The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Pablos Holman — One of the Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met (#827)

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Pablos Holman (@pablos), a hacker and inventor and the bestselling author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs, including a brain surgery tool, a machine to suppress hurricanes, 3D food printers, and a laser that can shoot down mosquitos, part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. Pablos hosts the Deep Future Podcast, and his TED talks have been viewed more than 30 million times. He is also managing partner at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems. 

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

---

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

---

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.

WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

---

Tim Ferriss: Where to begin, Pablos? I don’t even know where to start. But I will start perhaps with my first glimpse of Pablos, which was circa 2008. I think it was the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It could have been Google at Night, but it was a demonstration, and I remember watching you.

Let me actually take it to Wired magazine for a second. So this is what they wrote about this particular event. 

“San Diego, California — Your credit card, the lock on your front door, your cell phone’s voicemail, your hotel television, and your web browser are all not as secure as you might like to think, as Pablos Holman, a hacker clad in all black, gleefully demonstrated on stage Wednesday like an evil Las Vegas magician.

“Holman used caller ID spoofing to break into the AT&T voicemail of the organizer of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference being held this week in San Diego.

“Using the speaker phone, Holman changed the outgoing message of the target, Brady Forrest, while he sat helpless in a back row.” 

“Maybe that’s why I’m confusing with Google at Night, because Brady also did Google at Night at one point. 

“Don’t chuckle too much. The hack works for all many AT&T users, including anyone with an iPhone.

“Holman continued on to show how Schlage…” is that how you say that?

Pablos Holman: Schlage.

Tim Ferriss: “…Schlage locks — the kind that is likely on your front door of your house — can be quickly opened by banging a filed down key with a small mallet.

“Likewise, Holman used a snippet of Javascript to create a link that forced CNNMoney.com to load a modified Onion story saying that the iTunes store would soon be selling Tim O’Reilly’s home movies for $1.99 a piece.”

Then I’m just going to paraphrase here in the interest of time, called up a volunteer, this one, a young man sporting a headband. also had an RFID-enabled credit card. Holman waved a magic reader over the kid’s pocket. Up popped the kid’s credit card number and expiration date on the projection screen with a few digits Xed out. Turns out that after months of trying to figure out how to break the encrypted information transferred by the card, Holman just bought a merchant card reader on eBay for $8. Now, the only reason I think I may have been at a different event is because my memory, and maybe I conjured exaggeration for dramatic effect, is that you actually walked along the front line, the front row of the attendees and then put all of their credit cards up on a screen.

Pablos Holman: It was wild times.

Tim Ferriss: Wild times. So I just want to read some notes from a mutual friend of ours to give people a taste of where we’re going.

Pablos Holman: Oh, man.

Tim Ferriss: I put shorthand here, “Password-stealing robot? Keychain unlocking REDACTED within a square mile? Hardware in a car in Seattle downloading and uploading hard drives from unsecure Wi-Fi. Printing food, things that taste like steak?”

Pablos Holman: Oh man,

Tim Ferriss: So, so far that’s all. Is that all facts?

Pablos Holman: I mean, there’s — 

Tim Ferriss: Ish?

Pablos Holman: There’s something factual about all of them, but certainly something must be exaggerated, I guess. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Certainly something must be exaggerated. Well, we will find out. Let’s begin with a question around this term hacker.

Pablos Holman: All right.

Tim Ferriss: What is a hacker to you and do you consider yourself a hacker?

Pablos Holman: Well, I’m a hacker because my early life was all around reverse engineering a computer. And that was out of necessity because I grew up in Alaska and there was nobody around who’d ever seen a computer. But I got one when I was like nine years old, one of the first couple thousand Apple IIs ever made. So I had a computer in the cold, in the dark, in the basement, in Alaska, and nobody to show me anything about how it worked. So I had to learn by reverse engineering, what we would call reverse engineering. You break things and see what they do and then try to learn from that. And so I learned the hard way.

And then for the first, I don’t know, couple decades of my career, it was all about trying to do new things with computers and advanced computers. And I didn’t have any formal training. I didn’t go to college. Software development was invented long after I got started. So there’s a lot I didn’t get that most people get. And so a hacker is somebody who I think is attracted to puzzles. They are attracted to computer security, because it’s a bottomless pit of puzzles. And I am trying, at this point, hack everything but computers, and I’m trying to rescue hackers out of the computer security department and get them into helping go attack bigger problems.

Tim Ferriss: How did you end up acquiring a computer in Alaska?

Pablos Holman: So my dad had put some of the first mainframes in the oil industry in the early 70s, let’s say. And so he wasn’t really a computer guy, but he had a notion that these things might be interesting. And when Apple needed customers, at the beginning of Apple, they went to the oil industry, because that was the big rich industry at the time. My dad said, “Sure, we’ll take one.” So I got one of the first Apple IIs. So I’m like nine, 10, 11 years old. I had an Apple II, I had a skateboard. People were sure that neither of them was a good waste of time, but it was a fair fight. It was just too early.

And I was lit up about this thing. Apple II isn’t very powerful, and in those days computers weren’t useful. It didn’t have hardly any memory. It was super slow. But I was lit up. And so I tried to convince everyone around me that this computer was going to be amazing someday, and no one believed me. They’d never seen a computer, but they were sure they weren’t cool. And so, I was inviting girls over to my basement to show them my computer and — 

Tim Ferriss: Is that what they called it back then?

Pablos Holman: It made an impression, just not the one that maybe I was going for. So I’m still doing that. I’m still trying to convince people that these technologies are important.

Tim Ferriss: I’m trying to pull from your book, which I’ve been devouring.

Pablos Holman: All right.

Tim Ferriss: Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, about three-quarters of the way through, and I’m going to do something dangerous, because I just got off of opioid painkillers from my arm surgery, try to pull from memory.

Pablos Holman: Way to go.

Tim Ferriss: But let’s give it a good college try. Do hackers ask some version of not what does this do, but what can I get this to do?

Pablos Holman: The way I described that before, in the book, is just a simple way of thinking about the mindset of a hacker. Most people, if you get a new gadget, like your phone, and give it to your mom, she’ll ask you, “What does this do?” That’s a totally normal question. “iPhone, Mom. Says on the box.” If you give a new gadget to a hacker, then the question is, “What can I make this do?” And they’re starting from a completely different position. They’re going to take out the screws, break it into a lot of the pieces. You’ve met Samy, he’s the poster child for this. He’s violating the warranty before he got the shrink wrap off.

Tim Ferriss: Can you, just for entertainment value, people can listen to my conversation with Samy Kamkar to hear about his amazing adventures and his crime and punishment involving MySpace.

Pablos Holman: Oh yeah.

Tim Ferriss: He wasn’t allowed to touch computers for a while.

Pablos Holman: Samy is just — 

Tim Ferriss: But what did you — 

Pablos Holman: He’s just the most delightful hacker.

Tim Ferriss: He is a super delightful human. What did he do with Google Maps?

Pablos Holman: Oh, Google Maps is one of my favorite things he did. Early on, Samy was finally allowed to use computers again. Google colors the roads for traffic, based on where everybody’s phone is, just reporting to Google when you’re stuck in traffic. And so Samy figured out he could just lie to Google. He just sent a bunch of fake data to Google. And he figured out how to structure it so that he could make all the roads he’s about to drive on, just clear out, because they look like they’re all log jammed.

Tim Ferriss: Just ramped all the way.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, they all look like traffic jams. And so Samy could manipulate the traffic. I mean, Google’s since fixed this. But I often like to show off Samy on stage, and so I’ve shown his exploits a bunch of times and that’s one of them.

Tim Ferriss: What makes for a good hacker?

Pablos Holman: So I think the hackers have one way or another ended up being the people who start from that position I described. They’re the ones who don’t take the conventional wisdom of what something is for.

Tim Ferriss: Masters of off-label use.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, off-label. And so they’re creative, in a sense. They are the people who figure out what is possible. You can’t invent a new technology by reading the directions. That’s just never happened, ever. So a hacker, I’m interested in their minds as inventors. I’m interested in their minds as creative people who are going to figure out how to elevate what humans can do. And so a good hacker is somebody who is willing to do that.

I learned a little bit about hackers, because I was, like you described, I was doing this bizarre kind of hacker magic show stealing people’s passwords. But some magicians, actual magicians, showed up in my audience one time. And they explained to me like, “Hey, you kind of suck as a magician.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, you could probably tell me what I should do.” And what I realized is magicians, getting to know them, are like these people who will spend an obscene amount of time, more than anyone can imagine, focused on the most useless thing. And they’ll figure it out. They’ll figure out something no one else could imagine ever figuring out. And that’s part of how their capabilities, their tricks come together, the things they invent.

And you could say maybe what magicians are inventing is useless. And you could argue that a lot of what hackers are inventing is useless. It’s like, why are you spending all of your time trying to figure out how to fuck with Google Maps? They’re just going to fix that bug and then it’ll be useless. But to Samy, it’s no problem at all. That is what he wants to do with his time.

And so I think a big part of it too is this, you could say as a class, maybe hackers have ADHD, but they can focus on what they’re interested in. And when they get interested in a puzzle, they’ll just go deep. And so you have to do that as well to get somewhere that no one’s gotten before. This is actually the reason I think I’m here is because I want you to know that you are the hacker. You’re like a very important hacker. And you don’t think of yourself that way, but the reason is you are the one who showed people that what hackers are doing can be taken places that are not computers. And you did that with all the things in your books. That’s what the Tango thing is, and the wrestling thing is, and all those examples, swimming and all the things that you showed in your books, that’s the exact same thing hackers are doing. And you’re showing them that it can go somewhere else. And that means a lot to me because I’m trying to get hackers to see that they could go somewhere else besides computers.

Tim Ferriss: Right, outside of software.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, thank you for saying that. That’s a huge compliment coming from you. And it’s also a very smooth segue, because you mentioned two things that were of questionable value when you were a kid, computers and skateboards. Rodney Mullen. Could you describe for people who Rodney Mullen is?

Pablos Holman: Oh, man. So Rodney Mullen, I don’t have to describe for anyone who ever touched a skateboard, because Rodney is the godfather of street skating. He’s the guy who invented every single thing you’ve ever seen a kid do on a skateboard, and including he’s the first one to ollie a skateboard, which is the fundamental basis of all street skating. I’m a shitty skateboarder. But Rodney is one of my favorite people on earth. He’s such a delightful human. And we spend all night hanging out together talking about everything but skateboarding. But I’ve used him as an example of an inventor, again, because I’m trying to show people that an inventor is a valuable and important thing. Hackers are one source of inventor, but skateboarder is inventor. There’s a difference between Rodney and every other skateboarder. And that difference is that Rodney will imagine something in his mind that’s never been done before, maybe impossible. He can spend months every night trying to make it happen on a skateboard and then finally get it.

Tim Ferriss: Now, did he grow up in Santa Monica?

Pablos Holman: No. He grew up in rural Florida. So we have this kind of odd parallel childhood. I mean, Rodney is way more important than me. But Rodney’s childhood was in rural Florida, no neighbors, like a farm. And he had a little patch of cement in the driveway. His entire skateboarding life started there. No one around him could skateboard. He didn’t have any influences. He just had his brain and the skateboard. So he invented what was possible. And so I think that is so important. So it’s analogous to my Apple II in Alaska thing.

But what’s so cool about it is that once Rodney does a new trick, puts it on YouTube, two weeks later, kids in Kazakhstan are doing it better than him. And so it’s a very important contrast, I think, to show people the difference between what an inventor does the first time. The zero to one, that first time is incredibly hard. It takes lifetimes, it takes careers, it takes everything you’ve got to do something the first time that humans have never seen before. Every time after that, the second time to the nth time, that’s craft. That is not invention, that’s not art, that’s craft. You need a skill to do it. Rodney needed to be able to skate to invent. But I want people to understand how important inventors are. And we throw them under the bus. You don’t know anybody, probably besides me, whose business card says inventor. It’s not a legitimate career choice.

Tim Ferriss: I only know one person, a guy named Stephen Key who’s just prolific in the toy world. But — 

Pablos Holman: Okay, cool. You know one.

Tim Ferriss: But he’s literally the only one.

Pablos Holman: But how many music artists could you name?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: Or painters, or — 

Tim Ferriss: A hundred. A hundred

Pablos Holman: Yeah. Or actors. I mean, and it’s just the contrast is extreme. It’s our most important creative class, inventor, and they don’t count. And I think we got to fix that.

Tim Ferriss: I want to dive into some of the personal, because some of the magic tricks, so to speak, I want to try to unpack a bit.

Pablos Holman: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: And it might be pearls before swine because I’m not technical.

Pablos Holman: It’s okay.

Tim Ferriss: Do not know how to program. But I am curious, for instance, this robot, I don’t remember its name.

Pablos Holman: Oh, the Hackerbot.

Tim Ferriss: The Hackerbot with a printer attached, right? Did I — 

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. What did this do — 

Pablos Holman: No, it had a screen, not a printer.

Tim Ferriss: Had a screen. Okay. How did that work?

Pablos Holman: Okay. So — 

Tim Ferriss: And what did it do? Maybe you could describe it.

Pablos Holman: So, it’s like a long time ago. So Eric Johanson is my co-conspirator on a lot of hacking stuff. He and I were hanging out. We went to one of those first robotics competitions, which are huge now it’s teenagers making robots that they turned into a spectator sport. And we realized, like, oh, these kids are making robots. If they can do it, we should be able to do it, because super geniuses with a machine shop. I had the Blue Origin machine shop. So I figured we could build a robot. So we started — Eric is amazing. You come up with an idea, he’ll smoke cigarettes and stay up all night and get it done while I go to sleep. And so Eric — 

Tim Ferriss: A great friend to have.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, great friend to have. So Eric starts trying to get PWM controllers and all this stuff to build a robot. I bought the wheels, because I’m good at buying wheels. So we started building this thing, assembling it as it goes. And then — 

Tim Ferriss: These are robots for a competition?

Pablos Holman: No, we just were making a robot for no good reason.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I got it. I got it.

Pablos Holman: And eventually, we figured out it should have a reason. So we’re like, “Well, what should our robot do?” Neither of us drink beer, so it didn’t need to fetch beer. We’re like, “Well, we could make it do some hacking since that’s what we’re normally doing.” So it became the Hackerbot. And everything that robot can do, a nerd with a Linux t-shirt and a laptop can do. So we made the robot, so it would drive around and it would find people, kind of like triangulate Wi-Fi users — 

Tim Ferriss: At a conference or — 

Pablos Holman: Anywhere.

Tim Ferriss: Anywhere.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. It’d drive up to them and then show them their passwords on the screen. Because we had all the tools for cracking Wi-Fi.

