← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Beyond Software: Pablos Holman on Deep Tech, Energy Inequality, and Building a Better Future | Ep 1111
00:13:33
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Pablos Holman. Pablos Holman is a hacker, inventor and technology futurist with a strong focus on turning complex technology into practical tools. His projects include early work on cryptocurrency in the 1990s, developing artificial intelligence for stock market trading, and building spaceships at blue origin for Jeff Bezos. He contributed to creating the world's first smallest PC and worked on 3D printers at MakerBot. Pablo's assisted Nathan Myerbold in starting the Intellectual Ventures lab, where he participated in various invention projects. These projects include a machine to suppress hurricanes, a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste, and a laser system designed to shoot mosquitoes out of the sky as part of an effort to combat the malaria, and a collaboration with Bill Gates. He holds over 100 patents. Well, good afternoon, Pablos. Welcome to the show.
- [01:07]
B
Hey, how you doing?
- [01:09]
A
Absolutely great, my friend. I appreciate it. And you hailing out of Manhattan today? New York? I'm in Kansas City, so yeah. Oh, great time zone traverse today. I've done 54 countries now. I'm pretty excited about that. But Pablos, if I could. I'm going to jump right into your first question. You began as a cypherpunk, working on cryptocurrency early on, then transitioned into AI driven stock trading, building spaceships at blue origin, and now investing in maverick inventors through Deep Future. How does your perspective evolve from experimenting with tech to funding it?
- [01:41]
B
What I think about is that there's these technologies that we could bring into the world, new technologies. I got to work on some of them. And the truth is the big tech industry doesn't really do that anymore. They're just doing software. So other kinds of technologies are not getting a lot of attention. And so what I did is I started a venture firm where I could invest in other inventors who have invented something new, maybe meaningful, that could help solve a big problem. And so for me, a lot of it's the same, comes from the same place, which is that I want to try to bring technologies to life that can make the world better. Now I'm just helping other inventors do that more than working on my own ideas.
- [02:25]
A
Thank you. Appreciate that. You're right. There's this big focus on software. You look at big tech today and certainly it seems to be a new app or a new software or something might be nice, but there's so much more to do. And I appreciate that bringing these new technologies in the world, and you shifted your focus from inventing to helping other inventors create. So I appreciate that. Pablos, you're known for turning complex technologies into practical tools, be it the world's smallest PC, AI systems, or 3D printers for food. How do you decide which ideas are worth translating into usable innovations?
- [03:01]
B
Well, what you want to do is figure out if you're going after a big problem. That's how I think about it. Are we trying to do something that matters, you know, that a billion people could benefit from? And we're kind of running out of those kinds of problems with SaaS. You know, what you can do, though, is look around the world and think, okay, is every single human on Earth a potential customer? And the answer for that is yes, for a lot of things. That's true for energy, food, construction, manufacturing, apparel, even mining. You know, these are industries that we take for granted because they've been around for centuries, but they are completely untouched by Silicon Valley. And so I see a lot of potential for new technologies to go and bring it. You know, if you've got an invention that can make one of those industries 10 times better, that's worth a lot. You don't have to get all 8 billion customers to be successful. Even a fraction of that would be really good. So those are the kinds of problems I start with. And these days, almost everything we do maps to one of those kinds of problems, and we call that deep tech. So deep tech is really the technologies that are not exclusively software, but might help us to reimagine one of those big industries or big problems.
- [04:21]
A
Thank you. And I like the name deep tech. You're really taking this at a deeper level. And I liked how you said you look at things, you want to figure out if it's going to. If you're going after a worthwhile problem. Right? How you can help humanity and how you can touch lives beyond Silicon Valley, like you said. You know, I interviewed hundreds, over a thousand people out of Silicon Valley, and you're absolutely right. There's more that we can do beyond just emerging tech out of Silicon Valley. So I appreciate that.
- [04:49]
B
Well, a lot of those folks would want to work on bigger problems. They would want to work on cooler technologies. They want to do robots and lasers and nuclear reactors. But the tech industry just got drunk on software and just. That's all they're doing. And it's kind of been so easy to make a successful business with that that it has sort of attracted all of our best and brightest people to go help make iPhone apps to have weed delivered to your dorm room or something when they really could be helping with something much more impactful.
- [05:19]
A
Absolutely. We need to be more creative holistically and not just get in and try to make a million bucks. So I appreciate that. Pablo, you've suggested that we really just live in a world full of software and that significant breakthroughs will come from hardware based solutions. Can you explain why hardware still holds the key to transformative innovation and what excites you the most in that domain today?
