Bitcoin vs. Stocks: What’s the Smarter Investment? (AMA) w/ Salim Ismail | EP #139
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The numbers are insane. Bitcoin compared to everything else over the last number of years, outperformance is off the charts. 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. 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 we'll do well. Make your organization as adaptable as possible, and that will give you future proofing and staying power. That was what was going to drive the future in a huge way. How high will Bitcoin go in 2025? What are your predictions? My guess is 300k by the end of the year.

Everybody, welcome to Moonshots, our special end of year episode in which I'm going to be answering your questions. We're doing an AMA, myself and Salim Ismail, in this special WTF Just Happened in Tech episode.

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 has built custom supplementations for a surprisingly affordable price. They measure 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.

an 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. Some of these are made me think, and I'm excited about your thoughts.

The first one is from Zoe Varian. 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 brain computer interface or brain machine interface. So what happens there?

- You know, it's like I said in the last episode, right? I think we're gonna 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 gonna 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, those things you could do. And now the most valuable employees and colleagues you have are the ones that are the most human.

And they can learn it fastest. 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 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 BS asks, thoughts on Saylor and MicroStrategy's Bitcoin playbook?

So at the as, 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. The performance micro strategies is off the charts. And and Michael is one of the most brilliant people that I know. And he has gone beyond

He's dove in deep. 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?

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 new 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. You know, I've heard people say we've got about three years to start getting switching over.

Maybe, you know, in 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 or not fully 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, 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.

uh reminiscent of jfk but those boots are going to be an optimist robot when would i go uh

I'd like to go to the moon actually. That's 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? I'm

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. Really? No, I don't agree with that. I think it's a round trip. No, no, one-way ticket meaning you can get there. It's going to be very hard to get back.

Well, the whole idea of Starship is that it's being fueled with methane and liquid oxygen. Not from a physics perspective. It's the human, it's the time lag, it's all of 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. Okay.

You know, what's interesting is Bezos and I, I've known Jeff since college. When I saw him back after Amazon was started, 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. We're going to see New Glenn, their first orbital mission effort very shortly. Good luck, Jeff.

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 1G and are in orbit around the sun, maybe co-orbiting with the earth. And I would love to go and pioneer one of those, bring all my friends along and build one. All right, next question is at Felso.

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?

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 look at their latest Grand Theft Auto, it's almost indistinguishable from real life. And there's this point in time where resolution on a screen exceeds that of the human eye, and we're just about there now. And that changes the game completely. What's interesting about all of this is that virtual reality is much more disruptive than real reality.

And therefore, you'll see some really fascinating things happen. So gamifying it and going to a ready player one scenario, I completely see that happening in the near short to medium term future. 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 interesting.

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 you want. And so I think we're there within two years that the hardware on your head has to catch up. Do you own a Vision Pro?

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 applications like surgery and fixing sensitive aircraft parts and things like that. I think we're a ways away from the profile of that. The Metaglasses are really an amazing leap forward device.

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. 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. And you don't notice the way 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 Kurzweil'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, bypass the peripheral nervous system. 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? Oh, 100%. Yeah. 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 neuro-linguistic modeling.

capabilities and neuro-linguistic programming, et cetera, et cetera, all the way to psychedelics. But once you have technological interfaces, those accelerate at 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 along, it's better. And therefore we have lots of technologies that can help it. We don't need to know exactly how it works. And so the brain-

The brain will operate in the same way. I think we'll interface within really powerful ways. 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?

I think it's very simple that 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, delivers 40 times the shareholder returns over a seven-year period than those that were least flexible and least adaptable.

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 was going to drive the future in a huge way. 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 20s. 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 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? Yeah.

I mean, if you look, I mean, the numbers are insane. If you look at, if you compare Bitcoin compared to everything else over the last, you know, number of years, outperformance is off the charts. I think that's probably really going to be the safest bet going forward. And I would much rather put my money into Bitcoin than an aggregate fund today. Yeah. I don't know where, let's see where Bitcoin is at this very moment. 107? Yeah.

As we're speaking here, Bitcoin is at 106.50. 106.50. 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 lead. By far, you'll get multiple entries in that. Therefore, it'll just expand the scope of that whole domain of using the bond market to augment, etc. So I think there's a huge future in this. Here is 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? 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 question about? So a lot of great questions.

You could take an entire episode to discuss just that, but you're 23 right now, Saleem, what would you be doing? - 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. 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. They're both massive trillion dollar opportunities.

So I would get absolutely clear about my purpose in life, my purpose and passion. MTP. Yeah. And by the way, if you don't know what your massive transformative purpose is, my team and I have built 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-

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 cash in my pocket. So I'm not going to raise the money from anybody else because it's just too painful to build these companies that are so cash dependent.

Okay, next question comes from at Alex Lubarsky. If you could design a system of healthcare in the US focused on youthful longevity, what would be the most important aspect? Alexi,

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 RFKs 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. 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?

- Yeah, I think two things. One is there's a massive amount of regulatory capture in the healthcare industry and you wanna 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

uh in a huge way i think that's one and the second thing is a faster path to market for breakthrough new therapies and diagnostics yeah for sure right now it takes seven years to get through the fda and by the time your drug is approved it's out of date um 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 hittery absolutely drop everything and go watch that interview with 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 in line. The opportunity for transforming healthcare is absolutely there, and we need to take full advantage of it. Well, it's what you teach inside of OpenEXO. I mean, there's so much disruption that is there, especially in the highly regulated. And I think you nailed the head, nailed the whatever.

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. Makes no sense. 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?