Tim Ferriss: This is a Wi-Fi password?

Pablos Holman: Yeah, we’re cracking Wi-Fi at the time. One of our buddies had made a tool called AirSnort to crack Wi-Fi, and we were cracking Wi-Fi and stealing passwords for fun. But the cool thing about the Hackerbot was it was just this insanely mediagenic kind of thing where everybody thought it was cute. It’s a nefarious robot stealing your passwords, but people thought it was cute. So we realized we could — in those days, we were just trying to raise the alarm about how insecure everything was, and nobody gave a shit about it. No one wanted to hear from hackers. But the Hackerbot got on television and that kind of thing. So we learned something from that, how to contextualize the lesson. I made a lot of friends stealing passwords too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. They’re like, “Wow.” Got to keep your prospective enemies as close as possible.

Pablos Holman: I came unarmed.

Tim Ferriss: Well, honestly, I’m not going to lie, when I saw that demo at whichever conference, I was like, “I don’t know how close I should get to this guy, because if he decides that I’m a pain in the ass, I really am defenseless.” I feel like I would just be bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. And so I was simultaneously incredibly curious, but I was very, very nervous — 

Pablos Holman: Fair enough.

Tim Ferriss: — at the same time.

Pablos Holman: You’re not the only one.

Tim Ferriss: Is it fair to say, and I tend to tilt a little dystopian, so I’ll just disclose that in advance, that if you are a legitimate target who is non-technical of a very competent hacker, that your goose is cooked? I mean, and I’m sure there are basic digital hygiene things that you can do.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. You’ve heard them all.

Tim Ferriss: But what are your thoughts? Because I’ve talked to people, for instance, in the intelligence community, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah. If you’re the target of a state actor and the entire machine behind it,” they’re like, “They’re going to get your stuff.”

Pablos Holman: Yeah, that’s true. The problem is it is a moving target. So there’s this war of escalation between attackers and defenders. And a lot of what people are familiar with, it’s just kids in Romania screwing around trying to try an attack against every IP address of the internet and see what falls in their lap. That’s stealing credit cards and Bitcoin wallets and stuff. So that you could say it doesn’t really count. I mean, it sucks, but that’s all the recommendations you’ve heard of, use a password manager and stuff, will help you with that.

But if you are the target of a sophisticated, mostly nation state actor, it would just be an extreme lifestyle change to insulate yourself against that. And there’s a very sophisticated game of finding new exploits, selling them mostly to governments, and then they sit on them. They don’t use them. Because every time you use a new exploit, like say I’ve got a way of hacking an iPhone, that is so valuable, I’m going to save it for a really, really, really good use. The day I use it, I risk someone figuring out that it exists. So I want it to be what’s called zero-day. So you don’t use those lightly. So most people don’t have anything to worry about because governments don’t give a shit about you. And so I think you’re fine. If they start to, then you’re going to have a problem.

Tim Ferriss: What does the marketplace look like for zero-day exploits? Because I’ve heard of, say, Israeli developers formerly of Intelligence developing these exploits, these zero-click exploits, if I’m using the term correctly, and then they sell it for like a million dollars a pop or $2 million a pop for specific targets or something like that. But how does that transaction actually take place?

Pablos Holman: Well, so I don’t play this game anymore, but friends do. Say I were to discover a way to make a zero-click exploit for iPhone, that’s probably the most valuable thing in the world right now.

Tim Ferriss: Which means you don’t have to click on anything.

Pablos Holman: Right. It means I send you a text message or something and I’m in and I control your phone. That is very hard to do. Apple’s trying to keep that from happening. But if I have that, then I sell it to a broker. And so there are certain hackers whose job is to vet these things.

Tim Ferriss: Those are the brokers.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, the brokers.

Tim Ferriss: Do you find those people on the dark web or is it like a referral number, a referral?

Pablos Holman: Actually some of them, I think these days they’ll hang out a shingle. I’m not going to name any here. But the point is hackers who are finding exploits know who they are. And so then you sell it to a broker. And those guys have relationships with the shady folks at governments around the world. And that’s only people they’ll sell to, because otherwise they risk getting prosecuted in different jurisdictions. So you can get away with selling to a three-letter agency in the US, but you can’t get away with selling it to even a corporation in the US. Because to use an exploit like that for corporate espionage, you’re getting into very risky turf. 

American hackers don’t want to play that game because they can make more money doing legit stuff. If you’re a Romanian hacker, there’s no six-figure job for you, so you might play with seeing how I can use that to get Bitcoin wallets or something. Love Romania, by the way.

Tim Ferriss: I do too. Love.

Pablos Holman: Amazing.

Tim Ferriss: I was just there a few months ago.

Pablos Holman: Amazing hackers.

Tim Ferriss: Go to Brasov if you have the chance, folks. Also, little known fact, lots of bears in Romania.

Pablos Holman: Not compared to where I come from, but — 

Tim Ferriss: I find that to be an appealing draw, but — 

Pablos Holman: Their bears are little, though.

Tim Ferriss: — that’s just me. In any case, are there pockets of incredible hacker density, geographically speaking, for whatever reason? You see this with all sorts of things where there’s a particular tennis school in Russia that produces just an absurd percentage of top tennis players for a decade or two. Or there’s a million examples from a million disciplines.

Tim Ferriss: So does that exist for hacking?

Pablos Holman: Yeah, there’s — 

Tim Ferriss: Is it like, oh, this particular city in China, oh, this particular place in Uzbekistan or wherever?

Pablos Holman: Yeah. Well, there’s two things that caused that. So one is a center of gravity of technical excellence. And so you could say places like Hungary put out amazing mathematicians, which translates to pretty good understanding of computers. Some of those Eastern European places had that and/or still do. And so there’s a center of gravity there. Germany had these extraordinary hackers that would blow our minds. We would go over there and just wonder why we were — 

Tim Ferriss: You say had, past tense?

Pablos Holman: I don’t know now, because again, I’m hacking other things. But I used to go to the Chaos Computer Congress in Germany, which is the big hacker convention. And we could blow their minds a little, but they could blow our minds a lot. So that was cool. But what happened is, in the early two thousands, Microsoft started to get serious about computer security. And they started to import hackers to Seattle from everywhere. I was in Seattle at the time, again graduating out of hacking and computer stuff into other things. But all my friends were hackers. And what was great is we had this critical mass of hackers from all over the world, including Germany and all these places, that Microsoft imported. So that was a center of gravity for a while. I don’t — 

Tim Ferriss: Must have been fun grabbing dinner or drinks with that crew after work.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, that’s what we were doing. Actually, it was funny because it was at the same era Dodgeball came out, which is like this pre-iPhone location, SMS app.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I thought you were talking about the movie with Ben Stiller.

Pablos Holman: Not the movie, this is an app. Before Foursquare. It’s like the predecessor to Foursquare. And so you’d send a text to this one number and then it would go to all your friends. And so you’d send this text and like, “I’m at the bar.” And immediately a hundred friends would get the text. And they’re like, “I’ll go to the bar.” So the drinking rate amongst hackers just went off the charts. But we were hanging out together all the time, and that was actually a really cool community vibe for hackers. And we had some hackers that were good at getting people together. So that was a good era. I think it’s hard to say where the center of gravity is. Hackers have conventions that they go to now.

Tim Ferriss: What are the most interesting to you?

Pablos Holman: DEF CON got a little out of control. I think it’s a little too big. And then we did ShmooCon for 20 years. This is the last year though, so that one’s over. But you could still go to Germany for CCC. That would probably be the best thing to do. In the US — 

Tim Ferriss: I’d leave my phone in the hotel room.

Pablos Holman: — ToorCon if you — oh, yeah, don’t take any computers to these things. But go naked and you’ll be fine.

Tim Ferriss: Naked and afraid.

Pablos Holman: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: CCC edition. Let me just pull on this geographic thread a little bit and then we’re going to move to other things. But this is from another of our mutual friends. So questions around geopolitics from a tech angle. In other words, who is leading and what? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Pablos Holman: Oh my God. Geopolitics.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a promising start.

Pablos Holman: Here’s how I would try to think about it. Technology in general, especially computers, especially computer security, these things are a war of escalation. You cannot win that war. You can lose very easily by not playing. And so for better or worse, I think it’s important to think about these things this way. You can see it, if you’re going to say geopolitically on technology in general, China and the US are definitely trying to play. And you can see a lot of places that I won’t name, like Europe, that you absolutely could say are not playing. And so you’ll see how that plays out. You can see how it plays out with lots of technologies.

Tim Ferriss: What are the main technologies?

Pablos Holman: Well, these days — 

Tim Ferriss: I mean, are we talking semiconductors and AI? Are we talking about — 

Pablos Holman: These days, those are the biggest ones. And the reason they’re so big is they’re generally applicable. So computers can be applied to everything. If you haven’t got one in your pocket by now, you will. I mean, they go everywhere. So computers are very important. Technology that’s generally applicable. You just can’t ignore it. You could hang out in Copenhagen and draft off China and the US if that’s what you want to do. But I think it’s dangerous not to play the game. You want to get to the point where you can at least wield these technologies to whatever extent you think is important. So that’s as much as I think people really need to know. 

Now, there’s a whole stack. The software relies on the chips, which rely increasingly on energy. All these hyperscalers have woken up this year to the fact that a chip from Nvidia needs a shit ton of energy and we’ve been burning gas to get it, so maybe we should find something better. So now there’s a lot of intention on improving energy. I’m so excited about that because — 

Tim Ferriss: Do you think the hyperscalers will actually help resurrect nuclear energy in the US?

Pablos Holman: I think hyperscalers are going to save us. It’s a crazy thing to say.

Tim Ferriss: Wild to say, huh?

Pablos Holman: It’s a crazy thing to say. But you can thank Meta and Microsoft and Google. And the reason is that we don’t make enough energy on this planet. Now you could say we make enough energy for Americans, because we’re not very price sensitive and we can just keep throwing money at it. But you will watch, even not counting AI, you will see that energy demand is off the charts. Try to remember when Shell or Chevron advertised to get you to buy more gas. It’s the biggest market in the world. They don’t have to advertise their product.

I mean they advertise to get you to buy it from them instead of — 

Tim Ferriss: Well, speaking of dodgeball, I think in your book you wrote that at one point, was it the Senate, was switching players on a dodgeball team between Chevron and someone else?

Pablos Holman: Well, yeah. I mean, I would say the oil industry probably staffed Congress for most of our lives. Now, it’s hyperscalers. And so we are getting the legislation that we need. Last year, the most bipartisan bill I know of was called ADVANCE. That was to build nuclear reactors in the US. Now, Trump has signed multiple executive orders to build nuclear reactors and free it up. And it’s working. The overhaul of the NRC, which regulates nuclear, has been amazing. They’re supportive and helpful in my lifetime. They were usually an anti-nuclear activist group. It’s been crazy how — because we started, we invented one of the most advanced nuclear reactors at the Intellectual Ventures lab where I was before. And for the last 18 years, you’ve seen me on stage telling people nuclear reactors are awesome and they’re coming and they weren’t coming.

And that is because the NRC regulated them into oblivion. That has all changed now. And as of this year, this is crazy, as of this week — so we have now a nuclear reactor company I should describe, which has invented a reactor that fits in a borehole. They bury it a mile deep. So this reactor is unquestionably safe.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the size of a small car or something like that.

Pablos Holman: It’s the size of a Toyota, not more complicated than a Toyota. And the thing can be made in a factory like a Toyota, but it’s buried under 10 billion tons of rock. It’s something that if anything went wrong, there’d be no radioactivity at the surface. It’s a mile from anyone’s backyard.

Tim Ferriss: And when you retire it or when it stops functioning — 

Pablos Holman: Fill the hole with dirt.

Tim Ferriss: Just bury it.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. Leave the uranium where we found it. It’s a really exciting way of making nuclear reactors.

Tim Ferriss: How do you cool it?

Pablos Holman: So there’s water in the borehole that goes down and cools it. What’s so fascinating is if you look at a Fukushima type problem, there’s these pumps that are supposed to be pumping water through the reactor core to cool it. And those pumps could fail. Well, that pressure, the water pressure in the borehole from gravity creates enough pressure to cool the reactor.

Tim Ferriss: Gravity has been pretty reliable so far.

Pablos Holman: Pretty reliable so far. So then that makes steam, that goes back up and you run a turbine in a generator like everyone else. So the reason I’m describing this is that that company was on a track to get the reactor approved in a couple of years, build a test core at a national lab over a couple years, then build a commercial reactor in 2029. The Department of Energy is pushing them to do all of that by July. They will deploy their first reactors in July. It’s insane. It’s awesome.

Tim Ferriss: Is it?

Pablos Holman: And then we’ll make thousands in a gigafactory.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think the US is kind of a day late and a dollar short in terms of waking up to the reality? Because my understanding, and I’m not going to get the number right — 

Pablos Holman: That’s okay.

Tim Ferriss: But looking at China, they have how many functional reactors?

Pablos Holman: I think they have about 130 reactor projects and they tend to get them done on time, on budget. There’s different technologies. They’re trying them all. It took them about three years to build a reactor. And those are big ones. They’re smoking it. It’s amazing.

Tim Ferriss: And is that legacy, well maybe it’s cleaned up, but mostly legacy technology in terms of — 

Pablos Holman: Yeah, so there are different kinds of reactor technologies, and I won’t weigh in on that because I think we need a thousand silver bullets and I kind of want them all to succeed. Obviously I invest in the ones I think are the best. But the future of reactors involves a bunch of advanced reactor technologies and they’re — so like the TerraPower reactor that we invented at the Intellectual Ventures lab, which we can’t build because it’s new technology, not because there’s any other reason.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a regulatory hurdle?

Pablos Holman: It’s a regulatory. But just because the US has never figured out how to approve any advanced reactor technology. Once they do, we could build something like that. That reactor is powered by nuclear waste. It literally recycles nuclear waste inside the reactor. So that’s where we want to go. That might take a while. So the deep fission reactor that I described, that goes in the borehole, no new technology, just a simple design. And you get the containment for the price of a hole. And we have a whole industry that’s real good at holes.

Tim Ferriss: So if you were, I’m not saying you would agree to this, but if you were brought in by people you trust to advise the current administration on what the US needs to do to remain globally strategically advantaged or at least not lose, what are some of those pieces of advice that you would give?