- [05:41]
B
Well, hardware always held the key to transformative innovation. Software is very important as just generally applicable. But the people who, you know, we just sort of over indexed on software, we were able to systematize building businesses out of that. So, you know, Silicon Valley has a very effective machinery for taking a software idea from a napkin to the world. That happens in a week now. And you get a whole company around it, you get investors around it, you get metrics around it, you get everything. It's all, it's all systematized and that's great. Hardware is considered too hard, that's why it's called hardware. And so we've been steering away from anything that couldn't be done exclusively with software. But if you think about those industries that I'm talking about, automotive shipping, you know, those are things where you're going to have to make something physical. Well, what has changed? This is what I think a lot of people have missed. What has changed is that the reason software is so cheap and so successful is because the cost of doing a experiment is so low you can afford to just try things and throw out the things that don't work. Now that turns out to be much more successful than trying to be really smart. So Silicon Valley is a machine that makes thousands of million dollar experiments and we throw out the ones that don't work out, but we always find the winners. And if you are building a hardware company now, or a deep tech company, if you're making a rocket or a Tesla or a hypersonic jet, you design it in software, you, you test it in software, you crash it in software, you do that thousands and thousands of times until you know exactly what to build and then you build one. So the superpowers that made software so powerful are now advanced enough that we can bring them to building hardware. And that is what has changed in just the last few years. So we have extraordinary supercomputing capacity now. We can model our world, we can model these physical things and we can create better design. So when you see SpaceX crash a rocket yeah, they gotta crash some rockets now and then, blow one up, but not nearly as many as NASA did. And the reason is they've crashed or blown up a billion rockets in software before they ever do it in the real world. And so when, when that happens, a lot of times they're doing it on purpose just to test whether their models were accurate. So this is what's happening, and we see it in almost every industry. I'm not trying to throw shade on software itself that is very useful and need it, but we're aiming it at the wrong class of problems is what I think.
- [08:23]
A
So thank you, I appreciate that. And software is important, but there's so much more beyond that. As you mentioned, hardware has always held the key to innovation. And hardware is hard. There's less margin or less room for error. It is quite expensive in that realm of development and innovation. And software obviously has that higher margin. It's easy to reiterate thousands of times. So I appreciate your insights on that. Pablo, the last question of the day, you've articulated a belief in being a better ancestor, building technologies that will benefit future generations, not just the present. How does this worldview influence your decisions on what to invent, invest in and speak about?
- [09:03]
B
Well, we live in a world that's highly optimized for what you could think of as 10 year projects. Most clear example of that is venture firms. I run a venture fund. Every venture fund is a 10 year fund. So that means whatever money we are investing, we have to get a return that in 10 years. Well, that puts a real limit on the kind of projects you could do. I can't take a venture capital fund and invest it in something that's going to take 20 years. And so it shortens the time horizon for things that need to get done. Now I think we have overdone it on that. So a lot of venture funds are looking to get that return. And three or four or five or six years, and that even more shortens what it does. And when you have such a short window, you can't be very ambitious. But you know what, a lot of things, big things have been built in 10 years or less. Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Google, they were all huge successes in less than 10 years. SpaceX and Tesla, of course. But guess what? The Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, the space shuttle program, the, the Apollo program, all of these things were done in 10 years or less. So, and they're not all software. So I think you could look at that and say, look, maybe we're not being, maybe we're not really being ambitious enough because it's hard to look around you and see any, anything on that scale being done in our lifetime. And so why I think that matters is we have scaled people. We've got 8 billion people on this planet. And whether or not you think that's too many, I think we should try to take care of them. We made those people. We didn't make everything they need to thrive. And it's easy to lose sight of that, especially if you live in, in the US Like I do, because this is a very rich country. Most people in the world don't get access to the kind of resources we do. A simple way to think about that is with energy. The average person on Earth gets about as much energy as one toaster running 24 7. If you super glue the button down, Americans get eight bonus toasters. So we get nine or ten times as much energy as the average person on Earth to get averages like that. Three billion people live on less than one toaster. That's not an acceptable living standard. By toaster I mean all the energy for heating, cooling, food, air conditioning, you know, travel, all those things that you do, they're not getting enough. And you would not want to live that way. You would not find it acceptable. And the reason is there's a threshold at which it's not a healthy living standard. You don't have clean water, you don't have sanitation. You don't have the kinds of things we take for granted. And so if you look around the world, what we really have is what I call energy inequality. Now, that gap isn't the problem to fix. You want to bring the baseline higher. You want to bring those people from one toaster to two or three or four or five toasters at least, so that they have an acceptable living standard as well. And then you would be living in a much more peaceful world. A lot of those wars we're fighting are about access to energy. Who's controlling oil? Well, if you could make enough clean, cheap energy for everyone, you would not have a reason to have those wars. And so I think it's going to be an exciting future. We are invested in all kinds of new technologies that could help scale up energy production that is super low cost. And so that's what's happening and it's pretty exciting time.
- [12:38]
A
Thank you. Appreciate that. Just highlight a few things here you talked about. It's hard to be ambitious in 10 years or less, but there are a lot of things can be accomplished in that time. We just need to get back to the basics, as I'd like to say here, and really start to create and innovate in these areas that you talked about. I thought it was important. It is super important to take care of the beautiful 8 billion people in this world. And I am certainly grateful for the country I, I live in, served my country and and I love the amenities and so, so grateful. But I do like your analogy or the toaster example around energy. And you're absolutely right. We need to be thinking beyond just ourselves and how do we make this place a better planet? So I appreciate that. Pablo's it was certainly a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [13:23]
B
Awesome. Thanks, Brian.
- [13:24]
A
Bye for now.