Well, this has been in different domains. It's been around for a while now, right? But let me give you the numbers. So a...

it's approximate numbers, but like a physician by themselves with a set of data can diagnose at like 70% accuracy. A physician with a chat bot 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. 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. Don't tell my nieces that. I know, but look, you spend seven years early in your career becoming a doctor and then you never refresh.

And that's just absurd given the amount of pace of change. They do have continuing medical education, CME credits and so forth. But the field – I remember –

And so functional medicine is a branch 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. And AI in functional medicine is going to just be that much better. 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 and healthcare are the worst there are out there. Yeah, it's insane. Yeah.

All right. At MathGov says, how do we overcome exponential tech being used to wage future wars?

Interesting. You first, buddy. 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 one. 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, they 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 800 construction workers in the 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. So, so the question really is,

exponential tech like drones and humanoid robots and humanoid robots with guns or ai powered tanks uh waging future wars you know my bigger concern would be biotech because somebody will design a virus that could and they could say to 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 to do. Well, you've got your attack dog in the background there ready to defend you. I knew the dog was trying to protect me from the back. Yeah. Not that that dog could do anything to protect anybody, but still. 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 and

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 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 were like in the simulation and they,

They would say, OK, in the city precinct, 100 people died here. So go in you 100 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 happened.

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 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 shout out to the underlying framing of Star Trek which was IDIC infinite diversity and infinite creativity

I think 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 an all-time high, an all-time low in human history.

So that's already happening and trending. We don't notice it because we only see the current wars and the current conflicts. 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 people a counterpoint is once you have abundant energy, which is coming shortly, then what are you fighting over? Because 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. 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, uh,

a real refocusing on resources and energy in particular United States. And I think we're going to start to see fourth generation nuclear power plants becoming the thing that's going to power our hyperscalers.

Absolutely. And small nuclear and fourth generation are going to change the game. And if we don't do it, 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. 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...

- Yeah, I think solar and storage trump fusion because if you have a solar at very, very low cost and storage at near low cost, at almost zero cost, and it's very, it becomes very distributed and decentralized, that trumps fusion. - Yeah. - 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 sixties, it's five years away.

One of my favorite companies I advise is a company called Paranova, and it's a perovskite company. So folks need to realize not all solar is made the same. There's solar thermal where when I'm flying from here to Las Vegas and I fly my plane over these solar thermal, all these...

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.

Yeah, we saw this, I think, in 2013 or 2014. Yeah. 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 you huge opportunity. Here's the numbers. Conversion rate rather than like what we'll take at 20%, these are at 30% higher conversion rate and has the potential theoretically to get up to the mid-40s.

And it's like 40% cheaper than silicon. Yeah. And doesn't use rare earths because it's a widely available substance. And it's flexible and can be used in space. So Paranova 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. - 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. - Well, I was in conversation with Eric Schmidt again in Riyadh and we were 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 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're going to use AI to solve our climate crisis later.

Thoughts? Well, two thoughts. One is nation states can 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 XPRIZE, which is so important that XPRIZE is running. So just by an aside for folks who don't know,

I was able to get Elon to put up $100 million for an XPRIZE to remove carbon out of the atmosphere and the oceans. We launched that about five years ago or so. And we are going to be basically awarding that in 2020.

April of 2025. So stay tuned. It's coming up very quickly. 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. So at Leader Stocks is what jobs will be in demand in the future? Where should I focus my attention for myself and my kids? At Leader Stocks, I think focus your attention and your kids on what you're passionate about. Become a 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? 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 a doctor or an engineer and you're trying to sell 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. So now we can go to the demand side and solve all of that. All right. One of our last questions from 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. - 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. I think of it the following way. When you look at all the research on sleep, the only viable means of survival

means and necessary conditions. And 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 happened to us during the day. And therefore 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.

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. I'm focused on what are the broad civilization institutional transformations need to take place and how do we get there? That's my big MTP anyway. Wow, okay. It's a niche project.

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. Yeah. And for me, it's one of the most important books. My goal is get it out into the world. I'm providing it at cost to everybody. If you buy it on Amazon, it's twice the price.

But I donate those funds to the XPRIZE 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?

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. Yeah, and it's not about the politics of... No, no, nothing to do with politics. Just sheer startup chaos and madness. Yeah, you had some madness. That you're over now, and you're dominating, and you're winning, and I'm excited for you, brother. I am not focused on politics. I don't focus on the past year.

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?

- Absolutely. I've got a stack of 45 books on my bedside table that I'm trying to read 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 help from a healthcare perspective for the year coming. So we'll work on that together.

That's beautiful. I love this time of year. It's me time. 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? 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 need to take that on. Writing is done right now. Stop doing more stuff. 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. I hate writing.

You hate writing? I hate writing. 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 Guidebook is called Mindset Mastery. It's about 70, 80% done. And then Stephen Kotler and I just sold a book to Simon and Sister called Age of Abundance, which will come out in 26. So important.

Yeah. And it's, and, and Steven's such a beautiful writer. I'm always learning. He's awesome. He's awesome. Can I tell a very quick anecdote? Very quick. I remember when Steve Jobs died, I got a ping from Vogue saying, would you write a little summary article about what happened and et cetera, et cetera. I was like, I can't, I'm in the middle of running an executive program. I have no time. And Steven Kotler pings 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 there's people that can think at a very, very high level and there's people that can execute like hell and get shit done. 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.

I love you, brother. I'm so happy to be partnering with you in so many different ways. Good luck to the OpenEXO community. Add Salim Ismail is your handle, isn't it? It is. 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 moonshots for 2025 and I'll see you soon. Absolutely. Please, everybody, go get drunk. Be well.