Pablos Holman: Wow. Well, I’d say the number one thing is going to be energy. In energy, the number one thing is fission reactors. Love fusion. Hope we get it someday. Don’t hold your breath. We have other technologies that I think could happen sooner than fusion that we could talk about like space solar, but I would say aggressively deploy nuclear reactors, make that as easy as possible. Take on the — I mean the biggest problem remaining is the litigious nature of the US. So you start a nuclear reactor project, you get a thousand lawsuits. We’ve got to squelch that because we’re competing with China and China doesn’t have that problem. And so make a clean regulatory track that makes it possible to deploy these things at scale. So that’s the most important thing. If you get nuclear reactors, you solve a lot of other problems for free. And so I think that with limited attention span, that would be where my focus would be. Commercially, we can take care of the chips and everything after that.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe just patting myself on the back here in a self-congratulatory way. But when you talk about sequencing, picking the proper sequence of problems to solve, it just makes me so happy because I feel like — 

Pablos Holman: That’s your mantra.

Tim Ferriss: Right. There are quite a few people who are good at defining, say, the constituent parts of a given problem. There are a lot of people who are good at applying some type of an 80/20 analysis, but it seems like the secret sauce that is kind of self-evident when you really peer closely at it that gets ignored a lot is the sequencing. Where it’s like, yeah, you can try to fix these 18 separate issues, but if your lead domino is solving for energy, then those either become irrelevant or they become a lot easier to solve.

Pablos Holman: The great example to me was how recycling played out in the US. We’ve been recycling our whole lives. Right now it’s kind of a wash. You’d probably burn less gas making fresh plastic than if you try to recycle these plastic bottles and things. And we’re 50 years into that. And so it’s just putting the cart before the horse. Recycling is going to work great once you have a nuclear reactor to power your recycling plan.

But we’re not there. We’re burning gas to do it. And you watch out your window when the truck comes, it’s going to pick up the trash and the recycling and throw them in the same truck. It’s not working and we’re not being honest about that. And it placates people. They feel like they did their part, separating stuff out. So I think it’s one of the things I’m trying to convey to people with technologies is you can’t keep putting the cart before the horse. We don’t have time to keep scaling the wrong thing. We got to pick something that’s going to work and then go build that. And you can just do basic arithmetic to get those answers a lot of the time.

Solve energy first, then you can solve — if you want to go do carbon captured, pick co-to molecules — 

Tim Ferriss: 400 parts per million.

Pablos Holman: 400 parts per million means 400 needles in a haystack with a million pieces of straw. That’s what we’re talking about. So good luck. I think you want to find a less entropic source of carbon, leave the coal on the ground if that’s what you want to do. It’s very highly concentrated there. So if you had energy that was cheap and basically free, then you could go pump all the air through a filter and go get those carbon molecules. But we’re really not being honest about the basic arithmetic for a lot of these things. And so I can be a little harsh on these ideas, but it’s not because I don’t want them to work, it’s just that I want them to be done in logical order.

Tim Ferriss: And tell me if I’m off base here, but I don’t want people to misconstrue what you’re saying. It seems like what you’re saying, if I’m understanding it correctly, as much as people sometimes say “It’s the economy, stupid,” it’s the energy, stupid. But in the sense that that is the biggest lever we have to pull. What you’re not saying is everyone should stop recycling if their municipality actually sorts and so on.

Pablos Holman: I mean, maybe they should stop. Some of them are working. Copenhagen in one neighborhood, they figured it out.

Tim Ferriss: I guess product would mean more microplastics and there are issues with a larger volume of plastics besides the energy equation, I guess. But I don’t know how you think about that.

Pablos Holman: So again, something like plastics are part of the reason we all exist. They are very, very useful for saving lives in a lot of ways. But yeah, you want to use the plastic where it belongs, not where it doesn’t belong. So yeah, keep it out of your testicles and keep it out of the ocean and keep it out of the places where you don’t want it. But there are places where it can be very, very helpful.

Tim Ferriss: The inventions that you describe in your book are really compelling. And as I believe you described them, please fact check me if I’m getting this off, but that with deep tech, and you should probably define what that means —

Pablos Holman: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — the risk isn’t so much, it doesn’t seem to be market risk or a need risk. People could read about the description and say, “Of course we should use that.” There’s technical risk up front, but I’m wondering how you think about and assess as an investor regulatory risk and all of the red tape and bramble bushes that entail getting something like that to launch or adoption.

Pablos Holman: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: Because you have built or indirectly funded people who have built much better mousetraps.

Pablos Holman: Right.

Tim Ferriss: Quite a lot. And been involved with Nathan Myhrvold’s lab and building technology for, say, reducing the likelihood or severity of hurricanes, simple tech, which we could get into. And it’s like why the hell isn’t it being used?

Pablos Holman: Yeah. Okay. So there’s a few things there. I usually get involved when I see a technology that I think is 10 times better than state-of-the-art. If you go to Hewlett Packard, there’s somebody there. There’s an engineer that’s super smart figuring out how to make inkjet printers like one percent better, which is awesome. But I want the guy who’s figuring out how to make whatever comes after inkjet. So two times better. There’s probably not enough margin there to ensure that you can go the distance, but 10 times better. That’s a real window. It is 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, 10 times more efficient, 10 times on any metric could be a good window. So that’s kind where I see deep tech breakthroughs as becoming sort of contenders. And then we try to invest in them and help get them out of the lab or out of the garage and into a startup.

That’s what I’m looking for in the world. Now that’s a much different thing than what we’re both very familiar with startups and venture capital and probably audiences too. The last couple decades of Silicon Valley, let’s say, have evolved a very impressive machinery for funding iPhone apps to have weed delivered to your dorm room by a drone. They’re not going to take on nuclear reactors. You can’t take a nuclear reactor and go knock it on doors in Silicon Valley and expect to get a response. Maybe this week it’s getting better. But the point is we’ve been funding these SaaS holes for decades instead of actual technologies.

And that’s okay. That’s cool to make software and it’s a good, I think good practice run. If you’re an entrepreneur and you made an app. Cool practice. Now take on a new technology that’s a 10X multiplier in some hundred-year-old industry where nobody in Silicon Valley has touched it. To me, that’s where the action is. And I think I can prove that.

Tim Ferriss: Does it need to involve hardware?

Pablos Holman: It doesn’t need to. We have a small percentage of things we backed that are exclusively software, but by and large, they don’t need our help. They probably don’t need your help because those are easier things that other people are going to do anyway. I do things like say new algorithms in AI, but I wouldn’t do applied AI, things like that. So things that move the needle along, what’s possible. New chip architectures, I do. But anyway, the point is, let’s get back to hardware in a minute. When you’re investing, you’re looking at risk as you described. So all of Silicon Valley, you could say, is fixated on market risk. So we have milestones like MVP, product market fit, those kinds of things because that’s a way to reduce market risk.

Technical risk. You never heard of it. If I can draw an iPhone app on a napkin — 

Tim Ferriss: Except in my biotech investing.

Pablos Holman: Okay, that’s different. Yeah, we’ll leave Boston out of this. But for software investment, there’s really not technical risk that much these days. If you can draw it on Canva, then we can make it. Okay, so what I’m doing is the opposite. I take a lot of technical risk. Can we build this nuclear reactor? Can we put solar panels in space? Can we do whatever? But the day that I get through that, the day we get through that, the day the first reactor goes in the ground and lights up, there’s no more technical risk. It works. You can see it. And there was never any market risk because I just have vast industrial markets, trillion dollar markets. And that’s very important to understand. So I actually get — our companies, on average, will graduate from Venture earlier.

We’re not selling equity to make more nuclear reactors. There’s project financing and debt for that. So I think investors are missing what’s possible in deep tech. Basically no market risk once we get through the technical risk. And so the size of the markets, if you’re one of these SaaS investors and you see a TAM of 10 billion, let’s say for a Zoom or a Slack or something, that sounds good. If you add up all the software companies in the world, including Microsoft and Meta and everybody combined, their combined revenue is about $2 trillion a year. The global GDP is over a hundred trillion dollars a year. So Silicon Valley is doing two percent of what humans rely on. That other 98 percent is my TAM.

Tim Ferriss: Is top-line revenue and GDP a fair comparison?

Pablos Holman: I mean, you could nitpick over the details. It’s actually, if it’s unfair, it’s unfair in my advantage. It’s unfair to my advantage. So I’m trying to be generous here. And so just rough numbers, we can nitpick later. Fact-check me, guys, 98 percent. If you fact-check me, I’m going to win. Okay. 98 percent of what’s left is that’s energy, but it’s shipping. Shipping is a $2 trillion Industry as big as software. We could talk about that. Durable goods.

Tim Ferriss: And by shipping, you mean mostly ocean based.

Pablos Holman: Right. Durable goods, all your sinks and bicycles and light fixtures and chairs, that’s $4 trillion a year. Automotive is another four, five, six trillion. I mean we’re just talking about massive industries bigger than the entire tech industry and we’ve completely ignored them in Silicon Valley. That’s what deep tech is. That’s what we’re going after.

Tim Ferriss: What about the regulatory implementation piece? Because for instance, I was reading the book and I’m fascinated by containers and how the standardizing of containers revolutionized activity on the planet. And learning through your book about the different types of fuel and just the congestion at ports caused by extraordinarily large seaborne container ships, cargo ships, which is a necessity to reduce drag because they’re optimizing for fuel.

And the alternative that you propose seems like a no-brainer. But then I’m like, well wait a second. Is it like the Greek and Chinese cartels, so to speak? The sort of — 

Pablos Holman: So you’ve named two more kinds of risk.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah. I mean what are we talking about?

Pablos Holman: All right, well, so just to make it clear for the audience, we have a team that’s developing cargo ships that are autonomous. I don’t think it’s that hard. You duct tape a Tesla to the front and it can drive across an ocean. Probably anybody listening would believe that’s possible. There’s nothing to hit out there. One documented pedestrian ever.

Tim Ferriss: Are we talking about JC? Is that — 

Pablos Holman: Yeah. And so other than that, it’s probably going to work. I don’t think it’s — not very questionable at this point. The other important advancement is it’s sailing, so it doesn’t need a crew, but it doesn’t need fuel. Those two trillion spent in the shipping industry every year are spent. Five out of six of those dollars is burned.

Tim Ferriss: You said sailing. What if there’s no wind?

Pablos Holman: If there’s no wind, we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone.

Tim Ferriss: I see.

Pablos Holman: But we’re actually really good at weather prediction because even cargo ships now need to avoid storms. And so the weather prediction has improved so much. We’re really good at that. But yeah, your worst-case scenario is you’ve got a ship full of bananas and they’re stuck in a dead zone. So we have electric backup to get out of the dead zone and then they sail themselves.

Tim Ferriss: Why aren’t these things everywhere?

Pablos Holman: Exactly. So they’re not everywhere because look at how we’ve all learned about disruption. You’ve seen what happened. Any taxi company in the world could have made an iPhone app. None of them did. 

Tim Ferriss: Instead, they ended up suing Uber everywhere they launched.

Pablos Holman: Any shipping company in the world could make this ship. None of them will. So that’s what we have to do. That’s what the tech industry needs to do. That’s why deep tech matters. That’s why I want your fans who are listening, once they graduate from software, come help us build this ship. Help us take on — you don’t need to be a physicist. I’ve got physicists. What I need is entrepreneurs who want to build these industries. And when you look at what happened with Uber, that playbook is incredible. What happens the day my first ship sails? Do we sell this to Maersk? That would be like Uber selling to Yellow Cab. No, we build the next Maersk. That’s the opportunity. 

Would you have rather built Uber or Maersk? That’s where — 

Tim Ferriss: I mean, Maersk just might take it into hospice.

Pablos Holman: Risk of assassination is high. I grant that. Maybe higher than even in taxis because there are a few big cabals globally that run the shipping industry. You might need to partner with one of them, but that’s a tomorrow problem. The truth is we can do this.

Tim Ferriss: Pablos, one day I’m going to ask you for a favor.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, might need one myself after this airs. So the point is you could identify, I don’t know, risk of assassination as a fourth kind of risk. But look, we have to build these things. The regulatory risk in different industries in shipping you’re dealing with, look, teamsters and ports, I mean that’s where labor unions come from. Read about the Wobblies having shootouts with the sheriff’s office. I mean this is crazy stuff in the history of labor. So you’ve got to be careful about who you put out of a job. But I think it’s one of these exciting things.

What you mentioned is the reason ships are so big is because you get a drag advantage, you get improved drag. When you double the size of a ship, your drag only goes up by 50 percent. So you’re incentivized to build the biggest ship you can.

Well, those ships are clogging up ports. So if you look at what’s happening in shipping, your happy meal toys start out in China, it takes 50 days to get them to Los Angeles. Only 14 of those days are on the water. The rest of the time they’re just hanging out at port waiting to get loaded or unloaded. So that 14 days is a little slower when you’re sailing. 30 percent slower. But overall it’s faster. But we can make smaller ships and lots of them.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I guess you need to get to a certain position of dominance in order to clear the congestion at ports. You need to start replacing a lot of the container ships that are clogging.

Pablos Holman: I mean that would be great, but we will start out with tiny ships that move a few containers to islands. I mean there’s all these islands that you can’t even get a ship to. And we could just do that. Sail your happy meal toys to islands.

Tim Ferriss: Is Pablos a common name in Alaska?

Pablos Holman: Pablos is a totally fake name because all hackers have fake names.

Tim Ferriss: Is the last name fake too?

Pablos Holman: No, I mean I’m not trying to fly below the radar at this point. I got that username on a mainframe when I was like 12 and I don’t even remember how. I’ve been called Pablos for longer than anyone can remember.

Tim Ferriss: And I have to ask, I know we’re taking a left turn here, but on the cover of your book, you have your glasses. In every video I’ve ever seen, I see you in the glasses. What is the story behind the glasses?

Pablos Holman: I’ve been wearing the same glasses for 20 years, which is kind of why they ended up on the cover of the book and people associate me with the glasses. These are the best glasses ever made, which is why I started wearing them and because in labs all the time, I kind of need safety glasses that wrap around.

Tim Ferriss: Are they prescription?

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Okay.

Pablos Holman: And I’ve been wearing glasses since I was four, but I started wearing these. They’re made of titanium alloy.

Tim Ferriss: What are they? Are they Oakley?

Pablos Holman: Oakley made them in their heyday. So back before Oakley got sold out, they had these designers who were little gods. They could do whatever they wanted. And they built this factory in Nevada to make titanium frames. But this is intensive to do. 425,000 watts to make one pair of frames. And they have all these volatile gases in the casting process. And so eventually the factory blew up and nobody will ever make glasses this way again. But I’ve been wearing the same ones for 20 years.

Tim Ferriss: One pair?

Pablos Holman: You can’t break them. Oh, I have a few pairs that I cycle out because the nose bridge gets loose and I got a guy who will tighten them up, but two pairs would’ve lasted this long. Yeah, I have more just in case I live a couple extra lifetimes. I’ve been stockpiling them.

