same answer that Brett Adcock said 10 billion humanoid robots, at least one per human on the planet. it. And so that's a pretty extraordinary prediction. Did you see the humanoid robot that was just, you know, buzzing around on X called clone?