Tim Ferriss: Are you optimistic? Would you describe yourself as optimistic?

Pablos Holman: Well, people cast me that way and I think it’s probably fair. But what I wrote in the book about that is that I think I’m not a pollyannish optimist. I don’t think everything’s going to be awesome. What I think is the future could be awesome that we have some volition in this, that we build that future ourselves with the toolkit we have. That toolkit is largely the technologies we have. And so I think it’s up to us to try. It’s up to us to decide where we want to go, what we want to aim for, what future we want to build and do that. I call it possible-ist. I think a future that’s awesome is absolutely possible. A shitty future is also possible, but the balance is up to us. And so that’s how I would describe that.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let’s talk about the B word for a second. Billionaires. So I know of at least three, you don’t need to name names, although you mentioned a few publicly who just find you to be the shiniest, most attractive hire. And I want to know why you think that is? Because they’re not looking for script kiddies in Romania. There are a lot of people who can steal passwords and who are capable hackers of various types, but you just seem to pop up again and again on these teams. Why is that?

Pablos Holman: Okay, so first of all, lots of hackers that are way smarter than me and way more potent, so nothing to worry about. I think that the heart of what you’re getting at is probably what you could say about me is I do have a kind of extreme risk tolerance. My whole career, I’ve only worked on things that I thought were cool or interesting. I’ll optimize for that over everything else. I’ve gone broke a bunch of times because I worked on things that were way too soon or way too cool or way too expensive. But I’m okay with that because I want to do the thing — 

I’m not going to do that anymore. But I’m okay with that because I’m good at doing things I’m interested in. I think people are optimized for that. I don’t find that I’m effective if I’m working on something that’s not interesting. I’ve always optimized for that. I took on things a decade before other people would see them as rational. That’s how I ended up in some of those unusual situations in my career. As far as billionaires go, I think — look, I don’t think I’m just a shiny object. They can hire whoever they want.

Tim Ferriss: Not my words, by the way. It’s one of our mutual friend’s words. Shiny meaning attractive, by the way. Not just a crow collecting buttons or something. I’m just saying.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, I mean some of these are very — just circumstances that I ended up being open to when most people wouldn’t. I’d say that’s the biggest thing and I think it’s replicable. Other people could do that. Think about your worst case scenario. Probably your startup fails, you end up on your mom’s couch, regroup. Try again. For most people, you and I know most people in the US, most people in tech, that’s what it looks like. It’s not so bad. So why are you over-optimizing on safety? Why are you going to work for a big tech company or Goldman Sachs or whatever? That’s optimizing for safety.

Tim Ferriss: So let me ask you this, do you think people are under-optimizing on location? Because you mentioned Seattle, I’m not sure how you got to Seattle, but when I think Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, all Seattle, right? So is there some engineered serendipity placing yourself in the right location? Or is that less of a factor?

Pablos Holman: Okay, so I was in Silicon Valley before that and I would say the main reason I left is that sock puppet attack. In 2001, everything in Silicon Valley got shut down because of the.com bubble. So it was a wasteland.

Tim Ferriss: Sock puppet attack.

Pablos Holman: It was this — 

Tim Ferriss: What does that mean? I like it. I want to use it. So I need to understand what it means.

Pablos Holman: Because the poster child for .com bubble was pets.com and they had this ad campaign, they spent like a billion dollars on ads, like Super Bowl ads with a sock puppet. And it was just the most ridiculous thing.

Tim Ferriss: You’re like, the end is nigh.

Pablos Holman: The end was nigh, and it’s because everything was over-hyped. Too much money was put into too many dumb things. I have a bad attitude about this because we had real technologies, and we got shut down too. I don’t like what I see in Silicon Valley. It’s too much crap. Not enough actual technology. We overindexed on entrepreneurs and we threw the inventors under the bus. It’s time to course correct. I want the guy from WeWork and I want to give him a nuclear reactor. Let me arm you. If you are an entrepreneur that wants to build a company, great. Let me arm you with IP, with an invention, with a CTO, I can hook you up. Only the good ones. So that’s kind of where I think this goes. 

Tim Ferriss: Now the WeWork founder is a controversial choice.

Pablos Holman: Okay, whatever.

Tim Ferriss: No, no.

Pablos Holman: I’ll take the Uber founder. Any founder. Controversial or otherwise — 

Tim Ferriss: Those are the two strong ones.

Pablos Holman: Okay, fine. But good entrepreneurs. No tech. So let’s arm those guys with some actual technology. That’s what I think — but that’s not your question. The point is, in 2001, everything got shut down. Silicon Valley was a wasteland. You couldn’t start companies, couldn’t do hardly anything. So I ran out of excuses to pay rent and go broke in San Francisco. And so Seattle was like, for the price of rent in San Francisco, I could rent a whole neighborhood. And I was like, “Oh, let’s try that.” And — 

Tim Ferriss: How did you choose Seattle over every other place?

Pablos Holman: Because I’m from Alaska, Seattle’s like the default next, so I knew more people in Seattle than anywhere. And so I was just hanging out in Seattle during the summer funemployed and looking at real estate prices thinking, “Oh, this could be okay.” And then I got an email from Neal Stephenson who — 

Tim Ferriss: I was going to bring him up, so I’m glad you did. Yeah.

Pablos Holman: So, look, Neal, if you’re any kind of nerd, Neal is a demigod.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Snow Crash, Metaverse. I mean, when did Cryptonomicon come out? Which I loved.

Pablos Holman: ’98.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, so early glimmers of crypto.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. So I was working on cryptocurrency in ’98 when Cryptonomicon came out, so I’m a closet Neal Stephenson fan. And so I got an email from Neal and he’s like, “Hey.”

Tim Ferriss: How did he find you?

Pablos Holman: Mutual friends. Jeremy Bornstein introduced us and he was the founder of the company I’d been working for, doing AI stuff that got shut down in dot-com bubble sock puppet attack. So anyway, so Jeremy introduced me to Neal, Neal said, “Hey, we’re building a lab to do some cool stuff. Come check it out.” So I went down to this lab. So Neal and an astrophysicist named Keith Rosema had gotten this old envelope factory and turned it into a machine shop that they bought a machine shop on surplus, and actually the crusty old machinist kind of came with it.

So they were trying to build what was called Blue Operations. And I went down there and they’re like, “Hey, we’re trying to go to space.” I’m like, “Cool, whatever. Space is good, I’ve got nothing else going. Let’s do it.” And they needed help with computer stuff, of course. And so I started helping on that, and we were trying to figure out alternative ways of going to space besides rockets. And eventually we hired a couple other machinists and some other super nerds and tried all these experiments. And that was the origin of Blue Origin.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. What were the alternatives that you guys were exploring?

Pablos Holman: So rockets are like 90 percent fuel. So when you light up a rocket, you’re just burning fuel to get out of Earth’s gravity.

Tim Ferriss: Cargo ship plus.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, right, totally. So you can’t make rockets sail, but we thought maybe you could. So what if you could just take the payload, the craft, the part you want, people or the stuff or the satellites, and then beam power to it from the ground, which sounds kind of crazy, but every day gets easier and easier. We have the technologies that could do that now, so I think eventually we will do these things. But the problem was Jeff Bezos was the one who started Blue Origin. He’s the one funding it. And in those days, Jeff was worth like $7 billion and our job was to figure out what we could do with one. So — 

Tim Ferriss: That’s a ballsy bet. He’s done pretty well since.

Pablos Holman: He’s done all right and now it’s putting a billion or more every year in Blue Origin. But the point is we could get further faster by standing on the shoulders of NASA and Russia than starting in a $50 billion hole, inventing some new propulsion scheme. So we have a bunch of ideas that were really cool, but in the end — so this, again, started in 2001. I’m going to go to Blue Origin next week for the 25th anniversary, and I get to meet some of the staff. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore, but hopefully get to meet some of the folks who are taking that and running with it. But the last thing I worked on was we built this terrifying craft with four Rolls Royce jet engines that we retooled to operate vertically and made like a quadcopter out of them. 

Tim Ferriss: Sounds safe.

Pablos Holman: It’s totally not safe. This is before you could buy a quadcopter at Walmart, so we had to write all the code to do self-balancing and stuff on these microcontrollers and get it working and do thrust vectoring and all this. Anyway, we drug this thing out into the desert in central Washington, we fire the thing up, and it goes up and flies around like a UFO and then it comes back down and does a vertical landing. And so we proved that it could be done, and that was the day we decided go do it with a rocket, and Blue Origin got started on a track to go build a rocket and that’s when I left. You don’t need me to build a rocket, so yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Amazing. All right. This is going to be out of left field, but I like out of left field. But I don’t want to leave this question of why you get hired for these projects too quickly.

Pablos Holman: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Because for whatever reason, I feel like there’s more there. How do you look at the world or what toolkit do you have? What are you able to provide that — 

Pablos Holman: Honestly, I think there’s probably somebody better at everything than me.

Tim Ferriss: You’re very multidisciplinary.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. At this point, I’d say I’m kind of the canonical T-shaped person. I went real deep in computers and so I can appreciate and communicate with people who are experts in other things because I’m kind of a generalist. So I don’t write much code, I mean I’m fucking vibe coding for fun, but no one cares about any code I’m writing. I’m not that guy. But because my depth of knowledge is deep, I can appreciate another expert’s depth of knowledge and I think that that helps me to work with folks. A lot of people get pigeonholed into just the thing. We see that with scientists or engineers a lot. They’re specialized too much. And if you look at millennials, they’re kind of typically very flat. They just — “I could do anything,” but they can’t do it too well.

Tim Ferriss: An M-dash-shaped person?

Pablos Holman: M-dash. Yeah, M-dash for millennial. I like that. So I think that my suspension of disbelief, my willingness. Also, I think one of the other things that works to my advantage is most of my colleagues and friends are legitimate scientists or engineers, and they’re formally trained and they know what they’re doing. Those folks get stuck with kind of some professional liability. If you’re a scientist, you can’t say crazy shit because that could be professionally damaging for sure.

I’m a hacker so I can ask all the dumbest questions in the world because they think I’m a little bit smart, a little bit dangerous, but if I don’t actually know about shipping or rockets, I mean I had to learn physics on the job. I’m working with actual astrophysicists who know about rockets, and I have to understand what does delta-v mean, and I’m Googling that shit on the side. So I had to learn those things on the job, and I’m more fluent now, but I’m not formally trained in those things, but it’s okay for me to ask a dumb question about rockets. And so I think that helped me a lot.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s my job to ask dumb questions.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. And you get away with it too.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: So that’s really cool. And you’re doing such a good job of that because you’ve been able to bring in people, whereas someone else, and you can see this when you see experts interview people, it’s not interesting. It doesn’t go anywhere because they can’t ask those dumb questions. Ask me some dumb questions. We’ll prove it right now.

Tim Ferriss: Okay, Zero Effect.

Pablos Holman: Oh, man.

Tim Ferriss: What is Zero Effect? You and Elan Lee are both fans of Zero Effect and I’ve never seen it. What is Zero Effect?

Pablos Holman: I thought I got this from him, but he says he got it from me. So this is a philosophy that drives me. So there was a film called the Zero Effect. It was like Ben Stiller made it 20 years ago.

Tim Ferriss: 1998. Yeah.

Pablos Holman: Okay. The main character is the world’s greatest private detective. And at one point in the film, he’s articulating his philosophy of being the world’s greatest private detective, and he’s a private detective who never leaves his home, so he stays home and he cracks every case. 

Tim Ferriss: It’s like the fantasy of every millennial on screens right now.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, right. Well, here’s how to do it guys. If you lose your keys and you go looking for them, of all of the things in the entire world, you’re only looking for one of them and your odds of finding it are very low. But if you go looking for something in general and you don’t set such a specific target, you’re bound to find something. And so it’s a way of thinking about like, “Oh yeah, if I’m open, if I’m open to what’s possible…”

So for example, why I say that’s a philosophy that matters to me. I’m running the most wild venture fund ever. We invest in things that sound crazy and I have to be open. Most of them, even I don’t like them at the beginning. Even I’m like, “That sounds crazy,” but I have to force myself to stay open, let the founders try and explain why it’s not actually crazy. And by the time we invest, I’m convinced and I understand enough that it’s like, “Okay, it sounds crazy, but it isn’t.” You know by now I’m in the business of things that sound like complete bullshit but aren’t. I have to be right enough times that they’re not, but I got to be open. So I think the Zero Effect is how I think about staying open to finding anything.

So people come at me with perpetual motion devices every day now, and it would be crazy to invest in one of these perpetual motion devices, but it might be genius if you invest in all of them, so I do. Well, or at least a lot of them. So if one of them works, I’ll have it. So that’s kind of the game. And I think more people would get something out of that approach to life than the opposite, which is much more common, which is people are trying so hard to be so sure and be right all the time, and they really aren’t any way. They’re spectators in the world, they’re not building something anyway. So I think be open to things and be supportive.

One of the best things about Silicon Valley in the ’90s was the way everybody was like that. You could just walk down the street, find a homeless dude, start telling them about self-sailing cargo ships or nuclear reactors. He’d be like, “Oh, cool, man, my college roommate is an astrophysicist. He might be able to help you with that.” Everybody was in on it, and I think they get a bit of that now with AI. People are supportive, but it’s hard to find a critical mass of that dynamic anywhere else, so I try to be that for the deep tech folks.

Tim Ferriss: Is the movie worth watching or is it really just the philosophy?

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah. Oh, totally. Good movie. It’s a good movie. It’s awesome. Go watch it. Yeah, I mean, I don’t even watch movies, but trust me, this one’s good. And WarGames, those are the two movies in the world to watch. Everything else, you can ignore.

Tim Ferriss: WarGames, the only defensible movie on hacking?

Pablos Holman: Only defensible hacker movie ever. I keep trying, Hollywood calls me to put hackers in a movie. I keep trying to help them put legit hacking in the movies and I explain everything, I show them exactly how to make it go so that real hackers will get on board. And then by the time the movie comes out, my influence is completely lost. It’s just fake access, control, override again.

Tim Ferriss: “Enhance photo.”

Pablos Holman: “Enhance photo.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s one of my favorites.

Pablos Holman: I know enhance — it’s such bullshit. Although enhance photo is working pretty well now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. Now it’s a thing. So perpetual motion folks, it’s coming.

Pablos Holman: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned looking for keys. I just have to ask because I know that you’re focused on deep tech, but still it seems like you have occasional side projects. So the key with duct tape, at least as it was described to me, where you were like, “Oh yeah, this one opens my car, closes my car, and this one unlocks every REDACTED in a one or two-mile radius.” Is this just a fairy tale?

Pablos Holman: It’s not a fairy tale. It was figured out by a hacker named Major Malfunction in England.

Tim Ferriss: Great handle.

Pablos Holman: And so those keyless remote or the remote key buttons that you have for your car, they’re kind of like RFIDs. They have a battery in them, so they can emit a signal, and then the car is listening for that signal. And when you build almost anything, you build it to do the thing, but you almost always build a little back door. Watch board games. So Major Malfunction, not through hacking, but by calling tech support for his REDACTED, because his wife was locked out in a sketchy situation, was told, “Oh, do this, manipulate the key.” So he’s able to manipulate the key to open any REDACTED and he explained this to me. And I don’t know if he was drunk or what, but he probably shouldn’t have. And so — 

Tim Ferriss: Pablos on the loose.

Pablos Holman: — go by the dealership and you can open any REDACTED. So at the time, I wasn’t going to say the name of the brand, but you did. So yeah, it was — 

Tim Ferriss: I mean, we can bleep it out.

Pablos Holman: — one brand of cars can open any car from that manufacturer. I think they probably have fixed this by now, but you would have to, or at least in modern cars, I sure hope so. I’m not going to say how to do it, but yeah, so look, that’s a vulnerability that has poor foresight because in those days, this is an old attack, so I don’t mind talking about too much, but you don’t have a system update. Those cars are not online. Now a Tesla and modern cars almost all have an internet connection and they can run system update, which is a very important way of reducing attack surface for vulnerabilities. So now that cars have system update, we could fix something like that remotely, but in those days you couldn’t. And so it was a pretty wild attack for a while. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I guess it still is if you’re going after vintage vehicles, potentially.

Pablos Holman: Maybe, yeah. I’m not going to tell you how to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s all right. I’d be curious to know, and there was another friend who popped up in your book, Chris Young.

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah. Oh, good.

Tim Ferriss: I’ve spent a ton of time with Chris Young — 

Pablos Holman: Great.

Tim Ferriss: — for the book that I wrote about learning and cooking and so on, and had a blast. And that’s also the first time — I think I bumped into him twice now, but met Neal Stephenson — 

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah, good.

Tim Ferriss: — who is one hell of a diversified polymath. I mean, that guy is up to a lot more than writing. I mean, he certainly is a prolific –

Pablos Holman: Neal’s delightful. We got to obviously do Blue Origin together. He helped us start the Intellectual Ventures Lab. He and I started a sword fighting school one time.

Tim Ferriss: He’s really into Victorian-era exercises, right?

Pablos Holman: Yeah, right. No, you got all the club bells and for a while was training with a Sherlock Holmes-esque cane, I forgot what’s that called? Bartitsu. Oh, man. Yeah, Neal, it’s great. I mean I really love Neal. He’s delightful, but he would spend about half his day writing in the morning and then the afternoon working on some crazy project, and I got to work on a lot of those with him.

Tim Ferriss: What are some of the characteristics or mental frameworks, anything at all, that distinguish some of these people who have employed you? So for instance, and I think you might’ve written about this, certainly I’ve thought about it a lot, but the advantage that, for instance, Jeff Bezos was able to create even before he created his empire with longer time horizons than anyone else, just changing the timeframe of thinking and planning. What else have you gleaned from these folks?

Pablos Holman: Well, that one, I think it’s a very important one because like you said, you sort of flippantly mentioned billionaires, and people get off about these folks as soon as they’re rich just because they’re rich or successful. But often what I see is it’s blinding them, it’s blinding people to learning what is it that made those people successful? What is it that’s good? What is it that’s replicable? What are the lessons? And that’s why I think we kind of need you to pay attention to them because for better or worse, more people will probably listen to you than these billionaires. And so you can — 

Tim Ferriss: That’d save us.

Pablos Holman: — get those lessons, yeah. So for example, what I learned working for Jeff that really made a big difference to me personally was that if you think about Blue Origin, what is really going on there? It’s not a way for Jeff to get rich. That’s covered. So why make Blue Origin? Well, Blue Origin’s vision is to build a future for humans off of this planet and turn Earth into a wildlife refuge that maybe you would visit once in a lifetime because this is an awesome, amazing, and beautiful place and we don’t want to fuck it up too badly. So that sounds crazy, and none of us are going to be around for that, but it might take thousands of years to craft that future for humanity.

In the best case scenario, Earth just melts into the sun and that’s if nothing else wipes us out in the meantime. So if you believe in the sanctity of human life, you believe humans are something special, and I do, then in the long run you want to build kind of a plan B if not planet B. So that’s what Blue Origin is about. Now, that’s going to take generations, maybe millennia to do, but even so it would start with one small step. Blue Origin is that one small step. Can we get it started? And it’s actually a really amazing thing.

And so I learned to start by thinking on longer-term horizons, and that’s not super — like a thousand-year project to build space colonies is obviously not very relevant to me. I run a 10-year venture fund like everybody else who’s an investor. So what does that mean for me? Well, it gives me a way to think about new technologies. If I look at this nuclear reactor that goes in a borehole as an example or this cargo ship, and I say, “All right, 100 years from now, are we going to be burning nasty bunker oil to move those happy meal toys around or would we make these self-sailing cargo ships?” It’s like such an easy thing to answer. Anybody could do it. You don’t need to be smart, you don’t need to know anything about tech to answer that question.

Tim Ferriss: As soon as you extend the horizon.

Pablos Holman: You extend the horizon. In 100 years, anything could happen. In 100 years, the regulatory environment could change, Maersk could be out of business, all the cabals could be out of business, whatever, all the things, any objection you have probably could be solved in 100 years. So then ask yourself, “Does it have to take 100 years or could we do it in 10?” And if you can start to craft a vision for how to do it in 10, then you align with a lot of the machinery in the world that works. Venture funds are all 10-year funds. I can’t invest in things that take 20, but I can invest in things that take 10. So all the money is in 10-year funds. So people’s careers, they could sign up for a 10-year project, but a 20-year project might be too much. So that’s the kind of thing that helps me craft a vision for what I could invest in.

Okay, ships, yeah, we could do that in 10 years. The nuclear reactor, totally we can do it in 10 years. We’re going to do it by July. So all these crazy-sounding things that we do, I looked at them as things that definitely will get done in 100, but we’re going to try and do it in 10. And I learned that from Jeff. And you look at what even Amazon is doing, they’re taking on a whole bunch of projects that they could prove a success in less than 10 years. They’re like a giant venture fund internally, basically. Silicon Valley is thousands of million dollar experiments. We just try all these things that could be done in 10 years or less. And in 10 years you could do a lot. I think people don’t realize Google, Apple, Microsoft, all companies that were successful in less than 10 years. But not just that, the Apollo program was less than 10 years. The Space Shuttle program — 

Tim Ferriss: Hoover Dam.

Pablos Holman: The Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal.

Tim Ferriss: The Empire State Building was like 18 or 24 months or something insane.

Pablos Holman: Right. So what are we sitting on our thumbs for, making more iPhone apps?

Tim Ferriss: My friend gave me that number when his remodel in Santa Monica took five years. He said, “Come on guys, what is happening?”

Pablos Holman: There you go. So the answer to that question is the answer to every question about the future, about what’s happening in the world around us. We need to solve all the things in that window. Let’s build in less than 10 years everything.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think that Elon actually wants to colonize Mars or is that a clever visual and story to tell to marshal public interest and support and so on? Or do you think that whether it’s Jeff, or Elon, or someone else, that the most practical future we’re looking to off-planet is something closer to Elysium where it’s in sort of a self-contained large-scale ISS city of some sort?

Pablos Holman: All right. Well, two things there. One, I do know Jeff, I don’t know Elon, so I know as much as you, I’ve seen publicly what he has done. I don’t know if it’s just because of Blue Origin, but I’m a little more on the space colony side of things than on the Mars thing. You only get one Mars anyway and so it doesn’t seem like that good of a destination.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I remember somebody said to me, they’re like, “If you think you want to live on Mars, go spend a month in the winter in Antarctica.”

Pablos Holman: Yeah, which I have done for my entire childhood, so Mars doesn’t exactly appeal to me. I’ve had enough of that. I want to be in a city with people. But I think it goes back to the thing that matters to me is what I said before. People are blinded. They’re pissed off about Elon for one thing or another, and it blinds them to learning. That guy is showing us, “Here’s how you make modern industries.”

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I mean, he’s a phenomenon.

Pablos Holman: It’s phenomenal. And look, if you don’t like Elon, fine, go show us how to do it better.

Tim Ferriss: Well, you also don’t need to like everything about someone.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, that’s true.

Tim Ferriss: Or admire everything about someone in order to recognize and potentially model some of the things that really do work.

Pablos Holman: Well, I appreciate you demonstrating that by hanging out with me today. I mean, I think there was this thing I learned a little, I got a glimpse of this from this thing that a bunch of music artists did called the ONE Campaign, like U2 was doing it, and the idea behind the ONE Campaign was because they wanted to solve malaria, they wanted to solve HIV, they wanted to go after some big global scale problems. And the reason it’s called ONE is that they wanted to get all these constituencies from around the world to focus on this problem, and they only had to agree about this one thing. We only have to agree about this one thing, which is that we need to solve HIV.

Yeah, we don’t agree about all this other stuff. We don’t even like the same music. We need the Republicans and the Democrats and the autocrats all together for this one thing. And that had a big impression on me because I think it is important. We don’t all agree about everything. I’m a cypherpunk. We don’t agree about a lot of things, okay? That’s okay. And most of my friends, I want them for what they’re good for and what we can work on together. So yeah, I’m with you on that. And that’s why I can work for people who, I mean, I probably don’t agree with everything people I work with are about, but yeah, we need like 1,000 Elons. Maybe they don’t all need X accounts, but we need 1,000 Elons and we need them to go after all these things and that’s how we’re going to build the future.

Tim Ferriss: So this is from a New York Times article from 2018.

Pablos Holman: Oh, man.

Tim Ferriss: So this may not be relevant anymore, but I have attended a lot of conferences. You’ve been to a lot of conferences. I’ve heard of most of them, but one popped up, Mars, the conference. I don’t even know if it still exists, but what was it like to attend that?

Pablos Holman: Oh yeah. Well, Mars is — 

Tim Ferriss: And what is it?

Pablos Holman: So that’s just a small event. So Jeff Bezos has that event annually. It’s for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And so Jeff and Amazon organize it. It’s a really delightful event because we bring in the world’s experts in those four things, and we’ve been doing that for like a decade. And so it’s a way to make a peer group out of people who often are siloed because they’re researchers in a lab somewhere. They wouldn’t necessarily party together otherwise. And so it’s a very important thing. I’m oddly probably the one person who’s worked in all four of those things. Everybody else is usually a Nobel Prize winner in something, but it’s otherwise like a normal conference. We come hang out together for a few days. Thankfully, Amazon or Jeff is paying for it, which is great.

And we get to cross-pollinate these folks who really often are peerless in a sense, because they’re world-class experts in their thing. You’re surrounded by people who are smarter than you. We’ll have five or 10 Nobel Prize winners and we don’t even put them on stage, so it’s a rarefied group. And I am convinced that these things are so important because people need a community. And we have like a WhatsApp group where we sort of stay in touch with each other the rest of the year, and people are very supportive and helpful. And it’s just wherever you are, I mean, look, you don’t need Mars, but you do need a community. And so one cool thing about Silicon Valley, if you’re into, I guess right now, AI-type stuff, you could definitely find a community there. The deep tech founders are having a harder time because there’s no geographic center of gravity. So we’re trying to, at least for our founders, help them get that going. But, man — 

Tim Ferriss: Well, this is a good — 

Pablos Holman: — community matters.

Tim Ferriss: — good time to explain why the hell we’re sitting where we’re sitting. What is this location? Where are we?

Pablos Holman: This place is so cool. So we are at the Newlab in the Brooklyn Navy yard, and this is like nothing else even I know about. It’s actually kind of like my lab or the Intellectual Ventures Lab. It’s about the same size, maybe a little bigger. There’s a machine shop here, there’s labs of all different kinds, and it’s an incubator for deep tech startups. They have like 100 of them.

Tim Ferriss: Beautiful space.

Pablos Holman: It’s a beautiful space. It’s I think kind of a public-private partnership with the city to build this thing. And they’ve been at this for like a decade. I’ve been friends with the founders for that whole time and just so impressed with what they’ve done. I actually don’t have anything to do with it. I’m pimping Newlab because if you have a deep tech startup, these folks can help. And I think it would be great to attract more deep tech founders to these things because they built this one, and they built one in Detroit that’s even bigger, and it’s so cool and it’s got space. So if you’re trying to build something, go see Newlab. And I thought this would be a cool place to record the podcast because it’s cool. And in New York it’s hard to find a cool space that’s not tiny. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. This is anything but tiny. And I was pulling up my phone because we haven’t spent much time together, and I’m pulling up to this location that I have no familiarity with. And so I just want to read our text exchange for a second. “Pulling up now.” “Enter through building 77.” I’m like, “Where the hell’s building 77?” Okay, you drop a pin. Apparently the main gate is under construction. I’m like, “Okay.” So I walk over and then you’re like, “Walk all the way through that building. There’s a turnstile with a guard, but he’s easy to PSYOP. Then go out and left.” And I’m like, “Building 5? PSYOP completed. I’m out walking left.” We’re going to come back to the PSYOP.

But then you say, “The big building straight ahead is your target. Get to that and then go left. No number on it. Entrance is at the far corner of the building.” And then I said, “Am I being set up for a podcast kidnapping? Very elegant,” ’cause I’m like, “Where the hell am I going?” Then you said, “I’ll come out and meet with the black van.” And there was actually a black van. And I’m like, “Wow, this is just…”

Pablos Holman: Now you know why Elan Lee and I are friends.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah. I was like, “This is a coin toss. I have no idea what this — this could be the long con.”

Pablos Holman: Yeah, it’s a bit — 

Tim Ferriss: This would be an amazing long con.

Pablos Holman: Well, my dating life has been very colorful because of every girl who’s dating me ends up meeting me at some strange warehouse in the industrial district with wires hanging out of metal. And yeah, it’s — 

Tim Ferriss: So I remember ages ago when it first came out, someone recommended that I read Kevin Mitnick’s The Art of Deception, which — you made a face.

Pablos Holman: Oh, I did? Shit.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. Tell me what that’s about.

Pablos Holman: Well, look, I mean, Kevin’s a delightful human, you could say. He’s dead now, so we don’t want to say anything bad about him, but hackers kind of rallied around him ’cause he was one of the first hackers to get thrown in jail.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: But most hackers, I don’t know, if you’re elite, Kevin is kind of a joke because he was a good social engineer.

Tim Ferriss: Well, that’s why I bring it up, because you mentioned PSYOP. And as far as I could tell, 90 percent of the book was social engineering.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, that’s his thing.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Pablos Holman: And it’s worth learning. I mean, that’s a totally great thing. It’s different than hacking.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. But PSYOP, was that a joke or is that something — 

Pablos Holman: Oh, just because — no, I had gone through building 77 and I’m like, “Hey, going to new lab,” and he just waved me through.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay.

Pablos Holman: So I’m like, I think this — 

Tim Ferriss: Supremely easy to PSYOP.

Pablos Holman: — will be an easy challenge for you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, okay. All right.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. Anyway.

Tim Ferriss: I want to ask you a bit more about China. So I lived in China for a period of time. I went to two universities there, studied Chinese, the whole nine yards. Spend about, oddly enough, right now, 20 percent of my time probably speaking Chinese, resurrecting my Chinese right now.

Pablos Holman: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And that’s actually an exaggeration, but it’s like 10 to 20 percent probably. And I’ve been so simultaneously impressed and terrified by China on so many different levels.

Pablos Holman: You and me both.

Tim Ferriss: And there was a book, Tyler Cowen recommended, great, amazing guy, everybody should check out. There’s a book called Breakneck.

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And I haven’t yet read it, but one of my employees is reading it and recommended it. He said, “It’s an amazing page turner. Really well researched.” And the reason I mention it is that in that book, they describe some of the differences in government planning and efficiency based on the fact that a lot of leaders in the US have backgrounds as attorneys, whereas a lot of leaders in China have backgrounds as engineers. And I have been chewing on that. I just learned about this yesterday, but I’m wondering what impresses you about China ’cause they really seem to have their act together. The homogeneity, relatively speaking, of the country helps. The speed with which the CCP can execute top down helps tremendously. But anything else come to mind?

Pablos Holman: So look, I could learn a lot about China from you. I’ve been there some, but probably not as much. I don’t speak the language. My way of learning was to start sleeping with a Chinese woman. So I’ve been doing that for five years.

Tim Ferriss: Sounds more fun than memorizing characters, frankly.

Pablos Holman: It’s helped a ton. I really opened up my eyes to China. So yeah, my fiance is Chinese, but been in America long enough that she’ll put up with me. And I think the insight from that book, I haven’t read Breakneck yet, it’s a relatively new book. I am also just kind of a spectator on what’s happening in China.

Tim Ferriss: But you have a unique multidisciplinary technical lens that includes deep tech.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. So what I can tell you, I think there’s a couple of major factors and the insight about the preponderance of lawyers I think is huge and really important. So I’m excited about reading that book. The reason we invented LLMs is to put lawyers out of business so we can fix this country, and I think that’s going to work. So if you are a parent right now, don’t send your kid to school to become a lawyer ’cause we’re going to replace all the lawyers with AI. I think where this goes, I’m optimistic. I know I’m taking it aside here, but I’m only half joking about that.

Right now — 

Tim Ferriss: I use LLMs on a weekly basis for legal first passes already.

Pablos Holman: For lawsuits. Good.

Tim Ferriss: Not for all my lawsuits. No. Well, I’ll give you an example. I mean, this would be no surprise to you, but with just off-the-shelf basic ChatGPT or fill in the blank for your favorite LLM, I was selling a property in rural New York and it was taking kind of forever to get done. There are a lot of arcane local laws and so on. And I wanted to protect the land from overdevelopment. So I wanted to create deed restrictions — 

Pablos Holman: More laws.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, I wanted to create deed restrictions, which are very tricky. Make the sale complicated because it’s encumbered in a way the resale value is reduced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I just threw in, this county, this is what I’m trying to do. This is the contract that I need to add to, like, draft me some basic language. And it drafted the language, explained exactly why it drafted that way. When it was eventually reviewed by a lawyer to do the finishing touches on it, maybe two or three words were changed and then it was copy and pasted right in.

Pablos Holman: So that’s a great example of what’s happening. Obviously a lot less lawyers were needed to get that job done. When Congress passes a bill, no congressman has ever read it. Collectively, all the congressmen have not read it. And so what the future we’re getting to here is one where if you’re running a business, we build a computational model of your business now, not an LLM, but still an AI, where you can run simulations of your business and you can figure out how to optimize your business. That’s all happening right now. If you’re in business and not doing this, be terrified ’cause by next year your competitors will be doing this. So I take heart because what I think is it means a hundred years from now, governments will do that too.

Tim Ferriss: So if you haven’t seen this, it didn’t get as much airtime as I would’ve expected, but Abu Dhabi is implementing that right now for legislation.

Pablos Holman: That’s right. It’s unbelievable. And if you go — 

Tim Ferriss: And it seems like there were a lot of people who poked fun at it, where I saw a lot of people who were like, “Ah, this is nonsense.” As someone who has spent some time in Abu Dhabi with the people who are implementing this stuff, what they already have is science fiction.

Pablos Holman: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: It’s remarkable what they’re already doing.

Pablos Holman: These are tools to help humans make better decisions. Now, an LLM is the wrong tool for lots of kinds of decisions, but AI overall can be applied to help make better decisions and that is where we’re going. And so when governments figure this out, and it’s great to see that some of these countries are leading the charge. When you see a country like the UAE and you see what good leadership can do, it’s kind of embarrassing. Democracy needs a little maintenance work, and I’m hoping that this class of tools is going to help us level up and fulfill our potential. So that is where that goes. What I think about it is, China has done a great job of a lot of things, and it would be great to have a Netflix series where every episode shows something amazing from China that sucks in the US. I just think that’s the kind of story people need to get in their head just to see that contrast and realize we’re not playing in the major leagues in a lot of things.

So we need to step up. And I think there’s a lot that’s impressive about China. I obviously am an Alaskan, which is a super charged American. So look, I think that there’s a lot of dumb shit going on in China that I can’t stand, I don’t want to live there. But I think you got to give them credit for the things that they’re good at. Now, the thing that’s missing here is a respect for that engineering mindset, a respect for, like you described, putting the dominoes in order, a respect for building thoughtfully, respect for basic arithmetic, a respect for building the future that we want.

We need to work on that. China’s problem, no respect for me, for the hacker mindset, for the renegade, for the creative person, for the crazy ones. They don’t make room for that. And it’s hurting their ability to do new things. Now, they’re kicking by just waiting for us to figure shit out and then implementing it faster and better than us. So we’ve spent most of our life worried about China copying us. We need to figure out how are we going to copy China. And I think that’s a wake-up call where we’re at right now.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’m very curious to see where it all goes.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, me too.

Tim Ferriss: They’re moving at remarkable speed with implementation on so many fronts.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. And it’s great for humanity.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: I mean, it really is. I mean, they should get a Nobel Prize for bringing their country out of extreme poverty. We should probably get one for, I don’t know, making global trade possible with our Navy or something. But there’s also a lot of accolades that I think we’re not giving to China that we should.

Tim Ferriss: So I want to get your take. I wasn’t planning on asking this, but I’m curious about, since you’ve looked at autonomous shipping vessels, you have familiarity in that domain. I’d like to talk about, for instance, Taiwan for a second. So I’ve spent time in Taiwan. I love Taiwan. Absolutely adore that place. Incredibly friendly. Food is amazing. The culture has been preserved in a way that was not true through the culture revolution in mainland China and everybody should go visit. It’s just an amazing place. Now, it’s also a tiny speck of an island that happens to be incredibly valuable for a number of different reasons, primarily chip production. And there’s a lot of discussion around what say an amphibious assault might look like, how China might exert pressure on Taiwan non-violently, which I think is the most probable path. But on one side you have these statistics that are related to shipbuilding capacity, and China has, I’m going to get this wrong.

Pablos Holman: All of it. Basically all of it.

Tim Ferriss: It’s like 30x, 300x — 

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: — the US capacity. And I believe they also require that any commercial vessel over a particular size needs to be manufactured or built to military spec just in case they need to be requisitioned or otherwise enrolled in an attack. Now, we’re not going to catch up with that in the next two years, just it’s a logistics impossibility.

But you do have some startups like Anduril for instance, that talk about the only path forward to create a counter-attack in such a scenario would be lots and lots of small autonomous weaponized marine vessels. Do you think there’s a there there? 

Pablos Holman: Well, I do think the nature of ballistic warfare is changing. I think the case Anduril would make is fairly compelling. I think we probably need a lot more Anduril. I’m not the guy who should weigh in on the geopolitics of Taiwan, but I think it’s not hard to look at that and say, “All right, why can’t we do that?” Now, one of the criticisms often made of American schools is that the whole structure was invented to make factory workers after the war. Well, now that we need some factory workers, where are they? We don’t have them. What we’ve got are OnlyFans, creators. So could some of them maybe help us out in a factory? We need to build a lot of things. And I think if you look around, we’re just miscalibrated. You and I barely have to work. You don’t know — anybody you know hasn’t worked a day in their lives, we’re not digging coal out of a mine. We’re sitting in front of a laptop wondering how long is the line at Starbucks?

It’s just not even close. So I think we need to recalibrate on our expectation of what it means to work. Look, I think we’re optimized for work. We’re evolved to work. You wonder about why are people depressed? I mean, not everyone, I don’t want mean to disparage anybody who is dealing with something like that, but you’re evolved to be useful to the world around you, to the people around you. And if you can’t see how your work is useful, yeah, you’re going to get depressed. I mean, I think that happens a lot. I’m not saying it’s the only reason, but when you have a whole society that doesn’t really do anything where you can see how anyone gives a shit about what you do, that’s not going to be very healthy. So I think we just need to recalibrate in our society and recognize like, okay, everybody needs to do something that matters, do something where they can see how it matters. I’m good at connecting dots, so I can do things where I see how it matters in a thousand years and I’m good.

But most people might be better off if they’re like a nurse where you can see, “Yeah, I helped that person today.” Are nurses depressed? They might be depressed about having to do a lot of paperwork, but they’re probably not depressed about their work — 

Tim Ferriss: The meaningfulness of their work.

Pablos Holman: Again, I don’t mean to belittle anyone who’s depressed. I’m just saying as an example, we could be a much happier, healthier society if we’re doing things where we can see how it helps our world, helps our society. So building stuff is a good example of that ’cause you can build a thing and you can see I built that thing and somebody’s using it and that’s awesome. Are Tesla factory workers depressed. I don’t know. Or maybe swap out depressed for disgruntled or apathetic or something. You can solve some of these things. So I want to see us build, and I think Anduril is an example of we’re going to build these things that help us. I want to build those ships. We can build ships in the US.

Tim Ferriss: And Palmer Luckey is a machine. I mean, he’s an impressive — 

Pablos Holman: Yeah. And we can build — 

Tim Ferriss: — founder.

Pablos Holman: And so are other people there. We can build chip fabs. You don’t necessarily need tiny fingers. It’s not a lot of bullshit stories we’ve been told. We can build chip fabs, we can learn to work.

Pablos Holman Anyway, I’m ranting, but you get the idea. Let’s build some cool shit. And I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to do that. And we could build ships, we can build chips, we can build all these other things.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So how do you find wild inventors? Or do they just come to you and you act as kind of a honeypot for the forlorn, the crazy, the people into the DeLorean with the crazy hair, as I heard you say once.

Pablos Holman: Honeypot means something else to hackers. So I’ll go with lightning rod.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: You just look for the crazy hair and the DeLorean and that’s how you find them. Yeah, I’d say I attract some of them because I’ve worked on some of the kinds of projects they want to do, and hopefully they believe that I’ll at least hang in there long enough to understand what they’re trying to do and maybe believe in it and maybe invest in it. So that’s where I’m at. There are times when I find out about a technology or an invention that we might’ve been really helpful with, but it’s too late. That is frustrating. So if you do invent — 

Tim Ferriss: Too late in terms of stage?

Pablos Holman: Meaning, yeah, we’re basically helpful at the beginning. We’re helpful in the early stages when you’ve got to get out of that garage or get out of that lab and become more, maybe, venture compatible so that you could go, we’re trying to help people co-opt the machinery of venture capital and aim it at deep tech. And so if you’re kind of on that track, we could maybe be helpful. Not for everyone, but that’s what I’m looking for. And so yeah, I would love to see these, especially the breakthroughs, really early.

Tim Ferriss: But I guess is your game to attract them to you or do you go out and search in the — 

Pablos Holman: I do still, like — 

Tim Ferriss: — dark corners of nerddom.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, but I still need help. I need to deputize my friends. There’s probably VCs hanging out at Starbucks by MIT, but those professors call me when they have something that their post-docs want to spin out, and I’m like, “Yes, that’s the help I need because I can’t hang out at every lab.” I go and I visit and I try to be helpful. So some of its labs. About a third of it, I’d say, about another third is rogue engineers who are working at some company that’s got their head up their ass and not doing the coolest thing. So I like that. And then my favorite third is the crazy hackers who are in a basement. You just can’t find them. They’re not going to TED or whatever. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, right. Rodney Mullen wasn’t going to TED when he was a teenager.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, Rodney’s not going to TED. That’s right. He spoke at a couple of TED events, I think.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. But I mean, when he was the undiscovered — 

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah, no, right. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Where does salsa enter the picture?

Pablos Holman: Oh, my God.

Tim Ferriss: Because it seems to be important to you.

Pablos Holman: Well, it is important to me, actually. So I remember the Tango thing that you did that I read about, and you and I have a radically different relationship to dance. So I can’t do things that are choreographed. I can’t memorize things. I can’t focus on a structured plan for learning something like you do. I’m all reverse engineering. So when I show up to salsa, what I’m doing is, yeah, there’s a teacher and they’re showing me a thing I’m supposed to learn. I have to try everything and throw out the stuff that doesn’t work.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: That’s literally how I learned to dance. So I’m a really good salsa dancer now ’cause I started 20 years ago, but very unorthodox salsa dancer, which to be fair to my partners, I should say that ’cause I don’t dance like everyone else, and I can’t learn to dance like someone else because I can only — I have to try this stuff and then converge on what works, and that’s a really great thing. So I danced differently than ever else. But salsa for me was very important partly ’cause too much of my life was hanging out with hackers who fit a demographic that’s a little too homogenous in its way.

Maybe not intellectually, but certainly by all other metrics. And so I had trained in aikido for a decade, which is a Japanese martial art, very structured, very disciplined, very traditional. And I love, I’m obsessed with the physical communication. I love that part of it. And what’s cool about aikido is you’d always train with a partner. And that’s not true for a lot of martial arts. I’d done a lot of punching and kicking in the air with karate and stuff before that, and it just didn’t land for me. With aikido, you always have a partner, and so they’re attacking you and without words, you’re trying to communicate that you want them to shove their head in the ground or something like that. And I love that. I love that feeling of physical communication.

And I’m not great at aikido, and I was trying to learn that through reverse engineering as well, which also has its unorthodox problems. But eventually, short version of the story is I figured out that it was an upgrade to train instead of with sweaty, old Japanese guys, sweaty young Latin girls. So I’m still basically doing the same thing as aikido, but in salsa. And I can do it any night, anywhere in the world. There’s salsa dancers. You just got to know where to find them. You don’t need to speak the language. And so I got a lot out of dancing salsa ’cause I got a community of people in all walks of life. I’m not a rock star in salsa. I get out ranked by the Mexican dishwasher every night. It’s good for my ego ’cause I’m at the bottom always. And I think that’s good for me. And you learn something. My way of moving through the world is so heavily affected by aikido and salsa. Yeah. So anyway, I’ve been doing that for a long time.

Tim Ferriss: Salsa has a huge advantage over Tango that you can find it anywhere. Tango is pretty — 

Pablos Holman: Yeah, it’s more niche.

Tim Ferriss: — narrow.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Unless you’re in Argentina, in which case you have an embarrassment of riches. But anywhere else, even in Argentina, outside of the capital, you can find more salsa.

Pablos Holman: The salsa’s everywhere. And the reason I defected from Tango, I tried to do Tango first for a month, but it takes advantage of none of my natural talents. You can’t do reverse engineering in Tango. It’s too structured and disciplined and minute, and salsa, you can just wiggle your way through it, so — 

Tim Ferriss: So to actually implement the trial and error of trying everything and throwing out what doesn’t work for you, how do you even figure out the menu of options that you need to run through from A to Z?

Pablos Holman: Yeah. Well, again, you’re going back to the Tim Ferriss learning style. I’m not trying to codify the menu. I’m discovery mode. So what’s cool — 

Tim Ferriss: Okay. I’m just wondering, when you went in and you decided that that was your approach, innately, maybe just instinctually, you’re like, “This is all I know how to do.” What does it actually look like in class for you?

Pablos Holman: So in salsa, the first year and a half, you’re in class, you’re being shown a move. You’re learning the move, you’re learning the basics, you’re learning the timing, learning the steps. You have to do that. There’s just no way getting out. It’s excruciating for me because I kind of suck at that. But the day I got through that, and what that meant for me was the day I could get out of anything I could get myself into ’cause in salsa, you’re turning a girl into a pretzel and then untying her at 180 miles an hour. Once I realized, okay, I know how to get out of every possible thing that I can get into — 

Tim Ferriss: Every failure mode I know how to get out of.

Pablos Holman: — then I became dangerous because then I could just play. And in salsa, you get a different partner for every song. So you go out at night, you dance with a different girl every night, and it’s a different track, it’s a different girl, it’s a different, you know, and you’re just making it up and you’re leading. So I could just play and play and try things and see what works. So I have this vocabulary of bizarre salsa moves that I can do with a partner who’s never learned those moves ’cause I’m leading her through it and I know what I’m — I can feel it all. That’s what happened to me. And that’s pretty heterodox, but that’s what I meant. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: We may have more overlap than you realize. Just in the sense that I had, when I first got to Argentina in late 2004, maybe early 2004, I had zero interest in Tango, absolutely zero. I in fact wanted to avoid it because my reference points were Scent of a Woman, True Lies, flower in the teeth. I’m like, “Who would ever want to do that? It looks so stiff.” I did not have any interest in the choreography. My only dance background at that point was that I had co-founded the first hip-hop dance troupe at Princeton University.

Pablos Holman: Wow.

Tim Ferriss: And so breakdancing — 

Pablos Holman: All right.

Tim Ferriss: — that’s all I had, which was improvised.

Pablos Holman: Yeah, okay, cool. Right.

Tim Ferriss: And did not do any kind of set routines. It was all improvised depending on the songs and stuff. And it was that physical improv that appealed to me. Like, the improv jazz aspect of needing to be not just fast on your feet, but mentally fast enough to improvise in that way. And then I was walking down Avenida Florida in Buenos Aires, which is a very famous pedestrian area, no cars. And it was hot as balls. I mean, it was just so, it gets very humid and hot. And the only place I could see I was waiting for a friend to get out of a Spanish class was this Tango music shop, total tourist trap. Just had, it had all of this cold air. I could see it just billowing out the AC.

And so I walked in there and I was just killing time. And this older woman, middle-aged woman chain-smoking, bleach blonde hair, in Spanish was like, “Hey, asshole.” She’s like, “I know you’re not going to buy anything, but if you’re going to stick around, you have to at least give me 10 pesos for the class upstairs.” And I was like, “Okay, what’s the class?” “Tango.” And I was like, “Ah, okay, fine.” And meanwhile, for the first month or so there, a half Panamanian, half Argentine friend had convinced me to go to Argentina from Panama, because he had said that Argentina has the best red wine in the world, the best steak in the world, the most beautiful women in the world, and you can live there for a king on pennies. And I was like, “Sold. Let’s go.”

So I found the steak, I found the wine. It was cheap. And I was like, “Where are all these beautiful women?” And then I walked upstairs to this class. It was like 3:00 p.m. or something, and it was like nine smoking hot women and one bored-looking guy who was like a husband who had been sent there on assignment. And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And then throughout the course of that class realized, “Oh, this is all improvised.”

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Now this is interesting.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Now this is interesting.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And it was actually not for me, aikido, but wrestling, believe it or not, and judo that helped because it’s the same same.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, you’re shifting weight, you’re changing balance, you are directing the motion of someone else. The only difference is in dance, the person’s trying to cooperate instead of choke you out — 

Pablos Holman: Sometimes.

Tim Ferriss: — or break your arms or throw you on your head. Yes, sometimes. Exactly. I did get shamed off the dance floor by some old Argentine ladies when I first tried to go out into the wild.

Pablos Holman: I still do.

Tim Ferriss: Oh my God.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Practicing, it’s — 

Pablos Holman: It’s such a good story.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a good, very humbling experience.

Pablos Holman: For me, it was exact same thing ’cause I went to this Argentine steakhouse, and there was these pros direct from Argentina that — 

Tim Ferriss: Oh, man.

Pablos Holman: — danced between the tables and up on the bar, and I saw he’s leaving her. But the communication was so subtle, I realized that’s what aikidoka are trying to do, and they’re better at it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: And so I went to try and learn from them, and then — 

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is for people who haven’t really been exposed to dance, at the very least, you should go to a Tango or salsa dance hall to see good dancers who are strangers, dance with one another because if I took you to La Viruta or Niño Bien or one of these milonga in Argentina during kind of prime time, which would be like 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. I don’t know how they — 

Pablos Holman: The good dancers don’t show up until after midnight. Yeah. I never go out until midnight.

Tim Ferriss: They show up really late. And, I could show you a pair dancing and you would say, “Wow. They must have been practicing and rehearsing this choreography for six months.” And, I’d say, “No. This is the first time they’re dancing.”

Pablos Holman: There you go. There you go.

Tim Ferriss: It’s so unbelievable. And, I don’t know if this is true — it’s such a different type of dance. It may be very different, but the best female dancers or a lot of the best female dancers in Argentina will dance with their eyes closed.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: For that sensory — 

Pablos Holman: I’ll do that to salsa dancers. Salsa is super fast, but — 

Tim Ferriss: Salsa is a lot. Well, Tango can get fast, but salsa is dependably fast.

Pablos Holman: So, very fast music, the steps are fast and there’s a lot of spinning and shit. And so, I’ll close a partner’s eyes because I can lead her — 

Tim Ferriss: Sleek.

Pablos Holman: And, she doesn’t need her eyes because I’m leading everything. I’m tracking every moving object in the room. I’m putting her feet where they go. And so, you can sometimes, especially for some dancers, especially if they’re uptight, because a lot of salsa dancers will train for the stage, so they’ll train choreography and all this crap. And, I’m trying to get them out of that mindset. So, I’ll get their eyes closed and you won’t know. She can spin with her eyes closed.

Tim Ferriss: And, I remember also one of the aspects of my Tango immersion — because I went 110 percent. I just fully committed. I mean, I was doing three to six hours a day and my feet ended up so bruised because the shoes are these really thin shoes. They’re basically suede slippers. It was a lot of fun to dissect that and explore and try everything. And, one of the aspects I so loved, and I imagine this is true in salsa maybe, is that you’d go out to these different milonga, these different dance halls. Every one had its own personality, right?

Pablos Holman: For sure.

Tim Ferriss: There’d be one I remember, La Viruta, I think it’s in the basement of the Armenian consulate filled with smoke, which I can actually tolerate in that environment. Everyone’s sweating and it’s got kind of an illegal speakeasy type of feel.

Pablos Holman: Yep. Totally.

Tim Ferriss: Definitely a fire hazard.

Pablos Holman: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: And then, there’s another one, Sundaland, which was basically in a high school gymnasium on a basketball court, just blindingly bright lights and a totally different crowd. And, by crowd, I mean almost every age you can imagine. I mean, it’s like 18 plus. But, you would have older ladies, you would have 70-year-old guys dressed to the nines in a three-piece suit. I also got screamed off the dance floor by a few of those guys.

Pablos Holman: What was your violation?

Tim Ferriss: Well, my violation was very basic, and it is the most common mistake I would say that men make because in the classes when they’re teaching you the basic eight step, which is the first boot up sequence that everybody gets, almost always in every school where I’ve seen it taught, the first step is a step backwards. And so, you’ve got your partner and you step backwards. So, male, right foot back.

And, in a dance hall, you cannot do that. Why? Because you don’t have a bicycle helmet with mirrors on it. You can’t see where you’re going so you just end up smashing into people when you do that. So, when you go into a live environment in the wild, typically you’re going to take that first step out to the side because you can see where you’re going with your peripheral vision. So, I would get screamed off by the men because I would bump into them. And, Argentines, they are, at least in the capital city, very much like Italians. They are passionate gang of folks, very wild gesticulating, very high volume. And, if you bump into their lady, they’re going to give you an earful.

With the women in the beginning, this probably happens in salsa, but in Tango, at least, if you’re always practicing with the same partner especially if, in my case, that woman is a really good dancer, she will develop a sixth sense to read what you are intending her to do even if your lead or the mark is weak.

Pablos Holman: Of course.

Tim Ferriss: And then, you’re like, “Wow. I’m a Jedi. I’m doing so well.”

Pablos Holman: Totally.

Tim Ferriss: And, you go out and you do it with a stranger. And, literally I had women say to me, they would throw their arms down in disgust in the middle of a song, which is quite a show in the Tango world, and just be like, “I don’t know what you’re trying to do. I do not know what you’re trying to do, how you’re trying to move me.” And, they would just get furious. And then, I would put my tail between my legs and scuttle off and recover.

Pablos Holman: That’s why I say it’s important to do. It’s humbling. Even now, I mean, I’ve been dancing for 20 years, but if I show up, there’ll be incompatible dancers. And, my problem is, so I’m trained in what’s called essentially L.A. style, West Coast salsa. Salsa actually comes from New York City — 

Tim Ferriss: New York City. Yeah.

Pablos Holman: So, I live in the epicenter of salsa but they dance what’s called Mambo and they can see me coming from miles away. I’m like an invasive species. They’re like, “Oh my God. What is this trash?” So, I’m having a hard time. I have to now reorient. And, it’s just a minor change in how you do the timing and it’s actually super cool but man, I have to somehow whitewash myself of this filth from the West Coast salsa scene.

Tim Ferriss: The Tango world also has its factions since every subculture needs its infighting.

Pablos Holman: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: So, there’s definitely a fair amount of that. And, I brought up the older guys, the 70-year-old guys in part because I remember going to these dance halls and I’m a healthy red-blooded male, and I’m looking for the most attractive women to dance with, which was not worth it in the beginning because I was just going to make an ass of myself. But, of course, you’re looking around and taking a gander, and more often than not, they would be dancing with the old guys. And, the reason for that is that you get these young bucks who are 30 or whatever, professional stage dancers, they want to show off every tool in the toolkit and it ends up just being a melee. It’s like they’re a weed whacker, and it’s not fun for these women necessarily to dance with them if they’re just trying to showcase everything they know. Whereas the older guys, they can’t do that physically. They also have a very clean classical style and they listen to the music — 

Pablos Holman: Yes. The musicality.

Tim Ferriss: The musicality — 

Pablos Holman: Exactly.

Tim Ferriss: — is what matters.

Pablos Holman: And, same in salsa and its derivatives.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: So now, 20 years in, you started salsa, it seems, in part to get away from the homogeneity of the hacker world but you’re still doing it. What do you get out of it?

Pablos Holman: I do it less. I want to. COVID kind of damaged the salsa scene. It’s mostly back, but I don’t have a salsa community anymore. And, the problem with that is it takes me a while to sort of brainwash my partners into doing the thing I want to do. And, you got to find a certain special kind of partner that can hang in there for that. What I do because I travel so much and I dance salsa everywhere I go, it’s kind of like the first conversation when you meet somebody. It’s like, “What do you do? Where do you work? Where’d you grow up?”

And, it’s just that I have the dance version of that conversation over and over again. It’s not very rewarding. I need a pretty rarefied partner now, and if you learn to dance, you should get good as slowly as possible. And, I did do that and I was able to have fun for a long time but now it’s really hard for me to have fun unless I have a pretty rarified partner that will put up with my flavor of bullshit. So, yeah. It’s an evolution.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Pablos, we’ve covered a lot of ground. We could, of course — 

Pablos Holman: Keep going. Yeah — 

Tim Ferriss: — cover a million other things for another five hours, but is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you would like to bring up?

Pablos Holman: Oh, wow.

Tim Ferriss: Anything at all? And, I have a few closing questions as well — 

Pablos Holman: Okay. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: But, I’m just wondering if anything comes to mind.

Pablos Holman: I guess the thing I maybe alluded to but didn’t articulate very well is that you could see how I kind of, in my career, I got the software out of my system young because I got early start and then maybe by 2001 or something, I was able to sort of say, “Okay. Did all this stuff with computers, but maybe I could go beyond that and bring other technologies to life.”

And, when I look at Silicon Valley, I see a lot of people who might want to do that. They got to do the software stuff. They may be 10 or 20 years into their career now and so maybe we can win some of them over and help us come bring these other technologies to life. Like I described, I think the opportunities are bigger, the impact is bigger.

And, why would you want to do that? Well, I think there’s a meaning in it. There’s an opportunity here to see technology as a force for good, to make the world better. We build this toolkit that we’re going to use to build the future, and you get to add something to that toolkit. So, yeah. I just think if you put that framework to use, you could kind of get a sense of where technology can go and get a lot more excited about it. It’s really sad for me to see people that are pissed off about technology in general or even pissed off about their phones or whatever. I’m like, “Yeah. Okay. Well, what are you using it for? Are you just doomscrolling, because we could do a lot better than that.” And so, yeah. So, I think, if I had a chance to try and share something, it would be that there’s a lot left to do.

Tim Ferriss: That is a military helicopter that just flew over us.

Pablos Holman: Oh, yeah. You’re trained in military helicopters. Great. We can rewind.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. No. No. I’m good. I’m good. I just wanted to say this is a lively environment. I like it. Those people, let’s say there are at least a handful listening who resonate with what you just said. What should they do? Should they fill out a form on your website? Should they check out anything online related to you? Send you an email? I mean, what would you want those — 

Pablos Holman: Careful what I ask for?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I’d be careful with the email, but — 

Pablos Holman: Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, look, I try to read every email already. I can’t reply to all of them so I don’t know the right answer. With or without me, I think these are important things to do. We can take on some fraction of things and help out a little bit. I think that what I’m trying to do is convince not just those founders but also those investors like, “Hey. You could steer what you’re doing to bigger opportunities. Look at deep tech. You don’t have to be a physicist to do it. You could find some important things and some really, really lucrative things to invest in deep tech and you won’t be competing with all the other usual suspects.”

Tim Ferriss: I’ve made that shift largely in my own investing in the last five years.

Pablos Holman: Wow. Cool.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. I heard of, I know we can cut this out, but you’re an investor in Holobiome.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. That’s one that we did. Super cool.

Tim Ferriss: Holobiome is amazing.

Pablos Holman: It is. That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, I think that’s going to be such, hopefully, fingers crossed, we can talk about it, a service to humanity. I mean, building a proper library is step number one, right? It’s coming back to the — it’s like, yeah, sure, you can create probiotics with six widely available commercial strains, but ultimately you have thousands.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. What people don’t realize is that, well, just to make it clear to the audience, when you eat food, you’re not feeding yourself. You’re feeding a thousand different microbes in your gut, and then what they spit out feeds you. So, there’s this layer of indirection that we have no measurement for. Mine’s different than yours, everybody’s different. We’re tuned for different things and we don’t even have a way of understanding that. And so, that’s microbiome. We’re going to learn about it. Every one of those microbes is probably a few PhDs that need to get done, but Holobiome is crafting the machinery to do that, the mechanism to do that. And, it’s exciting because they’re figuring out cool stuff already.

Tim Ferriss: It’s a super cool company. I’ve been getting very involved with aqua culture and algae feed additives for cows to reduce methane production which is, frankly, very far outside of my comfort zone. I hope to have a positive return on investment, but I tend to get myself sometimes into trouble. For instance, I invested in a company that was developing in inhalable insulin. So, insulin that you could effectively use an inhaler for. And, the tech was super solid but due to a bunch of regulatory issues and other factors that I have much less familiarity with, puzzles that I’m not accustomed to solving for, I end up with a lot of zeros when I stray outside of stuff that I can directly promote to my audience. Because I can increase the value of equity in a company very clearly if it’s — 

Pablos Holman: For a certain thing.

Tim Ferriss: ,,, in Uber or a Blue Bottle coffee or fill in the blank.

Pablos Holman: That makes sense.

Tim Ferriss: But, nonetheless, I have been as an intrepid deep tech investor because a lot of it just seems more meaningful if it works.

Pablos Holman: Right. So, the trick there, I am sure by now what most investors would do is get a portfolio, try to get a big enough portfolio to offset those failures with hits and that’s a shots on goal game. That’s why we do so many. That’s why we focus on being the first check. We’re doing pre-seed stuff, actual tech, but we will do hundreds of these things and we’re going to hope to get a couple hits.

Tim Ferriss: Over the course of a single 10-year fund.

Pablos Holman: In one fund, we’ll do about 60. So, we’ll do another fund and we’ll do another 60 in the future. But, yeah. We’ll do multiple funds, but most VCs would kind of graduate from pre-seed to seed to series A. We don’t do that. We just stay — 

Tim Ferriss: Super early.

Pablos Holman: Lots and lots of pre-seed.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you could only place one bet in fusion, where would you place it?

Pablos Holman: Oh, boy. Don’t get me started. Okay. I’m started. Yeah. Okay. Fusion. Look — 

Tim Ferriss: Or, would your answer be zero?

Pablos Holman: It’s not zero. So, here’s the thing. So, as you know, fusion is like rattle these molecules and get them to break apart and get a bunch of energy out. That’s fission. Fusion is push these molecules together and get them to become one. Plasma fusion is the biggest branch of fusion research in history. And so what that means is you’re going to heat up these molecules so much that they kind of expand and open up to the possibility of getting stuck together.

Tim Ferriss: Just create a miniature sun, no big deal.

Pablos Holman: It is temperatures that rival the sun because that is what the sun is doing. It’s doing fusion. But, what you need that we don’t have on earth that the sun has is you need a lot of pressure as well. Now, the pressure you could get if you could make a vessel that would hold the plasma, but the plasma’s so hot, it’d melt anything on Earth.

So, the way we do it now is — the best idea so far has been what’s called a magnetic confinement. So you create a giant super magnet and use the magnetic field to push the plasma together, and it’s far enough away that it won’t melt. That’s using force to do it. So that’s a super cool idea but it has been very difficult to make it work. And, scientifically we didn’t even really know if it would work and that’s why people make fun of fusion all the time and say that it’s 20 years away and always will be. That changed.

So, the cool thing is, a few years ago, the team from MIT called Commonwealth Fusion Systems now, published a series of, I think, seven papers that explain exactly how they can make magnetic confinement fusion work. And, the real breakthrough was a new superconductor. It’s a superconductor that allows them to make the world’s most powerful magnet, which they have done and it’s awesome, crazy cool magnet. But, now they got that working, we’re out of the science risk window into the technical risk window, which means can they engineer a fusion reactor?

So, I’d say Commonwealth is probably the most well-funded, most advanced plasma fusion reactor company. They’re building what’s called a toga mac, which is like the giant doughnut shaped thing you see pictures of, and I wish them a lot of luck, but they have extreme engineering problems. It is really hard to build that thing. And, once they get it built, then they’re going to need tritium. And there’s about enough tritium on earth left to make it go one time. And, the only way to make more tritium is, you guessed it, in a fusion reactor where they’ve got to get 99 percent efficiency on getting the tritium out. And, we don’t know if that’s going to be possible. So, there’s just a zillion of these really hard engineering problems. So, anyway, that’s the long version — 

Tim Ferriss: Can’t just source the tritium from gun sites?

Pablos Holman: You can source it from the moon. So there are people who want to go to the moon and grab tritium and bring it back. The stuff in gun sites, there’s very little of it left.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Pablos Holman: It has tritium paint and in your old Swiss watches and things, and that’s why they glow. You need tritium. But, anyway, the point of all this is to say, in the best-case scenario, fusion is very difficult. I really hope we get it. The upside of that is, once it really does work, you’ll get more energy out than you put in. So, think of a gas tank, you’ll have to fill once and it runs the rest of your life.

Tim Ferriss: What is that? Q greater than one?

Pablos Holman: Q greater than one is the metric.

Tim Ferriss: Has anyone ever crossed that?

Pablos Holman: No one has ever actually achieved that if you count the entire energy for the system. There are projects and once in a while you see fusion headlines where it’s like, “Fusion works from Livermore,” or whatever. And, what they’ve done is, on system level one, which basically means the energy going into the fusion from the 192 giant lasers is less than the energy coming out of the fusion, but they’re not counting the energy going into the lasers.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Right.

Pablos Holman: And, the problem with all this, the reason I’m explaining is so people can understand, a lot of these fusion projects are very expensive to do research on. They’ve figured out that it’s hard to get that money from academic research financing. They’re trying to co-opt venture capital to do it. So, I think a lot of these teams are overstating what they can do, how fast they can do it, because they’re trying to attract that capital and I think they’re being a little disingenuous about it. I’m not going to name names. And, the problem with that is it poisons the well for the people who do have something that could work. So you’ve got to be very careful about whether you think it’s going to map to that 10-year venture time horizon.

I have seen a lot of the fusion companies. I haven’t evaluated all of them. I’ve not invested in any of the plasma fusion companies. I will tell you because I am a crazy venture capitalist who invests in wild ideas. I did invest in one and it’s called nanoconfinement fusion.

So these guys have figured out a very simple way to cause fusion by putting deuterium together with carbon nanotubes that cause a fusion. And, if it works, it’ll be fucking amazing. There’s work to do to prove it. Got it working in the lab, but they’re working on advancing that now. NASA has done the same kind of fusion using metal lattices. So, this is a very fringe area in fusion. Probably any physicist will tell you that Pablos is full of shit, which is fine but that’s the kind of wild ideas that we think are worth pursuing if we can. And so, there’s an important inflection point there where we were able to see this works in the lab, can we commercialize it is an open question.

Tim Ferriss: Also, as long as you are not completely insane and you have some degree of technical due diligence given the way you’re investing — if you were investing at series D — 

Pablos Holman: No, I can’t do that — 

Tim Ferriss: Then it would be a very dangerous game indeed. But, if your maximum loss is a check, which doesn’t need to be exorbitant in size at the precede, that’s your maximum downside res.

Pablos Holman: That’s right.

Tim Ferriss: Then it’s like, “Okay.”

Pablos Holman: Yeah. So I’m along for that ride. I’m going to get it wrong sometimes but, if that works, the upside is fucking utopia. So we’re going to do a few of those and we have a few.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not going to ask you to pick one because that would put you in a tight spot, but could you name one, of I’m sure quite a few or several from your portfolio, that you feel is likely to be a winner? And, the reason I’m asking is that I want to know what the characteristics are that give you that conviction.

Pablos Holman: Yeah. I think the heart of what you’re getting at, one thing worth articulating here is, I attract those technical founders, those inventors. A lot of the time I can’t invest. And, the reason is I love the technology, but there’s no entrepreneur, there’s no commercial animal, there’s nobody who can sell some shit. And, a lot of times the homework I have to give them is go find a frat buddy or a cousin or a roommate or somebody who can sell something because you need that to build a business. And, I can only take a few bets where I don’t see that hoping that it’s going to come later

Tim Ferriss: It’s interesting because you have the opposite problem of a lot of venture capitalists, right?

Pablos Holman: That’s right. I do. And, I know — 

Tim Ferriss: You’re not looking for technical co-founders.

Pablos Holman: Every other VC will tell you, “We back the best founders.” That’s their mantra and I get it. And, increasingly, I’m sympathetic. I have backed founders because I loved the tech but they spent their career on the tech. They’re only making a business because it’s the next logical step.

Tim Ferriss: I mean, the other issue is that if you have someone who’s very technical, let’s say that they happen to be a unicorn and they’re also really good at business. If they try to spearhead both sides of that coin, they’re going to burn out.

Pablos Holman: Totally. I think we have a fucked up mythology in Silicon Valley. We imagine this amazing, smart person who invented something and then became a patent lawyer and patented it, wrote the code to launch the first version, and then hired the genius team, and then chose an HR policy and took the company public. That is not actually what’s going on. It’s always teams. And we might have the quarterback out in front that is the focal point that the whole world looks at and says, “Oh, that’s the founder,” and that’s the one that you see on YouTube. But, that is a person who is doing an important job of being the human face for a company, but there’s a team behind them.

And so, as a founder, I think you’ve got to find the people who are good at the things you suck at. My founders often suck at marketing. They suck at business development. They suck at the kinds of things that — and that’s okay. You can suck at that. I don’t need you to be good at that. I don’t believe in personal growth like every other podcast host probably does. I believe in do the thing you’re good at, hire friends or people who are good at the things you suck at.

So what I don’t know how to do is scale up on co-founder dating for deep tech. I want that solved desperately. There are more entrepreneurs than there are inventors. I’ve got the thing that’s precious here, but I want to figure out how do I get them to party with entrepreneurs and team up? And, I don’t know how to scale that, but I really want to.

Tim Ferriss: Pablos, where should people find you online? What are the best websites or otherwise?

Pablos Holman: So, I have, deepfuture.tech is our website. There’s a podcast there, which is mostly just long conversations with nerds. That’s how I learn. So, I pick the brains of nerds and I record some of them. And then, I’m on all the stuff. I’m Pablos on X, but nobody listens to me there. LinkedIn, more people listen. But, yeah. So, you could do those things. Oh, I have probably the best email list in the world because the only things I send out are super inspiring and amazing technology. So, join that or whatever.

Tim Ferriss: They can find that at the — 

Pablos Holman: Deepfuture.tech. Yeah. That’s there, there’s a WhatsApp group with propaganda, you can join that too.

Tim Ferriss: And, if people are interested in the book, which I have in my backpack right now, it’s Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. A lot of good stories and a lot of head-spinning statistics.

Pablos Holman: Oh, no. Don’t say that.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I shouldn’t say statistics — that makes it sound too sterile — but just facts and figures that underscore a lot of important points that are pretty jaw-dropping, such as the $5 out of every $6 associated with shipping going to fuel or whatever the number might be and so on. I mean, it’s really remarkable.

Pablos Holman: The statistics, those are meant to be drop-kicks.

Tim Ferriss: Well, Pablos, thank you for taking the time. So great to hang.

Pablos Holman: Oh, man. No. This is awesome. I’m glad we finally got to do it.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s super fun.

Pablos Holman: After all these years. And I came unarmed, so I wouldn’t intimidate your sensibility about getting hacked.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, black van’s still out front, so it ain’t over until it’s over. And, for everybody listening, and we will link to all the things we mentioned, including Pablo’s website, the book, newsletter, et cetera at tim.blog/podcast.” I can guarantee you that Pablos will be the only Pablos, so just search Pablos — 

Pablos Holman: That’s true. Sounds plural, but there’s only one.

Tim Ferriss: — and you will find him immediately. So, that is where you can find all the resources. And, as always, be a little bit kinder than is necessary until next time to others, but also to yourself. And, thanks for tuning in.

Pablos Holman: Well, thank you. This is a real treat and I appreciate — I mean, you’ve done something really special with your whole career, and I’m really thankful that we got to hang out.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thanks, man. To be continued. I feel like this is the beginning.

Pablos Holman: Good. Yeah.

The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Pablos Holman — One of the Scariest Hackers I’ve Ever Met (#827) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.